Business Incubator Series: Ross Sanders, Bizdom U – Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: What are some of your successes stories?

Ross: We already talked about the online training company [Launch Learning Group]. They have been doing it for only six months. They have raised outside funding.

Campus Commandos is another good one. It does marketing and brand awareness on college campuses. So, if you are a brand, a large brand, and if you want to spread awareness on a college campus, this young man – his name is Adam Grant and he came out of Michigan State University – he will go on a college campus and do promotional programs, contests, and spread brand awareness. He has already covered his expenses for several months and is making good progress.

The wedding videography business I talked about, Wedit, they have been able to carry their expenses over the past couple months.

Our electronic medical records business for dermatologists, they just launched medical records business that focuses on dermatology practice versus general practitioners. They landed their first significant contract.

We had a man who launched a business that focuses on tennis shoes and he retails those over the Internet.  I think, he came into the program when he was 18. He has just launched that business. He has raised a significant amount of capital outside of Bizdom U.

So, they are all getting there. They are all making progress. They are all businesses that we can leverage and scale. But it is going to take time for them to produce a lot of jobs in the city because they are just startups and that just takes time.

Irina: What about Bizdom U’s own business model? How is it funded?

Ross: Dan Gilbert is the primary financier behind Bizdom U, but we have gotten a lot of assistance from some of the foundations in the city of Detroit.

For example, the New Economy Initiative has helped finance Bizdom U. There is collaboration among all these foundations in the trade area, and no single one is necessarily focused on entrepreneurship or job creation. They have their own areas they focus on.

But they realized that they need to focus on entrepreneurship and focus on economic development, too. So, what these major foundations do is inject some money, and it is like a business pool. From this pool they give to entrepreneurship programs and economic development programs. They provided us with a couple of grants.

Then, the Kauffman Foundation, the national entrepreneurship foundation out of Kansas City, Missouri, also gave us some nice financing.

They visit incubators all over the world. They came and they liked Bizdom U and they liked what we do here, so they have also given us some financing, but like I said, most of the assistance comes from Dan Gilbert.

Irina: You mentioned that you plan to become self-sustainable. How do you plan to achieve that?

Ross: What we do is we set a lot of goals. We set quarterly goals for our business to generate revenues. They have an annual plan, but we try to focus on the quarterly plan. So, we set a quarterly revenue goal and then as soon as we acquire a revenue goal, we break it down into monthly revenue goals and then we break it down into weekly and daily goal, and we monitor those goals.

For example, let’s say we want to close a certain number of insurance companies. Let’s say our online training company wants to close X number of companies by the end of the month. We will say, OK, if you want to close X number of companies by the end of the month, let’s go through the sales process. What is the beginning of your business process?

Well, we make a phone call to these insurances companies. Then what do you do? Well, if that is successful, then we have a face-to-face meeting. What is the result of this face-to-face meeting? Well, if that goes well, they ask for a proposal and you send it, and if that goes, what do you do? You send them a contract. OK, and if they sign the contract, what happens? Then you are done. That is the kind of our sales process.

We will say, OK, if you want to close these many insurance companies by the end of the month, how many contracts we have to send out in order  for them to get X number signed?

This segment is part 8 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Ross Sanders, Bizdom U - Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio
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