A-B Tech receives $100 thousand for Embedded Entrepreneur program

Posted on — Jeff Fobes

Press release from Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College:

College Receives Funding for Embedded Entrepreneur Program

A-B Tech Community College was awarded a $100,000 grant from the A-B Tech Educational and Entrepreneurial Foundation for its Embedded Entrepreneur program.

The Embedded Entrepreneur Program offers an innovative approach to assisting startup and growth-stage companies in reaching new levels of success. Five companies were selected for the pilot year of the program.

“Unlike many entrepreneur support programs that can only hit the high spots by providing guidance in short meetings and limited work sessions, the Embedded Entrepreneur Program (EE) intends to move participating companies forward by changing the typical support equation,” said Steve Poland, Director of the Embedded Entrepreneur Program.

Poland will work in each of the companies over the course of an entire year, helping company founders reach new milestones. The participating companies are WEMA Global, 5th Element Camping, Big Boom Design, AsheVillain and Simple Shot Shooting Sports.

There is no cost to the program participant, but they must meet certain criteria such as having been in business for at least one year, be a for-profit company based in Western North Carolina, be revenue generating and have at least the founder working full time in the business.

The Embedded Entrepreneur Program is a program of the A-B Tech Small Business Center and Business Incubation program.

“Example program elements include the high-level One on One Technical Support & Embedded Work,” said Poland. For example, skills development will cover time management coaching, delegation skills, critical path analysis, team building and employee retention. Other areas include business and financial training, execution guidance, lender and equity funding preparation.

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About Jeff Fobes
As a long-time proponent of media for social change, my early activities included coordinating the creation of a small community FM radio station to serve a poor section of St. Louis, Mo. In the 1980s I served as the editor of the "futurist" newsletter of the U.S. Association for the Club of Rome, a professional/academic group with a global focus and a mandate to act locally. During that time, I was impressed by a journalism experiment in Mississippi, in which a newspaper reporter spent a year in a small town covering how global activities impacted local events (e.g., literacy programs in Asia drove up the price of pulpwood; soybean demand in China impacted local soybean prices). Taking a cue from the Mississippi journalism experiment, I offered to help the local Green Party in western North Carolina start its own newspaper, which published under the name Green Line. Eventually the local party turned Green Line over to me, giving Asheville-area readers an independent, locally focused news source that was driven by global concerns. Over the years the monthly grew, until it morphed into the weekly Mountain Xpress in 1994. I've been its publisher since the beginning. Mountain Xpress' mission is to promote grassroots democracy (of any political persuasion) by serving the area's most active, thoughtful readers. Consider Xpress as an experiment to see if such a media operation can promote a healthy, democratic and wise community. In addition to print, today's rapidly evolving Web technosphere offers a grand opportunity to see how an interactive global information network impacts a local community when the network includes a locally focused media outlet whose aim is promote thoughtful citizen activism. Follow me @fobes
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