Workshops converting good ideas into startup businesses

Lifestyle entrepreneurs people who start businesses mostly to provide an income for themselves seldom are the focus of efforts to rebuild the northern Nevada economy.

Matt Westfield thinks they deserve more attention.

"Everybody is looking for the next Google," says Westfield. "But we can impact this community in a good way by nurturing people with really good ideas."

Westfield and Rod Hosilyk, veteran Reno entrepreneurs, are helping to nurture 11 companies these days, new firms that are direct outgrowths of seminars taught by Westfield and Hosilyk under the name of "Startup & Growth Strategies."

The startups, Hosilyk says, run the gamut from a pet-sitting business to a worldwide software consultancy to a clothing manufacturer that plans to focus on sales to consumers in China.

Running five workshops in Reno since mid-2010, Hosilyk and Westfield now count 125 graduates of their program. Thirty-three came back to share their stories during an "Entrepreneurs Assembly" a few weeks ago.

One of them, Hosilyk said, has completed a provisional patent application. Another has completed a product prototype. Two service-related companies have signed on their first clients.

And all have stories about how they're scraping together the money themselves to launch companies instead of wishing and hoping for banks or outside investors to come through.

"The most powerful thing we can do is to nurture them through the bootstrapping phase," says Westfield. "If they can do that, they can be self-actualized business people."

Hosilyk says students typically are highly motivated.

"The job market is so bad that people are desperate," he says. Startup & Growth Strategies got its start, in fact, from a volunteer workshop that Westfield and Hosilyk prepared for a group of out-of-work managers last summer.

They say the workshops seek to strike a realistic balance between the opportunities available and the amount of grind-it-out hard work that's required.

"There is a likelihood that some of these companies will not succeed," says Westfield. "But we hope to minimize the back-peddling by keeping them psyched, involved and ready to amend their strategy on any given day.

Adds Hosilyk, "Our object is to create peer pressure and peer help."