Calling All Angels
One of reasons the reasons I started blogging was to change the nature of the conversation about economic development in the Roanoke Valley. It’s easy to complain about lack of opportunities, but complaining doesn’t change anything. Opportunities start with ideas, and sadly, original ideas have been have been few and far between.
Two organizations have put forth ideas that have dominated the public debate over the past few weeks and months. Downtown Roanoke Inc. recently suggested converting Church Avenue to two-way traffic. Generally speaking, the demise of downtown areas across the country began at the same time that people started moving to the suburbs in large numbers. City streets were converted to one-way for the sole purpose of easing commuter traffic flow. With reduced traffic came reduced business for downtown merchants. The idea that restoring the normal traffic flow will encourage business growth has been proven in our city and many others across the country. Unfortunately, based on the vocal protestations of one business owner on one block of Church Avenue, our mayor has made a unilateral decision to kill the idea before any meaningful public debate takes place.
The idea that has gotten the most attention in recent months is the proposal put forth by Valley Forward to rebuild the Rockledge Inn on Mill Mountain. While I don’t agree that our problems will be solved by building a restaurant on top of a mountain, I applaud them for at least coming up with an original idea. I hope that they will continue to develop new ideas and present them for public debate, or better yet, put their own resources behind an idea and make it a reality.
What the Roanoke Valley needs to attract people are jobs, and the overwhelming majority of all net new job growth comes from small businesses. The two primary factors that attract new businesses are the availability of talent and capital. I believe that there is no shortage of talent in the Roanoke Valley, and we can solve the problem of access to capital by becoming a community of angels.
Angel investors are typically wealthy individuals putting their own money into new business ventures in exchange for equity. While there are plenty of wealthy individuals who could set the example by helping to fund worthy start-up ventures, we needn’t rely on the wealthy. There is no reason that a group of average citizens couldn’t pool their resources for the same purpose.
The main thing needed to make this possible is a central clearinghouse for information on entrepreneurs and investors. Entrepreneurs could submit their business plans for confidential review by interested investors, and investor groups could submit their profiles indicating the amount of capital available to invest, and the types of businesses they are interested in supporting. Think of it as an online dating service for entrepreneurs and businesses.
There are several local organizations that would be ideally suited to the creation and administration of an online clearinghouse. Valley Forward has already created a substantial organization on the basis of a single idea, and they seem ideally suited to the task.