February 8, 2024

The Last Chance University With Jim Correll

By: Gary Schoeniger
The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project | Jim Correll | Last Chance University

 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the entrepreneurial mindset project. Today, I’m speaking with Jim Correll, an everyday entrepreneur who started an entrepreneurial mindset revolution that transformed his community.

At the age of 50, Jim was hired as an outside staff instructor to teach the Successful Entrepreneur Program at a small community college in Independence, Kansas.

At first, his efforts struggled to gain the attention of students who were otherwise focused on a degree. And because he was a non-academic outsider, he wasn’t getting much support from faculty and staff.

Yet once he realized he needed to shift his focus from traditional business planning to the entrepreneurial mindset, things began to change as word soon began to spread.

Before long, Jim transformed an abandoned building into a thriving fab lab that soon became a hub of entrepreneurial activity. Soon, he was attracting not only degree-seeking students from the college but also everything from middle schoolers to mid-career adults, retirees, and everything in between. Some were starting businesses, some were reinventing their careers, and some were doing both.

This is a great story that demonstrates how one person can make a difference in their community by taking an entrepreneurial approach to grassroots economic development.

Listen to the podcast here

 

The Last Chance University With Jim Correll

In this episode, I’m speaking with Jim Correll, an everyday entrepreneur who started an entrepreneurial mindset revolution that transformed his community. At the age of 50, Jim was hired as an outside staff instructor to teach the successful entrepreneur program at a small community college in Independence, Kansas. At first, his efforts struggled to gain the attention of students who were otherwise focused on a degree, and because he was a non-academic outsider, he wasn’t getting much support from faculty and staff. Yet once Jim realized he needed to shift his focus from traditional business planning to the entrepreneurial mindset, things began to change his words soon began to spread.

Before long, Jim transformed an abandoned building into a thriving fab lab that soon became a hub of entrepreneurial activity. Soon, he was not only attracting degree-seeking students from the college but everything from middle schoolers to mid-career adults, retirees, and everything in between. Some were starting businesses, some reinventing their careers and some were doing both. This is a great story that demonstrates how one person can make an impact in their community by taking an entrepreneurial approach to grassroots economic development. Without any further Ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jim Correll.

 

Jim, welcome to the show.

It’s great to be with you. We’ve known each other for years and many times after our conversations, good things happen to me.

It works both ways. I appreciate you saying that. We met in 2011 in Portland, Oregon when we launched the Ice House Entrepreneurship Program. You showed up there. It was at an NACCE conference a National Association of Community College Entrepreneurship. You had been teaching entrepreneurship at a community college in Independence, Kansas. We don’t need to get into the Ice House stuff too much, but the Ice House methodology resonated with you and you became an early champion of this methodology.

I have been trying to teach entrepreneurship for five years and had a couple of small businesses of my own. I didn’t go to school to do this, but they wanted the program to be nuts and bolts as opposed to academic. I did it the way that I thought you were supposed to do it which is at the time, I thought you needed big business plans and lots of money to start. You were supposed to warn everybody how much hassle it was to be in business, have a business, and how much taxes you’d have to pay and all that, and then we’d sit around Economic Development meetings and try to figure out why nobody wanted to start a business.

When I heard you and Clifton Taulbert speak that first time at NACCE, and I’d heard of Ice House before but I didn’t know anything about it, I thought, “This is what I’ve been looking for.” That told me that if you can get people excited and inspired about what they want to do, they’ll put up with all the trouble later, but she doesn’t need to start with that. You can ease them into that as you go after you get them excited.

There’s so much to unpack with what you’re saying there. I still struggle to articulate but, I don’t even think entrepreneurship is a business discipline. I know that throws people off. Maybe I could think about it differently in terms of some people who want to start businesses. Everyone has a desire and the capacity to be entrepreneurial in some way to contribute to their jobs, solve problems, want to have some meaning and purpose in their lives and see a pathway towards something better.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project | Jim Correll | Last Chance University

Last Chance University: Entrepreneurship isn’t really a business discipline. Everyone has the desire and the capacity to be entrepreneurial in some way.

 

It’s a little different. We’ve thrown entrepreneurship in with all the other degrees, technical significance, and all that stuff. It is not the same thing. Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking are a means to an end to do something better. As you said, problem-solving and what I say many times is whether you go out and sell problems for customers or go to work for somebody else, they hire people to solve their problems. Everybody should be a better problem solver.

What I want to talk about is you’re a guy teaching entrepreneurship. Are you an adjunct or were you full-time faculty?

I was never a full-time faculty. They called me a staff instructor. I wasn’t in the Teachers Association, but I was an adjunct. I was a full-time employee, but they called me a staff instructor in the beginning.

You are a guy in Independence, Kansas. It’s a town of about 10,000 people. You’re teaching entrepreneurship at a local community college. You’re struggling to resonate in your community is what you opened with like people weren’t buying in.

I did have some people in my first classes, but people didn’t know me very well and I hadn’t paid a lot of dues yet. I wasn’t an academic. I didn’t have a Master’s degree. That’s part of the reason that I ended up doing well in it in the end. I did know that I’d never seen a business textbook that I liked. My boss agreed with that. I wrote my own materials for the classes in those early days. In the early days, it was a two-year program that was a nuts and bolts business management class, but I tried to do it on the practical side. Most of those people in those first classes would say that it was helpful for them, but it was hard to market for that. For one thing, people don’t want to go to school for two years if they’re going to be entrepreneurs and they still don’t.

That’s an important point. A kid wants to learn how to play baseball. If you want to sit him down in a classroom for two years and talk to them about physics and trajectories, you have to put them on the baseball field and let him swing the bat. I marvel at how the academic model clashes with entrepreneurship. I want to go back to something you said to dig in. You said you never met a textbook that resonated with you. I forgot how you exactly said it. Can you say more about that?

I looked at several and even though I didn’t know what I was doing back then, I didn’t resonate with all the stuff. Some of it looked like gobbled up. I thought, “I can’t imagine trying to have people go through this. It didn’t look very practical.” One reason they hired me is because I had a couple of businesses of my own.

Did you write business plans for your businesses?

No. We did a little planning.

It’s like the back-of-an-envelope planning.

I did a back-of-an-envelope exercise with those early classes. The ones I started are small, as we profess to do now, I didn’t borrow a gazillion dollars and then have that on the line. The last business that I had before I took the teaching job at this community college was a business that I started because it was sharpening tools and things. The only person in the town had died. I did that for 2, 3, or 4 years, and it ended up not being enough. There was some decent income in it, but not enough for full-time. I got into it without a lot of debt. I learned a lot of stuff. That was cool.

I saw this ad in the paper the weekend that they were looking for this leader of what they call The Successful Entrepreneur Program. I will say this about the college president at that time. He was quite a bit different than most of them. He wanted it to be nuts and bolts. He didn’t want it to be academic and that’s the reason he didn’t want to hire an academic person to teach it.

I often tell people that before college, I’d not done anything for more than 4 or 5 years at a time in my adult career. I never thought of doing the same thing for 40 years for a whole career, but I decided that the very experience I had along with a couple of businesses of my own made me to misfit they were looking forward to trying to do a not academic practical nuts and bull an entrepreneurship management program.

Misfit is a good word. One thing I’ve also observed, and I think you spoke to this, is that one of the big cardinal sins of entrepreneurship education is the tendency to take the MBA logic from large corporations. You treat the fledgling entrepreneur as if their startup were simply a smaller version of a large corporation. It doesn’t work. It takes a little bit of runway to explain the differences to people.

The opportunities large corporations pursue tend to be visible and quantifiable. There are big risks involved. Planning and research are important, but for the typical entrepreneur who starts with a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, there isn’t data. The data don’t even exist. I’ve told my story of gutter cleaning. I suppose if I walked into a small business development center and somebody said, “Write a business plan,” it would be like, “How do I do the research?”

It was easier to take the minimally viable product, which for me was a borrowed ladder strapped on the roof of my 1972 Dodge Duster, and go knocking on doors now to test the idea. Another way I think about this is it’s like this. If you characterize entrepreneurship as starting a business, you’ve probably eliminated 85% of the population.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project | Jim Correll | Last Chance University

Last Chance University: If you characterize entrepreneurship as starting a business, you’re eliminating 85% of the population.

 

It’s because of our culture in the last hundred years.

Tom told me this number. Somewhere between 3 and 7 per 1,000 in any given month are ready to start a business. It’s a very small percentage of the population, then if you go and characterize entrepreneurship in the image of the venture back high growth model, now you’ve eliminated 99.9999% of the population. One of the experiences that I want to ask you about is when you started to engage with people who never thought of themselves as entrepreneurs.

Part of what I’m trying to get at is I think there are millions if not billions of people who languish. They’re not flourishing, depressed, or down and out, but they’re languishing. They’re not fulfilling their potential. They don’t see an entrepreneurial mindset as a trajectory, framework, and way of being. Didn’t you start to bring people into your Makerspace that were career people that applied entrepreneurial thinking to their careers?

They did, and several people were in our mindset classes. Some of them were for other people and one of them was retired from some kind of data IT thing and she tells a story, “I thought I was finished. I thought I wasn’t going to be useful to society anymore.” She did take a part-time job at the local library, then she took the class and that set her on fire. She said, “That made me realize I do still have things to offer.” I don’t know how you get that word out if you take people like her and there are a lot of them and use their testimonials, sometimes that might be as good a way as any to get that idea across to other people of what an entrepreneurial mindset can do for them.

We have a training going on. There’s a lady in there, a teacher from South Africa. There’s some Federal mandate in South Africa to teach entrepreneurship in schools. This teacher said to me, “We’re forced to teach entrepreneurship and they’re teaching it as a small business. I had no interest in that whatsoever.” I gave a lecture at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg and like you, she heard our message like this is a different way to think about entrepreneurship. It completely flipped her around. The biggest challenge that we face is redefining entrepreneurship in a way that people can latch on to regardless of where they are, who they are, and what their position is.

The colleges have not been any help for hundreds of years and I tell people this all the time, “Business agrees have never been about people starting businesses.” Even now, they have some that they’re calling entrepreneurship degrees, but we all know that they’re warming over the same stuff or the MBA stuff as you mentioned earlier. That was all designed from the beginning to train people to be mid-level managers in big corporations.

I wasn’t quite around like that in the ‘50s, but in the ‘50s everybody thought it was going to be all big corporations in the government. Everybody gets a job and goes to work. They needed a level manager. That’s what the MBAs and the Business Degree people did. People see that even this teacher you’re talking about from South Africa maybe and they don’t see that it’s going to be useful, and it’s not because it doesn’t do anything to people’s thinking.

It’s severely limiting. You and I talked about this before. The big distinction to be made here is that the attitudes and skills required to discover opportunities are almost entirely distinct from the attitudes and skills required to exploit an opportunity. Many of these so-called entrepreneurship programs conflate those two things. They put the label of entrepreneurship on it, but what they’re teaching you how to do is manage a business that has known customers, partners, products and services, and cashflow these employees. Those skills are important, but they’re not helpful for the first part, which is discovering the opportunity and a bit more over. Not everyone wants to start a business, but who doesn’t want to discover an opportunity?

The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project | Jim Correll | Last Chance University

Last Chance University: Not everyone wants to start a business, but who doesn’t want to discover an opportunity?

 

That whole thing improves people’s self-efficacy and self-confidence and that’s a big thing. That’s a huge thing.

That’s everything in my view.

That’s severely lacking in our school kids, especially in our high school kids, and probably even college now because everything’s about the score on the SATs. That leads to all the cheating and all that, and then through all that, nobody gets any boost and self-confidence. It’s lacking.

I didn’t coin this term, but I’m embracing this idea of entrepreneurial discovery or learning as human-centered learning. What are you interested in? What makes you tick? Put the person first. I always think about this. Most of the dialogue around entrepreneurship is focused on the economic impact. That’s not to be diminished. There are serious economic journals that are saying, “Entrepreneurs are the most important players in the modern economy.” I think you embody this whether you think about it consciously or not. If you put the developmental aspects of the individual first, the economic stuff takes care of itself.

We say all the time that what business schools say the number one purpose is profit. All the time we say, “No, make the number one priority to provide a good service and solve problems for other people and there’s nothing wrong with the profit. You have to have it to stay in business, but that shouldn’t be the most important thing.”

As to the human-centered thing, at least we’re starting to talk about tech schools more now. More people are realizing that a college degree is not for everybody. I would argue it’s for some people, but there’s a whole bunch of people that it’s not for it, especially with all the debt and how expensive it is. There are two things. When we talk about tech schools, we never talk about how you could have your own plumbing or HVAC business. We never talk about that.

Debt problems in education are writ large. It is assumed that you’re going to work in an established organization.

You’re going to go get a job. The other thing is that we will take somebody out to a factory that manufactures. We have a John Deere plant here. We’ll take somebody out there and have young people or somebody watching machine parts. We’ll say, “You ought to do this. These people make a lot of money.” Most of the time, young people never get a chance to try anything like that.

In my way, the value of Makerspace should be to give those young people experience. It doesn’t have to be tons of training, but let them take a machine apart. Let them do some graphic design and print a banner. Let them make some stuff out of wood. Let them make some robots. Let them make this and that. When they’re doing all that, maybe they’ll stumble on to something that they like, and then they can go to the tech school and get the training to become whatever that is.

You’re saying something important there. I want to get into the makerspace here in a minute. The Makerspace you created, which I think you called the fab lab and it’s a community college, let’s back up one step. Most of us are steeped in what I would call a managerial paradigm. I’m not denigrating it in any way shape or form, but managerial values are focused on efficiency or on the efficient replication of useful things, things that are known to be useful.

These are the level three values and assumptions of the managerial system within which we all live. I say to people a lot that the entrepreneurial mindset only seems enigmatic to you to the extent that you are steeped in managerial thinking. The point that I want to make here is that managerial systems are important, but they tend to be intolerant of exploration and experimentation. They are error-reducing paradigms. Efficiency is the god to which the managerial system praises it. What you created in the fab lab was this safe space and the opportunity discovery is an error-inducing process.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project | Jim Correll | Last Chance University

Last Chance University: The entrepreneurial mindset only seems enigmatic to you to the extent that you are steeped in managerial thinking.

 

That’s the fundamental difference. That’s what I think you created with the Independence fab lab. You created a space where it’s okay for people to try things, fail, learn from each other, dabble, and play. That’s the key to creating entrepreneurs on purpose rather than by design and, more importantly, by creating entrepreneurial communities. What I want to do is get back to the story. You and I tend to go off in the weeds and talk about this stuff for hours. You’re teaching entrepreneurship at this community college. You ermbrace The Ice House Methodology. The president of a college gives you this abandoned building. It was 10,000 square feet or something.

In the beginning, he didn’t give us the whole building. He just gave us the shot part of it, which was a little bit less than 2,000 square feet. We encroached on the rest of the 8,000 square feet after the first few months but originally, it was a shop area that was a little less than 2,000 square feet.

One of the aspects of your story that is important to point out is the president of the college recognized you as, using your words, a misfit. You’re not a traditional academic. He gave you a separate space. I think that’s an important part of the story, like literally physically a separate space, but he didn’t fund it. He said, “I’ll turn the lights on. I’ll pay your salary. You have to figure it out.” That’s an important part of the story. Pick me up from there. How did that all unfold?

We got the thing open. There’s a fab lab in Tulsa which is about 75 miles from here. Tulsa is a big market with $500,000. They’ve been in business for 2, 3, or 4 years longer at the time that we started. They helped us a little bit, but they had a membership system where individuals could pay money for a year’s access. We just copied that, and then we decided early on, not only the membership but when we tried to do things, we would also try to at least break even or make some money.

People could bring in their own materials, but sometimes we wanted them to have the convenience of buying our materials if they wanted to and we made money on that. When we had bootcamps, different kinds of events, and things, we tried to figure out a way to make a little money on all of that. In the last few years, we have done a lot of non-credit community classes. It was a cool model. We’d find somebody in the community because we didn’t care if they had a degree or anything. We wanted somebody that knew how to make something.

We’d find somebody that we thought could teach a class on how to sew, make guitars, or whatever it might be. We’d sit down with them and work out how much to charge for the class and how long it should go, and then we pay them a percentage of that as a 1099 contractor. We didn’t have any risks. They shared the risk. They shared the minimum number they wanted. If you make the minimum number too high, the class won’t make it. If you make it too low, it’s not worth their time. That was a pretty successful model because you’re bringing whoever’s going to be the instructor in from the beginning and then we tried to make at least 15% or 20% for the fab lab on the registration fee. That’s how we did it.

The other thing was super important. We had our own checking account with the ICC Foundation. Our revenue and our spending didn’t have to go through the normal college channels. I was on the signature card. It was my responsibility to make it work and make sure that we didn’t run out of money. That was essential. If I had it all to do over again, I probably would have said our own 501(c)3 business entity for the fab lab. That guy who was president at the time we started, I could probably have got him to go along with that. The relationship with the foundation went on until one year, when the auditor said, “You need to bring those finances back under the umbrella of the college.” Now you’re back to doing a requisition and spending $5.

It got bureaucratic, but that worked well. We did have quite a bit of money left over when that ended because I knew that we couldn’t depend on the college’s budget to have any money for replacement equipment or even repair. I knew that I needed to keep some money off to the side so that we could take care of ourselves in that respect. Other than the utilities, rent, and our salaries, we were pretty much self-sufficient and making a little money for those eight years.

You went about it in a very entrepreneurial way. Where did you get the equipment? Was there equipment in this space when you started? Where did you get the money to buy the equipment?

There was one there was one piece of equipment of computerized router, and that was about it. Our good friend Tom was still in Kauffman. It’s quite a story. In 2013 you and Tom showed up to the NACCE or the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship. You went off and you were talking on your phone and doing something. I met Tom at Ice House training at the Kauffman Foundation, but I didn’t know it well. I went over and started talking to him.

He just got back from the bat again. He was bragging about putting some money together for a Makerspace in North Carolina or something. I said, “Why don’t you help us with ours? I think we can get it open for $100,000.” He said, “When you get back, put a letter together and come up with $50,000 and we’ll match it. “I got to throw this in because it’s funny. The next day, we’re all standing around in your Ice House booth on the trade show floor.

Tom’s telling everybody how tired he was the night before and he couldn’t remember anything. I went out to him and I said, “Do you remember the $50,000, don’t you?” He smiled and said, “Yes.” We had a serial entrepreneur locally that we finally got to do the $50,000. That was 2008. At that time the International Fab Lab Network had a suggested list of equipment that cost about $125,000. That was almost enough to get everything to get us started. We had another local guy. He donated $20,000. We started the thing for about $125,000 for equipment and then the college put some money in that shop. It wasn’t air-conditioned. They put some air conditioners in it so that members are not going to want to come in there at 100 degrees.

That’s a great part of the story. What you’re embodying or demonstrating is something I’m saying in my new book that the lack of resources works to your advantage.

Here’s what we found because over those eight years, including the money from Kauffman, we totaled between $1 million and $1.5 million and grants that we got over that time.

This is a town of 10,000 people.

Some of them came from out of town, but here’s I think the reason it worked because people almost don’t know what to do with kids. You take kids, and you can’t get them excited about anything, but they get excited in Makerspace when they’re making stuff. You want to talk about kids learning. You get them turned on in making a project that is something they’re interested in making and they will learn all kinds of stuff on their own because they can see the value of what it is. When funders like foundations and different places see what that does to people’s thinking and their self-confidence, they will give some money for that. It’s a little different than if you’re trying to rehab a theater in town or something. That’s nice and maybe you can make some economic sense out of it, but it’s not like it is when you’re changing people’s thinking and changing their lives.

You started with an empty building and a computerized router. That’s the important part of the story. It was one room in an empty building. It wasn’t even the whole building to the entrepreneurial thing where you beg for forgiveness rather than ask for permission. You took it over. There’s another aspect. Some of the things that I want to bring out of your story and stop me if I’m going off here, part of what I’m trying to demonstrate or use you as a model of this grassroots ecosystem building that how an ordinary citizen a Jim Correll can start the flywheel going? That initiative that you started with the Ice House program with 2,000 square feet of an empty building, an old computerized router, and some coffee, and how that made an impact to built into something that made a significant impact on your community.

It really did. We started Ice House and the fall of 2012. That was two years before we opened the fab lab. I came back from Portland and I was all excited. We went through the training and all that. The people that I knew in my circle already saw how excited I was about that. I recruited fifteen people to be in that first class. It was on Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t know if I could get people to show up for a class after lunch on a weekday or not, but I got fifteen people. I think 4 or 5 of them are successful in Downtown, Independence to this day.

I hesitate to use the word ecosystem because the academics have hijacked it. Let’s stick with the entrepreneur community. That did start that. Eventually, we had the Chamber of Commerce president. She took mindset class and then it was to make sure each class had 8 or 10 people in it. A lot of times 12, maybe not so many college students because they’ve been conditioned in high school to stay down that narrow path and get their degree. We usually could get 2 or 3 oddball college students to take the class, but then other than that, it was a mix. It was a few retired people, people who had businesses and wanted to start businesses.

People have been laid off.

Sometimes, probably.

Some workforce development stuff.

It ended up being an eclectic mix each time, but that was a good thing. Everything centered around this mindset change. It’s pretty cool that you do that a couple of times a year. We probably totaled up now having 150 or 160 people in the area that have gone through that training. That starts to make a difference. What I’ve noticed is sometimes even if they can’t get the every class or even if they don’t watch all the videos, they still do good ratings at the end and talk about how much the class meant to them and that kind of thing. I’ll throw this in we tried to bring local entrepreneurs in each week as guests and that was cool because even though they don’t say the exact same things as the entrepreneurs in the Ice House videos, you start to see that all those people have common things in the way they think.

They don’t even know it. It’s funny you say that because somebody entrepreneurs come up to me after I talk or something and they’ll say like, “I feel like you know me.” They thought they were flying by the seat of their pants. What I have the benefit of is seeing the behavior in the aggregate. When you think about it, it’s like how anyone would respond to this given set of circumstances. You’re trying to accomplish something. The path isn’t clear. You don’t have any money, but it’s important to you. The entrepreneurial behavior arises as a natural response to these certain conditions. We tend to think of it, “That person is just entrepreneurial.” It’s like no they’re somebody trying to make something happen and they’re trying to do it outside of a known system. It’s a self-directed thing.

Many times, after they’ve accomplished some cool stuff, they don’t realize that they’ve got something special. I’m sure you ran into that on the Ice House entrepreneurs. My guy, Doug who invented the armrest for the Jeep in 2000 is the one on my end. It took me two years to get him to come and be a guest in class because he didn’t think he had anything to offer. I finally got him talked into it and that was back in about 2013. That’s been a while. I’m still good friends with him. He’s on our local entrepreneurial board. He talks about that to people this day. He credits me with demonstrating to him that he had something worthwhile to show other people. That’s fairly common too. These people do this stuff and they don’t they don’t realize that it’s quite an accomplishment.

They don’t see the value in it. I saw the uniqueness of Uncle Cleve’s story. He took it for granted. He never saw it. There’s another element to your story that I want to try to dig into. I don’t know how to put this in a way. You’re not like a super influential guy in Independence, Kansas. It’s not like you’re a super-rich entrepreneur who everybody knew and would pay attention to. You’re a regular guy from Independence, Kansas, near retirement and you had some businesses. Do I have that accurately? I don’t want to say you’re like nobody but it’s not like you were like Mr. Mayor of Independence, Kansas.

It was never any of those things. In the beginning, nobody listened to me. It’s like, “Who’s this guy teaching this stuff? He doesn’t have a degree,” but now I’ve paid my dues in a few years. Now people will listen to me but it’s still different because they’ve seen all these people that have come out of the class and then we do some things with the Network Kansas Gap Financing Program. We’ve got 30 open loans now. Those people are doing stuff that they might not have been able to get financing for if it wasn’t for us. if you do that for a while and you help people, then pretty soon, people start to listen a little bit more to what you have to say, but it wasn’t because of like any money or a position. It’s just you pay dues for that long then you gain some respect for some people.

What I’m learning from your story is that you’re not a particularly charismatic guy or a rich guy in a community where people jump when you say jump. You’re a persistent guy. You’re the Energizer. You just keep going despite people ignoring you in the beginning or you’re not getting everything you want all the time. Ultimately, what I’m trying to get to is this is something anybody can do. I’m trying to get to the core ingredients.

I share your version of the word ecosystem because it has been. It’s a hijack term. I share your your sentiment there. I think this is like a grassroots entrepreneurial community that you’ve built from the bottom up. You had the blessing of the community college president who put you on a long leash. He let you do your thing. That’s an important part of the story, but he didn’t give you the money. He gave you the building and some latitude. It was up to you to make it happen. Talk about who is the first guy or person you recruited to become part of your merry band of misfits in Independence.

When it came to opening the fab lab and it was time to find a man, I was going to be the director and then we wanted to hire somebody that we’d call a manager, and the manager would be responsible for helping members on an individual basis, get started on the projects and keep the machines running. The one thing that I was able to keep for eight years is I wanted to report to the president. I didn’t want to report under the academic side of the house because I felt like with my ties to the community, it needed to be the president. I made that work for the first eight years.

The head of academics wanted to hire an engineer fresh out of Pitt State which is up the road about 75 miles, a good school. It turns out good engineers. It’s just that I knew an engineer was not what we needed for that position. I was over at the library one day and we’d hired this kid. I think he’s 40 now. Everybody 40 or less is a kid to me. We’d hired him as an assistant librarian. I didn’t know him very well, but I walked over to where he was sitting and he was all excited. He goes, “Look at this. They’re making bicycles out of bamboo. It’s much better than the composites because if you crash this when you could replace the part and it doesn’t ruin the whole frame.” He was excited. I knew right then he was the one that I wanted. He’s probably the first one. His name is Tim Haynes.

You did what any logical person would do. You hired a librarian.

That’s why it turned out most my stereotype of most librarians wouldn’t have worked. When I saw what he was like, I hired the librarian for me. He ended up being good. In about 2017, we brought somebody named Laura Scheid. She is a little bit quieter, but she’s got a good head. She helped us develop programs and when we wanted to do things with kids coming in. That’s quite a thing to figure out how to do it when 25 or 30 school kids show up and you have to figure out what they’re going to do.

The three of us are the best work team that I’ve ever worked with in my whole career. Some of the people outside of the college early on a guy named Brian Haight had taken part the my program before Ice House. Remember the recession that we were in in 2008, he started a candle-making operation in his house. In 2008, he rented a building downtown and he took my class before Ice House. They kept going with that store, and then he took Ice House in that first one of those.

He’s been involved with me from the very word go in all this gap financing and all that. He’s one of the first ones and he’s made a huge success out of that store. He’ll say this, “I was never particularly passionate about making candles, but I was passionate about and still am about giving people a good experience.” It’s a little bit different way of looking at a retail place. He had some family and South Carolina and he opened another store there.

After the pandemic, he decided to close it but his store manager there wanted to buy it. He came out of that without losing a lot of money. Now he has a store in Independence, but he does a lot of internet business. He’s been successful. The other guy that’s been with me from the beginning has a sandwich shop downtown. He was a manufacturing cabinet manager for his career and then on a lark he bought this little restaurant and didn’t know anything about restaurants, but he had that mindset. He’s going on for his 11th or 13th year now. Some of those guys started out and we still work together on stuff. It started from there.

In the beginning, there’s nothing. How did this unfold? There’s a snowball. In the beginning, people are like, “Who the hell is this Jim Correll guy? What the hell is he doing over there?” Did you get some resistance from people with people at the college and community scratching their heads?

I’m sure there are plenty of people scratching their heads. I don’t know that I got so much resistance from the college. They probably thought it was an anomaly. I don’t know if they took it seriously because it wasn’t an academic class and it didn’t fit into any of the programs. The problem was figuring out how to make it fit in, and then that matter. If it wasn’t a big part of any other programs. That meant it was hard to get college students involved in it.

The fab lab came along about the time we were trying to decide what to do with the successful entrepreneurship program. That was a two-year program. It got harder and harder to recruit community members to come in and stand for sitting through class once a week for two years. Even though I got probably 20 or 30 people that went through that, most of them would say, it was helpful. One lady who even decided she didn’t want to have a business. She opened a business and decided it wasn’t for her and she credits to class with helping with that. We had that.

I don’t know if I call it snowball or not because it’s that thing with marketing. No matter how many people know about you, they’re still like legions that don’t know about you. We got 8,000 or 10,000 people in this town and a few of them still don’t know anything about fab lab have ever been out here and don’t know anything about the class, but I guess you got to keep trying to bring a few more in each each time as you go.

I think you’re no different than any other entrepreneur trying to introduce a new idea, trying to bring an idea to life. Good ideas don’t sell themselves. That’s what people don’t understand. Everyone thinks, “I have a great idea. These people are going to be the path to my door.” It’s not the case. I interviewed a guy back in the day. He was the oldest living venture capitalist in the United States. His name is David Morgan Taylor. He had invested in Steve Jobs in the ‘70s. He gave me this framework. He called the Horse and the Jockey Framework. People think, “I don’t need to be a good jockey. I need a fast horse. I could hang on for dear life.”

The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project | Jim Correll | Last Chance University

Last Chance University: Good ideas don’t sell themselves.

 

What he was saying is the opposite is more likely to be true. You need to be a good jockey and you can take a mediocre idea and make something of it. That’s what I see the typical entrepreneur. They’re not inventing anything new. They are executing on established ideas. They are executing well like the candle guy. They’re delivering exceptional service. Brian Scudamore is a great example. It’s having empathy or understanding of the deeper dimension of human needs. I got a guy who’s dressed neatly and politely. It’ll go a lot further than if I got some rough-looking guy that aren’t professional-looking.

Brian Haight is very purposeful about what that store looks like when you walk in. He’s very purposeful about the music that’s playing. He still does that. He used to have a five-second rule. Within five seconds that somebody walking in that door, somebody is either greeting them or even if the person behind the counters on the phone, looks up and acknowledges that they came in. Some of us in town the Main Street director used to try to sneak in where they couldn’t see. They just try to beat him on that five-second rule, but it’s like you said, that goes a long way. If you’ve got to get a product and you’re professional and you act like you’re glad that they’re there, it goes a long way.

I get the feeling that sometimes interviewing entrepreneurs like your Guy Brian. It doesn’t matter if he’s selling ball bearings or candles. The candle is just a vehicle for people. I say this over and over but the desire to fulfill human needs to our own effort is an essential need that we all have.

If you think about it, it would be better because Brian could be a successful entrepreneur no matter what he was doing, ball bearings or any of the other stuff. We need more people like that. They are the stem cells. I think entrepreneurs like the stem cells of society anyway because if they’re doing it right, they figure out what’s wrong, and what problems need to be solved and they go in. We have a couple of those now that I would call serial entrepreneurs. She never even took the class, but she is fearless.

She had a couple of businesses and decided, “This is too much work. I’m going to sell them. I don’t want to have a business anymore.” She’s probably between 40 and 50 maybe. That lasted about one year, and then she couldn’t stand it. She thought, “I always like flowers. I’m going to see about having a flower shop.” She comes to Independence and starts going to each flower shop. That’s going to if they want to sell. She found one that did after the pandemic was going on but she took that on and has made a wonderful business out of that. The previous owners were a little bit beat up. They get burnt out over time if it doesn’t go well. The awning on the front of the store was shredded and looked bad. She’s changed all that. She is fearless. She’s not afraid of any of us. She figured, “I’ll learn what I need to know.”

I interviewed a guy named Joe Jaros. He was a pizza delivery guy. He’s now a multi-millionaire. He owned seven pizza shops. He was a kid out of high school delivering pizzas. He kept a snow shovel in his car like, “You walk need shoveling. I’ll shovel it for you as long as I’m here.” People remember him like that. He told me a story. In the first pizza shop that he owned, there was a lady or a customer they had. She was in the hospital. They wouldn’t release her from the hospital. She was in her 80s. She didn’t have anybody. They wouldn’t release her from the hospital unless she had somebody to come and get her, and she didn’t know who to call so she called the pizza place and they came and got her.

It’s always about putting people first. I think that’s missing so much from the conversation about entrepreneurship. One of the questions I want to come back to is you’re building this Makerspace. You got this musty old building, the president turns the lights on, gives you some old equipment, you’re going out fundraising, you are engaging with people in the community, you’re bringing school kids in and letting them learn, be creative, and try to build things. You’re teaching the Ice House Entrepreneurial Mindset Program, but you had a vision for something bigger. I remember visiting the Makerspace once and you had this little 24 x 36-inch whiteboard with a picture drawn on it. Can you talk about that?

I think it’s still around here somewhere. After we’d encroached on the rest of the 8,000 square feet of this existing building, we started thinking it would be nice to have some more room.

You outgrew the 8,000 square feet.

This room I’m in, we used it for classes and stuff. We had some equipment around the perimeter, but you can’t fill the whole thing. We started thinking about that. I even have you to credit because one of the books that we talked about in the Ice House is Think And Grow Rich. I had read that. I modified the Gonzales guy who was the preacher in that that preached a sermon about what he’d do if he had $1 million back in 1903 or whenever that was. I wrote this letter and worded it like this, “Here’s what we do with $500,000.” In the letter, I talked about how our programs were growing.

You wrote this letter to who?

It was just a letter at the time. I talked about how we had kids coming in all the time and all this stuff going on. We needed more room. If I had $500,000, I’d add another building and a paint booth because most people’s projects need some coating. We’d have a paint booth. It will be nice to have a little bit of welding. if somebody needed a welding project together, they could do that.

I did this whole thing, and then I was almost afraid to have Tim Haynes. I showed it to him and I said, “Would you want to put your name on this too?” He said, “Of course.” That’s the guy he was. We hadn’t told the president about this letter but we had a new newspaper publisher at the time and one of the employees brought him out for a tour. We showed him that letter in the drawing. Meanwhile, I took this piece of a whiteboard and a dry-erase marker and sketched out a floor plan. I tell people, “If you have an architect do the floor plan, it’s no good for fundraising because it’s too complicated. You can’t tell, but you saw it. It’s very basic. You can tell what I’m talking about.”

It looks like a twelve-year-old through it.

It’s a sketch. We showed this new publisher that and the letter. They said, “Can we put this in the paper?” We said, “Okay.” I remember the president didn’t know about this, but we weren’t asking the school for anything. I was only saying what we do with $500,000.

Did it say like, “Dear so and so?” How was it framed?

I don’t know. I’ll send it to you sometime, but I don’t remember if I said, “Dear so and so,” because I wasn’t thinking letter to the editor. It might have been in the form of a letter but not exactly. When it came out it was like all of page three except for the ads. They had some ads at the bottom to pay the bills, but it was all on page three. I think it was still a month or so before the president even said anything about it. We put that sketch drawing on display. People would come in. They’d say, “Is this going to happen? I think about Think And Grow Rich and I go, “I don’t know when. I don’t exactly know where the money is going to come from, but it’s going to happen.”

He started talking to the economic development administration. We knew the guy who went around in Kansas and started talking to him. They realized at the time that they needed to embrace more entrepreneurship, innovation, and that kind of thing, even though they’re steeped in a tradition of jobs, job creation, and all that stuff. They did see the need to embrace more. Finally, we got them to agree that it was half of it if we could match the other half. That took a little while. It was a fluke deal, but in the end, the College put in the last amount. I think the EDA did $500,000 and then we matched the rest of it.

You only started asking for $500,000.

In retrospect, I should have asked for $1.3 million, but I didn’t think big enough. I picked 8,000 square feet out of a hat because that was the size of the existing building. I wanted the new one to be 8,000. By the time we got the $500,000 and then some more we had to cut it down. It’s about 7,400 I guess but we had to cut it back a little bit. That was my bad for being afraid to think big enough.

You have to consider the contest at the time. People are probably thinking, “$500,000, Jim Correll has gone off the ranch.”

There was there were some people that thought I was nuts.

Did you have any self-doubt like saying this and then thinking yourself, “I might be hallucinating here?”

I suppose at some point, but I thought, “There’s not much risk in saying it. I’d read the book, and that’s what he said. What you think about comes true. I do believe that.” I tell people I’ve had that happen in my life a couple of times and I know you’ve done some of it. When you start thinking like that, especially if you write it down again and again, it starts to change. It drives your behavior toward that result. That building was always in the back of our minds. We showed it off and talked about it a lot. It all came together over 1 or 1.5 years. Even when people would laugh about my hokey drying, I said, “I got $750,000,” and then they quit laughing.

There’s another component to that that is worth mentioning. A couple of years ago, I was doing research for my book. I came across a paper written by Martin Seligman, who’s all intensive purposes the father of Positive Psychology with this idea. He called it Prospection Theory. He’s saying that what distinguishes humans from all other animals is our ability to look into the future. He went into the research gym about what happens cognitively by doing that. Without getting too wonky here, he put the science behind Think And Grow Rich.

What Seligman did and it’s a fascinating paper is he demonstrates that when our brains are oriented towards something positive in the future that we’re trying to accomplish, we’re able to access problem-solving abilities that are not otherwise available to us. Part of what he’s saying, and I think you spoke to this, is that we would call this your unconscious brain, but Seligman calls it your default mode. In Psychology, your default mode is that when it’s expected that you’re not thinking. You’re mowing the lawn, driving a car, or taking a shower, but your unconscious brain is trying to solve the problem. That’s what happens. I’ve come to believe that the thing that distinguishes an entrepreneur from a non-entrepreneur is a compelling goal.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project | Jim Correll | Last Chance University

Last Chance University: When our brains are oriented towards something positive in the future that we’re trying to accomplish, we’re able to access problem-solving abilities that are otherwise not available to us.

 

Our young people are not getting any of that because we tend to think it’s wonky as you said. When was the last time you had any evidence that any kid in school was getting anything about positive thinking or all that?

Asking kids what problems they want to solve, not orienting the brain that way. It’s like little task rabbits. As the rest call them excellent sheep. I’m grateful. That’s such a cool part of your story, that vision. This is a town of 10,000 people. You raised all told well over $1 million to create this Makerspace that played a very prominent role in shifting the economic landscape in your community.

It helps especially in the downtown.

Let me distill it. What are the raw ingredients for the Jim Correll story? To my way of thinking you need a champion. It doesn’t have to be a prominent wealthy guy in the community, but you need a champion. I think you need some basic entrepreneurial training. In other words, you need to get away from the business plan and the two-year certificate programs. You need Ice House training which means you have to go out in the world and figure out how to make yourself useful to other humans and you got to do that by trying lots of things on a small scale.

It’s about discovering opportunity. The second thing you need is some basic entrepreneurial training. The third thing I think you need is a space. There’s got to be a space. The space is not only the physical space where people are safe to make mistakes, like an error-inducing environment and people can also teach each other, but there’s psychological safety. It’s not just there’s a building with equipment in it. It’s the psychological space

Also, the culture.

The last thing in your story that I’m pulling out, I want to make sure I’m not missing anything, is that you engaged with the entrepreneurs in your community. You brought them into the process. I think that’s the formula. Is it not?

I think so because I started out in the entrepreneurship thing and even with Ice House, I always knew that the Makerspace needed to be tied in with entrepreneurship. That’s the natural way that we thought about it from the get-go. It’s not totally unique but it’s not universal among Makerspaces. A lot of them are still geek places where the geeks go to make technical stuff. The other thing that maybe made it a little different for us in tying in with the entrepreneurs is that we’re in such a small market. You can’t go down the street and print a nice flyer brochure. There’s no place to do it. We have the equipment at the Makerspace so that entrepreneurs can do things with tools to help them promote themselves.

You reduce the barriers to entry.

That’s maybe a little bit different than some Makersplaces. We wanted to have tools to help with that and it wasn’t take away from the rest of it.

The Jim Correll story is important and why I’m trying to distill it. I don’t want people to look at Jim Correll as this special guy who has these unique characteristics. In any way, I don’t want to diminish what you’ve done. You’re a guy that cared about your community. You saw entrepreneurship as a way to empower people, whether they’re going to start a business, accelerate their career, or whatever, everything in between. What I’m hoping Jim is that we can replicate this in small communities, urban or rural communities, everywhere.

I think it would be good. People come to our Makerspace bootcamps and say, “How do we find a Jim Correll or even a Tim Haynes in our town?” I usually say, “You probably have one, but you may not know it because if there’s not been a chance for them to come out, they’re doing their thing.” It may take a little bit to figure out how to find them, but I have this theory that every community has somebody who wants to do something for the community that’s different than trying to bring the big businesses in to save everybody with jobs.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project | Jim Correll | Last Chance University

Last Chance University: Every community has somebody who wants to do something for the other than just trying to bring the big businesses in to save everybody with jobs.

 

You’ve talked about that too. That was going on in Independence, but they’re bringing in chicken ranch jobs that are minimum wage jobs.

They’re still working on that. I guess there’s a place for some of that, but at least they are recognizing some of the importance of entrepreneurship, but then if you get to the towns that are smaller than Independence, whether it’s a few hundred people, there’s even less chance of attracting companies to come in. They’re even more left to develop themselves from within. I think a group like we had and perhaps a Makerspace or some space in every community could help with that.

Finding the champion is the lynch pen. Once you’ve got the Jim Correll, you’ve found a champion and understand this basic formula, and this is tied to your personality, but I think that’s another part of your story that made this work is that you don’t seem to be a guy that needs to take credit for the wins.

I like getting some credit, but I don’t do it for the credit. I try to help people help themselves.

It’s the inner scorecard with Warren Buffett would. It’s not the outer scorecard.

One reason I retired from college and I’m not sitting around is when you help people and they tell you how much you’ve helped them, that’s pretty cool and strong.

 It’s like a narcotic.

It can be kids or old people. I’d like to tell my iceberg story. There are two icebergs. The iceberg on the left represents, sometimes I think of it as young people but there are a lot of retired people who don’t know what they ought to be doing. People need purpose. They retire if they don’t know what their purpose is going to be. That’s not good. At the same time, some young people don’t know what their purpose is going to be. We’ve got school advisors and everybody telling them what their purpose should be, but they don’t know.

We have people who are ignoring the purpose. They’re pushing them down a path that’s all about financial security, but it’s a derived purpose.

You’ve even got some people that are doing stuff that there’s no purpose to it. They may or may not be making pretty good money, but they’re not particularly fulfilled with what they’re doing. The iceberg on the left above the surface is the people who are being fulfilled. They’ve got a purpose and all that stuff, but then below the surface, you have all these legions of young people and old people who are struggling to figure out what they want to do.

They are languishing.

The right-hand iceberg above the surface is the professions that benefit from the technical degrees and the academic degrees that are available, and all that stuff. On that side below the surface is the vast amount of work that needs to be done in the world and there is no training program for it. Companies have resorted to saying, “We will train the right person.” Here’s my idea and this doesn’t take very long and it doesn’t cost very much money. You take any of those people from the left Iceberg below the surface and you give them an entrepreneurial mindset through the Ice House course.

This is almost like Boy Scout. You let them choose 12 projects, you work with them to do 12 projects, different technologies, and disciplines. When they get done with all that, which could be done in 6 months for probably $500 or $1,000, they’ve got something called an applied entrepreneurial mindset certificate. We have companies in our area that don’t want people pulling down the handle the same way every day and doing it faster every day. They understand that they need problem-solvers and people that can think. They need people that aren’t afraid to learn something new.

If people have that mindset through the Ice House class and they have those twelve projects under their belt, they won’t be afraid to learn stuff new. For most of them, it will make them the right person. They can step right in. Some of them will become business owners because you’re going to talk about that when they’re going through all that, but the twelve projects will give them a wide variety of experiences and maybe let them see some discipline that they like. I’ve been pitching that a little bit and there are companies that would be very interested in seeing people if they had that.

One lady was some industrial something from Pitt State. She said, “Pitt State does something like that.” I said, “No, that’s a four-year degree. This could be done in 6 months for $1,000.” Those are the two icebergs. It’s too bad that there are many people like that who are searching. They’re in high school and some of them even started college and they don’t know what they want to do. They’re wasting a bunch of money.

It is part of that Jim that you have to take into account. In the absence of any purpose, what happens is that we turn to need substitutes. Purpose is a basic psychological need. Autonomy, competence, and purpose are the three fundamental nutrients that are necessary for human flourishing. In the absence of purpose, people redirect their efforts. They stop looking for answers and redirect all their attention towards recreation and leisure. They get themselves in debt. They buy things.

You and I’ve talked about this. The vast majority of human beings on this planet are not engaged in their work. The vast majority of students who leave high school are not engaged in learning. When you look at entrepreneurial people, they’re not necessarily scholars, but they’re learning all the time. They’re optimally engaged. They’re of the “Thank God it’s Monday” mindset. I think what your iceberg analogy gets at Jim is something I’m saying in this new book, which is that there’s this ocean of untapped potential hiding in plain sight.

We can’t get to it with our current way of thinking with this managerial hierarchical way of talking about learning and work. Winding down. I love this story. Please feel free to correct me, add to this, or say something to me later, but I think the four basic ingredients for creating a grassroots entrepreneurial community are first, find the champion in the community and provide some basic Ice House-type training.

So far, I don’t know of any other thing like it.

You have to create a space where people can convene, then you have to engage with the entrepreneurs in the community who will participate in the learning experience because they transmit the possibility. They provide mentoring and support for people who want to pursue their ideas. You’re plowing some new ground, and I hope that in this new book, you and I can find a way to scale what you’ve done to bring that to other communities. Thanks for taking the time to be in this show. I think that this is a story that should be shouted from the rooftops. It’s the underdog story of economic development.

I was glad to do it. I want to throw in Network Kansas, which is different than any other state program, but they had a lot to do with this. They are supporting us to make Kansas a petri dish for this because they’re all on board with something in every community. I worked with them for years. Ice House, Network Kansas, and the Makerspaces all went together because they have a whole different way of supporting entrepreneurs and the standard of thinking.

It’s fabulous. Thank you, Jim. Thanks for taking the time for the show.

You bet.

 

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