Amplifying stories from the Rochester, MN entrepreneurial ecosystem.
May 2, 2022: This week in the Rochester Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
Welcome to another week in our entrepreneurial ecosystem.
And welcome to May!
First off, I wanted to thank everyone who came out for our latest drop-in day of coworking and happy hour this past Thursday. It was so nice to interact with others in the community in this way and really get the chance to connect. If you're interested in coworking but just not ready to jump "all in" yet, this is the perfect way to interact with our coworking members and experience our space. We host a drop in day every month, so be sure to keep checking our newsletter and social media feeds for updates!
Second, I want to call each of your attention to our storytelling. These efforts focused on entrepreneurship and the true early stage starters in this community launched with our brand Rochester Rising in 2016. Over the years, we've been honored to gain the trust to share hundreds and hundreds of stories of starters in this community (and over 255 podcast episodes to date). It has been so rewarding to see these efforts take on new life and direction under the guidance of our Director of Community, Corrie Strommen. This work takes someone who truly understands the value and impact these stories can have in being carefully and truthfully told to inspire all types of entrepreneurship and elevate the expertise and incredible talent we have in this community. I encourage you all to take a few moments this morning to read the latest incredible story with Brooke Burch and learn more about this Rochester starter.
And make sure you are subscribed to the Rochester Rising podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen in so that you never miss any of these stories of innovation and entrepreneurship.
-Amanda
Custom Sewing, Alterations, and Vintage Fashion with Brooke Burch
Brooke Burch, who runs a custom sewing and alterations business and sells vintage clothing out of her studio, attributes a longtime love of sewing and creativity to her grandmother, who she moved to Rochester to live with at an early age.
“I wouldn’t say that I was a hyper child, so much as inquisitive. To occupy that, my grandmother gave me all kinds of crafts to do. I was always playing with glue and yarn. I don’t know how, but at some point I got a hold of a needle and thread and took an interest in sewing. I would cut things up and tie and sew them back together. Eventually she must’ve gotten tired of me doing that because she got me a sewing machine and taught me the basics. So I grew up just experimenting with sewing.”
Although she loved sewing and designing, when she pursued further education at University of Wisconsin-Stout she was contemplating a degree in biology. But, a year into her studies when she declared her major, her childhood passion won out and she pursued Apparel Design and Manufacturing.
->Read more HERE.
April 25, 2022: This week in the Rochester entrepreneurial ecosystem
Welcome to another week in our entrepreneurial ecosystem.
First off, I wanted to say congratulations to Collider member Nate Nordstrom on his latest entrepreneurial endeavor with New Spin Bicycle Shop! Nate hosted the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce's Business After Hours at his business just the past week, giving us all a chance to experience what he has built. It has been incredible to see the growth of Brandhoot, Nate's other business, within the Conely-Maass-Downs building, and it will be incredible to see what this business does in the community.
Last week, Collider was honored to co-host a roundtable event with Destination Medical Center and Rochester Are Economic Development Inc. The event facilitated a discussion between the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development Commissioner Steve Grove and local leadership about the state and value of the local innovation ecosystem. You can check out a recap of this event here.
And lastly, we hope you all can join us this Thursday for our next free day of coworking and happy hour. This is a great way to experience the Collider community and the incredible innovators and starters that exist within our ecosystem. Coworking will run from 9AM-4:30PM, with happy hour at CRAVE from 4:30-5:30. Please consider joining in! Please see more details below in the newsletter.
-Amanda
This week in your ecosystem:
When: Thursday April 28, 8-9AM
Location: Saint Mary's University of Rochester, 2900 19th Street NW
How does the creative community find their audience and price their products?
Join us for this panel discussion on this topic.
Register here.
Time: 9AM-4:30PM
Come join us at Collider for a free day of coworking! Come in to our space at the Minnesota BioBusiness Center at any time from 9am to 4pm to work and experience the Collider coworking community! We have desks, wifi, and snacks available for you. Get out of your house, meet some new people, and have a productive workday with us here at Collider! We will be gathering for Happy Hour afterward at Crave to unwind, enjoy some beverages, and network!
All are welcome!
This event is limited to fifteen people due to space limitations so please sign up with the free ticket link to reserve your spot!
*Please note that Collider is accessible via the skyway near the 3rd Street Parking Ramp and Think Bank.
Register here.
Date: Thursday April 28
Location: CRAVE American Kitchen & Sushi Bar
Join us every other Thursday to unwind, network, share ideas and support local businesses! All are welcome!
Ecosystem Storytelling
Rochester Rising Podcast Episode 255: Lee Green of Greenhouse Grafix
Listen in our our website, or on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts!
Collider Quarterly Report
To our friends and supporters in the Rochester community, thank you so much for your continued support of Collider Foundation and the work we do here. As the quarter draws to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reintroduce our mission and share with you the work we’ve been doing in the community for the past few months.
Collider Foundation is a Rochester, Minnesota based 501(c)3 organization. Our mission is to activate, connect, and empower early stage starters in Rochester, MN. Our vision is to create a community with zero barriers to entrepreneurship for anyone with a great idea and a passion to see it grow.
How do we do that?
Amanda Leightner, our Executive Director, along with recent Collider team addition, Manasseh Kambaki, our Director of Navigation, work together to reach starters in our community through connection to business resources. Together they link early stage entrepreneurs to the resources they need with a highly personalized approach to help overcome business barriers for local starters. Their insights into a resource rich network is key to making starting a business faster and easier for entrepreneurs.
We especially seek to serve minority entrepreneurs in Rochester as our research has shown that women and BIPOC starters to be the most likely to not be linked in to a network of connections and support, making it more challenging for them to start or grow their idea into a business.
We’re excited to share that Amanda and Manasseh were able to serve fifty-seven unique starters between January and March over the course of seventy-five hours of communication, support, and relationship building. Out of these fifty-seven entrepreneurs they assisted, forty-eight percent were women and forty percent were BIPOC starters.
Thank you so much to Mayo Clinic, Rotary Clubs of Rochester, the City of Rochester, the Small Business Development Center, Altra Federal Credit Union, and Premier Banks for supporting this work in the Rochester entrepreneurial community.
Thank you to all of our sponsors who make Collider’s work possible!
Another way we seek to enrich the entrepreneurial community of Rochester is through education and peer support.
Collider Foundation facilitates the meeting of two local peer networks, one for different food business founders and one for women founders, which each meet on a monthly basis to provide ongoing support and advice for these communities of business owners. These meetings provide a space to reduce the isolation associated with running a business. They also provide starters with an opportunity to connect with other business owners to learn from each other, celebrate their successes, and work together to think through challenges their businesses are facing. We are excited to see these two groups continue past their pilot phases into a second year of meeting and to connect eight unique entrepreneurs through these two peer networks. Both groups are actively recruiting members to their group, driven by current members of each network.
We are grateful to both Rochester Area Economic Development Inc. (RAEDI) and The Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) for directly supporting our work with these peer networks.
We have a series of educational events and programs in motion for the coming months. We are excited to partner with Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota School of Business and Technology to host Critical Conversations, which are panel discussions led by local starters discussing topics key to all entrepreneurs including: buying a business, finding co-founders, mental health, and hiring your first employees.
We are also thrilled to be launching our CO.STARTERS programs next quarter! CO.STARTERS is a program that helps starters move from idea to action. This program uses entrepreneurship to transform communities. Some major programs that are offered through CO.STARTERS include Get Started, which is a 3 hour workshop to help starters think through their business idea(s) and figure out which idea has the best chance to support a business. The other major program is CO.STARTERS Core, an eight week, cohort based education program to give starters the tools and support they need to take their ideas into action. Amanda spent a lot of time this quarter going through CO.STARTERS extensive training (along with some amazing partners in the community) to facilitate this program in the community. After piloting several different forms of cohort based education in Rochester after the past few years, we are so excited of the potential that CO.STARTERS offers to all starters in Rochester, MN.
CO.STARTERS is specifically supported by Think Bank, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota School of Business and Technology, and Fredrikson & Byron.
Another recent addition to the Collider team, Corrie Strommen, who joined us in January of this year as our Director of Community, has spent much time this quarter revitalizing our storytelling efforts in the community and amplifying the stories of Rochester entrepreneurs through original, insightful content. This includes weekly articles or videos and the monthly Rochester Rising podcast. This work helps provide inspiration capital that shows that entrepreneurship consists of many different things and that there is not one pathway to get there. It opens up the possibility of entrepreneurship by sharing stories of many different types of starters and allows anyone with a business idea to see entrepreneurship as something accessible to themselves.
Over the past few months, we have released four articles, one podcast, and one video with many more in the works! It has been a joy connecting with so many different entrepreneurs, from many different backgrounds and walks of life. So far this quarter, we have had the opportunity to connect with ten different business owners who are either women, BIPOC, or LGTBQ+ members of the Rochester community and are excited to share each of their stories.
Along with Collider’s work with the local entrepreneurial community, we also work to provide a coworking community to the Rochester area. Collider manages a low cost space for starters to connect and collide to spark new ideas. We currently have forty-nine members and are looking forward to seeing growth in our community in coming months. We provide member specific programming, such as peer networks and other member-only activities, as well as networking and social opportunities for anyone in the community.
Our coworking space, located in the Minnesota BioBusiness Center.
This week, Collider is running our quarterly fundraising campaign to support our mission to activate, connect, and empower early stage starters in Rochester, MN. If this work speaks to you, please consider becoming a donor: https://bit.ly/3NDhAXv.
How can your support help?
$100 helps 5 starters in the community get connected to the support they need.
$225 allows one entrepreneur in the community to participate in the 8-week CO.STARTERS Core program.
$50 allows one entrepreneur the opportunity to participate in the Get Started workshop.
$75 subsidizes the cost of 1 entrepreneur to participate in CO.STARTERS Core.
Regardless of amount, every dollar helps to support our mission of zero barriers for everyone in Rochester with a great idea and a passion to see it grow.
The Collider Team - photo by William Forsman
Collider Peer Groups Enter Second Year to Support Local Starters
This month, Collider Foundation wrapped up its first year hosting peer-to-peer groups, called Peer Networks, to support female and food business founders across southeastern Minnesota. This work assisted twenty-two different businesses through thirty-six hours of monthly meetups. Overall, participants viewed these Peer Networks as a unique experience that helped them feel supported and understood and reduced the isolation and loneliness of entrepreneurship.
This work leveraged the success of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation’s (SMIF) well established peer efforts to create these two pilot groups in the Rochester area.
Collider’s Female and Food Peer Networks connected entrepreneurs together, allowing them to provide solutions for one another as they individually started or scaled their businesses. These networks were built on mutual trust, respect, and vulnerability to allow founders to get value out of these interactions and be able to speak freely about their business struggles and successes.
In total, sixteen different women-led businesses participated in the Female Peer Network over the past year. In addition to monthly structured meetings, participants in this network have been organizing their own monthly meetings for the past several months to connect and work on their businesses together.
Our pilot Food Peer Network assisted six local businesses within the region. In addition to monthly get-togethers, this group created holiday gift boxes in late 2021, which were sold through Collider to benefit the continuation of this Peer Network as a way of giving back to the community.
Over this past year, the Female and Food Peer Networks were generously supported by the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation and Rochester Area Economic Development, Inc. (RAEDI). We are excited to announce that these two groups will continue on in the community for another year with support of these two organizations.
March 7, 2022: This week in the Rochester entrepreneurial ecosystem
Welcome to another week in our entrepreneurial ecosystem!
Events are back at Collider! First off, don't miss out on our brand new Walk In Wednesdays recurring series. This event will take place on Wednesday March 9th from 11AM-12:30PM within the Collider coworking space (221 1st Ave SW, Suite #202). We'll be joined by representatives from Rochester Area Economic Development Inc, the Small Business Development Center, and CliftonLarsonAllen to answer your business questions and get you connected to just the right resources. This is a low pressure, no appointment needed way to connect with multiple business resources in one spot and get your questions answered on how to start or scale a business in this community. We hope to see you there!
After two years of being gone, our free days of coworking are also back. Join us starting at 9AM on March 17th to spend the day in our coworking space and experience the Collider community. All are welcome to attend. Due to space constraints, we do ask you to register so we will know to expect you that day.
And lastly, we were honored this week to announce that we are a 2022 recipient of a $100,000 grant from Mayo Clinic's Community Contribution Program. We are so grateful to Mayo Clinic for supporting the work we do to create a community with zero barriers to entrepreneurship. These funds are critical to continue our work in this community. A huge thank you to all of our past Collider team members, including Julio Molina, Sara-Louise Henry, Kristopher Derwin Loving, Senior, and especially Jamie Sundsbak for their invaluable contributions to Collider Foundation that made this possible. I look forward to the work our current team will do to build on this strong foundation.
-Amanda
Walk in Wednesdays are a monthly event to bring together people with business ideas or people already running businesses with individuals and organizations that can help in Rochester, MN! Join us each month to talk through your business and let's get you connected to resources in the community to help it grow.
Register HERE.
Come join us at Collider for a free day of coworking! Come in to our space at the Minnesota BioBusiness Center at any time from 9am to 4:30pm to work and experience the Collider coworking community! We have desks, wifi, and snacks available for you. Get out of your house, meet some new people, and have a productive workday with us here at Collider! We will be gathering for Happy Hour afterward at Olde Brick House to unwind, enjoy some beverages, and network!
All are welcome!
This event is limited to fifteen people due to space limitations so please sign up with the free ticket link to reserve your spot!
*Please note that Collider is accessible via the skyway near the 3rd Street Parking Ramp and Think Bank.
Register HERE.
