20. Realizing Dreams: Reality Show Round Table

Realizing Dreams: Reality Show Round Table

Our family is launching an experiment called Fulcrum, a business that we think will make a difference in our city. We thought we'd share a bit about it with you and most importantly give you an inside scoop into the process as we will be on a learning curve and we hope that this will encourage some of you either as individuals, as families or a group of friends to dream great dreams that you think will make a difference in your world, your community and your city and take action to start pursuing those dreams.

Overview of Fulcrum

Fulcrum is a movement in the city of Yakima that we hope will bring creative people together to live, to work, to learn, play and build innovative solutions that will benefit our city and our county and ultimately the world.

• Fulcrum is a movement in the community of Yakima that brings creative people together to live, work, learn and play while they build innovative solutions that will benefit our valley and the world.
• The Fulcrum building will be an inspiring space where people can dream together, learn together, work together, eat together and do life together.

The vision of Fulcrum Yakima is to be the catalyst that helps us unleash our collective creativity as a town. We are launching community and a space where young and old alike come together to dream again and leverage our collective resources and talents to accomplish those dreams.

We are excited to be doing this as a family along with many other friends and community leaders. This is not a just a Gienger Family project.  Our family may be pivotal in launching this, but are engaging many others.

The Beginning of a Vision

This idea came out of a discussion we had about a year ago about a brain drain trend we noticed especially within the younger people of our city who we found were wanting to get out of our city as soon as possible. By the time they turned 18 the first thing they wanted to do was leave because they realized that Yakima didn’t hold much economic opportunity our vision is to change that. Right now there isn’t a lot happening in town because the members of community who could bring the economic growth back are facing outwards, our goal with Fulcrum is to hold hands as a community, young and old alike, face inwards and make our city an economic hub, where people can activate their potential and unleash the collective creativity of the city.  The Fulcrum building will be a physical space to house and cultivate this new innovative mentality and economic success for the city.

When we had our first gathering in the Fulcrum building, our goal was to open up the conversation with the community about what we are creating and how we will all have a part in it. We spent the much of the time hearing people’s stories and their passion for our city and the differences they’d like to see. We also had the opportunity to share our vision for Fulcrum. This is a community project and we hope that a lot of people will be getting involved over time engaging the best and brightest minds of people in Yakima who are dreamers to come alongside and help foster great things in our city.

As you've been listening to this podcast, you know that we're big on the value of developing businesses and the value that can bring to the world. The last episode talked about the value of the free enterprise system in America and my concern that not everybody is appreciates the value it truly brings to this world in building healthy societies. You can go back and listen to that episode if you'd like.

What we're doing in Yakima is a bit of a case study, an illustration of the expression of what a lot of us care about. We'd like to foster some startup businesses that have creative ideas, innovations that we think could make our city and ultimately our world better. So that's what we're setting out to do here. With that background, we thought we'd just have an open round table discussion on what we're developing. 

Seeing A Need

All great endeavors start with some idea to bring value somewhere and usually that value you want to bring aligns with your passions or skills or personal interests. So think of something that you'd love to do, that you're passionate about and that could add value to your world. Then find a specific related need and dream of how you could potentially fill that need.

Creating A Vision and Researching

Last year in January Chelann and I started talking about about the concept of a co-working space and business incubator or innovation center and what that could do for our city.  Clearly a trend in this around the world. There was over 14,000 co-working spaces that started in 2018 alone worldwide...a huge trend that is clearly meeting a need. There's a big rise of independent freelancers, and in the number of new entrepreneurs which fosters the value of co-working and co-living spaces. The desire for a place where you can live and walk right down the hall or just right outside your room and have access to co-working space.  The value of a space to live, work, eat, play all in one place. I think it's also meeting a need in the world where social media tends to make us a bit isolated from face to face personal interaction. Places like this create the opportunity to fill the need people have for more personal interaction.

Developing Your Idea

When you have an idea, you will have to throw it out on the table and watch it develop. Our idea started out as something more like co-working space and a business incubator and it's now morphed into something that's not really about a business incubator or just co-working opportunities. Instead, it's morphed into something much bigger and now something we're all very excited about.  After our first official meeting as a family to brainstorm on this project, we started thinking about the possibility of taking this into multiple cities and we all got pretty excited about the impact something like this could make for small and large communities around the country.  All of us became even so excited about it that we are willing to shift some of our priorities, businesses commitments and schedules to start focusing on this.

Find Someone to Support You and Your Vision

The next step we took was asking our family and others: “Who wants to be involved? What would you like to contribute?” After that, we had our first meet up within the community and had a turn out of 30 influential community leaders which just solidified our initial excitement for this project. It was energizing to hear from 30 influential community leaders who showed up and matched our excitement, letting us know they were behind us, giving us their cards and offering to help in any way they could. When you are able to engage everyone and delegate different roles to people who see the vision and share your passion it solidifies the emotions that you feel about your own project.

I believe that through this process God has really opened the doors in a way that seems he already planned to do something like this and we're just tagging along.  It has been as if all the stars aligned...from searching for a building, finding the ideal space and getting it under an agreement, to being blessed with a seller who is also very passionate about the vision of this project.

Creating a Name and Mission Statement

We got to the point with our project that we were calling it so many different things that we sat down and said we've got to figure out what to call this so we don't call it something different every time we talk about it. When we started the process of selecting name we got input from several people. We made a list a half dozen of the top names and sent them out to several dozen people in our target audience.  When you have a vision and as soon as you start crystallizing some things, start getting feedback from your target customer as soon as you can about everything you can, as early as you can. We eventually chose the name Fulcrum because that was the most popular and fortunately it's got a great meaning to it because we think this is going to be like a tipping point for our city to change the culture and the economy.

The next step we took, which is something you do early in start ups is to start getting clear about the mission, vision and values. What's the purpose behind this thing you want to do, what's the real cause? What will it look like when that cause if being achieved.  And what are the values, the non-negotiable principles that will guide how we do what we do in this enterprise? We all got together just started spitting out different core values that were important to each of us and compiled them all into a google doc. From there it is a process of elimination of what will represent our vision and values best. What will resonate with people and give them a clear image of what we were all about about and what we're creating here? 

Creating Organizational Structure 

One of the first things we did to create an action plan was just by asking how are we going to organize this project from a big picture perspective. And we ultimately concluded that we're going to have three different sets of entities/companies to make this all happen. One set of companies has to do with the operations of Fulcrum, what happens on a day to day basis to facilitate all of these good things happening in the space and in the community.

The second set of companies we'll need to establish will be the entities that won the real estate (the building and land and parking lot). Right now the real estate is under contract to purchase in the next 6-12 months.  By the time we purchase the real estate and start doing the renovations, it will be owned by a single purpose entity (company) that will probably have multiple investors/owners in it.

Once we get up and running and see some Yakima grown innovations turning into businesses that need funding, we'll have a third set of companies that venture capital investors can invest in and that will then be invested in some of the start up businesses fostered by Fulcrum.  We plan to facilitate a process that will bring funding to the best ideas and the best businesses that start as a result of this process. There are a lot of venture capital investors who are excited about investing and startup businesses that have the potential to make a strong positive impact on this world.  So we hope to attract investors like that invest in a fund that will invest in some of the businesses that start in Fulcrum. 

So, bottom line there will be three different sets of entities (or companies), operations, property ownership, and then venture capital funding.

Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities

The next thing we did is to get clear on roles and responsibilities. Who's going to lead what in these three different companies?  We started discussing the passions and skills and potential matching roles and responsibilities of each person on the founding team.  We then decided that one of the first roles we needed is an executive director for Fulcrum. Collectively we developed a written job description, and then an advertisement for that position based on that job description. We spent some money posting ads in places like ZipRecruiter. So this went out to many online job boards and we received a bunch of resumes.  Then we went through a process of screening the resumes based on what we had in writing. This is a classic system for success in recruiting. You define a position, write down the job description, develop accurate advertisement for the position, get the word out in multiple ways trying to get as many applicants as you can then screen the resumes down to a small number that you think are qualified based on what you see in writing. And then the next step is to do phone screening interviews with those that look like they might be qualified on paper.  So we offered the opportunity for top candidates to schedule a phone interview.  And then the final step to do in person interviews with your top 2-4 finalist candidates that make it through the phone screening interview process.  So we followed this whole process for the Fulcrum Executive Director position.  We even had a final interview committee that comprised more than our family and included someone with experience in hiring and managing for this type of position in another business innovation center in a different city.  We're excited to announce the Chelann Gienger ended up being the top candidate and was selected for this role. 

Establish a Specific Timeline for Your Project

The most recent thing we've done is to establish an overall project plan and timeline for turning this dream into reality.  Following is what we know about the timeline right now:

When will Fulcrum open?

• The Fulcrum movement (or experience) starts now. We are in the process of building the most important aspect of Fulcrum as we speak and that’s the CREATIVE COMMUNITY.
• The physical space that will help foster the Fulcrum experience is targeted to open in late 2020.

2018

Q4 – Free community events start (Monthly Fireside Chats)

Build volunteer team. Raise donations for seed funding

2019

Q1 - Architect model finished

Q2 – March:  First weekly Coffee and Concepts:

Secure capital for project

Q3 - Start construction

Q4 - Construction, start accepting first members

2020

Q3-4 - Grand Opening

How can I get involved? 

Join our Facebook group, Fulcrum Yakima, to stay in the loop with future events, volunteer opportunities and all things Fulcrum is up to!

 

THANK YOU!

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