Join the journey as Francisco Martinez, a vibrant force in economic development, shares his transformative story from graphic and web design to spearheading growth initiatives in Wilkesboro. Together, we explore the impact of the Entrepreneur Grant Program and the vital role of the Small Business Center at Wilkes Community College in cultivating a fertile entrepreneurial landscape. We also delve into the boons of co-working spaces for startups, painting a picture of a community that's not just surviving, but thriving through collaboration and support.
Get ready to connect with the heart of our business community at the Wilkes Entrepreneur Network's monthly gatherings. I'm thrilled to welcome you to conversations with Doren Tripp, Laurie Brown-Straps, and other local luminaries, where we stitch together the rich tapestry of our area's entrepreneurial spirit. Discover how these networks expand business horizons, and stay abreast of the economic pulse with updates from the Wilkes Economic Development Corporation. Embark on this episode with us, celebrating the collective efforts propelling Wilkesboro's economic future.
Join the journey as Francisco Martinez, a vibrant force in economic development, shares his transformative story from graphic and web design to spearheading growth initiatives in Wilkesboro. Together, we explore the impact of the Entrepreneur Grant Program and the vital role of the Small Business Center at Wilkes Community College in cultivating a fertile entrepreneurial landscape. We also delve into the boons of co-working spaces for startups, painting a picture of a community that's not just surviving, but thriving through collaboration and support.
Get ready to connect with the heart of our business community at the Wilkes Entrepreneur Network's monthly gatherings. I'm thrilled to welcome you to conversations with Doren Tripp, Laurie Brown-Straps, and other local luminaries, where we stitch together the rich tapestry of our area's entrepreneurial spirit. Discover how these networks expand business horizons, and stay abreast of the economic pulse with updates from the Wilkes Economic Development Corporation. Embark on this episode with us, celebrating the collective efforts propelling Wilkesboro's economic future.
From white lightning to lightning fast. The Wilkesboro Find your Back Road podcast covers all the people, places and things that make Wilkesboro one of a kind mountain destination.
Speaker 2:
Enjoy lively conversations as we welcome artists, local business leaders, event organizers and creatives from around Wilkesboro.
Speaker 1:
It's the Wilkesboro Find your Back Road podcast, and let's welcome our guest for this episode, francisco Martinez, and we're going to be talking economic development today, and it's one of those things that people will go economic development. What does that mean? Well, what it means really is the options that you and your neighbors have to make money, be self-reliant, enjoy community and see your community grow, thrive and sustain. Did I do a pretty good job with that, francisco? Did I cover it pretty good?
Speaker 3:
I'd say so Better to me. Oh, goodness Well.
Speaker 1:
I appreciate the kindness in that, but I am so glad to have you on the air. It seems like we've played tag for a few months trying to make this happen and our schedule's finally aligned. It took an eclipse to get things in the right order for us to finally sit down and have a chat, so welcome to Find your Back Road.
Speaker 3:
All right, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:
Well, before we get talking about Explore Wilkesboro and the EDC and all the different things that are going on to support the community and the growth and everything else, let's introduce you to folks that are listening, if they don't know you already a little bit of where you're from and how'd you end up doing what you're doing today here in Wilkes County.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, gladly. So. Yeah, I moved out here to Wilkes County about three years ago. I went to school at App State. I have a creative background in graphic design, web design. So after school I actually moved to Winston-Salem. I grew up in Winston and worked for a marketing department for the school system. It wasn't bad. It was definitely a good entry-level position. But yeah, I moved out here during the pandemic and just really did some odd jobs and wanted to get back into creative work, and it didn't take long until I landed a position at Wilkes Economic Development Corporation. Like a lot of people in my field, I just sort of fell into it and fell in love with it too.
Speaker 1:
Well, and you know, you really get a chance. We were talking off air and one of the things I love about doing Find your Back Road are all the interesting people I get to meet and hear their stories and see where they're at in their own development and evolution as individuals, as entrepreneurs, as artists and things like that. Well, in what you get to do and working with EDC, same thing You're getting to meet all of these people that have decided to go ahead and take action with an idea.
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah, it's a real treat. The Entrepreneur Grant Program was really my first intro into getting to this area of my work, a little intimidating at first. But Robin Hamby, our vice president, she's been running that program for some time, since 2015. And you know I work in the marketing. I get to take a look at some of the history of the program, the stats, and just see the businesses that have gone through it and, yeah, I mean it's just. I mean the give back from this program has just been phenomenal. But yeah, I've enjoyed working the program each round and I mean it's in partnership with the Small Business Center at Wilkes Community College. They sponsor our program. Lori Brentel Jarvis she's the director there at the SBC, so she's just been awesome to work with. We always try to get our applicants to go through there before applying. Just a great resource.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and from what I understand of it too, it's not just giving you access to capital potentially, but the lessons you learn just going through the process. You learn so much about really defining and managing and laying out a vision for your business Because as you go through that grant process and everything, it's helping you really organize your ideas and the plan of how you're getting to different benchmarks. And for a lot of people that go from having an idea or something they were doing for neighbors and people said you know you should make a business out of that. It's a great process. So, yes, capital is vital to success and having access to it, but also just the process and the conversations and the different things that you can learn muscle memory about business are just invaluable. Those are things that can shape people's course and trajectory for years to come, no matter what the outcome of a grant is.
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah, exactly, and I'd say, just the kind of relationships we have here with our resource partners, I mean we can just offer a very strong entrepreneur ecosystem for Wilkes County.
Speaker 1:
I'm glad you mentioned that because that's really something that's come up in some of the other conversations we've had, and one of the things that I think is some of the real secret sauce about Wilkes County and the surrounding areas and the foothills is the collaboration that exists, the non-siloed support that different segments of the economy and the community throw behind entrepreneurs and behind local businesses and things Talk a little bit about the collaboration that exists and the importance of that, not just from the EDC's operation but in the participants who are getting support or lending support toward the efforts that you guys are doing they've been operating.
Speaker 3:
But I love talking about this place. I mean I think it's just it's a real treat to say that we got a co-working space where a small business can just house themselves there and just have access to all these great resources like office supplies, podcast rooms and other businesses. And I mean there's different levels of spaces that you can have. You can work in the community space, rent out a desk space or just have your office, and we get to utilize this space for a lot of events. We have the Wilkes Entrepreneur Network.
Speaker 3:
It's a monthly networking meeting held last Wednesday at the Masthead, and so it's Doran Tripp. He helps us out there quite a bit. He's the community coordinator at the Masthead, and then you know Laurie Brown-Straps and I. You know we come in and just get the meeting started. We come in and just get the meeting started. It's really an opportunity for businesses to just come out, introduce themselves and talk a little bit about what they're doing, and we get to every now and then offer a presentation from one of the businesses themselves, maybe just talk about what kind of marketing they can do for your business. A coach or AI. I mean you definitely walk away with something from each meeting and I want to refer listeners to.
Speaker 1:
If you're listening through a podcast platform, scroll around a little bit, because Doran has been featured in an episode of Find your Back Road and so I want people to check that out. But one of the things, too, about it is like when I interviewed Doran and he was talking about, even if someone has an idea, if they don't have a structured business yet, but they have an idea and they don't know how to get it off the ground, that's also another opportunity to go and bounce things off other people that have already walked a few miles in the shoes that you want to wear and then, by having you and other representatives from different organizations, that can put some structure behind some of the ideas and the feedback too. It's invaluable and it's not something that every community has to offer folks.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it's interesting. I went to a workshop last week. It's part of my training just to becoming a certified economic developer, but I love that I get to go to these workshops. Becoming a certified economic developer, but I love that I get to go to these workshops. This one was about using entrepreneur as an economic driver, and something I learned was the percentage of businesses in the United States are entrepreneurs. So the answers were like do you think it's 50%, 75%, 85%? Uh, what do you think it is?
Speaker 1:
Oh, you're asking me. I'd say it's probably closer to 90%.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, yeah, it's a 99.7% 99.7. Yeah, I was blown away by that and, um, it's really strong in real communities and that. That was that. That was really neat to learn. Um, it's like well, hey, here I am in that community. I'm seeing it Um it's oh, you go ahead.
Speaker 1:
No, that's fine, and you know, because it. You know, relationship is what it's all about. You know this is something we were talking about. Off air, too, is is that. You know it's not just like oh well, you know, I well, I need an accountant. Okay, that's great, I need some marketing help. I need someone to redo my window seals on my building that I'm just about to get, whatever. But the relationships. It's not only that you're going to be doing commerce with someone that can help your immediate need, but you build relationships, and every single person that you bring into your network of relationships, they also have other networks of relationships, and so the referral aspect of things is so vital. You know and, and so I'm glad to hear you get passionate about that. You know and, and on and off air.
Speaker 1:
I want to tell people we talked about this off air too. You know and and um, you know to have people that are in positions like yours, where you're having, you know, processes for grant programs and you know networking, organizational type things individual entrepreneur that starts with an idea, all the way up to when they've grown to where they have a, you know, a multi-location business and a bunch of employees and everything else. It's a beautiful thing to see and I just want to remind folks again it's not something that exists in every community. We're very fortunate here to have the kind of collaboration we have. If people want to get in touch with and stay on top of all the things that are going on I know you have a monthly newsletter that you put out and some different activity reports and everything Tell people about that and how's the best way to connect with EDC and all the great things going on.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, absolutely so. I love our activity report. It's definitely one of the bigger assignments I had to face when I got to the EDC, just dealing with metrics and just kind of talking about the projects we've had come in. So EDPNC, that's economic development, it's our state-level economic developers, and so we just stay linked up to them. They sort of identify areas as businesses come in, where it may be suitable for them. So that's how we get fed some of the projects and you know, one of the challenges we face is just having the buildings and sites here available for them.
Speaker 3:
But really that's our metrics, that's our activity reports gives you an idea of that and the jobs that are currently here. I mean, it's just it's overview from month to month basis of Wilkes County. We also talk about events happening or events we got to be a part of. It could be a business spotlight, various things or things that we've gotten to participate in. We usually have about three to five stories in our activity report and so that turns into our newsletter and if folks would like to, you know, get their hands on it or just be a part of it, they can visit our website, wilkes Economic Development Well, sorry, wilkesedccom and from there you can subscribe. Our website's actually fairly new. We got it redesigned and launched still less than a year ago, but we worked with Katie Logan with Logan Provisions, another entrepreneur in the community, and it was just a great experience, very helpful. So she's very organized with how she does things and in economic development, websites can get very overwhelming with information.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it can be information overload sometimes, but you all have done a great job with the website. I've been on it and with Michelle and I co-hosting Find your Back Road and the travels that we do, because we also do a travel show. We have people ask if they follow the rabbit hole and they end up in Wilkesboro and and they'll ask questions and we refer them through, you know, either to your website or maybe to Thomas, thomas, sally or something, and say you know, there's lots of great information, there's people that are willing to help you find out more information. Um, you know so, um, you know it's. It's really great. I appreciate everything that you and the rest of the team do.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, oh yeah, and I mean you can. I was really impressed with our resource library, how it was sorted. So stories from my activity report, you know it just falls into place as I upload it and boom, there it is our resource library. I love that, all right. But yeah, I'm really glad to hear that it's being utilized and people are learning more about it. So, whatever we can do, we'd love to hear it and we'll go ahead and link to.
Speaker 1:
A lot of people will hear this through podcasts on various platforms. The show's available everywhere and we'll put a link in the description as well so that people can get to that. And you know, again, francisco, you know all things that are worthwhile are worth waiting for, and we finally got our schedules connected and we could have this conversation, so I'm really grateful for it and, uh, I look forward to getting to see you soon in person and, um and again, thank you to you and the rest of the team for everything that you're doing for our community.
Speaker 3:
All right, likewise, matt. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:
Thank you for listening to the Wilkesboro Find your Back Road podcast.
Speaker 1:
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