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December 2005
15
Committee Warms to Idea of Incubator
By Mark Wineka
Salisbury Post
It's time to incubate the incubator.
A five-person committee has started finding out what people, facilities and money might be available to a business
incubator should the Salisbury Community Development Corp. agree to take an incubator under its wing.
In effect, committee members will be writing the incubator's business plan — something usually required of any new
business before it starts.
The committee consists of Salisbury City Manager David Treme, bankers V.B. Brinson and Steve Fisher, accountant David
McCoy and CDC Executive Director Chanaka Yatawara — all members of the CDC.
They also have ties to the Salisbury-Rowan Business Incubator Task Force, which decided in November that the best place to
start an incubator might be with the CDC.
(McCoy chairs the incubator task force and the Rowan County Chamber of Commerce.)
In November, task force members expressed a desire to form a nonprofit organization to oversee a business incubator and
keep all the important players together.
Those players included the Chamber, the CDC, Rowan Business Alliance, Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, Salisbury-Rowan
Economic Development Commission, Downtown Salisbury Inc., the city of Salisbury and Livingstone and Catawba colleges.
An incubator board would sit down with entrepreneurs, existing local companies or businesses looking to relocate and
possibly give them access to staff, facilities and other resources they need to grow and be successful.
Task force members eventually decided that the CDC, known mostly for its success in residential development, might offer a
non-profit vehicle already in place.
Their one concern: if one organization such as the CDC took an incubator under its umbrella, would other partners lose
interest?
The CDC especially doesn't want that to happen, Fisher said, and committee members will be meeting with the other
organizations to see exactly what financial, personnel and physical resources they can provide.
"It's got to be full support," Fisher said, adding it would have to sustain day-to-day, year-to-year operations of an
incubator while also providing "angel" funds (venture capital) to grow businesses.
Treme said, "It has to be support with a capital 'S.'"
Treme cautioned that the full CDC board would resist limping along with an incubator. It would not want to misfire on the
project and lose any of its credibility, he said.
Yatawara, Treme and Fisher spoke at a brief meeting of the incubator task force Wednesday afternoon. They hope to have a
plan in place for the task force's review by Jan. 26. It also will share its work with the full CDC board.
Task force member Heidi Whitesell, director of the Small Business Center at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, said Rowan's
incubator model for now is "hard to put your arms around ... and know what it's going to look like."
Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263, or mwineka@salisburypost.com.
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