Preaching - And Doing - Entrepreneurship | New Mount Wachusett campus in Athol will adopt a startup mentality
Starting a small business requires a certain amount of chutzpah. It means deciding that your prototype of a new machine could be the next big thing, or that your hair-braiding hobby could be a career.
Mount Wachusett Community College is encouraging potential entrepreneurs to take the leap with the help of its new North Quabbin Entrepreneurship Center in downtown Athol. But the college is also taking its own leap in opening the center.
“We’re running it like a really small business,” said Jeremiah Riordon, associate vice president of lifelong learning and workforce development at the college. “The goal is to grow this one, prove that it can sustain itself, and then make it bigger and bigger.”
The entrepreneurship center is a collaboration with the Town of Athol and other communities in the North Quabbin area. It’s funded through a Community Development Block Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and tuition waivers are available for income-eligible residents in local communities.
The center is a bare-bones affair, located in a storefront space at the town’s senior center annex. The classes being offered—from a broad overview of how to start a business to a course in bookkeeping—are not for credit.
But Riordon said the vision for the center is anything but modest. He said he hopes the Athol location will become not just a full-fledged satellite campus for the college but also a model for other community colleges, and other schools in general.
“We’re at the front, which is a nice place to be once in a while,” he said.
Maria Bull, member service coordinator for the North Quabbin Chamber of Commerce, said having the campus right in town is a boon to local entrepreneurs, who don’t have access to the kinds of resources that are available in larger communities.
“We’re thrilled … to have Mount Wachusett coming a little bit west and helping our community grow with this kind of information,” she said.
Riordon said the Athol location reflects the college’s efforts to keep its various campuses from competing with each other. Along with its main campus in Gardner, it has a Devens location that’s largely devoted to biotechnology courses, a Leominster campus centered on adult education and English as a second language, and a dental hygiene program in Fitchburg.
Like most small businesses, the center isn’t planning to achieve overnight success. Classes started in mid-January, and, Riordon said, they’ve been operating at about 75-percent capacity.
Riordon said Mount Wachusett is committed to running classes even if enrollment is low, and it’s looking at the launch of the center as a soft opening, with more marketing efforts yet to come. The location is relatively inexpensive to run, given the modest space the college is using, he said. He said the college is anticipating it will take three years to build up the location before it sees a positive revenue flow.
“We have to make the investment,” he said.
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