The Club E Phoenix

This is a repost of a blog that was originally posted on September 25, 2008. I have made some comments (italic) where appropriate.

I chose this story, because much of it is familiar to recent happenings at Club E. Life happens though, and we continue to move forward.

Peter

"Ready, Fire, Aim....Again!"

Seeing a dream that started only a couple of months ago to come to fruition is an amazing experience. Tonight that's exactly what happened. In a small office space in a larger facility of 10,000' which was temporary headquarters for Club E (www.clubentrepreneur.net) the entrepreneurs organization that I started with a handful of my students from a class I taught a couple of years ago (now over 4 years ago), I rehashed an idea that I had put together with a friend some four (six) years earlier.

That idea was the "Entrepreneur Factory," and it was originally conceived by a former buddy and me to take "functionally obsolescent" hotels in inner cities and revamp them into incubators for start-ups, using the hotel rooms as the start-ups' offices and the common area for entrepreneurial support. We never did get around to actually actuating that idea but I dusted off the plan and rewrote it with a different twist this time, while I was sitting in my temporary office a couple of months or so.

I had lunch with our landlord and proudly demonstrated how we could take members of Club E's organization, which now topped at over 3000 local business owners in multiple Valley (and beyond) chapters and fill the now empty commercial building that the landlord was sitting on. There's a lot of that around these days with vacancy rates in commercial buildings topping 30%-40% in many metropolitan cities and Phoenix was no exception (much worse now, my friend). When I shared that he'd have to spend some money to upgrade his older building with amenities and features that would make the building suitable for an eFactory (now called Club E Office, or CEO), he foolishly balked.

I took my crew from Club E and moved out shortly after because what was the use of trying to work with a landlord that just didn't "get it?" His building sits empty today and probably will for the foreseeable future until he gets tired paying the mortgage on a long empty space and the bank takes it back. (he lost it to foreclosure long ago)

One of Club E's fellow members, hearing my plan to create the eFactory called me up excitedly to share that a friend of his had a state-of-the-art building that had been created with exactly what my vision for the eFactory had been in my plan...only better. I visited the site and was knocked over by the sheer magnitude of 15,000' of the nicest building I have ever seen. It turns out that the visionary that owns the building spend some $5MM in creating this incredible facility and now was looking for someone to do something with it. I gladly volunteered!

We put a deal together and Club E had a brand new headquarters plus a prototype for its eFactory rollout. Along the way, word got out in the local press that Club E was looking for a site for an eFactory and I was approached by three dozen developers, one of whom, Green Street Properties, knocked out a sweeping deal to build our custom eFactories in five of their properties...over the next 9-12 months! (Unfortunately, this plan fell through as I have learned often happens when private property owners do not own their property free and clear. We are happy to be in a building now that cannot be foreclosed on!)

Anyway, the awesome inner circle of Club E (Corey, Heather, Tony, Merlin, Toby, Kevin and Meredith - all have moved on to bigger and greater things now. Thank you all for your hard work and effort with Club E.) all worked terribly hard, creating manuals, allocating spaces and figuring out the pricing and amenities for renting out the many spaces to our fellow Club E members and we threw our Open House tonight. It was a smashing success and we already have many checks in hand from our members ready to move in!

Seeing the hundred plus people tonight at our event was heartwarming and exciting. Only a fellow entrepreneur can appreciate that feeling when an idea which was only have scribbles on a napkin or ideas outlined on a white board...actually manifest into an honest-to-goodness business that took in real money... a mere two months or so from conception. Only in America, my friends.

Anyway, we are proving out the new eFactory model and our prototype combination Club E headquarters will start getting out the bugs and systematizing everything we need for an orderly rollout of our first 5 eFactories with our new partner Green Street Properties over the next year. Wish us luck...it should be a heck of a ride! (Boy, I could say that again. Thanks to all of you who have stuck with us over the past several years. I am confident that we have now worked out the bugs in our system and are in the place where we should be.)

Learn more of what we are doing with the eFactory by visting www.clubefactory.com (actually learn more about what we are doing with CEO and Club E by visiting www.ClubEntrepreneur.net) and let us know if you want to be one of our fellow pioneers.

Best regards,

Peter J. Burns, III
Founder