Tagged: entrepreneur

A Grand Rapids entrepreneur is launching a $15 million venture capital fund to turn people’s ideas into successful businesses.

The DeVos family is backing the fund, called Start Garden. Richard DeVos started Amway, now the world’s largest direct selling company.

Rick DeVos is his grandson and an entrepreneur himself (Spout.com, ArtPrize, 5x5 night). He says his family is backing Start Garden “because we’ve seen firsthand the ramifications of an entrepreneur being able to get an idea into the world.”

In many ways, the headquarters for Eastern Floral in Grand Rapids, Mich. is like a factory. It’s in an old building with brick walls. The floor is smooth, cold concrete. A noisy printer rattles off new orders.

But of course, it smells amazing in here. Designers stand at long wooden tables, primping and pruning flowers. Red tulips. White daisies. Yellow roses. And just about any other flower you can imagine.

Bing Goei, the owner, says this work is more like artistry.

“I think you have to be born with that.” he says. “I was not. I admit it.”

Goei says this with a laugh.

But he was born with something else that turned out to be its own asset. He was born with a foreign birth certificate. His parents were Chinese. He was born in Indonesia, then moved to the Netherlands. From there, they moved to Grand Rapids, like a lot of Dutch people before them. Except, they have a Chinese name.

And like many of those immigrants before him, Goei worked hard. He started in the flower business in high school. Now, Eastern Floral has seven locations, about 60 year-round employees – twice that around Valentine’s Day – and the company has over $5 million in annual revenue.

Goei says being an immigrant, and being an entrepreneur, there’s a connection there.

“Almost every immigrant that comes to this country has come because they see America as that land of opportunity,” he says. “So immediately, their drive is to fulfill that dream.”

The data on this backs Goei up.

The Kauffman Foundation reports that immigrants are twice as likely as people born in America to start a business.

Richard Herman is an immigration attorney in Cleveland. Herman and Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Robert Smith wrote a book called Immigration, Inc.

More and more people have been attending an annual event that helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas into realities.

It’s called The Annual Collaboration for Entrepreneurship and it happens Tuesday, January 31. It’s hosted by the economic development organization Ann Arbor Spark.

Skip Simms is Ann Arbor Spark’s senior vice president. He says the event helps people with small operations engage in some good old fashioned networking, which can help them grow their businesses. Simms says in a few years’ time, these small start-ups could grow into the next DOW, Kellogg, or GM, and hire thousands of employees in Michigan.

About 1,000 people went last year and the space outgrew its original location at Washtenaw Community College. It now takes place at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor. Tickets are $20 at the door.

Governor Rick Snyder says he wants to attract more foreign entrepreneurs to the state. Snyder told a gathering of “The World Affairs Council of Western Michigan” he’d would like to leverage a federal immigration program to attract new jobs and investments.

The EB-5 immigration program

Under the program (Congress passed in 1990), immigrants who’ve invested at least $500,000 in a business that creates at least 10 full-time jobs can apply for green cards. That allows them to live and work in the United States permanently.