News

What's it take to be "Entrepreneur Friendly"?

by Matt Forshee • February 08, 2008

Yesterday, Fayette County was awarded the designation by the Georgia Department of Economic Development as an Entrepreneur Friendly Community.

What does that mean?

An “Entrepreneur Friendly” community is a community in Georgia which has created a positive environment for citizens who want to start their own business, by building entrepreneur and small business strategies into the community’s overall economic development strategies.

Each community that wishes to obtain this title does so by following a multi-step process.

First, you have to identify the local organization & champion who will lead the community in their entrepreneur and small business development strategy. The Fayette County Chamber of Commerce and the Fayette County Development Authority served that role.

You also have to form a committee that will support and guide the initiative. Our committee was made up of local entrepreneurs and service providers from all areas of Fayette County, including representative of the county, Peachtree City, Fayetteville and Tyrone, a high school teacher, the head of Clayton State University’s Fayette campus, Fayetteville’s Downtown Development Authority, general small business owners, minority small business owners, a local bank, the SBDC, the Georgia Department of Labor, Piedmont Fayette Hospital and others.

Next, you have to increase community awareness of and support for strategies, needs and resources, as well as educate the community about the benefits of “homegrown” business development and fast-growth companies. We did this through a number of avenues, including documenting local resources and opportunities, holding an “Entrepreneur Extravaganza” as part of a local job and business fair and through press releases and the Chamber’s Business Spotlight program on local access television.

You then have to identify local entrepreneurs and interview them on their successes and their challenges. We developed a list of over 100 local entrepreneurs and successfully interviewed over 60 of them. The results will be featured in a future news article.

We then presented the results of our work to a committee from the state. This committee was made up of former entrepreneurs, state officials and community development professionals. They toured our community, heard from local entrepreneurs and heard the results of our survey.

finally they presented us with the designation as “Entrepreneur Friendly”.

Now, we move to Phase 2 of the designation where we dig deeper into the data we collected on the local environment for entrepreneurs. What are their challenges? Do the challenges deal with funding? With business skills? With local government, state government or federal government regulations? We then develop solutions to try and solve these issues, making Fayette an even better place for Entrepreneurs.

The Fayette County initiative, lead by the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce and the Fayette County

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