Hope Lee has owned Lashes by Lee for five years, moving from Groton to State Street in New London, outgrowing that space, and moving to Bank Street. Two years ago, the state started requiring eyelash technicians to be licensed, a move she supported amid people thinking they could just learn these skills from YouTube or TikTok.

Lashes by Lee is expanding as it gets more into education, and Lee has partnered with the barbering and cosmetology school Bravado Academy to add to its curriculum.

But she said she feels “like you can never learn enough. Some things are always changing. There are so many questions you have as a business owner.” She thought, “Why not go to some place where you can kind of learn it all?”

It’s that attitude that brought Lee, 47, to the Entrepreneur Academy, a free 8-week pilot program sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut. The coordinator is Rosemary Ostfeld of East Lyme, an environmental studies professor at Wesleyan University who also teaches a course called Startup Incubator. She founded the local-farm sales startup Healthy PlanEat.

Participants are almost four weeks into the program, which involves a 90-minute session each week featuring an hour-long presentation from a business expert and then a discussion with a local business owner.

The topics for the first portion include legal considerations, branding, finances, access to capital, pitching a business idea and more.

“We want to demystify: How do you go from just an idea to having a tangible business?” Ostfeld said.

The cohort runs the gamut from people with established businesses to those trying to get an idea off the ground ― like lifelong New Londoner Angela Angulo, 27. She was on the fence about forming a limited liability company but found the Secretary of the State’s website was “inundated with all these technical terms I don’t understand.”

Angulo works in marketing. After working at The Day and Bridge Marketing, she now freelances and does marketing for the City of New London. She’s learned that with a potential future business, instead of doing overall marketing and stretching herself too thin, she wants to focus on her “bread and butter”: social media marketing.

Setting businesses up to not fail

Chamber President Tony Sheridan said in his 16 years at the chamber, he “must have seen dozens upon dozens of very hardworking people start a business and then fail,” and the mission of the Entrepreneur Academy is to prevent failure.

“It’s asking hard questions of yourself,” he said. “Is this an emotional dream of mine I want to make work, or is this a real business I can make a livelihood out of?”

Sheridan said Thames River Innovation Place, which is funded by the public-private network CTNext, provided $50,000 for the Entrepreneur Academy. He said the program, which he hopes to run twice a year, will have a “small charge” in the future unless the chamber gets a grant.

More than 40 people this year applied to the program, and no one was turned away, Sheridan said. It’s a hybrid program, with some people meeting in the Public Library of New London and others tuning in on Zoom.

Last Thursday, the first presentation was from attorney Jonathan Cabot, who is part of the Business Transactions Group at Robinson + Cole. He walked the participants through the considerations in deciding whether to form a corporation, LLC or partnership, with an overview of governmental regulations and filing annual reports.

The participants were teeming with questions, and his answer was frequently what he called a lawyer’s favorite phrase: “It depends.” Basically, every situation is different, and business owners should talk to their attorney.

Participant Pawel Lotkowski, 32, said afterwards he offers detailing services as Euro Detailing CT but lacks the status of a legal business entity and insurance, “two big things that are scary.” He joined the program for the educational aspect.

After the attorney’s presentation, Ostfeld facilitated a conversation with Laurie Zrenda, former owner of the Montville medical marijuana dispensary Thames Valley Relief. She received one of the first six medical marijuana licenses in the state, even though “we certainly didn’t know what we were doing and I didn’t have a business background. I was just a pharmacist.”

Zrenda went to a conference in Illinois and visited dispensaries in Colorado and Michigan. She hired a consultant to help with the application. She went to cancer centers and met gastroenterologists and psychiatrists to market her business.

Thames Valley Relief grew from three or four employees with 10 customers a day in 2014 to 25 employees and 400 people a day in 2019, Zrenda said. That’s when she sold to a larger corporation, and she’s now hoping to get into the recreational market.

Other partners and presenters throughout the eight weeks are Quinn & Hary Marketing, SCORE, Women’s Business Development Council, Connecticut Small Business Development Center, CT Next, Advance CT, and Connecticut Innovations, the state’s venture capital arm. Participants are also getting assigned mentors.

“We’re not trying to re-create the wheel here,” Sheridan said. “If any agency is doing a good job, we want them to come to make their presentation. We’re not trying to do it for them.”

The public can attend a trade show-style “demo day” scheduled for Sept. 9.

Falecia Porter said the Entrepreneur Academy has so far showed her that she and her husband “did a lot of things the right way” in opening Progression Training, a 3,000-square-foot training facility in Groton that’s mostly focused on basketball. But they also want to expand.

They want to build out a 125,000-square-foot community recreation center. Porter, 27, said the Entrepreneur Academy has helped her network with people in the same stage, and she’s learned about the free business counseling available from SCORE.

“It’s really a blessing to be surrounded by people who believe you can do it,” she said.

e.moser@theday.com