Informal partnership seeks to fill economic development niche

WASHINGTON — A loosely organized group called the Southeast Iowa Venture Club held one of its first meetings in Washington Tuesday afternoon.

Leaders of the partnership covering Washington, Henry, Jefferson and Van Buren counties said they hoped to facilitate networking and idea-generation between small startup businesses in the area. While each community has its chambers of commerce and other economic development organizations, Washington resident and partial organizer Terry Philips said the new group would fill a void by focusing on small, startup business.

“Other economic development groups out there can help, but they don’t have the grassroots approach that we do, and we feel that there’s a missing element there that we can work on,” Philips said. “There’s going to be overlap, and we’re not competing with anybody, any economic development group. We’re trying to make everything work together and compliment one another.”

The recently-started club holds Tuesday meetings every week, rotating between the county areas involved. Washington’s slot is the third Tuesday of every month.

At those meetings, participants have a chance to network and bounce ideas off one another for their plans, which are often side hustles or passion projects.

“Being a conduit of information and contacts (is) what this is all about,” Philips said. “It’s something that can be very beneficial to people who are not full-time business people. Most of these people have a day job, and this is their dream, this is their hobby … we want to encourage people, and also we want to give them the confidence to do what they can.”

The recently formed group holds Tuesday meetings every week, rotating between the county areas involved. There are no dues, no required attendance and no formal commitment for membership. Meeting structures are flexible and participants are encouraged to participate in whatever way helps the good of the cause.

That usually entails networking and bouncing ideas off one another for business plans, many of which are side hustles or passion projects.

Organizing Member Bob Ferguson, from Fairfield, said the chance for constructive input was especially beneficial to independently run start-ups.

“If you are starting a business and you have no peer group to work with, it gets a little lonely,” he said. “Partly, it’s just being with your tribe, being with other entrepreneurs, laying out, ‘Here’s my business model, this is where I’d like to go.’ It’s partly idea generation, it’s partly lateral relationships.”

The venture club’s local approach is a counterpart to what Philips called a “smokestack” strategy, in which communities seek to draw big investments from outside, rather than pushing smaller but more numerous businesses to success from within.

He said the locally-focused method was ideal for cities that weren’t major population hubs.

“Whatever Iowa City didn’t want to look at, they would send down to us, so we got very little,” Philips said. “In rural areas like Washington County and all the rest that are in the group, that is not practical. We do not succeed in pulling in those people with the smokestack industries, so we’ve got to be looking at something different.”

With the prevalence of novice business people in the startup field, venture club Organizing Member and NewBoCo Director of Development Mike Heaton said the approach was especially helpful for those who need advice.

Such input often comes best from those who have faced similar situations, usually for the same reasons.

“We don’t often, as business owners, talk about the hard stuff, the parts we’re failing at, struggling at, because once it’s out in the community, everybody knows about it,” Heaton said. “This is a safe space. The idea here is, we can talk about what we’re struggling with, some of the things like, ‘Yeah, I screwed up my accounting,’ … We’re here because somebody else is going to say, ‘Oh yeah, I did that too, here’s who to talk to about it.’”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com