Year in Review: Shining a Light on Owatonna

Just over a year ago, I started in my position as the new executive director of the Owatonna Area Business Development Center (OABDC, formerly known as the Owatonna Business Incubator). We’ve done a ton of work as an organization in the past year, as has Owatonna as a community of business owners, so I wanted to highlight the work that’s been done to help businesses start and grow locally.

On my second day on the job, I was connected with Owatonna Community Education. We put together the Small Business Academy powered by Co.Starters to help folks with any type of business start to build a foundation for their venture. We offer the curriculum in three formats – a 10-week course, a 2-day bootcamp, and a 3-hour workshop. In the past year, we’ve had 37 registrants across all formats, graduated 10 entrepreneurs from the full course, brought on two new facilitators, and currently have nine participants in our fall class.

With our business consulting services through the Small Business Development Center program of the federal Small Business Administration, we’ve served 73 entrepreneurs 221 hours of free, confidential business consulting in the past 12 months - more than double the amount from the year prior. We also brought on two new consultants to help folks put together business plans, budgets and financial projections, identify funding sources, and help with their marketing.

We’ve held workshops, from Non-Traditional Financing, to Marketing 101, to using the design process (which was developed for the software industry) for everyday business. We hosted numerous “design mini-sprints” to help accelerate businesses by making a lot of critical decisions in a very small amount of time – reducing weeks of work and meetings down to just two hours or less.

We collaborated with Owatonna Business Partnership to launch our Innovators & Business Owners Connect-up (IBOC), with over 20 people participating over the past two months alone. Come out next Thursday, 10/10 at 8 AM at Torey’s, to collaborate with other like-minded individuals who are helping each other with their businesses and making Owatonna an even better place to work and live! (If you RSVP via our website – Owatonna.biz - you’ll get a free continental breakfast as well.)

In the coming weeks, we’ll be launching our Southeast Minnesota Software Studio to bring affordable software development to organizations across the region, as well as our Makerspace for Southeast Minnesota to help folks turn their ideas into a physical reality. Keep an eye out for those announcements! With these two programs, we’re reminding the entire state that Owatonna is a destination for starting and growing a business in the 21st century.

Without the Small Business Assistance Partnership grant we were awarded by DEED, most (if not all) of these developments wouldn’t be possible, which is why we’re building a new model to keep them sustainable into the future. In the past year, we’ve gotten additional support from the Owatonna Foundation, the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF), LaunchMN, and the SBDC, with new organizations coming on board to support us almost every day – keep an eye out for more announcements on this front as well!

As an organization, we are lucky to have an incredibly supportive board of directors, including our president, Joe Effertz of Black Forest Ltd. Without the board’s leadership, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve everything we’ve done in the past year, and we wouldn’t be on the road we’re looking at for the future. We’ve also got an amazing staff of employees and contractors who bring their A-game every day to help local businesses – we couldn’t do any of our work without them!

Stay tuned in 2025 for even more from the OABDC and from all the folks we’re working with in Owatonna – on our roadmap we’ve got a new newsletter to directly deliver the latest in funding and business news to your inbox, additional facilities and services, an angel investor network, and a reboot of the Owatonna Business Incubator, among other plans. We hope you’ll join us!

This article was originally published in the Owatonna People's Press.