When thinking of business in Boston, the elegant and often expensive boutiques lining Newbury Street usually come to mind first – Armani, Burberry, Chanel and Diesel (and that’s just through “D”).
However, there are numerous small businesses operating in the city in low-income areas without the flash, cash-flow or corporate backing of those businesses on Newbury, and a Boston University-based program is helping them grow.
The program, officially called Boston InnerCity Enterprise (ICE), was started by BU sociology professor Daniel Monti along with School of Management research associate Andrew Wolk, and is headed by Andrew Goldberg, ICE’s current director of programs and development.
The program grew out of Monti’s research on the revitalization of American cities and the contribution of entrepreneurs from different ethnic communities in civic life. Monti realized community economic development was most successful when business owners have a personal stake in trying to improve the quality of life in their own communities.
In the fall of 1998, he formed an advisory group to explore the possibility of bringing together small-business leaders from different ethnic groups in the metropolitan area. From there, Monti spent years developing the ideas behind ICE, what kind of agenda it should have and what services it would provide. But the idea did not take hold at BU as strongly as Monti had hoped for.
“In all honesty, I had great difficulty getting much support for the idea inside Boston University,” he said.
When the prospects for ICE’s future seemed dire, Monti contemplated forming his own non-profit organization independent of BU. However, after approaching Peter Russo, the director of the SMG’s Entrepreneurial Management Institute, Monti was introduced to Wolk, and the plan took form.
Monti’s passion for revitalizing cities through economic development and Wolk’s insight into helping small businesses grow fused to form what would become ICE.
Whereas Monti provided the clear intellectual contribution for the program, Wolk said his experience working in the small business field gave the program economic perspective.
“I was struck that there was an enormous amount of attention and resource and technical assistance that was all focused on trying to figure out how to get people to start businesses,” Wolk said. “And having been an entrepreneur myself, I didn’t really understand why people weren’t focusing their resources on some [businesses] that were already started and possibly wanted to grow.”
Monti said it was Wolk who gave maximized the concept behind ICE.
“Andrew [Wolk] brought the curricular program and gave life to the mission we had constructed … Andrew [Wolk] and Andy Goldberg put real meat and muscle on the bones that I had laid out,” Monti said.
After collaborating with Roxbury Community College, Monti and Wolk were able to secure a three-year, $100,000 grant from Citizen’s Bank and the program was started, with its first “class” of businesses entering the intensive nine-month program in January 2004.
According to its website, ICE’s mission statement is to institute a program that “develops community leaders and creates better ties between ethnic communities and the broader business world by promoting wealth generation, job creation, capacity and community building for existing inner-city small businesses and organizations interested in growth.”
The program does not provide start-up business plans, because, as Goldberg put it, “unfortunately, depending upon which statistic you cite, six or seven out of 10 of those start-ups fail.
“Basically, what we’re doing is helping change people’s mind-sets and helping entrepreneurs that have had businesses up and running for a while,” Goldberg continued, “to almost change their view of who they are, and what they’re trying to achieve as an entrepreneur and a business owner.”
Wolk agreed with Goldberg, saying: “With this particular market, business owners or entrepreneurs are sort of stuck in their day-to-day [routines], and they may or may not have aspirations for growth, but giving them the luxury to spend some time thinking about it really gets them to shift their mindset into a whole different league of what it would mean to grow and how you might do it.”
Rather than a simple business-planning course, Wolk explained, ICE looks for businesses with a concerted desire to thrive, and then gives them access to the necessary resources to realize that desire using their own business as a case-study, something entirely unique to ICE.
In order to qualify for the program, businesses must go through a three-stage application process. First, those wishing to enter ICE must fill out a written application.
Second, the business’s leaders must have an in-person interview, which is a time “to kick the tires,” as Goldberg put it, and see if the applicant is suitable for the program and if the program will aid the business.
If it is determined ICE and the business match, the business will enter into the program and begin a long journey toward growth.
“What we’re really emphasizing with our program … is for entrepreneurs to be sort of crafting and executing on a three-year strategic growth action plan … We’re helping the entrepreneurs try to access new markets, capital and knowledge.”
This is done through intensive three-hour courses over the nine-month period; peer-to-peer networking between the small businesses themselves; private-sector outreach so the businesses can gain expert advice in areas such as legal, venture capital and banking; and a mentor program that pairs businesses with mentors tailored specifically to their focus of growth.
Since its inception, ICE has “graduated” 24 businesses from its program, and has an additional 11 in this year’s class.
The program has had an enormous impact on the Boston community at-large, according to its founding members and director, and they have designs for the program to expand.
“One of the greatest impacts that we’ve documented through all of this work that we do is really the local effect that all of this is having,” Goldberg said. “We published a report card in the fall of last year which not only shows how many new full-time and part-time jobs the companies created, but even at a more granular level, [what] percentage of were local hires in the neighborhoods where the businesses were located.
“A very direct result of what we’re doing is that these businesses are growing, they’re hiring, and they’re not hiring from out-of-state,” Goldberg continued. “Up to 60 percent of the new hires are right in the neighborhoods where these businesses are located.”
These businesses are not the upscale Boston Back Bay district norm, rather, these businesses are in areas that may be relatively unfamiliar: Roxbury, Dorchester and Jamaica Plain.
Red Sun Press, a cooperatively-owned commercial publishing company based in Jamaica Plain, is a business that joined ICE in November 2004.
Red Sun Press’s Chief Financial Officer Nancy Nichols said the business has been aided in numerous ways.
“[ICE] helped us worked on our three-year projection and take a look at what we were doing, and it helped us figure out ways to make decisions,” she said. “It basically allowed us to step outside of work and think.”
Red Sun Press was the runner-up in Initiative for a Competitive Inner City’s (ICIC) top 100 businesses at the time and was found by ICE through ICIC, according to Nichols.
Nichols said she highly recommends the ICE program to other inner-city businesses.
“I think it’s very useful to step outside of your day-to-day work with other people who are not part of your business but who are in the same situation,” she said, “[and] discuss the issues of your company and other companies, and sort of give each other help and support.”
Since joining ICE, Nichols said the company gained confidence to make major financial decisions that expanded the amount and type of work the business can do. ICE also helped improve the business’s efficiency.
Allston-based SIPLAS Research Organization, a company working in the “pharmaceutical and biotech industries,” joined ICE in February 2005, according to Managing Director Juan Gutierrez.
Gutierrez said ICE can help entrepreneurs who lack a clear path for growth.
“Especially if they do not have any formal business background, they can definitely get an overall idea of the major areas, that as an entrepreneur they have to look for and watch out for in their own businesses,” he said.
Gutierrez said more than anything, ICE helped him execute his business plan and achieve organizational goals, since SIPLAS, was, as Gutierrez described it, “a young company.”
Wolk said ICE provides three clear benefits to the Boston community: the cost of running the program is far less than the tangible benefits it produces (especially in terms of job creation); the businesses involved in ICE are continuously taking on more civic leadership roles in their communities; and finally, this program brings additional attention and resources to the market of small businesses in low-income areas who have a desire to grow.
All three of the program’s major players expressed extreme pride in ICE and continue to look toward the future.
“BU should be very proud that it incubated a program like ICE,” Goldberg said.
Both Wolk and Monti said BU’s main purpose in starting and continuing ICE is to provide substantial and concrete benefits to the metropolitan area.
“BU is located right in the heart of Boston, and Boston should be thinking about how it can leverage its resources to give back to the community,” Wolk said.
He said ICE is currently hiring a CEO and gaining private financial support so it can expand to cities across Massachusetts, and then hopefully across the nation.
Monti, however, does not want to lose sight of the University and Boston.
“Boston University has a larger mission, beyond the students,” Monti said. “And that is to the community in which it is located … President Brown has explicitly said that one of the initiatives he wants to support is working more with and paying attention to Boston. And programs like ICE, and faculty who have an interest in the metropolitan area might have found a champion in the new president, who clearly believes that working with issues that are important to the metropolitan area is something that Boston University ought to be involved in.”
