Entrepreneur Resources

The Iowa Lakes Corridor assists new and established entrepreneurs to plan and grow businesses, focusing on serving clients with high growth opportunities. The Corridor starts with a self-assessment of the entrepreneur’s leadership team, spotlights an understanding of the target customer base, provides focus on competitive advantage, assists to evaluate opportunities to protect intellectual property and supports the entrepreneur through the building and polishing of their growth plan.

As clients grow, the Corridor shifts services to meet changing clients needs. Services for maturing companies include mentoring on methods to define achievement milestones, measuring progress against milestones, ensuring leadership team composition keeps in sync with changing needs during pressured growth periods and ensuring availability of advanced technical and professional advisory services to enable informed strategic and tactical decisions.

Networking and Educational Events

A major barrier to entry for prospective entrepreneurs is the lack of access to professional and social support. To overcome these barriers, the Corridor offers informal and formal opportunities for exchanging ideas:

• Between entrepreneur peers
• Between Angel Investors and Iowa Lakes Capital
• Between Angel Investors and entrepreneurs
• Between institutional investors and entrepreneurs

Monthly evening networking sessions:

• Brief update on Iowa Lakes Corridor clients
• Feature entrepreneur describes business model
• Featured keynote speaker
• Hors D’oeuvres and drinks served

Iowa Lakes Corridor has partnered with the Kauffman foundation to offer Kauffman FastTrac® NewVenture and GrowthVenture educational workshops to help entrepreneurs plan and implement new, and grow existing, businesses. To learn more about Kauffman FastTrac®, click the Entrepreneur Training link above.

Advisory Services Provided to Entrepreneurs

For more information on the Entrepreneurial Resources provided by the Iowa Lakes Corridor, contact Brian Dalziel at 712-264-3474 or 1-800-765-1428 or by email.