What is Enterprise Facilitation ™?

Enterprise Facilitation is a locally-driven, locally-supported economic development model. It focuses on people, not on financial aid or traditional training programs. It enhances, but does not duplicate, other existing efforts.

The Enterprise Facilitation model:

• Assesses personal commitment to a business idea before assessing that idea’s business viability.
• Empowers entrepreneurs to take that idea from a passionate dream to practical reality through proper management.
• Teaches business owners the importance of team building to balance the three equally vital aspects of successful business management: product, marketing, and finance. 
• Encourages local expansion and retention rather than recruitment of outside businesses by capturing and enhancing the unique skills and passions of local people, creating a variety of local businesses with deep roots in the community.
• Relies on entrepreneurs’ own internal motivation and creates a “ripple effect” of excitement about the possibilities for local entrepreneurship.
• Brings together a diverse group of community leaders whose sole purpose is to advance entrepreneurship and strengthen local businesses.

How does it work?

• The Sirolli Institute works with the local project management team to assemble a local resource board consisting of local civic leaders, professionals, economic development practitioners and other community members. Board members receive intensive training to implement the program and to successfully fulfill their roles as resource board members, assisting an Enterprise Facilitator.
• The project management team, with the help of the Sirolli Institute, hires a full-time Enterprise Facilitator. The Sirolli Institute trains the Enterprise Facilitator in the methodology of the Enterprise Facilitation model. 
• The Enterprise Facilitator provides free, confidential, one-on-one business coaching, assisting existing and would-be business owners to make informed decisions about the viability of their ideas. The Facilitator develops the client’s capacity to assess their own management strengths and weaknesses. They may bring specific issues to the resource board for additional ideas, feedback and support.

Why Enterprise Facilitation ™?

The Enterprise Facilitation model has proven itself to effectively create jobs in rural areas worldwide. 

• During the first ten years of operation in Esperance, Australia, population 10,000, Enterprise Facilitation created over 400 businesses with a success rate of more than 80%!
• Over a five-year period in Baker County, Oregon, the program created 60 businesses and more than 140 jobs, with a business success rate of 88%!
• WesTex Allied illustrates their work with Sirolli on this website.
• The existing businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs are the backbone of the North Santiam area economy. Supporting the growth and sustainability of these enterprises is a critical long-term investment, overlooked by traditional economic development models. 

Enterprise Facilitation embraces and supports these small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Small business entrepreneurship can mean the difference between communities that thrive and adapt to the needs of their members, and those that wither in the face of changing market forces…Rural policymakers, who once followed traditional strategies of recruiting manufacturers that export low-value products, have realized that entrepreneurs can generate new economic value for their communities.  Entrepreneurs add jobs, raise incomes, create wealth, improve the quality of life of citizens and help rural communities operate in the global economy. -Corporation for Enterprise Development, www.cfed.org

What are the benefits?

Whether you are a business owner, an aspiring entrepreneur, or a local resident, the GROW North Santiam Program will provide substantial benefits both direct and indirect. 

• Free, local, confidential, one-on-one business assistance.
• A positive and diverse entrepreneur-friendly business environment
• A strong local economy
• Fewer instances of business and business loan failures
• Fewer instances of downtown ‘revolving door’ businesses and empty storefronts
• Increased sales (business to business)
• Local investment; circulation of wealth within the economy
• More efficient use of local resources
• Local job creation and retention
• Infusion of wealth to support local infrastructure
• Local capacity building

Eighty-eight percent of businesses in Oregon employ fewer than 20 people. 

This is not only an investment in the local economy, it is an investment in your future.

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