Starting a new business is hard, and ensuring the fledgling venture survives and thrives is a challenge. According to recent data (March 2022) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)[i], just 14.5% of new businesses survived in Maryland since establishment. Thankfully, startup businesses don’t have to “go it alone” – they can tap into the resources offered by Maryland’s business incubator programs.
Can Maryland Business Incubators Help Fledgling Businesses Flourish?
Maryland’s business incubator program can help fledgling businesses with office space for rent in Silver Spring MD, Columbia, Salisbury, and other Regional Institution Strategic Enterprise (RISE) zones. But it’s not just office space that comes with these programs. New businesses also receive professional startup support in terms of:
- Doing a self-examination of their vision and strategy
- Access to work-ready office space and technologies
- Planning and positioning your fledgling business to succeed
- Mastering the art of selling to your target audience
- Leveraging eCommerce as an engine for growth and profitability
- …and more!
Business incubators, such as the Maryland Innovation Center (MIC), offer all these benefits to startup businesses. And it’s all conveniently available to business ventures who rent and share office space within their ecosystem.
Self-examination: Doing an Introspective Review
As a fledgling enterprise, or someone with entrepreneurial plans to expand your start-up venture, it’s always helpful to do a self-examination of the current state of your business. Doing so will not only help you clarify your vision; but will provide additional insight into whether you’ve grounded your plans in business reality. Business incubator experts help you examine factors that include:
- Whether you are ready to expand your business beyond the traditional start-up network of well-wishers and acquaintances
- If your plans are scalable and replicable across broader geographic locations – not just your immediate neighborhood
- Assessing if your current revenue streams support your aspirations for future expansion
- Ascertaining the “executability” of your plans – i.e., whether they are realistic, or simply look good on paper
Why is this introspective review essential as part of the start-up venture process? The answer: Because it takes more than just vision and passion for start-ups to succeed. The four-factor introspective assessment will reveal whether there’s a credible, actionable, realistic business plan behind your entrepreneurial foresight and desire. It’s important to underscore, though, that it takes both – passion and plans – for fledgling ventures to succeed. One, without the other, cannot assure success!
https://www.bls.gov/bdm/bdmage.htm#MD and https://www.bls.gov/bdm/md_age_total_table7.txtstar
Starting a new business is hard, and ensuring the fledgling venture survives and thrives is a challenge. According to recent data (March 2022) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)[i], just 14.5% of new businesses survived in Maryland since establishment. Thankfully, startup businesses don’t have to “go it alone” – they can tap into the resources offered by Maryland’s business incubator programs.
Can Maryland Business Incubators Help Fledgling Businesses Flourish?
Maryland’s business incubator program can help fledgling businesses with office space for rent in Silver Spring MD, Columbia, Salisbury, and other Regional Institution Strategic Enterprise (RISE) zones. But it’s not just office space that comes with these programs. New businesses also receive professional startup support in terms of:
- Doing a self-examination of their vision and strategy
- Access to work-ready office space and technologies
- Planning and positioning your fledgling business to succeed
- Mastering the art of selling to your target audience
- Leveraging eCommerce as an engine for growth and profitability
- …and more!
Business incubators, such as the Maryland Innovation Center (MIC), offer all these benefits to startup businesses. And it’s all conveniently available to business ventures who rent and share office space within their ecosystem.
Self-examination: Doing an Introspective Review
As a fledgling enterprise, or someone with entrepreneurial plans to expand your start-up venture, it’s always helpful to do a self-examination of the current state of your business. Doing so will not only help you clarify your vision; but will provide additional insight into whether you’ve grounded your plans in business reality. Business incubator experts help you examine factors that include:
- Whether you are ready to expand your business beyond the traditional start-up network of well-wishers and acquaintances
- If your plans are scalable and replicable across broader geographic locations – not just your immediate neighborhood
- Assessing if your current revenue streams support your aspirations for future expansion
- Ascertaining the “executability” of your plans – i.e., whether they are realistic, or simply look good on paper
Why is this introspective review essential as part of the start-up venture process? The answer: Because it takes more than just vision and passion for start-ups to succeed. The four-factor introspective assessment will reveal whether there’s a credible, actionable, realistic business plan behind your entrepreneurial foresight and desire. It’s important to underscore, though, that it takes both – passion and plans – for fledgling ventures to succeed. One, without the other, cannot assure success!
https://www.bls.gov/bdm/bdmage.htm#MD and https://www.bls.gov/bdm/md_age_total_table7.txt
Office Space and Technology
When startups take advantage of office space for rent in Columbia MD, or in any one of the other RISE locations owned and operated by Business Incubators like MIC, they inherit an entire ecosystem dedicated to fledging business success. Entrepreneurs have access to facilities such as:
- conference rooms
- presentation venues
- meeting spaces
- audio-video, pod-casting technology
- high-speed internet and communications
…and a lot more!
Shared office space, within the Business Incubator program, means young businesses spend less time (and money!) office-hunting. It also means they walk into business-ready work premises from day one, and can get productive immediately. Best of all, renting office space at one of these RISE locations gives teams the flexibility to scale up or shrink teams at different phases of the businesses’ evolution. That’s something fledgling businesses, who own or long-term lease their business space, can’t easily do.
Support With Positioning Your Business for Success
One of the first things that any new business owner must understand, about their startup venture, is how to position their business within their niche. This often requires more than just doing a survey of the competition, and deciding to enter an industry with little or no competition. Strategic venture positioning involves:
- Exploring your proposed product or service offering in terms of the competition
- Identifying your competitive advantages viz. what your peers are offering
- Targeting specific market needs, as opposed to positioning yourself as a “generic” alternative
- Researching funding options and sources to support your market positioning
- Structuring your organization, and building a team, around your intended market position
- Understanding the cash flow mechanics that come with how you position your value proposition
- Building supporting business plans
- Executing your plans to achieve your targeted market position
A poorly positioned business is unlikely to succeed – regardless of how mush funding you secure, or how well trained or experienced a team you’ve pulled together. When you move into business incubator office space for rent in Salisbury, MD, you’ll also get access to an award-winning curriculum, such as the Kauffman FastTrac® program. By learning how to master the essentials of managing a startup, you’ll position your business on a trajectory for growth and success.
Learning and Knowing What it Takes Sell
When passionate entrepreneurs put credible business plans together, they’re more likely to succeed in their new ventures. However, it takes knowledge and understanding of execution (of that plan) to guarantee your startup business survives its initial phase, and thrives over time. And selling is one of the critical success factors for businesses to survive and thrive. If you can’t sell your product or service to your intended audience, then your fledgling business will likely not survive through the tough initial few months. So, what does it take to master the art of selling?
- Startup businesses must meticulously develop realistic sales forecasts to ensure they can realize the sales targets needed to generate projected revenue
- Making those initial sales, especially for a fledgling company, is challenging. It’s therefore critical that new businesses cultivate an endless (or continually refreshed) pipeline of prospects
- Customers and clients will only buy products and services that deliver them value. Articulating that value perception is essential for successful selling
- Clearly setting achievable sales targets is important. However, it’s important to understand the roots of those targets – attainable revenue goals!
- There’ll be times, in the sales cycle, where startup venture customers and competitors may pose roadblocks to a sale. Knowing how to handle those obstacles, to produce a successful sales outcome, is vital
- A sale isn’t complete until it is! Newbie ventures sometimes tend to celebrate their sales successes prematurely. It’s important to know not just how to make your pitch; but it’s equally critical to know how to close the deal
And if you don’t already know these aspects of sales success, then you should take time to learn about them. An easy way to do that is by establishing an association with a business incubator. Your office space for rent in Columbia MD will give you access to leadership programs and learning and development opportunities too. As a new business, you can capitalize on those options and energize your selling and marketing strategy.
Leveraging E-Commerce for Success
While many new startups thrive in a bricks-and-mortar environment, the future of new businesses lies in having a robust e-commerce presence. With so much else on the go, fledgling business entrepreneurs typically fail to recognize E-Commerce as a critical success factor. Working with a business incubator will help you leverage online marketing and sales platforms for strategic success. Renting office space within the MIC incubator ecosystem will provide you access to E-commerce marketing and management programs that deliver:
- Flexibility: So, your business model can evolve around the ebbs and flows of online demand for your product or service
- Scalability: To allow you to build an e-commerce platform that expands, contracts, or pivots, based on customer preferences and economic conditions
- Elasticity: Enabling your fledgling business to match funding, allocated to the e-commerce strategy, with real-world resource requirements
- Replicability: Which defines the ability to prove your e-commerce capabilities, and them mirror them across your business network as you continue to evolve through various stages of your startup venture
Finding such resources on your own, away from an incubator environment, is challenging. Yet, that knowledge is essential to successfully plan, design, implement and manage an e-commerce service. Everything you need to make a significant presence online, and compete successfully with other e-commerce ventures, you’ll find within the incubator network. It’s all under one roof for startups who rent premises within the incubator ecosystem.
One-Stop Recipe for Start-up Success
Startups, in association with the Maryland Innovation Center (MIC), are fortunate to have access to a one-stop recipe for venture success. Whether it’s office space for rent in Silver Spring MD, Salisbury or Columbia, fledgling ventures get more than just four walls and furniture. Alliances with MIC offer newbie venture team’s access to a depth of entrepreneurial knowledge on a broad range of topics – from how to market and sell their innovations, and leveraging social media for venture success, to establishing strong e-commerce presences.
Establishing a presence within the MIC family also offers participating businesses access to exceptional mentorship opportunities. The Entrepreneurs in Residence program is the perfect resource to help young business leaders take their enterprises to the next level. These mentors, who guide and advise fledgling venture leaders, have a track record of building and running their own successful ventures. That’s relevant knowledge and expertise a start-up business team can leverage to ensure their own endeavors lead to success.
No startup venture can succeed on its own, without an established network of supporters and supporting resources. Fledgling business, within the NIC ecosystem, tap into the extensive connections that the Center has established over the years. These networks not only provide businesses access to venture funding; but they’ll also benefit from in-house expertise that allows them to vet their ideas, refine their plans, and build stronger pathways to business success.
By moving into an available office space for rent in Salisbury, MD, underrepresented businesses can also tap into a range of initiatives tailored for them. BRITE – the Business Revitalization Initiative Through Entrepreneurship program, sponsored by MIC, is a great way for these fledgling businesses to receive technical training, mentorship, coaching, and other leadership tutoring and guidance.
