Moving Forward

The St. Landry Parish Business Resource Center is rapidly developing into a busy place for nurturing new businesses, training the leaders of existing ones, and collaboration between businesses and agencies that can help them prosper.

The center, also known as the Cajun Acceleration Station, has expanded its role as a so-called business incubation center providing a range of support services to start-up companies to include outreach and training, usually through partners, on subjects important to small business owners.

The resource center made a big step in 2015 when it showed enough success to clear itself of a burdensome federal loan used to purchase it. This increased SLED’s capital assets by more than $1.1 million and, just as important, freed assets that can be devoted to expanded services.

“The center has become a growing resource for conducting training, planning, counseling, board sessions and various types of planning sessions designed to promote enhanced partnerships and collaboration for the parish,” according to economic development director Bill Rodier. “More and more business owners, prospective entrepreneurs, and economic development partners are finding it a place where we do, in fact, move things forward.”

In August, for example, St. Landry Economic Development and the Small Business Development Center at UL-Lafayette collaborated on a well-attended seminar for small business operators on defining and reaching a target market and with Accolades IT consulting on another free seminar on search engine optimization, that is, making sure potential clients searching the internet can find and connect with a local business.

The center now houses ten tenants, ranging from housekeeping services to a fledgling speech and hearing center to trucking services.

“The variety of these start-up businesses shows the diversity of opportunity that can be found in St. Landry Parish,” Rodier notes.  “It’s exciting to watch these businesses grow from an idea to a real, working concern, and to play a role in making that happen. The goal of the Cajun Acceleration Station is to help start-ups get to their goals smarter, faster, and better, and we are getting better at reaching that goal as our varied client base offers new and different challenges.”

Meeting those challenges has included significant investment in the facility itself, all of which has been funded through grants that bring new money into the parish while shepherding taxpayer investment.

In the past several years grant money has been spent mostly on necessary repairs and renovations to the building itself, including a cost-saving investment to make the air conditioning system more efficient. This year the grant application focuses on Technology-related upgrades such as transformation of old kitchen area to provide a “think tank” setting with collaborative technical devices that could be used for business brain storming, student innovation contests and other activities.

Some of the money would also be used to expand wi-fi technology within the building and to update video and teleconferencing technology at the center.

“It is becoming more and more important that St. Landry Economic Development becomes more tech-savvy and has the resources to work and compete in an increasingly high-tech world, and that we provide resources available to our clients and small business owners who must also compete in that environment,” Rodier said.