FOUNTAIN VALLEY : Cable Show Teaches New Entrepreneurs
Burned out on your job? Tired of working for someone else? Got a million-dollar idea for a business?
It’s a tough business climate out there, but “Guerrilla Enterprises” can offer help to people who want to be their own boss.
“It’s the perfect name for the kind of people we’re dealing with; they’re like guerrilla fighters, cutting out their niches and using the best techniques to survive,” said Pete Vander Haeghen, a business teacher at Coastline Community College since 1978. “They have to be creative and ingenious to survive and succeed.”
“Guerrilla Enterprises” is a one-hour show that premiered in September on local cable and features former Coastline students who have become business owners.
“This is one of the really good examples of community education delivering to the public and providing useful information to start a business or improve a business,” said Ted Boehler, associate dean of tele-media production and co-producer of the show.
The college offers courses in international business and entrepreneurship, but Vander Haeghen said he wanted to offer real-life examples of students who have successfully started a business.
“One of the things we thought would be most beneficial is to show people who hadn’t thought about starting a business and give them a good model or motivational example,” he said. “We want them to get the spark to start their own businesses.”
And for businesses profiled, it gets them some exposure that could potentially generate sales.
The twice-monthly show is produced live on Thursday nights at the college’s Fountain Valley studio and combines on-the-air interviews with field videotaping, in-studio guests and audience call-in at the end of the program, Boehler said.
Boehler said the show also gives production students hands-on experience of working on a cable television show.
Aired from 7 to 8 p.m. every Thursday, either live or taped, the program is cablecast to Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Garden Grove, Westminster, Stanton, Costa Mesa and, in January, to Seal Beach.
Shows have featured people who have started businesses selling gift balloon arrangements to decorating services that involve selecting poster art for commercial offices. Thursday’s show has an international business theme and focuses on a manufacturer of plastic parts with footage shot at a plant in Tecate, Mexico.
As for the show’s success, Vander Haeghen said it’s too early to tell. “We know there are people watching, but we don’t know how many or the impact,” he said.
Vander Haeghen said Coastline has about 500 students taking courses each year on how to start a business. But he’s also seen a trend of new students who are established business owners and need help to keep their investments afloat during these poor economic times.
Vander Haeghen said his class on small business management and ownership is a practical course that offers students a chance to write a business plan to determine first if their idea is a worthwhile venture.
“They’re all million-dollar ideas for a while,” he said. “There’s a lot of fantasy when they walk in the door, and when they start learning to work with the toughest boss in the world--themselves--and find out the time to operate a business, the cost and how hard they’re going to have to work to break even, it scares the faint of heart, the weak ones.”
And though it may be tough to start, Vander Haeghen said small business owners “can pick a niche and meet a need, make a nice living and contribute to the economy without going through a major bureaucratic process to get going.”
