Speeding Forward

Sometimes it’s a lonely life trying to get a business off the ground, and sometimes, if you want to grow that business, you better have some help.

And growing small businesses into bigger ones has never been more important, as the nation’s unemployment rate sits near 10 percent, and the recovery of economies worldwide are likely to be driven by entrepreneurs innovating their way to a new economy.

That’s the rationale behind the accelerator program run by the Entrepreneurs Organization, a group of more than 7,000 entrepreneurs in more than 40 countries. To become a member of the organization, an entrepreneur has to run a business with more than $1 million a year in revenue.

But the vast majority of businesses don’t get that big. About 25 million businesses in the U.S. do less than $1 million, while only 650,000 earn more than $1 million, said Kevin Langley, the co-founder of Ellis Construction in New Orleans, who has helped to develop the accelerator program for EO.

“Less than 4 percent of all businesses that are ever started get over a million dollars,” Langley said. “The accelerator was started to change that. It’s all about job creation. It’s one thing to create your own job and another to start hiring other people. It’s the jump from sole proprietor to entrepreneur.”

In the past four years, the organization’s accelerator program, designed to identify and mentor entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses has helped create more than fifty $1 million businesses and led to the creation of more than 3,000 jobs.

It’s a pretty impressive record at a time when most businesses have been contracting instead of expanding, and it speaks to the power of networking with the right people and learning the right lessons of entrepreneurship.

For Langley, the program has a deep personal connection as well. His group in New Orleans was one of two to pilot the accelerator program, and they did it as the city was just starting to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

He and his fellow New Orleans EO members had been working on developing the program for more than a year. And then Katrina hit in August 2005, flooding immense sections of the city, leaving vast areas uninhabitable, and devastating businesses.

Langley’s business, for instance, functioned without phone service for nine months, with numerous employees housed in trailers outside the office.

And he was offered the choice of whether to go forward with an accelerator program in New Orleans.

“I was standing in the middle of this disaster with no power in the office,” he said. But he added at the time, “Don’t count me out of this program because it’s more important to launch than it ever has been.”

Detroit was another city that saw the program as crucial. Suffering from the slow decline of the auto industry has been a disaster all its own. And entrepreneurs there have seen it as their calling to bring their city, too, back from the brink.

“It was important that we launched this program in these two cities,” Langley said.

The accelerator program is designed to teach specific lessons, such as getting financing or dealing with personnel issues, as well as to pair fledgling entrepreneurs with more experienced mentors, and other businesspeople on their own level.

“When I went into the accelerator, it was like stepping into a toolbox. It gave me all the things I needed to launch my various businesses,” said Reza Bavar, a Los Angeles attorney who has formed an international trading company, a software development company, and most recently, his own law firm, Bavar Law Group. Before passing the million-dollar mark and becoming a member of EO himself, he took part in the accelerator program.

And, Bavar added, it eased that feeling of being alone.

“It’s really energizing to hear that (other entrepreneurs) are having the same or similar experiences,” Bavar. “You realize that you are all tethered together.”

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com