Missionary of Enterprise

Driving north on McGregor Boulevard in Fort Myers, beyond the palm-shaded Edison & Ford Winter Estates and just after the River District, the road name changed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I passed Promise Land Furniture, with two mattresses leaning against the façade, and I Like it Like That, a bakery that accepts food stamps. The condo high-rises had shrunk to matchsticks in my rearview mirror.

I pulled up to a chain-link fence, read the address painted on a scrap of wood and confirmed that this was the Southwest Florida Enterprise Center. I'd signed up for its six-week course, Entrepreneur School, after the center e-mailed me a press release. Was I just the latest dupe in this tropical land of schemers and dreamers?

Definitely shouldn't have worn Prada, I thought as I pushed open the door to the trailer. Five students, including a nurse's assistant, a maid and a welder, sat around a table covered in blistered, cracked contact paper. I pulled up a tattered chair, idly stuck my pen in a paper-blister, and waited for the white-haired man at the head of the table to try to sell me something.

Yet when he started speaking, I was transfixed. A bona fide big shot, Tom Scott, 59, spoke of his time as a top-drawer Los Angeles retail exec and business professor at Purdue University in Indiana. He left the corner office behind in 2001 to become director of the Enterprise Center, a city-funded business incubator, which rents reduced-cost workspace to low-capital startups. Taking Scott's Business 101-a.k.a. Entrepreneur School-is mandatory for the center's tenants.

The press release suggested nothing about the rough-edged nature of this operation, and Tom Scott seemed an unlikely director.

"It was a unique opportunity to combine all of my backgrounds and interests," he says. "It has to do with business, it has to do with teaching and, most importantly, it has to do with small enterprises, which I think are more exciting than big businesses because you can see when things work right away."

I raised an eyebrow and thought there must be more to that career move: You don't just go from high roller to hoi polloi because the weather's good, and he was young to take on a retirement career for altruistic value.

Over the next two hours, Scott lectured about business basics, from conducting market research to incorporation and IRS guidelines. He was part teacher, part preacher-and his note-taking flock was rapt. He inspired even me to take more seriously my latent entrepreneurial dream: a doggie boutique for larger breeds. So much for first impressions.

This industrial stretch near the oft-maligned Dunbar community won't ever be the classiest part of town. It probably won't get the historic landscape restoration of the Edison and Ford estates or the brick-paved streets going into the River District. Yet with Scott at the helm, the humble Enterprise Center could prove a vital asset in the Southwest Florida business community.

"Under Tom's leadership, it's come a long way in terms of filling up the center with businesses and providing them the tools they need to grow," says Don Paight, director of the Fort Myers Community Redevelopment Agency. "I think [the center] fills a need that's out there, especially for light-industrial businesses that can generate quite a few jobs in the manufacturing industry." Scott has helped about five businesses in five years "graduate" from the incubator to stand-alone workspace in the community, an improvement over the pre-Scott years.

The center was established in January 1988 as the Business Development Center and suffered inconsistent management for its first decade. By the time Scott arrived, says Paight, "[There were] limited facilities to work with: an old drive-in theater and some run-down buildings." Entrepreneur courses, once administered by a county-sponsored outfit called Leedco (the Lee County Employment and Economic Development Corp.), had grown few and far between.

"We saw that as an opportunity," Scott says. The result was Entrepreneur School: two hours of class, one day a week for six weeks, taught by Scott about six times a year.

After he launched the course, Scott commissioned an independent market-research firm, University Research Consultants, to conduct a feasibility study for the Center's expansion. His vision was to tear down the 8,000 square feet of outdated trailers and bays and build two structures totaling 40,000 square feet of workspace for light industrial, warehousing and service businesses.

In July 2005, the market researchers' study predicted the plan was not only feasible, but it could effectively pump an additional $11 million into Southwest Florida.

"I think [expanding the center] is a great idea," says Gary Jackson, a Florida Gulf Coast University professor and one of the authors of the report. "We made recommendations with the idea that these businesses would get assistance from places like SCORE and the [Small Business Development Center], not just Tom, during the first years when most businesses have high failure rates, and then move on to the community and create new jobs there."

Feasibility study in hand, Scott applied for a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Admin-istration (EDA) and received $1.5 million for construction. "It was the second largest grant that the EDA has made in the state of Florida in the last 10 years," Scott says, beaming. The City Council, in turn, agreed to match that money with $1.7 million for the new Enterprise Center, slated for completion in 2008.

About a year after these milestones, in 2004, Scott was contemplating his good fortune while enjoying a tractor ride past grazing horses on his property in Alva. Then an internal heat wave overtook him.

"You know how you get all flushed when you're embarrassed? Multiply that by about a thousand," Scott says. His wife drove him to Lee Memorial Hospital.

After listening to his heart, the doctor asked him if he was aware that he had a heart murmur. The next thing Scott knew, he was in an ambulance racing across town for emergency surgery at HealthPark. An aneurism was ripping through his aorta, and the surgeon said Scott had a 10 percent chance of surviving the operation. He advised Scott to say a final goodbye to his wife, Kendra, and pray.

As a medical team rolled him into the surgical theater, Scott remembers praying, "Lord, you gave me my life. It's yours if you want to take it. I'm not going to argue with you. But if I'm going to stay, I want to be real clear about what you want me to do." His last thoughts before going under were about Kendra and the Enterprise Center.

Hours later he woke up with a pig valve in his heart and a "garden hose" in his chest. From that moment on, the job he had taken in Florida-where he moved for his wife's career advancement-would be his mission.

Luis Echavarria, a short Dominican with strong, callused hands, is among the newest Tom Scott faithful. Earlier this year, he came to Florida from New Jersey, where he'd been a dump truck driver, hoping to find the same work in sunnier climes. When buying his own dump truck didn't work out, he decided to pursue his passion: ornamental welding, a trade handed down from his father. A search for industrial space led him to the Enterprise Center.

"[Tom] gave me opportunity [and] direction. He gave me the space and told me the rules to follow to get my business straight. He was completely right; like he explained to me, my first two years were going to be a lot of investment, a lot of [advertising]," Echavarria says.

Ads in the Yellow Pages and magazines have paid off, and his work has led to some word-of-mouth referrals. When Echavarria installs his decorative metal gates, railings, even simple window bars for first-floor businesses and residences, neighbors approach him about doing work for them. In fewer than six months, Echavarria has doubled his space at the Enterprise Center.

"Without [Scott], maybe I would be completely lost. I know how to generate business now," Echavarria says. In fact, Scott is a recent client, having commissioned an automatic gate for one of his pastures.

Though Scott's near-death epiphany recalls many a Hallmark movie, his dedication to fledgling entrepreneurs is echoed at dozens of business incubators nationwide. Some have grown ventures with far-reaching impact. In Bethlehem, Pa., for instance, an incubator nurtured a business that developed tests that use saliva for HIV testing. Today, OraSure Technologies is a publicly traded, multimillion-dollar company.

The Enterprise Center isn't equipped for technology or administrative businesses, at least not yet. Though it has no funding currently, the proposed build out for the 7.8-acre site would add 40,000 square feet of office space, as opposed to warehousing and light industrial space.

I, however, will not be renting any kind of space in the Enterprise Center. After six weeks of class, I learned that in addition to start-up capital, affordable workspace and an understanding of how to start a business, entrepreneurs must have passion for and confidence in their business ideas-and I'm not so sure about a large-breed doggie boutique. Do Labrador retrievers really need sweaters?