Tieton Farm & Creamery Poised for More Growth

Lori Babcock is excited about the future.  As co-owner of Tieton Farm and Creamery she is seeing her hard work pay off and feels the business is primed to double or triple sales of its gourmet goat cheeses.  Babcock was the speaker this month at the Yakima Chamber’s Entrepreneurial Spotlight, a monthly series promoting new businesses in the region.  Lori told the audience that getting the business established has been full of trials and tribulations.  At the same time though it is very obvious that Lori and her partner Ruth absolutely love what they are doing.

Tieton Farm and Creamery got started when Lori and Ruth got interested in farming and concerned about their job security at a financial software company.  After running a small farming operation in Bellevue, the ladies decided to bite the bullet and produce gourmet

cheese.  Lori said they initially looked for farm sites in Western Washington before being drawn to Tieton by Ed Marquand and the Mighty Tieton group.

Lori indicated that their focus on branding and marketing helped the company get off to a successful start.  She purposely positioned their product at the high end of the marketplace, explaining that they could not compete successfully on price vis a vis other larger competitors.  Putting an emphasis on quality and sustainable farming practices has helped Tieton Farm and Creamery develop a loyal consumer following.

Babcock indicated there are two areas where entrepreneurs and start up businesses need to be careful.  Properly capitalizing a business is absolutely critical.  Credit markets are difficult to access for new firms so it is important to have enough capital to feed the business.  Lori said this was a difficult lesson for Tieton Farm and Creamery.  She put a lot of work into getting a loan before realizing that banks would not fund her proposals.  The company did get funding from Wheatland Bank to start the creamery, but the ladies had to postpone their dream of building a bed and breakfast at the farm.

Lori also told the group to be careful with time estimates.  She and Ruth underestimated how much work was involved in starting the business and how long it would take to launch Tieton Farm and Creamery.

It is great to see Tieton Farm and Creamery doing well.  Their gourmet cheeses are outstanding and the company Is a great addition to the Yakima Valley.  You can purchase their cheeses at the Deep Sea Deli in Yakima.  The ladies also sell their products at local farmers’ markets.  To learn more about Tieton Farm and Creamery click here.

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Next month’s Entrepreneur Spotlight will feature Jeff Winn from Yakima Craft Brewing.  Visit www.yakima.org to learn about and register for this event.

New Steps to Support Entrepreneurship in Yakima County

Our organization is pleased to announce the start of our new Entrepreneurial Friendly Cities (EFC) Initiative. Designed to support small businesses in Yakima County’s rural cities, we expect to ultimately partner with several communities and help them advance strategies that aid home town businesses. Through our entrepreneurship initiative we learned that emerging and established businesses outside of Yakima have limited access to small business counselors and related support services. New Vision plans to work with selected cities to recruit and train small business counselors that can help and mentor local companies. We also plan to help these cities develop small business resource libraries and counseling centers in their communities.

Additionally each community will be able to use the talents of a college intern to help jumpstart these small business projects. Our office is working closely with the Yakima Valley SCORE Chapter, Heritage University, and the Yakima Valley Community College to support the EFC initiative. These partners have been great resources throughout our entrepreneur initiative and we could not move this new initiative forward without their active involvement.

Several cities are interested in receiving the designation. Cities vying to become EFC partners must develop an action plan with the input from their local businesses over the summer. A review panel will evaluate applications from each city and ultimately choose up to four cities to participate in this new initiative.

Our goal through the EFC initiative is to broaden the safety net for small businesses and entrepreneurs in the Yakima Valley. By developing satellite business assistance centers we hope to bring important help to companies closer to where they operate and live.

Since this is a new initiative for New Vision, we decided to work with a smaller number of cities first before trying to bring every rural city into the fold. This allows our organization to evaluate results in each designated city, work out any implementation bugs, and ultimately determine how to scale up these services for other interested communities within the region.

We are excited about the EFC initiative. Through effective partnerships we are building capacity in our rural cities to help entrepreneurs and small businesses succeed.  For most of our smallest cities retaining and growing these firms is their lifeline to the future.

By David McFadden

The Man behind two of the World’s Biggest Brands

When you think of  a corporate brand, there are two that stand out far and above many others:  Nike and Starbucks.  I had the pleasure of hearing Scott Bedbury, former marketing executive for both of these companies.  Scott was the marketing leader behind Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ branding campaign and also helped build Starbucks into the brand it is today.  Ironically enough, he mentioned that visiting Yakima brought him full circle to the early days of his career when he worked in this region for the Yakima and Wenatchee Fruit Commissions.

Bedbury treated the audience to a short ‘branding tutorial’ with a few timeless gems:

• A brand packs a promise and has a set of values.
• Everything has a brand…your city, your company, your employer, religion, your mother, your kids.
• What’s the real difference between your brand and your competitors?
• The day you stop trying to be better than your competition, is the day it comes down to price.  Service DOES make a difference.  I’ve also heard this phrased that ‘if you’re not better, you’d better be cheaper’.
• A successful brand finds a way to connect to a timeless, human need.
• Branding comes down to basic psychology – people want to feel valued and recognized.
• If you don’t define who you are, someone, somewhere will be happy to.

He captivated the audience with two short videos from his corporate experience: one was of an old Nike commercial – the first time Nike interjected humor into ads, and the second was a video used to train Starbucks employees and managers.  In this message, the coffee is an afterthought, the significance is about emotional connectivity and getting down to how their customers feel.

Bedbury’s genuine and unassuming personality made his branding tutorial even more credible.  He ended the message with some words about the world we are in today; the instant socialization and web makes everything transparent and a company’s customers,employees and messages are even more important than before.  He gave a great example of how if you are treated poorly by a front line employee, it can forever change your image (and buying power) of that company, no matter what kind of product or service they have.  He also commented that employers who treat their employees well will be more likely to retain key staff.

It was a timely and important message applicable for any business, employer or entrepreneur.

Three Ways having a Business Plan Pays Off

It is no secret that we encourage entrepreneurs to develop a business plan prior to starting a business.  In fact, part of the reason we started the Enterprise Challenge Business Plan Contest was to identify and reward Yakima County’s best and brightest new businesses and entrepreneurs.  One of the most valuable things entrepreneurs can do is to use their business plan as a working document and review often.  The real value isn’t in the actual completed plan, but in the process of gathering information, research and planning your business.

Writing a business plan can be a lot of work, but can pay dividends in the long run.  It will aid you in identifying how much money you will need to get started (and operate), narrow your market and customers, prompt you to think about future growth and exit plans and help you refine your sales pitch.  Here are three ways that having a business plan can pay off:

1.  Recruiting and securing investors. Having a solid and realistic business plan can open the door for private and equity investment.  Most investors, venture capitalists and angel investors are going to want to look at a business plan before they plunk down any cash for a start-up.  Read my blog on Liberty Bottle Works for inspiration – this recent venture of the first U.S. made recyclable metal water bottle was started using 100% private investment and he has been fortunate to have the support from his investors when he needed additional start-up capital.

2.  Getting a bank loan. Unfortunately with the lending market, loans can be difficult to get;  entrepreneurs should plan on having a business plan and personal equity to even apply for a bank loan, micro-loan or government backed loan.  Here’s a handy loan checklist from the Small Business Administration.

3.  Winning a business plan competition. Now this may be more of a challenge since business plan contests are extremely competitive and may be hard to locate; however it’s not an impossible idea.  The winner of the first Enterprise Challenge, Tieton Farm and Creamery, invested many hours into their business plan and it showed.  They not only had a solid business plan, an innovative and sustainable product, but had started the business recently so they had a little bit of traction and history to back up the plan with real results and numbers.  Read more about other business plan contests.

Here’s a great article about two entrepreneurs that started a restaurant, Bogota Latin Bistro, which is now a multi-million dollar venture and they are looking to expand. The part I love about the Bogota story is the men did their homework, realized the areas they needed help with and took a cautious approach before diving in.

” The pair now had the passion, but lacked a coherent plan, any funding, and basic business know-how. So when Ali saw an ad in the Brooklyn Courrier, for a 16-week business course for $90, both signed up. During the workshop they drafted a rough business plan. They went on to win the Brooklyn Business Library business plan competition, called Power Up, in November of 2003. The prize: $10,000 in cash and $10,000 in-kind services to jump-start their business.  Only they’d need more like $400,000 than $20,000 to open.”.  Inc. May 31, 2011.

One final thought on how business plans can help: they can be an excellent reality check to gauge progress once you do get started.  I am always impressed when I visit a company and they can tell me right where they are at with their projections from the original business plan.

There are numerous resources for business plan assistance for Yakima County entrepreneurs, both online or in person.  Not sure how to get started putting your plan together?  Please contact us.