Ohio Venture Association event urges entrepreneur activity

Ohio small-business owners can benefit from local pro-startup figures as they work toward more growth. Crain’s Cleveland Business said that the Ohio Venture Association held a summit highlighting the potential of regional entrepreneurs. The event, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, seemed especially focused on the development aspect of running a small business, with a theme of “Beyond Northeast Ohio: Expanding Your Horizon.”

Speakers at this conference addressed the challenges of finding your way forward as a small business in the Midwest. According to the source, attendees and speakers came from different backgrounds, speaking to their own experiences with Ohio-based development.

Some of the pieces of advice included staffing companies with complimenting skill sets, researching markets and focusing on the strengths of the Ohio business scene. A big benefit can come from finding local resources that other firms miss out on or assume aren’t available.

There’s also the repercussions of the Great Recession of 2008 to contend with, which affected different areas of the country in varying ways. In January 2017, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Vice President and Senior Regional Officer Guhan Venkatu spoke at a different OVA event, one co-sponsored with the Harvard Business School Club of Northeastern Ohio. In his prepared remarks, Venkatu referenced the real impact of this recent job loss.

“We have fairly strong employment growth for this point in a business cycle,” he said. “One way to think about the robustness of the current recovery is the string of monthly job gains over the course of the current cycle. It’s actually the longest on record. We’ve seen 75 months of continuous job growth.” He also went on to call job losses from that period “very, very severe.”

For state-specific ventures, the right course of action is an Ohio SBA loan. Growth Capital spotlights programs with a distinct local advantage, such as the Community Advantage Loan Program. Contact us to find out more.