Business Incubator Series: Ross Sanders, Bizdom U – Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Ross: [Since LLG is an online training platform for a pre-licensing exam for the insurance sales force], we can grow the company in Detroit, Michigan, but we can service the entire country and we don’t have to be in those different states in order to sell our services in those states.

So, that is a great example of a platform that once you build, you can drive customers to it. That is what we call leverageable. You have build this online curriculum, and now you can leverage across numerous customers. You can also market that online.

That is the kind of business that we call brain economy business. It is scalable and we can grow and create jobs an create growth in the city of Detroit, but we can service customers really all over the country.

What we mean by that is that we believe that for far too long, Detroit has been a muscle economy, you know, manufacturing.

Now, Dan Gilbert has worked through Bizdom U to help Detroit transform itself from the muscle economy of manufacturing to the brain economy of entrepreneurship.

We have another business, a wedding videography business [founded by Brett deMarrais, called Wedit]. Here is how this business works: What used to be, when I got married, that was a long time ago, you’d hire a videographer to come to your wedding, and he would film your wedding.

Well, in today’s world people are so adept with cameras that you really don’t need to have this kind of videographer to come to your wedding, videotape it for hours and hours, then give you a couple of the CDs and be done with it.

Now, folks are so skilled at creating video content themselves and sharing that content via social media, so the prior ways of doing videography is antiquated.

So, what Wedit does is, if I am a bride and I am looking for a videographer, I can go onto the website. I can order the flip cameras to be sent to my wedding. They will send, say, five flip cameras to the wedding. Then the bride will distribute flip cameras among all the people at the wedding, and they can film the wedding and different pieces of it.

Then the client sends this flip cameras back in a box. Then the client can go online and edit the content herself, or the company can edit it for her. After that, the content can be shared on Facebook and all other social media sites, all this at far less expensive rate than before. Plus, it captures more of the spontaneous moments at a person’s wedding.

Typically, a wedding videographer would only capture certain things. But, if everybody has a camera, capturing all these spontaneous moments, then it is a lot more fun; the wedding video becomes a lot more entertaining.

So, it is a whole different model. Again, that is a business we can operate from the Detroit, but we can do the wedding videography throughout the country, and it is not something for which we have to create a lot brick-and-mortar shops or be in those states to sell services there.

The entrepreneur just recently hooked up with one of these wedding portals that offers these different wedding-related services. You know, they will send around coupons and things for different services. I think, recently, [through them], he had about 26 clients in one day. So, it is one of these things that spread out, again, via social media.

Irina: That’s great. At what stage do you suggest that a companies apply to your accelerator?

Ross: We are looking for entrepreneurial people with business ideas, but we are also looking for people who can execute ideas. There is a lot of people with business ideas out there who kind of fancy themselves as running a business. We are looking for people who are actually going to do it.

We try to distinguish between real entrepreneurs and want-repreneurs. Real entrepreneurs are going to go and do it. Want-repreneurs have thought about it, they have an idea, but they really not pursuing it.

We are looking for people who have an idea, maybe they have a business plan that they have taken around to different investors, maybe they are participants of a business plan competitions, or they are at a very early startup stage, who think that they have an idea, or a concept they would like to bring to fruition. Those are the folks we are looking for.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Ross Sanders, Bizdom U - Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10