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Mass Innovations, From The Beacon, November 2016
With new small businesses often struggling to find an affordable storefront or office space, Leominster is offering startups a place to do business with inexpensive rent and a retail shop where they can sell their creations.
The city’s small business incubation program, which began earlier this year and now has its first office tenant, is also looking to rent the city’s emergency management kitchen to food entrepreneurs and to offer training and certifications to would-be business owners.
The program takes a four-pronged approach to supporting new businesses: START, the affordable office space; MAKE, a city-owned retail shop; FRESH, a shared kitchen; and LEARN, an educational component.
Having been to many small business grand openings, Mayor Dean Mazzarella said that he’s met business owners who have mortgaged their homes, borrowed money from relatives, and leveraged almost everything they have to pursue their vision.
“Starting a small business is no longer small in America,” Mazzarella said. “Each one of them is a huge undertaking.
“I think we can help them with the guidance and the support that they’ll need, and give them an affordable place to actually start. If they had to go pay rent somewhere, they’d never get from the living room office to the actual brick-and-mortar location.”
Using the 3,000-square-foot vacant upper floor of the city-owned former Gallagher School downtown, the city created four incubator spaces called START. (The lower floors include Leominster District Court, state legislator offices, the school superintendent’s office, and a robotics business.)
Lisa Marrone, the city’s economic development coordinator, said tenants will negotiate 12- to 18-month license agreements with the city, which they hope will give them enough time to get their startup on solid footing and work toward finding a long-term space.
Tenants must pay rent, Marrone said, but the city doesn’t make a profit, with all rent going back into building maintenance and improvements and providing resources to the tenants.
The first tenant is Ingenuity Hub, a nonprofit, self-directed learning center that designs curricula based on each student’s experiences, interests and goals. Executive Director David Lane said he was struggling to find an appropriate space until he met Marrone, who told him about START.
“Everything else was either way too expensive for us to get started or they weren’t interested in tenants working with teenagers, so it was tough,” Lane said. “Every time we talk to anybody about this, we’re very clear about how grateful we are to the mayor and the city.”
Participants in the city’s program can sell their wares at MAKE, the city’s storefront space, which opened on April 1. Members pay $50 a year to join, can exhibit up to 10 items in the store at a time, and receive 90 percent of the sale price from their items, with the remaining 10 percent going to the cost of rent with the private building owner.
The store is operated on a volunteer schedule, Marrone said, and features kitchen items, clothing, home décor and more.
“Anything that’s handmade can have an opportunity to have some downtown visibility and a retail spot,” she said.
Still in the works is FRESH, a program that would use the certified kitchen built in the city’s emergency management building after a devastating ice storm in 2008 to provide food for families during power outages and other emergency situations.
The kitchen goes unused most of the time, so Mazzarella decided to make it a city-owned and operated shared kitchen for food entrepreneurs. Marrone said she is still researching the upgrades and policies needed to properly operate a professional shared commercial kitchen, and she is working with the Somerville-based Foundation Kitchen, which operates shared facilities, to learn how a municipality can run such an operation.
The 2008 ice storm also led to the build out of the emergency management building’s classroom training space, which was transformed into a 50-seat amphitheater for municipal training, with work done by vocational students from the Center for Technical Education at Leominster High School. With technology for presentations built in, Marrone said the city hopes to offer trainings, guest speakers, and possibly entrepreneurial certifications and similar programs that would assist small businesses through the LEARN portion of the program.
Mazzarella said the city hopes to offer would-be entrepreneurs enough early support to increase their chance of success.
“Even if they just come in for a training and a realistic approach, a lot of times we can give them a better picture of what the expectations should be,” he said. “We don’t want to dampen dreams. We want to reinforce them.”
For more information, contact Economic Development Coordinator Lisa Marrone at (978) 534-7525 ext. 257 or lmarrone@leominster-ma.gov.