Giving legs to a fledgling business venture is no easy feat, but increasingly more locals are giving entrepreneurship a shot, say officials.

"I like to say that anybody that takes a shower can have a good idea," said Jim Pillans, director of the Brazos Valley Small Business Development Center. "It's what you do with it after you dry off that counts."

Pillans said his office -- a federally-funded center providing business consulting and training to novel business owners -- sees between 100 to 150 new clients per year. Of the 300 to 350 clients the center sees during a typical year, 25 to 50 launch businesses, creating some 150 to 200 area jobs at a little over $5 million in capital investment.

The Research Valley Innovation Center, a science and technology incubator and accelerator, has seen month-over-month increases in clientele, General Manager James Lancaster said.

The center -- launched late last year -- is working with five times the number of clients and has doubled the number of prospects it was working with last year, Lancaster said. In July the center was juggling five clients and 21 prospects, as public awareness of the center also continued to increase.

"For a variety of reasons, not all of these prospects will formally become clients of the RVIC, whether it's the progress of the venture, industry, market size, etc.," Lancaster said. "So some prospects fall off the list from time to time."

Those prospects typically fall off, not because they do not have potential for success, but because they do not fit the innovation center's profile, Lancaster said.

The center describes its target client profile as being tied to a large, rapidly expanding market with a management team that can execute, innovative technology that can be commercialized and protected and a strategy that has a strong, sustainable competitive advantage.

The small business development center and innovation center work with each other on a referral basis, Lancaster said.

No one local organization was able to provide statistics capturing the full picture of start-up and job creation or economic impact of entrepreneurial activity across the Brazos Valley.

However, local officials agreed that a depressed national economy, culture shifts, the area's proximity and linkage to Texas A&M University and a bumper crop of savvy Baby Boomers approaching retirement age are all contributing to a surge of local entrepreneurship.

"A lot of companies that are laying people off are giving good severance packages," Pillans said. "That's giving them the capital they need to be able to start."

Lancaster said when he moved to the area from Dallas late last year, he was surprised at the number of people in the area who had full-time jobs and so-called side ventures.

"I would estimate there is literally 1.4 jobs for every person in town who's employed," he said. "There's a lot of activity going on the side."

High-tech

More than a year ago, Cody Marx Bailey and Aaron Farnham were one of those statistics -- the two worked full-time day jobs while "moonlighting" their young software development and consulting business on the side.

Their firm Downtown Cartel, launched inside a co-working space with a handful of other young start-ups in downtown Bryan, now dabbles in the start-up industry primarily in Houston and Austin working on early-stage development and prototyping.

"We eventually decided to start our own business because we thought we'd rather do that than get up at 8 a.m. and go to a job working for the man," Bailey said. "We got tired of our 9-to-5 dress code, meetings, hierarchies and bureaucracies."

Richard Scruggs, director of Texas A&M University's Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship, said the area is seeing increasingly more high-tech start-ups.

"I think certainly the university has an influence, but that's not 100 percent of it," Scruggs said. "There have been software start-ups here that probably did not come out of the university, like some of the work out of Fiber Town."

However, high-tech start-ups have the advantages of belonging to an entrepreneurial community in the Brazos Valley with linkage to a "great" talent pool -- particularly in life sciences and information technology -- Scruggs said.

Michael Pincus, an experienced entrepreneur who recently relocated his 22-year-old technology company to College Station, said he enjoys his firm's proximity to the university. But he said he sees a need to increase opportunities for creative collaborations with individuals within the university and among local business owners.

"Teaming and technical collaboration is the name of the game for us," said Pincus, of Mnemotrix Systems Inc. and AA Informatics LLC, a corporation he started in Texas.

Mnemotrix, the firm Pincus and his wife Kathy have operated since 1986, is an information mining and data fusion services company. AA Informatics is based on a system of "smart" databases the couple have created for the agriculture industry.

Roby Fitzhenry, a co-founder of Always Creative, said his brand and Web development firm enjoy the benefits of being a big fish in a small pond.

"We have the ability to do things that actually promote change in multiple ways, not just from a profit standpoint," Fitzhenry said. "Here, it isn't us dealing with a board, we're talking directly to a business owner and they're talking to us."

Texas A&M

The Texas A&M University System's Office of Technology Commercialization has been helping university researchers in Bryan-College Station (and other campuses) convert science to mostly local spin-off ventures since 1992, when then-system Chancellor Herb Richardson launched an office of technology transfer.

Jimmy Moore, a professor of biomedical engineering at Texas A&M, said the office was a large part of the reason he took his position at the university five years ago.

Moore said he previously was at Florida International University in Miami where he did research on stents, small devices that hold blood vessels open.

"We came up, based on our basic science research some new ideas for a stent design that we patented."

He continues to this day to try and push those technologies forward through his firm Angiomechanix, he said. He also has Failure Analysis for Cardiovascular Technologies, a firm that provides consulting companies to medical device companies.

"[Vice Chancellor for Technology Commercialization] Guy Diedrich is outstanding," Moore said. "He's someone who knows the venture capital world and knows what it takes to get things out on the market."

Moore said Texas A&M attracted him because the university has the resources to do research and commercialization.

Brett Cornwell, commercialization services director for the office of technology commercialization, did not have office statistics available for just the main campus of Texas A&M University.

Systemwide, the office has helped researchers garner more than 300 patents, peaking at 43 and 42 patents in 2004 and 2005. The office also helped generate some 46 license agreements and 11 options in 2007.

Locally, the system office had a hand in helping companies like Terrabon LLC, a local company that converts waste to fuel and Synfuels, a company commercializing system technologies related to the conversion of gas fuel streams into liquid fuel streams, get off the ground, among others.

A representative with the vice president of research's office at Texas A&M couldn't be reached to comment on where the university currently stood on an initiative started several years ago to hire some 450 professors with ties to entrepreneurship.

Todd McDaniel, president and chief executive of the Research Valley Partnership, said Texas A&M students are showing an increased interest in entrepreneurship.

"Maybe one out of 10 seem to have some sort of predisposition toward entrepreneurship," McDaniel said. "That's good news compared to other markets."

• Holli L. Estridge's e-mail address is holli.estridge@theeagle.com.

Comments

(Requires free registration.)

0 comment(s) found!