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Press Coverage
Rarin’ to be Their Own Boss
GCC students pick up, share entrepreneurial tips
The Greenfield Recorder, Monday November 28, 2005. pg 9
“I don’t want to be locked into a typical job,” says Brattleboro resident Ben Riseman, president of the GCC Business Club. “I’m trying to empower myself with as much knowledge as I can to have as much financial independence as I can in the future.”
“I’ve always liked the idea of working for myself,” says Kane Gallagher, of Hadley. “If you are your own boss, you’ll work harder because it’s going to benefit you, instead of letting someone else reap the benefits of your hard work.”
Sentiments like these motivated 25 GCC students to spend a day attending the Harold Grinspoon Charitable Foundation’s Collegiate Entrepreneurship Conference on Oct. 21. Held at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, 120 students from eight colleges in the Pioneer Valley learned how to get money to make money, the importance of a business plan, and the virtue of persistence. The GCC contingent also inspired their peers with the story of their successful enterprise, Café Academia, a coffee bar serving the college’s East-Building.
“Entrepreneurship as a discipline is gaining a lot of ground in community colleges across the nation,” says Thomas Simmons, Professor of Economics and advisor to the Business Club. “When you realize that two-thirds of all new jobs that are going to be created in a given year are going to come from small businesses, it gives a different perspective to the need for entrepreneurship.”
Nathan Richardson, of Greenfield, attended a workshop on creative entrepreneurship. “I’m an English major, but at some point I would like to open my own business,” says Richardson, who will be taking a luthier course in April to learn guitar building and repair. “I learned that I don’t have to open a technology business per se, or something noncreative. I can do something I enjoy, like building and repairing guitars, selling skateboards or maybe starting a record label.”
Gallagher was inspired by the example of Jordi Herald, founder of the Iron Horse Entertainment Group. Walter McHugh of Greenfield dreams of starting an overseas operation that would manufacture vintage musical equipment for the U.S. market. “What I want to do is, essentially, recreate some of this equipment that is no longer made-the electronics, actually,” says McHugh, “It’s a background that I know about; I work in an electronics shop.”
Professor Simmons and students Dawn Walsh and Eli Glace were invited to lead a workshop called “Students in Action.”
“It was very specifically using the Café Academia at GCC as a model for student entrepreneurship on campus,” says Simmons. “The three of us spoke about the obstacles we ran into, what we did wrong and what we did right.”
Students took home a variety of lessons from the seminars they attended. The best advice, according to Riseman, came from bankers “because they’re the most brutally honest type of people. You go to them with your business plan and they can look at it and tell you, ‘Yes, this is going to work’ or ‘No, it’s not going to work.’
“ ‘You’re going to hear no a lot,’ they told us, ‘but you’ve just got to keep getting back up, hearing why they told you no, making adjustments to your business plan and trying again.’”
“I learned where to go for financing, and how I really need to work on a business plan,” says McHugh. “I also learned that life as all about networking.”
Back at GCC, students can practice their entrepreneurial skills through Business Club enterprises like Café Academia. New this year is an emerging collaboration with the Women’s Resource Center, with plans for a three-part Women in Money workshop series this spring.
The Business Club, says Riseman, “is all about empowering students with knowledge and skills that complement the education they get in the classroom.”
The club meets every Wednesday at noon in the East Building Room 126 and all students are welcome to join. |
