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Helping entrepreneurs succeed
from Bonners Ferry to Cascade
and beyond
by Mary Ann Reese
When Robin Campbell moved from Portland, Ore., to Sandpoint a few years ago, she’d never owned a business. Today the former advertising copywriter owns two—Great Stuff and Zoodoozles, a gifts store selling distinctive housewares, jewelry, even chocolate, in Sandpoint’s tourist corridor, and a toy store two miles north in Ponderay. She employees three people.
In Cascade, Ralph and Sheri Hartshorn’s Thunder Mountain Auto has maintenance, transmission, and engine rebuild business stacked up a week or two so often now they’re considering expanding.
They are among the more than 130 Idaho residents who’ve sharpened their business skills in recent years during 10- to 15-week entrepreneurship courses taught by UI Extension educators. Meeting up to three hours a week, students work on business plans and learn to navigate state and tax laws.
Each week extension educators bring in a different local expert so the group can both learn and network—an attorney to discuss legal issues, a banker, accountant, marketing people, experts in employment law, commerce and labor experts.
“People learn a lot from networking, not only with from guest experts but from each other,” said Sarah Howe, Boundary County UI Extension educator. She probably holds the UI entrepreneurship class record, teaching some 98 students during seven semesters in Bonners Ferry, Sandpoint, and Plummer.
In a state where 96.9 percent of businesses are small (under 500 employees), supporting potential entrepreneurs is important. UI Extension selected as the best course the Nxlevel Entrepreneurship course. In Idaho, the course is licensed through the Small Business Development Center.
“Not all of our students go through with their business plan,” said Howe. “But that can be considered a success too, if you keep someone from losing their hard-earned nest egg, once they consider the realities of starting a business.”
“Our students always rate Sarah as outstanding,” said Bill Jhung, director of the Small Business Development Center in Post Falls. This spring Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce gave her a special award “for going way beyond the call of duty.” Howe drove 40 miles each way from her Bonners Ferry home to Sandpoint during winter nights to teach Nxlevel Entarepreneurship (www.nxlevel.org/)
Campbell says the course gave her “the confidence, the roadmap, the sense that this (starting two businesses) was all do-able. It helped me know what I needed to know.”
Shari Hartshorn sees the course she took from Steve Hines, when he was UI Extension’s Valley County educator, as preparing her and Ralph even for their upcoming expansion. “I used everything I learned for my business, even small things like figuring the economics of shipping vs. freight. We found it was cheaper to go by UPS from our wholesale part outlets,” says Hartshorn. Hines’s class “prepared me for three, four, ten years down the line.”
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