Lars Kuehnow grew up helping his family run their grocery business in Duluth. In other words: “entrepreneur” was always part of his vocabulary.
But it wasn’t until his mid-20s when he realized he wanted to follow that same path. He set a somewhat ambitious goal to do so. “I didn’t say what kind of a business, or where or any of those things,” he remembers. “I wasn’t super thoughtful about it, but I knew I wanted to open my own business by the time I was 30 years old.”
Five days before his 30th birthday he incorporated his first company, Kuehnow Management Inc. They bought and managed gas station convenience stores, and ended their 16-year run in 2000 with 30 employees and annual average revenues of $8 million.
From there he moved between leadership roles in the construction material industry and a non-profit. In each case he pulled these enterprises out of their struggles and into states of success.
Now with LISC, he’s applying that same business management experience through an advisory lens. In 2018, and in partnership with the University of Minnesota-Duluth, LISC Duluth helped launch a local chapter of Creative Startups Labs, a pre-accelerator program designed for creative entrepreneurs just starting to think about business management.
The program is mostly targeted at entrepreneurs of color. Participants work with Kuehnow and other advisors to decipher the market viability of their idea, and identify the customer relations steps they should take to forge long-standing ties with consumers.
Fifteen of the 22 participants in the first cohort were generating revenue six months after graduating. Thirty percent decided that they wanted to keep their business low-key and run it from home—“which is a success story,” noted Kuehnow.
So Duluth has the accelerator support nailed down. Now they’re thinking about ways to launch equity-focused capital programs that can help graduates take next steps.
One impetus for this is their charge to turn Duluth’s Lincoln Park district into a maker-centric Main Street-style thoroughfare. They’ve been applauded by local press and leaders for making that happen, but Kuehnow’s concern is that few of the participating makers in that area are businesses of color.
“That’s where the UMA cohort was perfect timing,” said Kuehnow.
With support from UMA and the Creative Startups program, they’re hoping to change that reality. The goal is to give a greater diversity of Duluth residents the opportunity to create entrepreneurial environments that their families can grow up in—just like Kuehnow had.
This case study was co-authored by Mark Foggin and Johnny Magdaleno and published in 2020 as part of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance’s “Forging Fairness: How community-based lenders are centering both inclusion and manufacturing to promote equity [link to report].” This report highlights the work of practitioners in UMA’s Pathways to Patient Capital cohort and how these leaders are helping entrepreneurs of color – including makers and manufacturers – access to the capital and know-how they need to realize their business ideas and plans at scale.