Page 7 - BusinessWest September 28, 2020

to mail it in, and that took a while.”
But Ortiz persevered, and opened for business just over a
month ago. Her truck, usually parked on Race Street, not far from the Cubit Building and just a few blocks from the computing cen- ter, is actually exceeding goals set higher than most everyone she knows thought were reasonable.
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Juan and Elsie Vasquez, owners of 413 Family Fitness, are like
many small-business owners in that they have had to pivot during the pandemic and create new revenue streams.
Printing
Successful launches in the middle of COVID-19 are certainly
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rare, and for most area entrepreneurs, especially those trying to
get a concept off the ground or to the next level, these are chal-
Printing
lenging times, when the focus is on pivoting and adjusting to
meet changing needs and changing ways of doing things.
In most all ways, the same can be said of the region’s entrepre-
neurship ecosystem itself, which specializes mostly on programs focused on people gathering in large numbers or sitting across a
table from one another — things that can’t be done during a pan-
“For a while there, it really felt like we were kind of providing therapy to small- business owners.”
demic. Agencies within the ecosystem have been pivoting and adjusting as well.
This is especially true of Valley Venture Mentors (VVM), the nonprofit based in Springfield’s Innovation Center, which is in the midst of what interim Director Chris Bignelli, a partner with the Alchemy Fund, calls a ‘reset.’
That’s the word he chose to describe a retrenching after most of the agency’s staff members left within a week of each other last spring, and after COVID prevented it from staging any of the large gatherings for which it became known — not only here, but across the state and beyond.
“Our mentors advise entrepreneurs about the importance of
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BusinessWest FEATURE SEPTEMBER 28, 2020 7