Kansas City must keep pushing ahead to help entrepreneurs

Kansas City’s bid to become “America’s Most Entrepreneurial City” is three years old. So how’s it faring, especially in creating companies and jobs?

Not well enough is the honest answer after evaluating early numbers released by supporters of this important and worthwhile effort. Still, more progress is in the works.

It’s part of the Big 5 program promoted by the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce to improve the region’s economy.

Supporters said in 2011 that increasing the numbers of innovative enterprises and jobs in those companies would be crucial ways to measure success. In recent interviews, Peter deSilva and Maria Meyers outlined the successes achieved and challenges still faced in pushing the entrepreneurial envelope.

DeSilva, chairman and CEO of UMB Bank, is the enthusiastic champion of the Big 5 idea. Meyers, director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Innovation Center, is a relentless promoter of new ways to get even the smallest of business efforts off the ground.

DeSilva makes a good point: This has to be a movement in Kansas City, not an initiative with a starting and ending date. It’s a “long-time transformational change,” he says.

Simplified a great deal, this Big 5 idea will succeed if it can link people who have great ideas to capital that help transform those ideas into new retail or high-tech products or other things that Americans want to buy to improve their lives.

The free market is going to decide the value of these ideas, which means there’s going to be a fair amount of failure when some of them crash and burn.

Kansas City will become “America’s Most Entrepreneurial City” — or something close to it — if lots of people think this is the best place for them to put down roots, become successful and perhaps create a fast-growing company employing many others.

Now for a few self-reported figures:

▪ The Digital Sandbox KC initiative has created 23 companies and 154 jobs.

▪ The Kansas City Startup Village has 25 companies and 75 jobs.

Among the companies helped through these and other entrepreneurial initiatives is one that files and manages long-term care insurance claims for families; another whose mobile app helps people find and share their favorite live musical events; and still another that makes it possible to quickly find and buy reused materials for home projects.

A bakery owner got a microloan to open a shop, while another business has an app that provides a password-free experience by instead involving scans of users’ eyes for authentication.

One of the historical hurdles in this region to economic growth has been the lack of adequate capital, often linked to supposedly stodgy and conservative local business leaders.

Things are better than they used to be, Meyers said, thanks to more sources of local private funds as well as money from other places such as a recently announced $300,000 Small Business Administration grant to help local entrepreneurs boost their sales.

A key to such growth is getting the right people to talk to each other. “It’s a lot about connections,” Meyers said.

The Big 5 designation by the chamber has helped create much more excitement about the promise of entrepreneurial activity in Kansas City. As deSilva said, “Somewhere in there is the next Cerner” and this region must not let it “slip through our fingers.”

Of course, plenty of cities across the country are competing for millennials and others who have the passion to be their own bosses. While Kansas City boasts certain strengths, entrepreneurs aren’t going to automatically come to the Heartland.

They have to feel welcome, be able to bounce their ideas off smart people and, yes, get their hands on the cash needed to put their best ideas in motion.

This story was originally published October 12, 2014 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Kansas City must keep pushing ahead to help entrepreneurs."