MORE gets funding to grow biz-support system
Crains Detroit Business - Aug. 2010 - By Sherri Welch
While Brian Balasia was launching Digerati Inc. 10 years ago with fellow University of Michigan sophomore Joe Klecha, the two spent lots of time searching for resources, from access to seed money to help in negotiating a business lease.

"We made far more mistakes than necessary ... those types of challenges consume a considerable amount of time for businesses that are just getting started or even struggling or growing," Balasia said.

Five years later, after the pair had established their business developing software to help clients with strategy in the medical, legal and business industries, and they'd founded a nonprofit at UM to help other entrepreneurs, something clicked.

"We started to see similarities between the work doctors were doing in diagnosing patients and the work we were doing through the (Michigan Opportunities & Resources for Entrepreneurs Program) at UM to help entrepreneurs," said Balasia, a member of Crain's 20 in their 20s Class of 2008.

The two realized the software systems Digerati had been developing for the medical field could be adapted to help entrepreneurs and businesses get to the funding, services and contacts they needed in much shorter time, through the use of specific questions and algorithms.

Seeing its potential, the New Economy Initiative has granted nearly $1.6 million to the MORE program to fund development of the Statewide Entrepreneurship Support System and portals for business support organizations.

To develop the system, Balasia and Klecha have ongoing work with library science departments at UM and Michigan State University to catalog the assets of resource organizations down to the type of assistance, rather than just the organization.

The system has also attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Commerce, thanks to an introduction on the part of Detroit Regional Chamber President and CEO Sandy Baruah, who formerly served as acting administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration and as U.S. assistant secretary of commerce with the responsibility of leading the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke is expected in Detroit Wednesday to announce the department's participation in the SESS and the opening of a permanent CommerceConnect office in Pontiac, Balasia said.

Digerati is readying the system, which so far contains more than 20,000 Michigan and federal resources, for a spring beta launch.

"While there has been talk by numerous groups of creating a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs, there has not been a successful effort to inventory resources in a manner that was useful to entrepreneurs regardless of their experience or the sector they are working in," said NEI Executive Director David Egner, who is also president of the Hudson-Webber Foundation.

SESS will hold the largest inventory of resources for entrepreneurs ever assembled in one database, inventoried by the issue it solves, and make it easy for any level of entrepreneur to navigate, Egner said.

Operating on a $1.1 million budget with four employees, the nonprofit MORE program's primary work now is overseeing development of the SESS system, Balasia said. It has contracted Digerati to develop the system for entrepreneurial use.

It also has contracted vendors such as Media Genesis in Troy to lay out the user interface for the system and build the portals; Saginaw-based Issue Media Group for help in identifying resources that could help entrepreneurs; and Mort Crim Communications Inc. in Southfield to help recruit municipalities and resource providers' assets for the system.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and the Michigan Municipal League were among the first to offer their support to the project. Other resource providers offering their assets for inclusion in the system so far include Wayne County, major public universities, the 14 private liberal arts schools that are part of the Michigan Colleges Foundation, Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Ann Arbor Spark, Troy-based Automation Alley, Macomb-Oakland University Incubator in Sterling Heights and TechTown in Detroit, the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., Inforum, the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center and the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

The region and state definitely need a database to make it easier for entrepreneur support organizations to access resources outside of their own operations, business incubator leaders say.

Said TechTown General Manager Leslie Smith: "I think a system like this will really help ... triage them to get (them) to their resource faster.