On July 30, 2020, Stafford community business leaders are invited to join the county’s interactive town hall.
This meeting will discuss the New Entrepreneur Development Initiative launching in Stafford County and the Greater Fredericksburg Region. The Initiative is designed to encourage business expansion and formation, particularly around technology use.
“With our virtual town hall, we can ask entrepreneurs about their business needs and opportunities to grow their business. An important part of this is that it’s not just start-ups, although it is start-ups. It’s also for existing businesses to consider new ventures or ways to do business differently,” said John P Holden, Director of Economic Development and Tourism.
To achieve this, Stafford County Economic Development & Tourism secured a grant from GO Virginia and is partnering with RIoT, an internationally recognized non-profit organization focused on entrepreneurship.
RIoT helps start-ups and entrepreneurs launch their businesses through training seminars and networking with other successful businesses.
In addition, they run an accelerator program that facilitates a number of entrepreneurial processes to help businesses grow. This includes customer discovery, marketing, financing, legal aid, and more.
“Once we started talking to RIoT, we realized part of their need and part of our need to figure out how best to do this around the region was to follow our own advice, which is called customer discovery,” said Holden. “In an entrepreneurial development program, that’s the first thing you do. You try to figure out if your idea actually has a market and how you’re gonna serve that market.”
This idea was proposed by the Stafford Economic Development Department, which will host the event.
The interactive town hall will be held from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Zoom. It will feature local and outside business leaders in cyber and smart technology.
While the original plan was to host the event in-person, it will now be held virtually. It is the department’s hope that doing it virtually will reach a bigger audience.
First, there will be an introduction and then the participants can enter “breakout rooms” of their choice to discuss a number of topics.
These topics include
- Cybersecurity
- Doing business Post COVID-19
- Entrepreneurship
- Smart Cities
- Business Innovation
- Internet of Things (IoT) and Technology
Registration is free and all community and business leaders in Stafford County and the Greater Fredericksburg Region are invited.
“The way creativity, innovation, and long-term leadership happen is through the innovation of new ideas from places you wouldn’t expect it. So we encourage as much participation as possible in this program, certainly from our region and also beyond,” said Holden
Invitations to the conference were sent out on July 1. Attendees may register on gostaffordva.com.
