Academy Helps Entrepreneurs Get Down to Business : Commerce: Ventura County’s program teaches such skills as planning, marketing and financing. The goal is to promote job growth.

Fists on his hips, Bill Parker paced the small, crowded conference room.

“Why are you doing this? Anybody?” he asked.

Arranged in rows before him, 44 men and women from local businesses sat with pens and notebooks, students in their first class at the Ventura County Entrepreneur Academy. More than two months of classes stretched before them, and Parker, an instructor, was sizing up his charges.

A babble of answers followed: Make more money. Whip the business into shape.

“I want to do what I want to do,” said Robert Voyle of Ventura.

“Who said that?” Parker said, scanning the room. “What’s your name? I’m Bill Parker. Glad to meet you. That’s the exact right answer.”

The students were there to learn business skills--methods of planning, marketing and financing that would help their businesses thrive. The county’s Board of Supervisors created the academy in 1994 in the hope that, by teaching entrepreneurs to prosper and grow, the county could create new jobs locally.

After this first class, in late September, the students would spend an average of 3 1/2 hours each week, for 10 weeks, meeting in a conference room at a Southern California Edison building on Ventura’s Telegraph Road.

Somewhere between an undergraduate business theory course and 12 evenings with a motivational speaker, the classes would show students how to analyze their markets, put together a marketing plan and manage their cash flow.

Above all, Parker and fellow instructor Jonathan Barbieri would prod their pupils, again and again, to focus on goals. What did they, as entrepreneurs, want to do? What steps were necessary to reach those goals?

“Get numbers on them, get them quantifiable, because I can tell you folks, if you can’t see it, you can’t get it,” Parker said.

AVOIDING MISTAKES

Ann Reeves of Ojai listened as Parker gave his spiel. She knew what she wanted to do, but not how to do it.

A former business communications specialist with First Interstate Bank, she had struck off on her own this year to pursue her true interest: time management.

For Reeves, the term means more than simply using one’s time effectively. It means convincing people to stop thinking of time, schedules and deadlines as the enemy.

“The culture as a whole has a very dysfunctional relationship with time,” she said. “We kind of view time as the Darth Vader of our lives, this dark and faceless foe that gradually destroys all these things we value.”

Too many people, she said, drive themselves without trying to strike a balance with their more relaxed, creative impulses. Such people end up “joy-starved,” she said, and their productivity suffers.

Reeves offers time-management consulting services to organizations and individuals. She had dabbled in the field for years, writing articles and giving occasional talks. Now she had entered it full time, working out of her home, and realized she needed to start thinking of her work as a business instead of a labor of love.

“I’ve never taken any kind of business courses, so one of my hopes and expectations would be that I could avoid some of the typical mistakes,” she said.

Eric Rasmussen had made some of those mistakes.

His 6-year-old company, Guidance Dynamics Corp. in Simi Valley, specializes in components and control systems for military and scientific rockets. But defense cutbacks had eaten into profits.

Then in September, the company’s major customer--a Seattle-based firm setting up a commercial launch system for satellites--began having problems with financing. Guidance Dynamics, now down to four workers from a peak of seven, had to move into smaller offices.

“We had allowed ourselves to become too vulnerable,” Rasmussen said. “We’d put all our effort into one project, scramble around like mad men and women to get it out the door and say, ‘What’s next?’ ”

Rasmussen had heard about the entrepreneur academy through a machine shop his company uses. Realizing he needed to rethink his business, he signed up.

He approached the class hoping for tips on marketing. As essential as it was to his business’s survival, he had never considered it his strong suit.

“That’s been the problem with this company from the start--we’re all engineers,” he said.

PROMOTING GROWTH

Problems like these prompted the county’s personnel department to propose creating the program, said academy administrator Hui Ling Tanouye.

In 1993, the year before the academy’s first class, the county’s unemployment rate reached a record 10.4%. As a result, the program was designed to promote job growth, Tanouye said.

“We only want to work with those businesses that are interested in growing,” she said. “If they aren’t interested in growing, they shouldn’t be in the group.”

Most students must pledge to create a new job within six months of graduating (low-income students are exempt). Although each must spend $30 on a textbook and $100 on a deposit--refunded after the student completes a post-graduation business performance survey--the class is essentially free, funded with federal money dispensed by four cities--Ventura, Oxnard, Port Hueneme and Simi Valley.

Judging from the performance surveys, most students live up to their pledge. So far, more than 300 men and women in business have attended eight academy courses offered in different cities around the county. Tanouye said graduates of the first six courses created 284 new jobs within three months of graduation. They also reported an average 16% increase in gross sales.

Vic Pollard of Westlake, who graduated from the academy in 1994, parlayed his new expertise into landing a $3-million contract to help build an American-style dental clinic in Moscow. Closer to home, C&T; Auto Supplies in Oxnard moved a small family business into an 8,000-square-foot store and warehouse, hired eight new employees and added five new delivery trucks.

The training that produces those results can be intense. Parker and Barbieri teach as a tag team, splitting each evening lesson into alternating segments and bombarding students with information.

They also try to draw on their students’ experience, turning to them for anecdotes to illustrate the material.

“You’re winding up with a relatively large group of people over 40, and you have a very large spectrum of experience, knowledge and acquired tools,” said Barbieri, who runs JDB & Associates management consulting firm in Ojai. “There’s always a lot of knowledge in the people there, so you try to bring it out,” he said.

“How many people have experienced cash flow problems?” Parker called out to the class one evening.

People laughed. A few hands went up.

Parker frowned. “How many people have not experienced cash flow difficulties?” he said.

A few hands.

“Are you in business?” he asked them skeptically.

This evening, Parker and Barbieri wanted their students to realize the impact that slow billing and slow payment for services can have on a business. Lori Bernstein, who runs the LaserEdge laser printer repair service based in Camarillo, had already learned the lesson.

“I’ve had to write letters saying, ‘If you haven’t sent the check by the time you get this, I’m coming by and taking out the part I installed,’ because I had to pay for that [part],” she told her classmates. “And you know what? It’s there the next day. It’s like they’ve FedEx’d it to my house.”

Parker warned the entrepreneurs that a lax approach to collecting money could kill a business. “In your timidity as a human, you’re afraid to ask for your money,” he said. “Knock it off!”

Throughout the course, Parker had tried to shake his students out of habits that could be holding them back. A former Navy weapons specialist and the training coordinator at California Amplifier in Camarillo, Parker is convinced most entrepreneurs are limited only by fear and preconceived notions of what they can achieve.

“Here in this society, in the good old USA, we can have anything we want,” he said one morning in his largely undecorated office. “The problem is knowing what we want. We feel we need approval and acceptance before we can go out and get it.”

The class, he hoped, had freed his students of that attitude. “They understand now that the goals they set are theirs, and they don’t need approval.”

FOCUS ON MARKETING

Eric Rasmussen had some idea what his Simi Valley electronics firm could achieve. Even before the course, the company had begun exploring new uses for largely military technology.

One idea, inspired by the Northridge earthquake, would create a home emergency system to turn on low-voltage lights when the electrical power died.

At the entrepreneur academy, he hooked up with another businessman who installs solar heating and electrical equipment and discussed designing controls for solar energy systems.

But the biggest change Rasmussen foresaw was the amount of time he planned to spend on finding new clients.

“We always perceived marketing as our weakness,” he said. “But I think what the class did was show us that it’s not that difficult if you approach it like other aspects of your business. . . . It’s not a task to be avoided, but something to be looked forward to.”

Reeves, too, came away from the course thinking of ways to reach potential customers. Customers were out there, she said: baby-boomers looking to manage their late-blooming talents, self-employed entrepreneurs who, lacking the structure of an office, need help organizing their time.

To reach some of them, she placed an ad in the January edition of a local film society flier. “That ad will say, ‘When you’re really serious about finishing that screenplay, call the time trainer,’ ” she said.

She has also begun to redesign her brochures to target specific types of customers--such as businesses looking for someone to give a seminar or individuals needing personal time-management training--instead of lumping all of her skills and all of her customers together.

As for many of the more technical points of the course, Reeves said she would need the next few years to digest them all.

“I’m extremely satisfied,” she said.

“It could easily mean the difference between success and failure, or at least between success and greater success.”