Fort Worth leaders are looking to a new committee to strengthen support for local entrepreneurs and innovators as part of the city’s shifting economic development efforts.
At its Jan. 25 meeting, the Fort Worth City Council created the 19-member Entrepreneurship and Innovation Committee, chaired by District 7 Councilman Leonard Firestone, with District 3 Councilman Michael Crain as vice chairman.
Both men have experience as entrepreneurs. Firestone was one of the principals behind the successful Firestone & Robertson Distillery that was sold to Pernod Ricard, the No. 2 worldwide producer of wines and spirits, in 2019. Crain is a partner in Northern Crain, a locally owned, full-service real estate brokerage.
Crain said he and Mayor Mattie Parker, who were both elected in 2021, discussed how to better support entrepreneurs on the campaign trail.
“We have the Business Assistance Center and we’ve got Tech Fort Worth,” he said. “We’ve got all these pieces, but there really hasn’t been a coordinated effort from the city level to make sure we’re doing everything that we can. And, as part of that idea, the CDFI Friendly initiative came about and, as part of that, Techstars, that we’ve invested in, came about. And then, what she and I discussed, too, is that we need to look across the board at what we’re doing from the government perspective.”
Cameron Cushman, assistant vice president of Innovation Ecosystems at HSC Fort Worth, is also a member of the committee. He said the committee will support an often overlooked component of economic development.
“To put it very simply, there’s three ways to think about economic development,” he said. “There’s the recruitment of bringing companies to town. There’s the retention of keeping what you’ve got and helping them grow. And then there’s the start your own, the entrepreneurship piece.”
That entrepreneurship piece may be small, but it remains key, he said.
“They’re usually a pretty small part in number of any ecosystem,” Cushman said. “But they can have pretty transformative effects, because they can hire a lot of people. They can grow quickly. They can be that next big thing that changes your whole local economy. They’re harder, they require a lot more capital, they grow faster. In some sense, they’re more risky, but they can also have a bigger bang for your buck, so to speak, when it comes to this.”
Sparkyard, a local entrepreneur resource platform, has done studies two years in a row looking at the impact of new companies on the Fort Worth economy.
Cushman said new companies – defined as zero to 1-year-old – were responsible for creating 30,000 jobs in Tarrant County in 2019.
“The data’s a little bit old, so it’s pre-pandemic,” Cushman said. But he suspects that if you asked most people on the street, they wouldn’t guess near that many jobs created by new companies less than a year old.
“They’d never get to 30,000. And so, we at least have a number now. We at least have some data,” he said.
Crain agreed with Cushman’s assessment.
“I think that when you look around how we’ve at least invested in our entrepreneurs and small businesses before, we haven’t really invested in an ecosystem here that will create the best so these organizations can thrive,” he said. “And we spent a lot of time and effort in trying to convince other companies, other Fortune 500s to move here and bring their headquarters here. But we haven’t spent an equal amount of time, realizing we already have some great entrepreneurs and innovators here in Fort Worth.”
While these entrepreneur-led companies may be small, they could bring big rewards, Crain said.
“How do we help them thrive? They’re the next Radio Shack, the next Alcon, you name the businesses that we’ve had — Pier 1 — those next companies that we’re really incubating and growing,” he said.
The city also wants to make sure that when a company does start growing, that it stays here because it has support it needs to succeed, Crain said.
“Companies get to a point and realize, they look around and no one’s here supporting them,” he said. “So, they run off to somewhere else where they can get that capital.”
Mayor Parker has already discussed her efforts to be proactive when it comes to economic development.
Speaking to the 2022 Real Estate Forecast, presented by the Real Estate Council of Greater Fort Worth, Parker said there will be changes to economic development efforts.
“We’re going to do it a little differently,” she said. “I think what you’ll see in the next few years – it’s a long game, it’s not a short-term play.”
The first meeting of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Committee is at 3 p.m. Feb. 8.
Disclosure: Cameron Cushman is a member of the Report’s Reader Advisory Council. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org.
This article was originally published by Fort Worth Report.