Reynolds students learn basics of entrepreneurship

Joe Geiger's crowded classroom is bubbling with great ideas, visions of services and goods, hopes for achievement -- and dreams of still-distant fortunes.

• "I have so many ideas," said Sara Crawford, 22, of King William County, who is in the health-care insurance industry. "I need some way to organize them."

• Mohammed Said, a 26-year-old Richmond public utilities engineer, wants to start a Web-page design company. "I was forecasting for a narrow market," the Ethiopian-born man said. "I'm rethinking it. I just need to expand my target clients."

• Richard Anderson, 26, of Richmond delivers food and does valet parking for a living now. But for him, "entrepreneurship is the American dream," he said. "You'll never get rich trading hours for money."

Welcome to Geiger's Business 116 class -- Entrepreneurship -- at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College's Parham Road academic campus.

"It's how to start a business," Geiger said about his BUS 116 class.

"We teach kids how to start a business in an organized way," Geiger said, "and how to do a real business plan which they can take to a bank, to investors."

And that kind of skill has its own solid value.

Entrepreneurship education generally tends to be -- like Geiger's course -- "Business Plan 101," said Chad Moutray, the chief economist for the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy in Washington.

"Community colleges provide those skills as well as any others," Moutray said.

"That's where they do a really good job," he said. "My own personal research shows that . . . with more education, people tend to choose self-employment as an option."

Virginia's 23 community colleges are showing 10 percent to 12 percent increases in overall enrollments this fall semester, and a record number -- 11,878 -- of students started classes at J. Sargeant Reynolds, a bump-up that officials attribute to the economic downturn.

Geiger's class filled up two weeks before the start of classes this fall, he said.

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In Geiger, who holds a business degree from the University of Denver, his 21 students have a teacher who's been a practitioner of the entrepreneur's art -- not someone, as he says, who "never ran a taco stand" -- and done the long-days' work, taken the risks and reaped the rewards of free enterprise.

"I spent over 50 years as an entrepreneur," he said, "starting, building and selling a variety of businesses."

Among other ventures, the Richmonder has had companies that sold airplanes and legal insurance, manufactured yachts, provided college food conces sions, and built furniture.

"I wish I had this when I first started," he said of his own class, "because I had to learn it the hard way, expensively, making mistakes."

"They're learning in 16 weeks what took me 50 years of mistakes," Geiger said. "You don't really learn from your successes."

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Last Tuesday night, class members divided into groups of four or five and attacked the business-plan assignment, debating alternatives, scratching out nonstarter ideas, drawing boxes around key notes, underlining unresolved issues, circling thoughts worth another look.

The groups were serious, laughing -- each different, each similar. Asians, Africans, African-Americans, European-Americans, women, men, young people and folks with gray hair.

And, by the way, they've got day jobs, families, lives.

Designer lawn care, a 24-hour hair salon, organic fast-food restaurants -- "I'm always thinking of food," said Lindley Flohr, 23, who's doing face-to-face marketing part time -- the concepts ebbed and flowed.

"If I'm going to be doing financing, I need to know how much I need to be begging for," Richard Anderson told his team, pushing them to come up with some numbers.

Another group was thinking about a business pitched at traditional college students, doing the mandatory end-of-term cleaning of dorm and apartment rooms.

"A lot of students don't want to do it, don't have time to do it, don't care to do it," Crawford explained. "They'd rather throw money at it, and we're here to catch it."

Bruce Chisholm, 55, a state employee from Goochland County who holds two graduate degrees, outlined some of the dorm-cleaning venture's strengths: "Not a lot of start-up costs, and we've got the ability to grow it. We can add a retail component."

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When they complete Business 116, Geiger expects his would-be entrepreneurs to be able to recognize a feasible opportunity, craft a business plan, do a "SWOT" -- strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats -- analysis for a venture, and figure out how to get the money to get their new-start off the ground.

"Writing a business plan is really where it's at," he said, "because it forces you to examine what you're going to do, how you're going to run the business in detail . . . what the costs are in real detail."

Vietnamese native Ba Diep is already an entrepreneur. The 31-year-old Mechanicsville resident started investing in real estate when he was in the Navy.

"My main thing is more education, to keep learning. I've never learned how to write a business plan to help my business grow and expand," said Diep, who also has a job as a transportation security officer.

Geiger counseled his class that, after they do their business plans, "you'll say, 'If I was going to invest in this, I don't think I would.' That's fine. You've discovered the fatal flaw. By the same token, I want you to come up with the very best one you can."

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The U.S. is home to an estimated 29 million businesses, the SBA's Moutray said, and virtually all -- 99.7 percent -- are small firms, those employing fewer than 500 people.

The vast majority of American enterprises are very small companies, he said. Eighty-nine percent of U.S. firms have fewer than 20 employees, but in aggregate, small businesses employ about half of the nation's private sector work force.

Despite their size, small companies -- examples of entrepreneurship by definition -- innovate and create jobs at faster rates than their larger competitors, Moutray said.

Running those fledgling businesses involves choices of actions based on imperfectly known facts with diverse consequences, Geiger said, all influenced by forces that entrepreneurs may or may not be able to control.

"And yet, as a business manager, you are expected to make the correct choice," Geiger said. "An incorrect choice can be disastrous for you, your business, your employees and your customers."

"I've worked for a few small businesses, and I've always been interested in them," said Alex Pedersen, a 23-year-old grocery clerk from Richmond who is taking Geiger's class.

"Owning my own business would be the way to go."

The nation's commerce, however, is still battered by the recession.

"The economy is starting to stabilize a little bit," Moutray noted.

"While we aren't going to see any job growth for a while," he said, "this is probably a good time to start a business -- to at least think about it."

Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or .