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How to grow a local business community of 14,000+ entrepreneurs and 9-figure impact.

Nashville is one of the fastest-growing cities in the US, thanks in large part to its business and entrepreneurial community.

The Nashville Entrepreneur Center has been serving Nashville for about 13 years and its mission is to make Nashville the best place in the country to start and grow a business, and increase the likelihood of success of its entrepreneurs.

Its CEO Sam Davidson – who took over in 2023 – came from business. He’s started and built four different companies and understands how lonely the walk as an entrepreneur and business owner can be, and how important community is as a support system.
Half of all businesses will be out of business in five years. But the EC isn’t helping entrepreneurs just beat these odds – they’re working to change the odds themselves.

84% of entrepreneurs who come through the EC’s programs are still in business after 5 years.  And they achieve this by connection.

The EC provides virtual and in-person resources for business owners and has a co-working space, but a large part of what they do is use their membership-based community to connect entrepreneurs with each other; with mentors; and with events, ideas, and opportunities that will help them start and grow their business.

Sam says, “Opportunity is often the result of our community. If we want more opportunities, especially more great opportunities, we need to increase our exposure to and depth in community.”

Opportunity is often the result of our community. If we want more opportunities, we need to increase our exposure to and depth in community.

How to grow your community with a layered digital and in-person strategy.

The EC’s growth strategy is multifaceted because entrepreneurship itself is multifaceted. There are multiple entry points into the community, both digital and in-person, that reach people at different stages of their journey and that they use to bring people deeper into their community.

Choose your own commitment to community approach.

One of the most interesting approaches they have is to have a kind of “build your own commitment” approach. You can have a low touch experience through their Slack channel all the way up to a six-month, weekly-meeting Accelerator cohort.

It can work both as a funnel to bring people through the stages, and each piece can also work as separate entity.

They are actively looking at how to add more benefits to the lower levels of commitment in order to help people invest in community at a deeper level.

They’re also looking at how to have options, services, and support for a broader demographic and type of entrepreneur, such as entrepreneurs who are further along in their journey or who don’t fit into one of the accelerator. While the EC can’t be for all entrepreneurs, they want to be for any entrepreneur.

Slack Community.

The EC has a Slack community of about 1,800 members. It’s a low-commitment, first line support system for quick questions and referrals. But it gives people a place to interact with each other. Because of Slack’s democratic nature, the community itself can populate and ask a lot of questions.
It also acts as a broadcast platform for announcements and resources to activate people to engage with the in-person community.

Co-Working Space.

Half of the EC’s facility is dedicated to co-working space. You can get a dedicated desk, take meetings, get a PO box.
But there’s one major thing that differentiates it from other co-working spaces – it’s filled with other entrepreneurs. People who are going through this with you. The synergy and serendipity this creates is one of the keys to the EC’s success.

Accelerators.

The EC has 6 different accelerator programs. They’re designed to grow your business concept fast, and provide a deeper level of community – frequent and intentional. Some of the accelerators are based on the stage of business. Some others focus on businesses in specific industries, like Healthcare, Fintech, and Music and Entertainment

Referrals from people who need your community to grow the people they serve.

In the beginning, the main growth vehicle was referrals from funders.  Investors would send people who weren’t ready for money yet to the EC to learn what they needed to learn and get ready.

There’s a powerful growth lesson here for community builders – there are people who need your community. Who are the people that need someone after they’ve been in your community?

If you find the second-level beneficiaries of your community, they can become a great referral source.

Stories like yours matter.

The best communities tell a story that you can find yourself in. The community tells a story and someone says, “I see myself in that, let me go join, I want to do that too.”

The EC is using its platform to tell the story, not of the EC, but of its entrepreneurs.  Stories like Bill who came through the EC and 30x’ed his revenue.  Or Shawnee who connected to her first funders through the EC.

Leveraging story is part of what Sam sees as the biggest source of growth – referrals from alumni.

The best communities tell a story you can find yourself in.

How to nurture your community through consistency, conversation, co-creation, continuation, and connection.

Healthy communities create consistency and reliability.

Though the EC has always done events, this year they started doing a weekly event to build consistency that people can expect.

This is an important lesson for community – having consistency and reliability helps you bridge the gap between touches.  Maybe someone can’t make it for a week or two, then they’re not waiting out in the cold to come back in and re-connect.

If you only have a quarterly event and someone misses one or two, all of a sudden it’s been half a year since they’ve seen anyone or actively been part of the community. The feeling of being so disconnected and out of the loop could cause them to not come back at all.

Find your cadence and routine.  There’s a reason church is every Sunday.  Then you can play with the frequency and find out what’s too much or not enough.

Good communities ask for feedback from members.

The EC made a commitment to not just host weekly events for the first quarter of 2024, but to ask for feedback on how to improve them after every event.

Don’t just assume.  Ask, have a conversation.

And sometimes picking a metric to judge success by doesn’t tell you the real story.  Volume doesn’t tell the full story.  Did people engage, did they tell other people, did they show up for the next one because this one was so good?

Strong communities co-create with members.

Community isn’t static. You don’t just start or launch a community and then you’re done with the hard work.
Good communities create and re-create over and over again.
This goes hand-in-hand with soliciting feedback. When someone offers suggestions, the EC says, “Great, let’s do that together.” And this leads to future events that it knows members are interested in and want to engage with.

“Real powerful communities don’t rely only on the leadership of that community to gather them or to grow them. The most powerful communities are those who recruit peers and start planning and doing things on their own.”

Part of your job is creating an environment that fosters co-creation and enables community members to shape the community.  You won’t have a community if no one wants to be a part of it.

The most powerful communities are those who recruit peers and start planning and doing things on their own.

Create more robust membership offerings.

Again, this builds on the previous two points of soliciting feedback and co-creating with your members. Work with your members to build more robust and compelling membership offers.
The EC is using the community feedback they’re getting to find ways to continue to offer the benefit of membership by expanding programs and benefits for lower levels of membership.

Good communities build sidewalks not walls.

Sidewalks connect communities.
Where the EC’s sidewalk ends, they want it to continue onto someone else’s sidewalk, and to have a strong relationship with their neighbor. Sam considers it a win for someone to walk to that other sidewalk in a safe way that gets them there faster.
Some people want to put walls around their community and make it harder to climb over and out. This doesn’t help someone get where they’re going; Sam likens getting off this kind of sidewalk to the person having to climb over the wall and end up in the middle of the road. It’s dangerous and it takes them a long time to get to the next destination. This doesn’t help the EC or the people it serves achieve either of their long term goals.
Part of retention for the EC isn’t just keeping someone in its programs endlessly; it’s understanding where they go after. Maybe they leave the entrepreneur side of their community, but join the advisor side and become one of the mentors that helps newer entrepreneurs.

Create intentional and serendipitous community.

Community can be a place where you trust the people you’re around to ask them for recommendations. If someone intentionally asks for a copyright lawyer, the EC can refer them to a copyright lawyer in the community.
But there’s something potentially more powerful – creating an opportunity for right place, right time meetings.
Two people meet at the community coffee pot and then something like this happens: “Hey, what’s your name? What’re you working on? Oh my gosh, that’s exactly the thing I need, can we have a conversation about it?”
I call this the “Small World Factor” – cue the boat ride.
You meet someone and afterwards say, oh my goodness, can you believe I just coincidentally met this person in this way? Whodathunkit?

Part of this comes from the focus of a community.  What the community is about generates the potential for the type of serendipity it will create for its members.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of community. Sam says, “The more serendipity you create, the more of a shot you have at community.”

How to monetize your community in a way that achieves your bigger picture goal.

Raise money.

The EC is a non-profit organization, so monetization looks a bit different for them than for many other communities. Their primary method for funding their operations is by raising money.

Use a membership program.

About 1/3 of the EC’s revenue is earned revenue from its Membership program and Accelerators. Membership starts as low as $49, and can grow based on other benefits.
The prices for the Accelerators vary; but part of their monetization is understanding what they don’t do to monetize – the EC does not take equity stake in people’s companies. Because of that, they do have a fee for their Accelerator programs. The fee can be a sliding scale based on revenue or background, it can vary based on the type or length of the program. Project Healthcare, for example, is $1,000 per month. Scholarships are often available thanks to individual and corporate donors.

Monetization should align with your goals and values.

Community is a valuable service, and it’s not wrong to make money from community. But your monetization method and amount should be congruent with the goals and values of your community.
But you should also be asking people to invest in themselves and their community. There’s something to be said for investing in your community. Sam says, “The things we invest in are the things we protect and grow.”

Measuring success requires a different metric in community.

The EC has served 14,000 entrepreneurs in its history.
It has raised $300 million dollars in venture capital, helped generate $400 million dollars in revenue, and $100 million dollars in exits.
But Sam tells the story of Madeleine, who was trying to get a major licensing contract for her startup, but was getting pushback on cybersecurity from the big corporation. The EC, serendipitously, was hosting a workshop on cybersecurity.
All of 4 people came to the workshop, and Sam thought the event was a total bust.
But Madeleine came, connected with the guy leading the workshop, got help getting cybersecurity insurance, signed the deal with the big client, and was off to the races.
The number of attendees is the data point most people look at. By that measure, the event was a failure. But there’s a bigger story underneath.

Data + Depth of story = a different view of success.

“I think community is always measured in depth. One thing I tell folks is worry less about the amount of people in your community and worry more about the amount of community in your people.”
A hundred people in a space is just a group, a mob, or an event.
“It’s not how many people can we count, it’s how many people can we count on.”

Community is always measured in depth. Worry less about the amount of people in your community, worry more about the amount of community in your people.

Build your community before you need it.

Sam believes we should always be building community and that it’s an act of perpetual creation.
The advice he wants to leave you with is: Take the call, go to the coffee, say hello. Because that person may not provide a direct benefit to you today, or vice versa, but having them in your network and in your community, for when those needs do align, is going to be priceless.