By Fletcher Word
The Truth Editor
A major challenge for budding entrepreneurs, for those who are trying to start businesses with limited funds, is to cope with all of the demands in their lives – their full-time jobs, families, studies – and also perform the tasks necessary to achieve that start-up business success.
Ebony Carter, director of the Minority Business Assistance Center, realized several years ago that a program had to be created to help such entrepreneurs by acknowledging and addressing all those challenges in their lives. Such a program would still enable them to have the opportunities to assemble the blueprint for success in business.
“We were teaching the wrong way,” says Carter of those earlier efforts. What was needed was to look at the comprehensive picture of such students. “We had to [help them] separate the two budgets and help them transition without ignoring the fact [of those many tasks].”
So “The Art of Scale Up” was created, a program designed to help navigate the real challenges of growing an existing business. This program, says Carter, is a way for people to take into account all that is happening in their lives and still put together the numbers necessary to take a critical look at growing a business. “We ask people to implement it into their lives,” she adds.
The program started in connection with the Junction Coalition and then moved over to the Toledo Urban Federal Credit Union. The results over the past several years have been gratifying, Carter notes.
The eight-week Art of Scale Up, a free program, just graduated its sixth cohort last Tuesday, April 14, with a ceremony for the 17 students who completed the course. That course, according to the MBAC flyer, is built “specifically for business owners who are ready to grow smarter, stronger and more profitably.”
The graduation ceremony, last week at the Toledo Urban Federal Credit Union, Monroe Street branch, was an affirmation for graduates that they are ready to take their businesses to the next level, to make financial decisions that will position their enterprises for sustainable growth.
If you are interested in learning more about the Minority Business Assistance Center and the Art of Scale Up program, contact the Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce at www.toledochamber.com.