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Start local
It used to be not just understood, but it was enforced. That if you were serious about getting your business off the ground, if you were serious about getting external funding, if you were talking to venture capitalists, you better be sitting in Silicon valley or you better be sitting in New York city. At most, there was starting to be a little bit of a pulse in Los Angeles and at a couple of other significant sized cities, but you had to be in a major metropolitan area, somewhere close to venture capitalists. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think that not only are cities all around the country of creating hubs that have ecosystems for entrepreneurs, but even also ecosystems for investors.
But as the person that’s profiled in this particular hack in my book, Sheena Allen proves she’s built an entire business focused on the unbanked. Well guess what? There’s not very many unbanked people in Los Angeles and New York and San Francisco. So what she has really proven is this idea that… And we’ve known this always in businesses, is that you’ve got to be close to your customers. In her case, her customers are in the deep, deep south. So yeah, she’s coming to New York, she’s going to Silicon Valley. She takes trips to secure capital. She takes trips to do media, but her business at its core is in the deep south. And that’s where she’s headquartered. That’s where she’s staying. And that’s where her company is and will continue to thrive.
Another advantage for staying where your customers are and for really retaining roots in some place that you know, is that it’s also the places where you’re most needed. If there is a brain drain and that by design is the way that we’re going to have businesses thrive in this country, then there will always be a gravitational pull to the New Yorks and San Franciscos. But we need, and we as entrepreneurs are the best vehicle to fill this need, we need to be building economies in Detroit, in Baltimore, in New Orleans, in places that won’t survive without the help and the innovation and the capital that entrepreneurs like us bring to the table. So there’s a benefit to your company, but there’s also a benefit to the community.
And I don’t know about most entrepreneurs, but I know that the ones that I’m surrounded by, and certainly my aspiration as an entrepreneur has always been to build things. What’s the point of going places where you’re just another number versus staying someplace where you can really build something meaningful and create community and if possible, rebuild where other people ignored?
Pursue growth
Now on the other side of that, while it’s amazing to start local, and while it’s amazing to build within your community, what I want for every entrepreneur is to see growth. So if you are following the path of growth and expansion, no matter where you started, you’re going to have to go into new markets. And you’re going to have to go places where nobody knows you. That’s been the majority of my career, is taking businesses and going into new markets. And there’s a company that’s featured in the book called Cinch Pay that I love because she’s from Israel. And what she did is she’s a great case study into how to get hyper, hyper local. She’s from Israel, she’s starting a business in the United States.
And what she realized is that somebody with an Israeli accent, with a model that nobody had ever heard before going into these little neighborhoods around the boroughs of New York, is going to have a problem of goodwill and trust. And so what she ended up doing, which I thought was genius. And I think it’s what any entrepreneur going into a new market needs to think about is she found an amazing partnership in the local, teeny, tiny newspapers and media companies that are hyper, hyper focused on just their neighborhood. She figured they already have relationships with the store owners and the restaurant owners and the various different entrepreneurs that are in that neighborhood already. So let me leverage from them. Let me use them as essentially my entry into a whole new community that already has trust and that already has relationships with this local newspaper. And so she built a partnership with them, and then she went one by one to getting to know the various different players in the neighborhood, with the newspaper in tow. With the newspaper giving her the key in a gate into a community of trust.