[OSList] entrepreneurs in open space

[doug]

Friends--

Report on a half-day OST in Northern Indiana, held today:

A local women's college has a program to help low-income women become 
entrepreneurs. It runs 6 weeks and has as faculty many community people, 
bankers and business leaders. I convinced them from the start that OST 
should be an integral part of the curriculum. This spring was the 4th 
class. This spring we had two classes running concurrently, one meets in 
the evening, one during the day. Today was the first time both classes 
had met each other.

We gathered at 8:30, scheduled the opening for 9:00 and actually started 
at about 9:10. Village marketplace was done by 9:40. There was so much 
good food they brought to share that it was 8:57 before they gathered 
for their first groups! We scheduled to run to 1:00. So we did 3 
sessions of 1 hour each, with the closing circle at 12:40.

There were 21 of the 23 students there, and there were 4 faculty and 
advisor folks too, a total of 25. The faculty and advisor people stayed 
out of the sessions for the most part.

There was a healthy amount of bumble-beeing and butterflying, lots of 
banter and laughter.

14 topics were posted, and they elected to combine 3 into one session. 
Theme: "Issues and Opportunities in Our Businesses, Our Lives." Topics 
included:
Managing business risk
How do we sell our products?
A name for my business
Juggling home, family & business
How do I connect with people
Finding a business location
The three that were combined: Funding for the future; How do we invest 
in our business?; Connecting with business/financial partners
Ideas? Marketing...outside the box!
Stepping out
Having a business at home, or opening a store?

What I have learned from these folks is the shorter sessions (1 hour) 
work better for them. Perhaps their needs and questions are more 
discrete at this stage in their entrepreneurial adventure (many have not 
actually started their businesses, they are just learning about business 
plans and payroll taxes and the like). Maybe they are still unsure about 
themselves and not sure even what questions to ask—maybe the questions 
(or the answers) get deeper and have more permutations after they have 
actually been doing their businesses for awhile (I have also been doing 
retreats for graduates of this course with longer sessions and a 
day-long format, and they sustain the conversations for longer times). 
Not sure why shorter sessions would serve them better, but I saw groups 
breaking up before the 60 minutes was up at least twice, maybe three 
times, and at the end, the conversations seemed to be running down so I 
went up to them after about 50 minutes and asked if they were done and 
wanted to move into closing early, and they said yes.

A lot of emotion in the closing circle--even passing of tissues!

Another one for the books. Of course it worked.

			:- Doug. Germann