Planting Liberally

The other day I wrote about helping progressive millenials make it, and Mike Connery at Future Majority chimed in. There seems to be a growing consensus that big donors are not going to save us. My proposed alternative is liberal entrepreneurship, and in particular, structures to support liberal entrepreneurs. My goal is to help struggling but creative progressives start a business, make money, and strengthen our movement, all at the same time. So what can we do to move towards that goal? Here is a simple first cut. It's just one idea, and there might be many others out there, so I'm happy to listen to criticism or better suggestions. But I'd like to start moving in this direction. I'd like to create a combined business plan contest/business incubator for liberal entrepreneurs. The business plan contest would solicit business plans from enterprising progressives who want to strengthen the progressive movement; it could invite contestants to solve any of the problems mentioned in my first post on liberal entrepreneurship, or it could use some other motivation. The contest would be geared to students and young activists, but it would be open to anyone. Plans would be expected to leverage the power of the web - mostly, because that's the only hope we have of creating a successful business on the cheap - but any realistic plan would be reviewed. The winners of the business plan contest would get to have their idea developed and turned into a real business using the business incubator. The incubator would pay the winning entrepreneurs a small stipend for a few months - small but livable, perhaps $5,000 per month plus benefits. But more to the point, the incubator would give the entrepreneur access to a full set of professionals who would get the business off the ground. These professionals would include a lawyer to handle incorporation matters and other legal issues, an accountant to handle taxes and other financial minutiae, a graphic/web designer to create a brand identity and logo, a web developer to create a simple website, and an online marketing expert to help the entrepreneur reach his or her target audience. There is one more professional who would be needed, but who I have not yet listed. This is where things get really interesting (from my point of view). Many start-up businesses have an advisory board, consisting of domain experts who know something about the start-up's chosen industry, and who can advise the entrepreneur on new lines of business to pursue and other opportunities in the field. Book publishers will seek advisors from the publishing field; pro-union employment law firms will seek advisors in labor law; etc. Guess where we might be able to find such advisors? The progressive blogosphere is a virtually infinite source of potential advisors for progressive businesses. It is full of every imaginable stripe of professional expert, in a wide variety of industries. My idea is to have one of the professionals be a "blogosphere expert and business advisor recruiter". This professional would be responsible for helping recruit a business advisory board for the entrepreneur. She would be responsible for being familiar with the basic contours of the blogosphere, knowing where to find experts in a given field, and how to successfully recruit them. She would also be responsible for managing the initial relationship between advisors and entrepreneurs. Not only would this job be really interesting and fun, it would start to tap into some of the enormous talent potential in our movement. In exchange for all this help, the incubator would own a small share of the resulting business - perhaps 5%. The entrepreneur would be responsible for developing services and products and delivering them, running the business, managing finances, etc., and would be expected to be self-sufficient (or mostly self-sufficient) after a fairly short period - perhaps 3 to 6 months. Revenues for the incubator would be driven by profits from successful businesses that it helped launch. Now, the main question is, how to get the incubator off the ground? Theoretically, a set of good progressive professionals could be brought together to run the incubator as a side-hobby, each chipping in perhaps 5-10 hours per week; they would own the incubator jointly, and might forego salary until the incubator became sustainable. The real costs are stipends for entrepreneurs and running the business contest. I imagine the business contest could be run on a shoestring budget, with costs running around $5,000, mostly for legal agreements, web development, online marketing, and some other miscellaneous costs; the incubator owners could serve as judges, and do most of the work remotely. The main cost is stipends. Stipends obviously depend a great deal on a couple of factors: how many plans are declared winners, and how many months the stipends last. For ten entrepreneurs supported at six months each (which I think are both reasonable numbers to ensure that a few businesses succeed and thereby drive sustainability), the costs run into about $360,000 (counting fringe benefits at a 20% premium on top of salary.) That's a pretty hefty sum, and it's the main "failure factor". I'm fairly sure that the rest of this plan is realistic, or at least, reasonably so. I think there are a number of potential liberal entrepreneurs who would take advantage of this opportunity; I know a fair number of professionals who could staff the incubator; and I think that the numbers I'm throwing around (supporting 10 entrepreneurs for 6 months) would realistically lead to incubator self-sustainability within a few years. I'll keep digging away at the money question, and see what I come up with. In the meantime, if you have thoughts about where to get $360,000 for an incubator project (that does not involve someone getting shot in the arm in a Las Vegas hotel), let me know! Update: My wife (of Looking for Faith fame) looked at this and said, "you need to have someone running the show", which my past experience says is certainly true. A full-time manager of the incubator could definitely tie the whole thing together. That adds maybe another $60 - 80,000 / year to the yearly cost, but otherwise, I think the basic idea is the same.