Northwest Missouri Enterprise Facilitation (NWMEF) celebrated its 20th anniversary Wednesday with Dr. Ernesto Sirolli, the founder of the enterprise facilitation movement, speaking to the gathering.
NWMEF provides consultation services to businesses free of charge. All services are confidential. The facilitator is Adam Summers, a Worth County grad. If he doesn’t know an answer to someone’s problem, the backbone of the group is a group of 60 current and retired entrepreneurs who can provide answers and expertise. They are non-profit and are funded by local governments municipalities, and private donations. All donations are tax deductible. Donations can be mailed to Northwest Missouri Enterprise Facilitation, PO Box 13, Stanberry, MO 64489. They serve six counties including Worth, Nodaway, Gentry, Andrew, Atchison, and Holt Counties.
Throughout their existence, they have served 1,390 clients including 244 businesses that either started or expanded. For 2025, they served 109 clients, including 22 that were new or expanded. Clients served have created $10,604,712 in capital and $31,293,508 in new sales. For 2025, those figures were $395,000 in new capital and $750,000 in new sales.
Among clients they serve, 34% provide services, 25% are retail, 12% are restaurants, 6% are construction, 5% are ag, and 5% are healthcare.
Their biggest fundraiser of the year is the Great Northwest Winefest which is held in Mound City every year. This year, the Winefest will be October 3rd.
Twenty years ago, Sister Kristine Martin and others formed Sparks of Hope, an entity seeking to revitalize rural America. They encountered Ernesto Sirolli, who was doing a speaking tour in Nebraska, and they decided to form a new organization to help rural businesses and use his model. He agreed to help, and after a series of meetings, the organization was born.
Ernesto Sirolli was born in Italy and early on had a passion for international aid. But he learned the hard way that the current model of providing aid to people wasn’t working, because it didn’t involve listening to the locals. His first project in Africa involved starting a food cooperative which would grow tomatoes in Zambia. All went well until the night before they were to harvest their tomatoes, when a large herd of 200 hungry hippos went through and ate all their tomatoes and ruined the crop. That led to locals asking him why he didn’t talk to them before starting the project. Furthermore, people in that country could buy 50 pounds of corn starch for $1 at the time.
Not learning his lesson, Dr. Sirolli’s next project was a project with the Peace Corps. They encountered a village that had no way of getting to a neighboring village to trade their goods because a gigantic river was separating them. Dr. Sirolli and his team had the idea of building a bridge, and they thought they had the perfect location 35 miles north of the village and they would clear roads to link the two communities. All went well until the rainy season arrived and the river completely changed banks and its course, turning it into a bridge to nowhere.
Discouraged and burned out, a colleague gave Dr. Sirolli a book entitled, “Small is Beautiful.” It started with the premise that if people don’t want to be helped, they should be left alone. “We go in because we think we’re better than them,” he said. He did a whole PhD thesis on the notion that if you shut up and listen to people, you would get much better results than the conventional wisdom, which held that superior knowledge entitled one to go into someone else’s community and impose a solution.
Most of the professors Dr. Sirolli encountered were incredulous at his direction, asking him, “You want to listen to them??” But in reality, Dr. Sirolli found that there is no geographical limitations to intelligence. Another barrier he found to people who need help was that some people were afraid to ask for help because they didn’t want to be laughed at. This drove the free and confidential model that Dr. Sirolli has championed for the last 40 years.
Dr. Sirolli finally found a professor who, while he didn’t agree with his model, agreed to mentor him. One of Dr. Sirolli’s first clients was in Australia; he had run a smoked fish outfit from his garage, but the city had shut him down and he was broke and had been unemployed for the last 12 months. Dr. Sirolli agreed to help him, and they came up with an idea to sell his fish to restaurants. They pitched their fish to the five most luxurious restaurants in the city, and all five ordered some fish. They were able to find a building he could operate out of, and he was able to hire 12 employees to help him. He even supplied fish for a royal banquet for the late Queen Elizabeth.
From there, they started the first Enterprise Facilitation, which served 60 clients and 27 new businesses in the first 24 months. The goal of each Enterprise Facilitation is to help people understand their strengths and weaknesses and help them find new opportunities.
There are three aspects to any business, Dr. Sirolli said. One is the vision, one is the marketing, and one is the finances. One can have a vision, but if other people don’t know about what you have to offer, you can’t succeed. Or if they don’t know how to handle finances, and it costs more to make your product than it does to sell it, you will go broke. It is very difficult for one person to do all three aspects really well; Dr. Sirolli said that the reason most businesses go under was because of a breakdown in one of those three aspects.
And then, there is character. Dr. Sirolli said that one can go to college and develop a vision, be good at marketing, and be good at finances, but without character, which is difficult to change, it won’t matter.
From the first startup in Australia, there are now 400 different enterprise facilitations similar to NWMEF around the world. Several members from the Northeast Kansas Enterprise Facilitation were present at the banquet in Maryville Wednesday. They are found in 14 states and numerous countries around the world, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Congo, Tanzania, Australia, and New Zealand, among others. They have helped start 65,000 businesses around the world, yet they have not scratched the surface.
Dr. Sirolli said that none of this would have been possible without his wife, Martha, who was present in Maryville Wednesday. She was one of the first people he ran his idea of letting the people drive aid instead of the other way around, and her first reaction was, “It makes sense.”
His advice to people who were interested in starting a business was to make sure it was really their passion and that they were willing to suffer for it. He encouraged people to try to remember what they enjoyed doing as kids before they were corrupted by popular culture. “Once you’re absolutely sure, make a commitment and be prepared to walk all the way through your journey,” Dr. Sirolli said. Along the way, people will find dragons to slay and trails to follow, but that magical helpers will always appear. “Make sure it’s really your journey, or it will destroy you,” he said. He said that an MBA will teach people a lot about finance, but that it is not a replacement for the kind of passion that is needed for one to be an entrepreneur.
No comments:
Post a Comment