Entrepreneurs share challenges, experiences at Business & Breakfast event

CEDAR RAPIDS - When three key employees said they would be taking overlapping 12-week maternity leaves, Lynn Manternach, CEO of Mindfire Communications in Cedar Rapids, needed to figure out how to keep the company moving forward with the temporary loss of 20 percent of her staff.

'Our company was about seven years old and we had been growing rapidly,” Manternach said Thursday during a panel discussion on innovation and strategy at the Business 380 Business & Breakfast at the Cedar Rapids Public Library. 'We're marketing and branding, so we were not super ‘buttoned down.'

'It became super clear to me that we were going to have to get buttoned down and get buttoned down in a hurry. We didn't have a lot of processes, and we didn't have a lot of procedures documented.

'We didn't have job descriptions. We were flying by the seat of our pants.”

Manternach said taking care of clients was Mindfire's initial priority in turning a 'baby boom” into a business opportunity.

'We really weren't in a position where we could bring people in temporarily,” she said, 'What we do is very relationship focused, so by the time we got someone up to speed to take care of a client, our employee would be back.

'We figured out the procedures and the processes. We documented what people were doing for their clients.

'Cross training made us a better team across the board.”

Eric Engelmann, president and CEO of Geonetric in Cedar Rapids, shared how his company launched an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to develop additional products for hospitals beyond creating websites.

'We were prepared to spend a lot of money on this new big product idea, but we needed to have at least one customer,” Engelmann said. 'We found a customer who was willing to spend $1 million for us to build an application.

'We built that one thing for one customer and it didn't work. We ended up wasting a lot of money and about a year and a half to realize that a market of one is not enough.

'It ended up being a sort of ‘mission of life' crusade. How do you take the gamble of any new product, idea or venture and reduce the risk radically?

”That's where the idea of the Iowa Start­up Accelerator came from. In order for someone to build new product ideas and introduce them to the market with less risk, they need to know how to do it really well.”

Tim Guenther, founder and CEO of Clickstop in Urbana, said a company's corporate culture needs to reflect the values of the company and its employees.

'We base our employee reviews on a document we call the ‘Clickstop Code', which includes the values and traits we expect on a daily basis,” Guenther said. 'It's given us the platform to take our corporate culture from where it was to where it is today and where we want it to go. We're at a point where we're focusing on things like confidence and humility, which drive us on a daily basis.”