Now that the Bose corporation is a multi-billion dollar business and one of the world’s leading manufacturers of audio equipment, Sherwin Greenblatt‘s choice to work for the company seems like an obvious one.
But back when he made the decision in 1964, he was a recent college graduate and the company was a fledging idea with no actual product. Still, Greenblatt had a passion for music, a stack of research he had conducted with his former professor, Amar Bose, and a shared belief that he and the professor could make a world-class loud speaker.
Greenblatt’s risky choice to help launch the business paid off, and now he’s working to make similar choices a little less risky for the new generations of entrepreneurs.
Greenblatt will take the stage at CivicCon on Monday to discuss how to build a community that supports small businesses and startups, and why entrepreneurs can be the motors that drive a city’s economy.
Greenblatt’s career at Bose included being the project engineer for the Bose 901 speaker system, which was the company’s most successful home speaker product. He went on to hold many executive positions before serving as president of Bose for 15 years.
Today, he is the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Venture Mentoring Service. The service matches entrepreneurs with volunteer mentors. It uses a team mentoring approach with groups of three to four mentors sitting with an entrepreneur in sessions that provide professional advice and coaching.
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“The way it works is we take volunteers from the community — people who have been successful, who understand how to start and how to build businesses, and how to run up-and-coming businesses — and have them share their experiences with people who are just starting out, who don’t have that knowledge,” Greenblatt said. “And hopefully, by sharing those experiences, you can avoid the pitfalls that one would encounter in starting a business and therefore make the chances of success greater.”
The Spring, a part of the Studer Community Institute, engaged MIT to train local mentors and help establish a volunteer team of mentors to assist Pensacola area entrepreneurs and startups.
According to Venture Mentoring Service, since 2006 its Outreach Training Program has helped 114 organizations in 27 states and 24 countries establish their own mentoring programs.
“It’s a program that doesn’t just work at a university,” Greenblatt said. “It can work in any organization interested in developing economic benefits in their community.”
Greenblatt contends that investing in local small businesses and working to help them grow and reach their full potential is more likely to pay off in the long run than throwing all your money, efforts and incentives at large corporations.
“People who try it find that just bringing in a big company or something like that doesn’t really provide lasting benefits,” he said. “Big companies have other interests, they’re not interested, necessarily, in your own community. And while it can be helpful, it may not be lasting. But if you want to build a strong community, what you need to do is you need to build people within your community who can help make your community strong.”
Greenblatt will dive deeper into his experiences at Bose and lessons communities can apply to supporting their own entrepreneurs during a free, open-to-all presentation from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Monday at The REX Theatre in Pensacola, 18 N. Palafox St.
CivicCon is a partnership of the News Journal and the Studer Community Institute to empower communities to become better places to live, grow, work and invest through smart planning and civic conversations.
Registration is available by searching “CivicCon” at eventbrite.com. Those who register will have the opportunity to submit a question for Greenblatt.
The event will also be livestreamed at pnj.com and at facebook.com/pnjnews.
For more information, visit pnj.com/civiccon.
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