Developing Entrepreneurs

Tools to Succeed 

Aspiring entrepreneurs should seek out mentors and look for ways to collaborate with them, say leaders of nonprofits that help fledgling business owners.

“People representing any industry, any idea, any product, anything that is business-related could benefit from being at Oklahoma Venture Forum meetings,” says Kyle Golding, chairman of the board of the Oklahoma City-based nonprofit, which has a monthly luncheon where members “meet each other, network and find ways to work together.”

Golding and his partners own the Golding Group, which provides consulting services to businesses and nonprofits, many of which are startups.

“We were in existence before I found out about the Venture Forum,” Golding says. “I wish I had known about it.”

Devon Laney, president and CEO of 36 Degrees North, calls his nonprofit “Tulsa’s base camp for entrepreneurs. We provide the resources, work space, relationships and education to really help entrepreneurs build and grow.”

Membership levels range from shared workspace or a dedicated desk to three sizes of offices, Laney says. Benefits include free seminars, discounts on business services, attentive assistance from Laney and his staff, and collaboration with peers.

“You are surrounded by other entrepreneurs, and everyone is working hard, trying to figure it out,” Laney says. “Those kinds of conversations are really valuable.”

Tulsa’s Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation also works “to decrease the barriers associated with Tulsans achieving their goals,” CEO Elizabeth Frame Ellison says. “Entrepreneurship is really important because we need more quality jobs in our state, and we need more young people to stay in our state.”

The foundation’s programs include the Mother Road Market, Kitchen 66, Kiva Tulsa and the Tulsa Startup Series.

Mother Road Market, on historic Route 66, comprises 21 businesses that sell food and retail products. The model allows an entrepreneur to test an idea or concept without opening a full-scale restaurant or retail space.

Kitchen 66, housed at same location, offers commercial kitchen space, business training (such as the Launch Program) and sales opportunities through the café and general store at Mother Road Market. Since 2016, it has helped more than 125 food entrepreneurs, including immigrants from 10 countries. More than half have been women.

Kiva.org is a crowdfunding platform designed to alleviate poverty.

“One of the reasons we brought Kiva to Tulsa [in 2017] is that it’s a lot harder for women and people of color to have access to capital,” Ellison says.

The Lobeck Taylor foundation partners with Kiva Tulsa to offer zero-interest loans of up to $10,000 and with the Oklahoma State University Riata Center for Entrepreneurship in the Tulsa Startup Series, which has generated more than 2,300 full-time, part-time and contract jobs since 2007.

Ellison looks for coachable people willing to take constructive feedback and tweak their business plans.

“We try not to tell our entrepreneurs what kind of business they should run,” Ellison says. “But in the food space, we might be more excited if a person has an idea for a restaurant Tulsa needs more of.”

Bruce Barringer, head of OSU’s School of Entrepreneurship, celebrates risk-takers who create new products and innovate.

“It’s uncommon that a traditional company would create something new, like an Airbnb or an Uber,” he says. “Small business is the backbone of growth in our economy.”

An entrepreneur must be an optimistic problem-solver willing to admit what he or she doesn’t know, says Laney, adding that “being an entrepreneur is really hard. You are going to make mistakes. It’s very lonely at times. That’s part of why being at an organization like 36 Degrees North helps.”

Entrepreneurship is worth the risk, Golding says. 

“I’m pretty happy with where we are,” he says of his company. “We have jobs we love and we enjoy working together.”

Molding
Entrepreneurs

Oklahoma’s colleges and universities, adjusting to the interests of students, offer a variety of resources to help aspiring business owners.

Every year, 5,000 people make use of the Tom Love Innovation Hub at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. It includes a maker lab, a woodshop, a metal shop, virtual reality equipment and other resources for people who have prototypes and want to learn new skills.

“It’s pretty unusual for a university anywhere to offer this kind of space for free,” executive director Tom Wavering says. “Our mission is to increase innovation and entrepreneurship across the university and the state. Anything we do is open to anyone – students, retirees, you name it.”

Experiential learning is a focus at the University of Tulsa, says Larry Wofford, the Davis D. Bovaird endowed chair of entrepreneurship.

“We have a number of projects where our students work with entrepreneurs to help their experiential learning and to help the entrepreneurs,” Wofford says. “A lot of entrepreneurship occurs within businesses by people who are looking to change the way they do business. Many of our students will get into entrepreneurship by joining or buying a company and becoming entrepreneurial and innovative and changing it.”

At OSU, the School of Entrepreneurship is one of eight departments in the Spears School of Business, Barringer says.

“About 225 students are majoring in entrepreneurship, and 150 minors,” he says. “Last semester, 1,200 students took one or more of our classes. We work with students outside the college of business, especially [science, technology, engineering and math] students.”

For those looking elsewhere, Tulsa Community College offers business development classes and Northeastern State University offers an entrepreneurship major.

Success Stories

Catherine Ha

The ink was barely dry on their master’s degree diplomas when Catherine Ha and William Booker founded Tulsa-based Babel Analytics, which creates data-driven software integrating technology with health care.

Ha, 25, credits mentorships, team-building and OU’s Love Innovation Hub for her success. She says she started as a collegian on a pre-medicine track, then went for a master’s degree in computer science at OU.

“My ultimate goal was to combine the two,” she says. “Research is a really good way to incorporate new findings to help people.”

One of Babel’s systems helps health-care providers use artificial intelligence to identify people at risk of opioid abuse. Another extracts and summarizes information from medical records “to find out what details are hidden in patient notes,” Ha says.

Babel also has a product that could speed up eye-injury diagnoses, ranging from curious children with laser pointers to military personnel hurt in combat.

Ha says Wavering, the innovation hub’s executive director, helped her learn about governmental research grants, which is how much of Babel has been funded since it began in May.

Ha and Booker finished third in the graduate division of the Love’s Entrepreneur’s Cup, a statewide competition for collegians with business plans.

“We had an MBA student on our team,” she says. “That gave us the … insights of what we needed to pay attention business-wise.”

Ha says she does not necessarily think of Babel Analytics as her life’s work.

“It would be super cool to grow a huge company here in Oklahoma and employ a lot of people,” she says, “but my thought is to take it one step at a time. With a startup, you have to be flexible.”