AIR DATE JANUARY 5, 2022

Title: Support for Start-Ups

Learn what it takes to become an entrepreneur and what resources are available in central Florida to transform your business idea into reality.

Guests

National Entrepreneur Center, President – Jerry Ross

UCF Business Incubation Program, Director of Innovation Districts Strategy and Partnerships and Senior Strategic Advisor & Director of Programs and Operations – Rob Panepinto & Carol Ann Logue

Central Florida Businesses Have Local Entrepreneurial Resources to Access

Many businesses fail within their first year of operations. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about one-fifth of new opportunities will stop serving customers within 12 months.

By the time a business reaches its fifth birthday, half of the companies that started at the same time will no longer be operating.

I recently spoke with Jerry Ross, a nationally known keynote speaker and lifelong entrepreneur. He became the president of the National Entrepreneur Center in 2007. He told me the best way to get the help a business requires is through proactive action.

“We’re open to everyone,” he told me. “We love to have people that are looking through a business idea to see what that might mean, and we have resources that they can search and do some research on maybe the market that they’re thinking about entering.”

Needing Help Is Sometimes the Hardest Thing to Recognize

I’m a huge fan of the UCF Business Incubation Program, which supports local businesses in part through the help of Carol Ann Logue and Rob Panepinto.

“We’ve been doing this for 22 years now,” Logue told me. “We have multiple sites as part of our incubation program, but we started really with one location in the Central Florida Research Park adjacent to the main campus of UCF.”

“There’s a misconception that because we’re with the UCF Business Incubator that you need ties to UCF to be part of it, but that is not the case,” added Panepinto.

Business incubators are essential to the growth of local economies because they provide critical benefits to new companies or entrepreneurs that could use a little help. You’ll find networking opportunities, mentorship support, and access to funding.

“We have five banks that are funding our center on the board, and they compete in the marketplace, but around our board table, they look at what’s best for the community, said Ross. “The level of collaboration we have here in Central Florida is unmatched.”

Central Florida Is the Place to Be for New Businesses

Ross told me thousands of families are moving to Florida each week, settling into our region. “That brings experience,” he said. “That brings knowledge, and that helps our economy to continue growing.”

The UCF Business Incubation Program offers three options to help support that growth, including a traction option that allows new companies to get ready for the work that happens. “One of the things we identified over the last couple of years is there are up-and-coming companies that are not quite ready for the incubator program,” Panepinto told me. “If we can help them [in the traction program], we can make it more likely that they will get into the incubator.

The UCF Business Incubation Program will also help companies launch an idea or expand to Central Florida.

More information about these opportunities is available at https://incubator.ucf.edu. You can also learn more about Ross’s work, including free business coaching sessions, at the National Entrepreneur Center by visiting https://nationalec.org.