Sebastopol opens business incubator

It took two years, but the city of Sebastopol's business incubation project has opened an office to help entrepreneurs with classes, advice and office space.

The intent is to "help the local economy and help enterprises start, build and stay in Sebastopol," said Councilwoman Kathleen Shaffer. "We keep losing businesses to Santa Rosa and Rohnert Park and we want to figure out ways to keep them here and keep them in business. The best way is to nurture them and provide advice."

The Sebastopol Entrepreneurs Project is unusual because it was started by the city itself, not business groups, said Ken Meyerhoff, Sebastopol's former economic development director.

"Incubators in communities of 7,500 are not very common and furthermore, the incubators don't usually come about as the result of municipalities," Meyerhoff said.

The office takes up 900 square feet on the ground floor of the Sebastopol United Methodist Church and is funded with $20,000 from the city's redevelopment agency.

The project has been pivotal for Sebastopol Microgreens, which was founded in March by Kathy Patterson and Stacey Schuett.

The two grow produce in their backyards and then deliver it, still in the growing flats, to chefs primarily in San Francisco and to a few in Healdsburg.

"We are gardeners, but we did not know how to process orders," Patterson said. "When a chef calls us, we were writing it on a sticky note and putting it on a clipboard. We did not have the technology."

Meyerhoff designed a spreadsheet and taught them the computing skills, creating a system that allows everyone to see the order documents as they were being worked on, Patterson said.

"It helped to have someone independent of our business come in," Patterson said. "He validated what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong and gave us a strategy to deal with those things we were doing wrong."

The project is also working with Earth Camp, a summer school program on sustainability, and Boogalu Productions, a producer of Cuban music and dance videos.

It has held one free class and has scheduled another, aimed at inventors, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday. Its offices are located at 500 N. Main St. Information is available from Shaffer, 829-0669 or 861-3390.

Shaffer said the goal is to have the project help create two new businesses a year.

"It is starting to gear up, but we need to do more marketing to let people know we are here," she said.