This episode of Simple Civics: Greenville County is brought to you by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, providing free books to children zero to five throughout Greenville County. To sign up, visit greenvillefirststeps.org/freebooks.
Thinking about turning your passion into a paycheck? The journey of starting a business in Greenville County is exciting, but it's filled with common pitfalls that can stop a great idea in its tracks. From navigating government paperwork to securing funding, the initial steps you take are critical for long-term success. Many new entrepreneurs make one crucial mistake early on that can kill their chances of getting investment later.
In this episode, we sit down with Eric Weissmann, the Executive Director of NextGEN, an organization dedicated to guiding high-growth entrepreneurs in the Upstate. Eric shares his expert advice on how to launch your business on sure footing. We break down the exact steps you need to take to handle the legal and financial requirements, ensuring you're set up for success from day one. If you're a founder, or even a "wantrepreneur," this conversation is your roadmap to avoiding the most common and costly startup errors.
This episode provides a comprehensive guide for anyone looking to launch their venture. We begin by discussing the absolute first step every founder must take: separating personal and business finances to avoid future chaos. Eric highlights the essential small business resources Greenville SC has to offer, including the Small Business Development Centers (SBDC) and Community Works, which provide foundational support for those at the very beginning of their journey.
A major focus of our conversation is on how to form a business entity SC correctly. Eric explains the critical differences between an LLC, S-Corp, and C-Corp, and why choosing the wrong one can be a massive roadblock when you seek access to capital for startups. We learn that while it's possible to change your business structure later, it's like trying to build a basement after the house is already built - painful and expensive. Building the right legal and financial foundation from the start makes your company more investable and protects you from liability.
Beyond the paperwork, we explore the mindset and strategy needed to scale. This includes the importance of customer discovery - knowing where your 10th and 110th customers will come from - and having a solid plan for sales. Eric also demystifies access to capital for startups, explaining that it’s not always about big "Shark Tank" pitches. More often, it's about small business loans, lines of credit, and surprisingly, the strength of your personal credit score. Finally, we discuss how to plug into the vibrant Greenville startup ecosystem through platforms like StartupGVL, emphasizing that entrepreneurship doesn't have to be a lonely sport. Getting out from behind the keyboard and connecting with peers is one of the most powerful things you can do when starting a business in Greenville County.
Episode Resources:
Introduction
Katy Smith: Are you interested in starting a business in Greenville County, South Carolina, or do you know someone who is? Then this episode is for you. Small businesses are the lifeblood of our communities, and starting one can involve risk and unknowns. However, there are ways to minimize that uncertainty and be sure you're launching on sure footing. And that includes taking care of all the necessary paperwork and permitting with government.
Katy Smith: I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville and on this episode of Simple Civics Greenville County I will talk with Eric Weissmann, executive director of NextGEN. NextGEN guides and supports high-growth, high-potential entrepreneurs and their businesses in Greenville and across the upstate of South Carolina. Their primary goal is to help founders grow and support their businesses. Eric will let you know what you need to do as a new small business owner or as someone who's thinking about starting a business from a regulatory perspective, and to make sure you're launching for success for yourself and the employees and customers you'll soon bring on. Eric, thanks so much for being here today. You are the perfect person for the job because you have worked with hundreds of founders throughout the country and here in Greenville County as they've started businesses.
Eric Weissmann: Thanks for having me, Katy. I appreciate you making the invitation and for opening up as much of my brain as we can to answer some of these questions.
Katy Smith: Outstanding. All right. So if you're listening and you're getting ready to start a business or you know someone who is, we presume that you have ensured that your idea solves a real customer's problem, that you have a business plan, that you've done financial projections to know what investments you'll need and when you're going to make a profit. We're going to talk about those things because that is not always the case for founders of businesses. But let's start on that governmental side. Eric, what is required of a new business owner to be sure they're on the up and up?
Getting Started: Your First Steps to Starting a Business in Greenville County
Eric Weissmann: What you're saying is accurate as far as you've got an idea, you've got some sort of solution for the problem that you're trying to solve, and maybe you're already solving it. So now how do you formalize that? The mistakes that we see are a business owner has mingled their personal business with now this real entity's business. You need to start off by separating those and saying that this is the business side of me. So I either have a separate account from a financial standpoint, maybe a different name. So that gets into the filing of a business.
Eric Weissmann: Before we even get into licensing as a business in our instance, the city of Greenville, but it could be the city of Greer, the city of Anderson, etc. Before you let the city and the county and the state know, you need to let your accountant know. You need to find an accountant. You need to meet up with some other peers, some other business owners that are also embarking on this journey. And there's no shortage of those type of resources that we have here. Where I would suggest people start off with is the small business development centers or SBDC. Community Works is another organization that really specializes at that very earliest stage, the widest, the tip top of the funnel, as it were, of those wantrepreneurs.
Katy Smith: Wantrepreneurs? I've never heard that term. I love it.
Eric Weissmann: But you know what I'm saying? I think I'm a business owner. I think I want to do this, but I'm a wantrepreneur. As you progress down that path to being independent, to being on your own, or at least treating the business as independent, because right now everything's merged if we walk through this scenario. So the SBDC and the Small Business Administration, SBA, and Community Works are good resources to go to at that very earliest stage.
Eric Weissmann: Once you get to the business filing standpoint, folks at the city of Greenville in this instance, they're the professionals. They're looking for forms to be filled out. They're looking for not the best place to go. Yes, they can answer your questions, but they're not the best place to give you advice on what box you should check, what type of business should you be. They assume that you've already got some of that stuff figured out. They assume that by the time you get to them, you know the difference between an EIN and an SSN, an employer identification number, or a social security number. So how you've filed or how you've organized yourself is important. So let's assume that these are some of the questions that we're getting at this stage of an imaginary entrepreneur that wants to convert that into a business.
Katy Smith: Okay, so let me just walk through this in some silly specific examples. I'm someone who I've always done a great job of yard work or home repair, or I've always been helping my friends with their computer setup. And I think, hey, I could make a living doing this.
Eric Weissmann: Usually somebody tells you, you should make a business out of this.
Katy Smith: Yes.
Eric Weissmann: I've been thinking that.
Katy Smith: Your candles are amazing.
Eric Weissmann: I've been thinking that.
Katy Smith: My cupcakes are great, whatever it is. I've been thinking that. And so you're suggesting that one of the very first steps is to go and meet with someone at the Small Business Development Center at Community Works or one of the other providers who we can put in our show notes. And they can help me think through, yeah, you need to get a separate bank account. You need to be an LLC versus some other type of company that makes sense for what you want to do and how to file to get an employer identification number and all that paperwork. They can help me get my situation lined up, know if I should talk to an attorney, go to my bank, open a separate account that has my new Katy's Cupcakes on it.
Eric Weissmann: And I'm putting a plug in for my peer ESOs, entrepreneur support organizations, but there is no shortage of information online that you can say, what's the difference between or and configurators that you can put some of your. So there's a bevy of resources available. But here locally, we need to support those organizations that are built. The reason for being is to help early, early, early stage startups, what I call startups, what you call small business owners, somebody that's got this inkling of an idea to at least establish that strong foundation.
Choosing Your Business Structure: LLC, S-Corp, and Building a Foundation for Investment
Eric Weissmann: There's another way that you could decide, thank you for all that information. I'm going to stay over here and I'm not going to do that because the pain in the butt factor or the risks in their mind outweigh the benefits. I'm going to continue to merge my personal when somebody pays me to do their yard work or pays me to do that. I'm just going to continue on that path. So we just need to know that that is an alternative. I don't suggest that alternative. We don't suggest that alternative, but that is an alternative. And there are plenty of successful, what we call side hustles or something that somebody does on the side that has significant momentum, that you can always stay below the radar.
Eric Weissmann: Again, I don't condone that because once we at NextGEN start to work with those companies, man, if you're not organized the right way or if you don't have yourself set up and we start to introduce you to potential new customers or potential new investors and they're expecting you to be organized as an S-corp or a C-corp. I'm throwing these buzzwords out. Hopefully you can either pause or people can stop and say, what did that mean? But there's a difference between an LLC, a limited liability corporation, and an S-corp, a C-corp, or a B-corp. Those all mean different things. But some of them are more investable than others.
Eric Weissmann: So if you've been organized as an LLC or just a sole proprietorship, and we introduce you to an angel investor or a high net worth investor or some individual, and they're expecting you to check certain boxes and you don't, that book gets closed pretty fast. And the conversation is over because, man, I thought you were more serious about this. So that's what I want to just make sure that we set up. Of course, there's multiple ways to form or not form a business. But the more you do that outside of the box, the more outside of the box you are.
Katy Smith: Thank you for highlighting this, because I will say you're making me think of there's an analog to this in the nonprofit sector where someone has a passion for some sort of cause. And they feel like to really fully demonstrate that heart, they need to form a nonprofit, which is another type of corporation, a 501c3. But that might not necessarily be needed. You can go do good stuff without necessarily now having to file a 990 tax return. But there are just different ways to go about it that you need to be thoughtful about. If someone becomes an LLC when they really should have been an S-corp. How hard is it to unwind that?
Eric Weissmann: Hard, but not impossible. The longer you go, the tougher it is. It's kind of like building your house and then saying, you know what? We need a basement. You can do it. It's going to be painful, but you probably should have built the basement first before you put the rest of the house on top of it. So it's not impossible, but it is better to think through some of that stuff. And I'm not saying that everybody needs to think of themselves as investable. I think you go to a good CPA, a good accountant, and I've got a list of these service providers that should be on your radar, CPAs and accountants, they're usually the first ones that see new business creation because somebody's filing their taxes and they got to say, I got to let you know I'm making these candles or I'm making this thing on the side.
Eric Weissmann: And the accountant is usually the one who says, we should treat this separately. Or what if somebody burns their house down because you didn't put the right holder into the wick or whatever like that. And they're going to come at, so the accountants have a good accountant that can give you that. An attorney that can make sure that you are organized in the right way to protect not just you, but the intellectual property of this entity. Maybe you've got a special recipe for your candles or you do something that's protectable. So an attorney can do that. And then you've got on the marketing side, how do you let people know about this? And you need to go to a good either partner or agency to handle your digital presence, but I'd like to keep this separate and in a legal fashion so that I'm on the up and up.
Katy Smith: So sounds like the moral of this story is surround yourself with all of these service providers and professionals who specialize in this. And we have such a wonderful array of them here in Greenville County, including NextGEN, who can help point the way for you. All right, so we've made sure that someone is ready to be legally prepared and strategically prepared for the long-term based on those initial legal decisions. Where NextGEN really shines is helping people make sure that business they're starting is going to make money and be scalable. And so, Eric, would love for you to talk a little bit about that. The other thought, not just my candles smell awesome and they burn for 20 hours, but how is this going to help fill up the college fund or make for early retirement?
Beyond the Paperwork: Validating Your Business Idea and Finding Customers
Eric Weissmann: Or to at least give you a good estimation of and some good tools to figure out, let's be realistic here what's your margin on these what's your cost of goods sold what are some of these industry buzzwords around that. But I think where we see a lot of founders get stuck is there's an element of you have to have a healthy disrespect for the status quo to even get to this point to run in the face of what many are saying, this is not a good idea, you have to overcome that. But at some point, you do need to listen to reality and do need to say that I need to figure some of this stuff out so that I can be successful no matter how great I think I am. These are some of this reality. So one of the things that we've really found out is that customer discovery is something that doesn't come naturally to most.
Eric Weissmann: Where you may have one or two customers, but we're asking, where's your 10th customer going to come from? Where's your 110th customer going to come from? What did they look like? And sometimes that's fantasy world, that's la-la land. That's so far out there that, oh, Eric, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. No, we need to think this through. So you need to go out and talk to some customers. You need to have some of this field research done that informs your business plan so that that helps you not only find more customers, but attract talent. How are you going to hire or keep somebody on board that they don't share that same vision for you? You haven't been able to paint that picture for you.
Eric Weissmann: So customer discovery and then selling is very critical. If you don't have a customer, you don't have a business. So if you can't sell this to somebody, if you don't have a methodology or even a plan to work that through, it's going to be really, really, really, really challenging for you to grow your business. And that is what we're looking for. At the end of the day, NextGEN is a part of the economic development strategy of the city of Greenville, Greenville County, the Greenville MSA, then the upstate kind of writ large, but the lighthouse is in the city of Greenville. And we need to diversify our economy and through small business and entrepreneurship, innovation and entrepreneurship and that's why we're here.
Eric Weissmann: So we want to help and we want to help remove obstacles from the track and also listen to where are you getting stuck? Where do people come into the ecosystem? Where do they drop out of the ecosystem? Where do we have a concentration of resources? Where don't we have enough resources? So a lot of that is dependent on the basics just like we're talking about and we've seen it when you get too far down the line and we assume that everybody knows that they've set their business up they've got a business license or they're set up to be successful and come to find out they're not or they haven't. Man, you need to go back to square one. We can do it really quick for you. But when you get to Venture South and Vicinity Ventures and Founderville VC and SCRA, man, those resources are closed off to you if you haven't done some of this basic stuff.
Securing Capital: From Small Business Loans to the Importance of Personal Credit
Eric Weissmann: But access to capital is another shrouded in mystery component to growing a business. Access to capital doesn't always mean Shark Tank. It doesn't always mean that I'm pitching my business and for $250,000, I give you 6% of my company. No, access to capital is credit cards, small business loans, lines of credit. And we kicked off this access to capital initiative at the beginning of the year and have some trainings, workshops that we've done. We've got one coming up early September. But one of the things that was clear and a theme that was building is the importance of your personal credit and how you can't forget about how important that's going to be as you grow and scale your business. Until you have inventory, until you have a track record, banks, lenders, even CDFIs are going to look at who are we lending this to?
Eric Weissmann: What's your story? And yeah, but don't, I made some mistakes in the past. I've done some wrong things, but now, okay, I get it. And there are tools and vehicles for second chance loans and things like that. We've heard about them, but a lot of that would be obviated if you had your ducks in a row and fought through this at those very earliest stages.
Katy Smith: So I want to call listeners' attention again to the show notes because we did an episode with Kerri Smith with Self-Help Credit Union about repairing your credit. And so if you are someone who has a dream to be a business owner, to be an entrepreneur, but you're not sure that your personal ducks are in a row, starting there is a, listen to the episode and then get involved with someone like Self-Help Credit Union or Community Works or your bank, whoever that may be, to prepare yourself.
Eric Weissmann: It is one of the unfortunate things that I have heard throughout my experience, not just in this region, but that is something that can come back to bite you. And it's a shame. At some point, you're going to need a line of credit. You're going to want that backstop of, I want to grow. I want to grow fast before my competitors catch up, or I've got an opportunity here that I need an extra $50,000 and it's going to take me a year to get that for my customers. And I got three months to build out this new e-commerce site or whatever it is. And that's where personal credit really comes in.
Katy Smith: So hopefully everyone listening understands that the reason this matters, the reason this has to do with civics is obviously because some of the decisions you make connect with government. But as Eric said, we want thriving business owners and entrepreneurs because that's what helps make all of us succeed in Greenville County. So if you're listening and you think, OK, I am an entrepreneur. How do I get plugged into what Eric's talking about? How does someone connect with NextGEN and what can they expect?
Connecting with the Greenville Startup Ecosystem: Resources and Networking
Eric Weissmann: That's a great question. We created a brand around this ecosystem. We call it Startup Greenville. So you can go to startupgvl.com and see a list of all the resources that are here in the community to help entrepreneurs, whatever stage you happen to be at, whether you need expansion resources from the Greenville City Economic Development Corporation or Upstate Alliance, or on the very, very basic side of, I want to go to Flywheel Café and just be immersed in this. I want to hear from some of the folks that are out there, and again, 10 feet in front of me on the trail.
Eric Weissmann: So we have a list of those resources. We also have a community calendar on startupgreenville.com. You can also sign up to get into the Slack channel. So Slack is a software platform that it's tech-based, but it's a way to build a community and communicate through that community. So that's a great way to get connected. And then also from a NextGEN standpoint, so nextgengvl.org. You can see the programs and the services that we provide and also get signed up for our newsletter. That's a great way to get dialed into the propaganda of all the stuff that's happening here.
Eric Weissmann: We try to have our finger on the pulse of not just the things that we're doing, but also some of our peer entrepreneur support organizations. My mantra is to get out from behind your keyboard and get into the real world. Entrepreneurship is a lonely sport. You can feel at times like you're the only dumb one. Everybody else has figured this out and I'm the only one. I'm the only stupid one that can't figure it out. We'll come to our events and you'll see that everybody's stupid and everybody's figuring it out. We're all trying to do this. And that can be such a reaffirming message to say, man, I'm now with these seven other people that I didn't know were having the same problem that I'm having. I feel so good that everyone else is suffering like me and God forbid you learn something from somebody that can just put their arm around you. This is how you used to feel that same way and that's what we're trying to build through this community and this ecosystem.
Katy Smith: And hopefully that will encourage you that maybe you don't know things yet, but you are taking a chance that 99% of the people are not. They might have had a good idea in the shower that they did nothing with. You're doing a thing. And so you deserve to be with other people who have that same fire in the belly.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Why Embracing Failure is Key to Success
Eric Weissmann: Embracing failure is part of startup success. Embracing that to say, I'm not sure what's going to happen here, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to learn from it. And I think we need to work on that in our culture of not being afraid to admit that this is my seventh startup. And that should be a badge of honor that somebody says, what did you learn the first six times? And that's what we're trying to, it's a special group that doesn't care about that. And as you convert from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur, that's important for you to feel that same level of confidence.
Katy Smith: Well, Eric, thanks so much for all you do to fortify our founder community, our startup ecosystem, and for being with us today.
Eric Weissmann: My pleasure.
Credits
Simple Civics: Greenville County is Produced by Podcast Studio X.
A Greater Good Greenville project.
