By Dennis Quick, Senior Staff Writer
Charleston Regional Business Journal 12/1/2003

When Patrick Vinci set out to open a local dry cleaners just over a year ago, he turned to the University of South Carolina’s Small Business Development Center’s Charleston office, then headed by John Clarkin, who is now director of the College of Charleston’s Tate Center for Entrepreneurship.

“John helped by guiding me in the right direction,” Vinci explains. Thanks in part to Clarkin’s assistance, Vinci tackled startup obstacles such as bank loans, upfront costs, impact fees, environmental regulations and other “hoops” through which Vinci claims he had to jump.

In November 2002 Vinci opened Coastal Carolina Cleaners in Mount Pleasant with six employees. Today he has two more Coastal Carolina stores—one in downtown Charleston, the other on Daniel Island—with 20 employees and about 4,000 customers.

“Anybody with a good work ethic and a good business philosophy can walk in and do a great job in their business,” Vinci says of Charleston’s entrepreneurial environment.

Entrepreneur magazine shares Vinci’s sentiments. Recently, the magazine ranked the Charleston-North Charleston area second among the South’s and ninth among the nation’s top midsized cities for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur and international business information giant Dunn & Bradstreet based the ranking on four criteria: number of five-year-old businesses and younger, the number of businesses with fewer than 20 employees that had significant employee growth from January 2002 to January 2003, job growth over a three-year period through January 2003 and bankruptcy rates.

Local experts point out that in addition to favorable ranking statistics, the Charleston area has formidable entrepreneurial resources.

One such resource is the Service Corps of Retired Executives, a nationwide organization noted for its aid to small businesses. With some 40 members, the Charleston chapter is SCORE’s largest in South Carolina.

Last month, 18 aspiring entrepreneurs attended a SCORE-sponsored seminar at the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce. There, the Tate Center’s Clarkin discussed the Small Business Development Center, angel and venture capitalists, the South Carolina World Trade Center, SCORE itself, the Charleston Citywide Local Development Corp., credit counseling services and other local organizations offering technical and financial assistance to entrepreneurs.

A week prior to the SCORE seminar, the West Ashley-based Center for Women completed its 2003 Wachovia-sponsored Entrepreneurial Woman Series with a business networking workshop presented by Work-Volf Consultants, a West Ashley enterprise founded by Floy Work and Chris Volf. Nearly 40 entrepreneurs attended. Throughout the year, the Entrepreneurial Woman Series offered tips on marketing, financing, business plans and other such subjects.

“Our attendance at the Entrepreneurial Woman sessions has grown steadily over the course of 17 sessions, and we have had more than 150 entrepreneurs participate,” claims the Center for Women’s Jennet Alterman.

Jody Gouge, president of VisionPath, a Mount Pleasant-based consulting and coaching firm Gouge formed two years ago to help businesses achieve their growth potential, points out that the closing of the Navy base eight years ago forced a change in Charleston’s business climate—a change that opened the doors to entrepreneurship.

“We no longer had the security of the federal government providing stability for the marketplace,” he says. “We realized we had to re-evaluate our business environment.”

Gouge notes that among the results of that re-evaluation are the emergence of the Metro Chamber’s ThinkTEC, a group dedicated to bringing knowledge-based industry (and its high-salary jobs) to the Lowcountry and of ThinkTEC’s FastTrac entrepreneurial training program, which recently graduated 11 participants. He also credits education leaders such as Mary Thornley, president of Trident Technical College, and Earl Walker, dean of The Citadel’s School of Business Administration, with providing programs that serve not only their students but the local economy.

Gouge, whose own entrepreneurship serves an array of tri-county area clients by counseling them on marketing, communication and branding strategies in addition to analyzing their business performance, believes there has never been a better time for entrepreneurs in Charleston.

“Ten years ago I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’m doing now,” he says. “The market has opened up.”

Entrepreneurial aid

Some of the Lowcountry organizations devoted to helping entrepreneurs and small businesses:

Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments, 529-0400

Center for Women, 763-7333

Charleston Angel Partners, 768-4870

Charleston Citywide Local Development Corp., 965-4089

Charleston Digital Corridor, 724-3773

Division of Continuing Education and Economic Development, Trident Technical College, 574-6022

DHE Partners LLC, 768-8423

FastTrac (Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce), 805-3073

SCORE, 727-4778

S.C. World Trade Center, 577-4080

Small Business Development Center, 740-6160

Tate Center for Entrepreneurship, College of Charleston, 953-4999

VisionPath, 367-7982