Beginning with an online community and growing into a statewide technology resource, MyEntre.Net serves thousands of Iowa small business owners annually with a changing menu of web-driven resources.  Initially funded through a USDA grant, the MyEntre.Net online community was created in 2003 to serve several rural regions of the state with online business profiles, free business webinars and a library of Iowa business resources.  Based upon enhanced economic activity among startups in those regions, the Iowa legislature appropriated funds in 2008 to make MyEntre.Net a statewide resource. Today, more than 11,000 small business owners select from online services designed to facilitate better business decisions and Iowa job creation.  More than 2,000 Iowans are served with a MyEntre.Net resource annually.  To learn more about the people behind each of our programs, please review our staff page.

The MyEntre.Net team philosophy is to listen to small business owners, imagine what we can do to make life better, and to create solutions leveraging our university and technology assets. Annually, we evaluate how we’ve done in terms of economic impact, user experiences, and popularity. We have learned how to better understand entrepreneurs through online interactions, an e-mail listserv, statewide annual survey, regional workshops and outreach events, and through a traveling statewide conference. Currently our best resources include:

The Iowa Business Concierge gives small business owners a single place to call, email, chat, or tweet to get business intelligence or a referral to an Iowa service provider partner. Our ‘Ask Us Anything’ approach gives confidence to the shy, empowers the excited, and insures best results for the entrepreneurs who we seek to serve. The UNI Business Concierge team has access to, and the expertise to navigate, dozens of both paid and free database resources. Small business owners can obtain competitive intelligence, mailing lists, GIS mapping of customers and competitors, consumer demographics and more-just by asking! An administrative application tracks requests and provides reporting for economic impact while customer relationship management (CRM) software follows each project in process and compiles communications with each client. More than 600 businesses have been served by the Iowa business concierge in the past 18 months- an average of one small company every day.

Dream Big Grow Here is a Software as a Service (SaaS) technology capable of hosting multiple online small business contests simultaneously. Launched as a pilot in 2010, Dream Big Grow Here has become wildly popular with small business owners and economic development sponsors alike. In 2011, Iowa’s Dream Big Grow Here contests attracted more than 100,000 individuals to MyEntre.Net, where they either voted or competed in one of six regional contests for $5,000 grant awards. A single $10,000 grand prize among those winners was awarded at the end of the year at EntreFest.

EntreFest! is a traveling, statewide small business conference for Iowans. It has become a moveable feast of networking, seminars, speakers, and peer networking serving the small business community. Since 2008, EntreFest! has been held in Cedar Falls, Coralville, West Des Moines, Dubuque, and Ames. EntreFest! is live video streamed and attendees become part of an ongoing year around conversation at MyEntre.Net.

MyEntre.Net conducts the only statewide survey of small business owners in Iowa. The 2012 survey captured economic impact and offered a needs assessment from small business owners with fewer than 50 employees in 94 of Iowa’s 99 counties. The data was gathered and crunched by a third-party partner who specializes in statistical collection and advanced analysis.  Through this survey, the MyEntre.Net team was able to identify gaps in services, and determine which programs have been most successful in helping Iowa entrepreneurs grow.

A subscriber based e-newsletter reaches 12,239 Iowa small business owners from every county, twice monthly. Through this electronic communication, we provide business tips, promote upcoming events by service provider partners across the state, and market our own offerings to entrepreneurs. An administrative tracking system allows us to see click-through acts and determine the value of each content element.

MyEntre.Net business webinars have been hosted twice monthly since 2003, serving more than 3,200 small business owners with free, high quality interactive learning opportunities. More than 800 small businesses attended a Webinar in FY 2011. MyEntre.Net webinars can be attended live, where interactive Q & A is encouraged, or they can be viewed as archived presentations in the webinar archive.