For more on this great event, you can check out an article written by Patti Vannoy over at Silicon Prairie News:

Capital Insights: From car wash client to company acquisition, Archrival founders reflect on growth

Sean delivered his message about the customer-controlled marketplace to students at the University of Nebraska-Lincolns Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management on March 29th.

GROW Nebraska is a non-profit organization whose mission is to help business start ups through promotion, market access and education.

Nebraskans have long had a history of being able to produce items but not being able to sell them. GROW Nebraska helps with product evaluation, product packaging, marketing programs and training opportunities.

The meeting will be held Wednesday, October 13 at 5:00 PM at the GROW Nebraska store in the Conestoga Mall in Grand Island. The open house will be held Thursday, October 14 from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the GROW Nebraska Holiday Store in the Westfield Gateway Mall in Lincoln. For information or to make reservations, call 888-476-9632 or email info@grownebraska.org.

There is no cost to attend either meeting, and anyone interested in developing a new product or who wants to learn more about GROW Nebraska is encouraged to attend.

GROW Nebraska’s mission is to maximize the state’s entrepreneurial and small business spirit, create an economically viable and sustainable environment for entrepreneurs, and generate social awareness through promotion, marketing and education.

“[Grow Nebraska] focuses solely on marketing,” said Jannell Anderson Ehrke, CEO for Grow Nebraska. “We provide entrepreneurs with marketing tools, promotion and awareness. There are wonderful organizations that help do things but we focus on marketing.”

Grow Nebraska is a statewide organization established in 1998. It provides several options for its members, including a store for Nebraska-only merchandise in malls in Kearney and Grand Island as well as their website. Those who become members of Grow Nebraska are given the proper marketing tools but are also given a webpage located on the Grow Nebraska website with information about each member.

“Since we began, we’ve been dealing with product entrepreneurs – anyone is eligible as long as they’re a resident of Nebraska or their primary business is headquartered in Nebraska,” Ehrke said.

Typical marketing tools such as advertisements and demographics are key to a business’ success. However, Ehrke believes online marketing is another powerful tool that can enhance a business and promote sales. Using popular social media sites can enhance and expand coverage for any business or company. Grow Nebraska provided training on these social media methods in an effort to expand the marketing for businesses online.

Grow Nebraska store at the State Fair - photo courtesy Facebook

“Last year we provided social media training on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with partnering with UNO [University of Nebraska at Omaha] extension,” Ehrke said.  “We’re hoping that we’ll do a similar platform that will be more on websites and online marketing. They need to wrap around this whole technology thing. It’s a real important part.”

Nebraska may have weathered much of the recession but Ehrke said entrepreneurs are still susceptible to failures if the owners neglect proper planning.

“I think we’re very fortunate because Nebraska’s a friendly state for startups,” she said. “It’s always good to have a plan. There are a lot of resources out there that are free or low fee to help do a business plan.”

Planning a business can mean anything from managing finances to finding the proper location to demographics but Ehrke said marketing is the key to success. The difference between success and failure can lie in how effective a company’s marketing is.

“The place I see most businesses fail is the marketing part,” Ehrke said. “It’s getting to making that connection to sell it to buyers. That’s where we try to fill that void and try to make those connections for them. At the end of the day, it’s all about if they’re making the sale and if they’re not making the sale.”

Information about Grow Nebraska, including tools on marketing, can be found on their website.

Betty Sayers and Nancy Herhahn, Nebraska Rural Living founders

When sisters Betty Sayers and Nancy Herhahn graduated from Holdredge High School, educators and parents told them they could be more successful if they left Nebraska. And so they did.

Herhahn worked as a real estate company executive, living in Chicago and then San Diego. Sayers taught at a community college in Belcourt, N.D., then wrote and facilitated grant proposals and co-authored a book in Detroit Lakes, Minn.

While living outside Nebraska, the two returned for occasional visits with relatives. Sayers said they saw a discrepancy between outsiders’ perceptions of rural Nebraska and what the sisters observed on those return visits. Sayers said media stories about rural Nebraska at the time described towns as decimated and desperately poor with no services. In contrast, she said, the sisters saw the opposite during their visits: prospering small towns, good schools, safe communities with amenities and strong health care systems.

“We just saw green and prosperity,” Sayers said.

When the two returned to Nebraska – Sayers in 2003 and Herhahn in 2004 – they decided to create a Web site, Nebraska Rural Living, to promote the version of rural Nebraska they see. With Sayers now in Holdredge and Herhahn in Lexington, they chose to focus on their region, working under the umbrella of the South Platte United Chambers of Commerce.

Sayers said a regional focus is important in rural areas. While one small town may not provide every want and need, a group of small towns in a region can provide amenities competitive with city living, she said.

Around the time the sisters returned to Nebraska, they read a quote by Jim Clifton, CEO of the Gallup Corporation, that helped prompt the site’s entrepreneurial focus, Sayers said. An article in the Omaha World Herald reported Clifton saying that Nebraska needs to “recognize and appreciate great entrepreneurs and inventors the same way it recognizes and appreciates great quarterbacks.”

“And that inspired us,” Sayers said. “Because we know that the entrepreneurs, the small businesses, are the strength of Nebraska and particularly rural Nebraska.” However, entrepreneurs sometimes operate quietly in garages or other nondescript buildings, she said.

“Sometimes the communities don’t even know about them,” she said.

The site includes a “Rural Success Stories” column where they feature an entrepreneur from their region every month. The column now has more than 50 rural entrepreneur stories. Some featured companies have mostly regional or Nebraskan markets, like the greenhouse Oasis Gardens near Loomis. Others have markets that span the United States, like orthotics company Burns Podiatric Laboratory in McCook. And yet others have world-wide markets, like sprint-car engine builders D & F Service & Speed in Holbrook and ready-to-bake frozen pie business The Village Piemaker in Eustis.

The site’s “Rural Foodies” column gives eateries in the region a boost. Sayers said city dwellers worry they’ll miss fine dining and ethnic food if they move to a rural region.

But their reviewing team has already eaten in and reported on 17 food enterprises in their region that, according to the site, provide “good food, well-prepared,” including down-home food, fine dining, ethnic food and specialties like wine and sausage.

“And honestly, every month we think, ‘All right, this is the last one. We’re not going to find another one. This is the end,’ and then somebody will make a suggestion. If it’s within 60 miles, you’ll find us there,” Sayers said.

Currently the site features 13 Nebraska communities. Participating communities pay roughly $1 per citizen to be featured. Sayers said they negotiate this rate, since it might be too much for some communities. The site encourages tiny communities to pool their resources and join as a regional area if they can’t afford to join alone, she said.

When a community joins, Nebraska Rural Living creates a community profile that includes information important to people considering moving to the area, like school quality.

“Rural Nebraska, as well as all of Nebraska, has very good scores in that line and rural Nebraska is getting stronger and better because the class size is small,” Sayers said. “And I think that is just one of the prime advantages of rural schools … In rural Nebraska you can get a private school education with public dollars.”

Site writers also research and report on the quality of healthcare in the community or surrounding area, tourism opportunities, community governance and citizen participation, amenities and features including recreation.

Sayers and Herhahn volunteer their services to the Web site. The site employs a part-time editor and hires some Nebraskan writers and photographers.

The site also includes an “Articles and Essays” column where anyone can submit writing. The site publishes selected articles or essays in this column with the writers’ bylines, but doesn’t pay those writers.

Sayers said about 26,000 people visit each month and stay an average of 4.5 minutes.

“According to Constant Contact, our software provider, this puts us in the top 20 percent of the Web sites they support for people just paying attention and reading,” Sayers said.

More than 400,000 people have “visited” the communities online over the past couple years, she said.

When Sayers and Herhahn developed the site, they consulted with the Nebraska Department of Economic Development and the Center for Rural Affairs. Under the South Platte United Chambers of Commerce umbrella, they received two grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

With enough funding, Sayers said they’d like Nebraska Rural Living to cover other regions of Nebraska and eventually the entire state.

Sayers and Herhahn have another Web site, Chicken Dance Trail, which provides online self-guided bird-watching tours. Grants from the Nebraska Department of Economic Development’s Division of Travel and Tourism and the Nebraska Environmental Trust they applied for via the South Platte United Chambers of Commerce helped pay for that site, along with in-kind contributions from GROW Nebraska. For the Chicken Dance Trail project, Sayers and Herhahn also consult with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.

More than 525 people registered to attend the fourth Nebraskan event on February 23 and 24, 2010 at the Ramada Inn Convention Center in Kearney.

The event is making a difference, said Kathie Starkweather, CFRA’s director of rural opportunities and stewardship program. Rural residents have started small businesses and created jobs in their communities as a result of the event, she said.

“It’s encouraging,” she said.

With MarketPlace, CFRA aims to encourage local community support of entrepreneurs. The event is designed to help community leaders embrace local small businesses, which are important to local economies, she said.

“Entrepreneurs do better if they don’t exist in a vacuum,” she said.

Rosemary Johnson, owner of Ben Franklin Crafts in North Platte, Nebraska, said she benefited from networking at the event. With other retailers, she discussed how to develop fresh ideas for her business, which she’s had for 10 years.

She said at first she heard suggestions she’d already tried. Then someone sitting next to her suggested she write down strategies she’s tried in the last 10 years and revisit them.

“I thought that was such an awesome idea,” Johnson said.

Organizers try to take a holistic approach when planning the sessions Starkweather said. MarketPlace offers different tracks for different interests.

Since the number of Hispanic-owned businesses in Nebraska has grown rapidly, the event offers sessions in Spanish on business ownership.

The last two years, MarketPlace has included a youth track. CFRA wants youth to know they can return to rural communities after school and start successful businesses, Starkweather said.

Save the Date: Nebraska MarketPlace 2011

MarketPlace also offers an agricultural track for farmers and ranchers, important entrepreneurs in the rural economy, she said. Other tracks included business development, technology, financial, marketing and women business owners.

“I just think Nebraskans are so resourceful,” said Beth Cole, owner of the WebServant in Merna, Nebraska. The WebServant provides Web site design and marketing for coaches, authors, speakers and consultants across the country.

Cole said the marketing workshops she attended were “packed” and speakers at the conference gave practical advice.

Carol Schooley of Grand Island, who started a golf t-shirt business called RUUD GOLF with a business partner, said she appreciated the focus on business plans.

“It set us off in a direction we needed,” she said. “We needed to organize it and get it off the ground and MarketPlace did the job,” she said in an email.

MarketPlace also provided helpful information about selling over the Internet, she said.

Vendor booths at MarketPlace make it easy for business owners and business suppliers to connect. Johnson of Ben Franklin Crafts said she found a booth on “secret shopping,” a management tool that provides feedback on customers’ retail experience. Johnson said meeting the vendor spurred her to act on this idea she had considered but not yet pursued.

Kori Miller, owner of The Tea Trove in Kearney, said her business provided tea and tisanes, or herbal infusions, to conference participants at one of the breaks.

“This exposure and direct connection with potential customers is invaluable,” she said in an email. In addition, she met representatives of other businesses who could help with finding qualified employees and Web site development.

“There was even a lawyer available offering free advice,” she said.

Next year’s MarketPlace will be February 22 and 23, 2011, in Kearney.

The marketing analytics firm – active since Jan. 1, 2008 – is in the midst of an ambitious 16-month project, wherein it hopes to release a new service each month for the next year and a half.

“The main purpose of these services is lead generation, generating qualified leads for sales,” Stanley said. “Not just throwing marketing material out there, but actually listening to people’s needs so you can get a 90% percent success probability: If you call them, they will buy. You’re not looking to sell 100 leads or 1000 leads, you’re looking at a list of three leads a month that are really, really good leads.”

In February, Contemporary Analysis made its search engine marketing expertise available to patrons by, as Stanley put it, determining ”the profitability of using one keyword as opposed to another, or saying, ‘This keyword is worth 10 dollars a click; this keyword is 50 bucks a click.’” This month, the company is gearing up to release an employee assessment tool.

“We’re selling the outcome of the product — you don’t have to buy the actual products, but you can buy the results,” Stanley said. “Think of it as a subscription to the benefits.”

Given the cut-and-dry nature of math in which there’s often only one right answer, Stanley exudes a steadfast certainty in his company’s services.

“People always ask, ‘How do you know you’re right?’” Stanley said. “Well, I’m not guessing. I’m finding what numbers most accurately represent the data you have, and then applying the necessary algorithms to show if this happens, then it impacts that in a specific way. As in, if this happens in the economy, then I know it impacts my sales like this.”

In a process he described akin to “panning for gold,” Stanley gathers pertinent information to be scrutinized from a wide range of places: accounting ledgers, assorted surveys, even social media networks. That last source, social media, has proven especially fruitful as its presence continues to expand throughout consumers’ lives.

“We rarely have to send out surveys anymore because people will typically — over a year or so — tell us everything we need to know,” Stanley said. “I don’t have to ask them their favorite music; I don’t have to ask them how often they party; I don’t have to ask them how often they talk to the opposite gender; I don’t have to ask them what products they love and what products they hate. They talk about it already. It’s wonderful.”

By overlaying that data with geographical spreads, Contemporary Analysis can map out areas where certain products or services will encounter the highest success rates. Of course, despite the wealth of information people post about themselves online, CA keeps the majority of that data private.

“We don’t violate privacy. If you want to remain private, it’s not like we hack your account,” Stanley said. “All we tell clients is, ‘in this location or this three block radius, these are your best chances.’ Basically we’re telling clients where specifically to send their product, but not anything about them.”

Off to a strong start, Contemporary Analysis appears to be in good shape to meet its bold 16-month service reveal schedule. But like any entrepreneur, Stanley accepts the venture as a potent mixture of risk and reward.

“Entrepreneurship is the exploration of the darkness,” Stanley said. “That path into the unknown.”

Grow Nebraska from Nebraska Entrepreneur on Vimeo.

Janell Anderson-Ehrke talks about GROW Nebraska and how they help entrepreneurs bring their products to market and the impact they have on economic development.