Lavelle has been offered "pretty hefty salaries" to join the corporate world, but has rejected them in the realization that "I wouldn't have the temperament for it." Instead, she has established her own profit-making incubatorlike enterprise nearby, not for personal gain, she insists, but to raise enough capital to do economic development the way it really should be done. "I've been disabused of the fantasy that some foundation is going to give this not-for-profit corporation any money. Why they won't, I've never been able to figure out." A case in point: when she tried to get $12,500 in requisite local funding to match Commerce's commitment of $37,000 to establish an independent purchase-order financing project -- a tiny sum she considered "a no brainer" -- she came up empty-handed. "At that point, I said, 'Damn it, the only way I'm going to do this is to have the money myself!' "
Another experiment Lavelle hopes to accomplish with her own money -- having also been turned down by foundations for it -- is to develop specialized uses for a given facility. A woodworker's building, for example, designed exclusively for that particular industry, wrapping companies around centrally owned machinery. If she further had her way, she'd invest in a few not-for-profit check-cashing services and liquor stores as well, because she hates the notion of their gains leaving the area and buying their owners Lincolns and houses in the suburbs.
"In the inner city," she has consistently argued to apparently deaf ears, "you must talk about the creation of wealth and the reinvestment of that wealth -- that to me is economic development."
LOOKING GOOD
It's seldom worth it
Over the years June Lavelle has seen enough success and failure pass through her portals that the mere retelling of the stories is a course in entrepreneurship. Here's a lecture from Start-ups 101: "A company comes in and decides it wants absolutely first-class space: furniture and carpets and air-conditioning and potted plants and every other leasehold improvement. I watch the money go. Those companies fail without exception. Their priorities are out of whack. In a building like ours, nobody else wastes money, none of the rest of us have anything, so there are lots of role models of how to do without. When the next business starts spending like that, I tell them, I wouldn't do it if I were you." Lavelle endorses foyers with a spartan aspect. "Even big buyers flying in on corporate jets expect to get value for their dollar. They don't want to be paying for leather couches and hanging plants. They see the stuff for what it is: expensive overhead."
PROFIT AS A MOTIVE
It beats all others
"Job creation is a by-product of business development, it's not the product," lectures June Lavelle, a debunker of the grant givers' main measure of success: number of employees. "Anybody ought to understand that no one goes into business primarily to hire people."
Here are some of the accomplishments of Lavelle's main criterion, strength of the profit motive:
* Forty-two healthy start-ups have already outgrown their limited incubator space and of necessity moved out to bigger square footage.
* Of the 143 companies, as of mid-August, that have been launched there, only 23 -- a mere 16% -- have failed.
* Lavelle's bad-debt rate has averaged 4%.
* Full capacity was reached within two years of acquisition.
* Today 77 companies are housed in the facilities; about 30 of them are minority- or women-owned.
* A total of 1,171 jobs have been involved; the cost to taxpayers has been a paltry $1,452 for each new job created. Most employees are low-or semi-skilled; most come from the immediate neighborhood.
* Since the Fulton-Carroll Center for Industry opened in 1980, surrounding industrial property has quintupled in market value.
ASKING FOR HELP
Too bad more companies don't
"Communities behave differently when times are bad from when times are good," reflects June Lavelle on her farm-youth background. "Relationships are stronger when people need them to be. They rise to the occasion when resources are less. In business, though, that isn't the case: the assumption is that if you're having trouble in your business, you deserve it. Business-people feel they have to show the outside world how strong and independent and competent they are; they can't reveal weakness or fallibility. What that does," she observes, "is deprive them of the necessary resources that others would be willing to contribute."
In the elbow-to-elbow community of an incubator, however, signs of struggle are accepted as calls for help. "They perceive that having trouble and admitting it is OK, because they look around and everybody else is in the same mess they're in. The facade of independence breaks away, and they get at the real issues, they rise up and support each other. They acquire a sense that a business is built on relationships."
