CREATE Toombs - Small Business and Entrepreneurship

The Cultivating Entrepreneurship and Transforming Economies (CREATE) Toombs initiative supports small business and entrepreneurship by:

• Alleviating finance, government, and site selection barriers.
• Providing online access to business intelligence services, including Georgia's Enterprise Network for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (GENIE [2]), GIS [3] Planning [3] and SizeUp Greater Vidalia® [4], needed to create a business plan, leverage data to find customers and suppliers, develop an effective marketing initiative, or choose a location.
• Facilitating connections to resources that provide basic business knowledge including accounting, human resources law, marketing, and sales.
• Dedicating staff resources to assisting entrepreneurs and supporting early state companies, developing programs to foster an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and securing funding to enable entrepreneurship to flourish.
• Developing a regional incubator concept for a physical location with shared services to help companies get started and become stable enough to venture out on their own, the Greater Vidalia® Center for Rural Entrepreneurship .