By Casey Rooney, Economic Development Director

The city of Cottonwood Business Assistance Center (BAC) has been successfully servicing the needs of local businesses for over 2 years. The BAC is a partnership between the city of Cottonwood, the Northern Arizona Council of Governments, Yavapai College and local businesses. The city Economic Development and IT Departments are located at the BAC. The Cottonwood Economic Development Council (CEDC) also calls the BAC their home office. The CEDC is a private, public economic development partnership.

The BAC provides business consulting services. A typical person might enter our doors looking for information regarding opening a new business. We will sit down with this person(s) and discuss their concept. Their business concept will often times lead us to work with our customer to develop their business plan. Sometimes, training needs are identified. Regular training classes are conducted in subjects such as QuickBooks, excel, Photoshop, and general business development. You could consider the BAC as a business connection service where we connect the business with the resources they need to move forward. Between all of our partners we have access to an amazing amount of creative business consulting talent.

In addition to mentoring businesses, we provide office space on a short to medium timeframe. A budding business can come in, occupy an office, and use our technology such as computers, Wi-Fi and printers for business purposes at little or no cost for an hour or an entire day. We have several business housed in our facility for 6-12 months. We charge a modest fee to longer-term occupiers of office space. We have incubated and graduated several business. These businesses leave our facility and move into the commercial office market where they pay market rate for their new space. Our facility is designed to help startups with every advantage they need to start and be successful. The process works!

The city of Cottonwood took the lead, working with the Unites States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Verde Valley Regional Economic Organization to develop a revolving loan fund to help support our BAC clients. One business recently borrowed $150,000 and another deal is about to close for $50,000. Between these 2 BAC client businesses we are creating approximately 35 jobs. That’s economic development!

The BAC can also be categorized as a virtual incubator. Home based businesses use our very professionally appointed board rooms to conduct business. Rather than meet clients at home they can use the BAC for important and strategic face-to-face meetings.

We presently house four full-time businesses in the BAC. One of our businesses is actually two businesses in one office with the same owner. Jamie Fulmer is the CEO of Fire Mountain Wines and Blue Stone Strategy Group. Jamie will be opening a wine tasting room shortly in Old Town Cottonwood. His Blue Stone Strategy Group is a business consulting company where the primary clients are tribes located throughout the United States and Canada. His consulting company employs approximately 20 high level business consultants. His story is a success story.

The wine industry is an emerging industry in Arizona and Cottonwood is the economic center of activity in the Verde Valley. The Verde Valley Wine Consortium (VVWC) is a trade association for the local wine producers, tasting rooms, etc. VVWC is headquartered at the Business Assistance Center.

All of the companies that graduated out of the BAC and all the present companies located at the BAC continue to be successful. That is a pretty good batting average.