If you have a food, beverage or value-added agriculture business that’s up and running but needs to scale up, now is the time for you to take advantage of Green County Development Corporation’s Food and Beverage Boot Camp. Boot Camp will be taught by nationally-renowned small business guru Tera Johnson of the Food Finance Institute.
Boot Camp is an opportunity for food and beverage entrepreneurs to disengage from their day-to-day crazy work lives and spend some focused time learning how to make money in their businesses and then work one-on-one with Johnson to help fix things. It is an opportunity to both learn and actually get things fixed — which is why it’s not just training, it’s Boot Camp.
Boot Camp focuses on the strategic and detailed financial side of business. It helps participants concentrate on areas that frequently get set aside and walks them through each step with individual coaching. By participating in the Boot Camp, food business owners can expect: a clear, realistic business model path that they can articulate to anyone; a credible business plan with realistic assumptions for future growth; and a digital financial package that can be shared with stakeholders to support fundraising.
The program includes four full-day sessions January 15 and 16 and February 19 and 20. All sessions will be held at the Enterprise Center at the north end of Blackhawk Technical College, the Monroe Campus.
Boot Camp has the most benefit for food/beverage enterprises or value-added farm enterprises that are up and running but are small and need to scale up. Current businesses work on their existing performance as a baseline. It is also greatly beneficial for well-established businesses that need to reposition themselves for success in the future. In food and agriculture, everything is changing so quickly, everyone needs to adapt.
The first half of Boot Camp addresses business models that work. This will give businesses a good idea of how big and how diversified they need to be. In the second two days, they work on documenting the business from a financial perspective.
Once people have a business model that will work with the documentation they need, and a good game plan for how they are going to raise money, they typically can go on to raise the money they need to grow.
Johnson draws on personal experience to help small business owners. She founded TerasWhey a decade ago when she had an idea to reclaim some of the organic whey she saw being mixed in with nonorganic whey for animal feed and process it into powdered protein supplements for human consumption. In 2008, she built a “green” plant in Reedsburg to process the organic whey. By 2013, TerasWhey was such a success, Johnson sold it for $26 million.
Class size is limited and interested entrepreneurs are encouraged to apply to the program as soon as possible. Call GCDC for more information at 608-328-9452 or email gcdc@tds.net.
— Cara Carper is executive director at Green County Development Corporation. She can be reached at cara.gcdc@tds.net.
