BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT:'Team Business' benefits locals

Romancing the Bean owner Kerry Kroll readily admits that when she opened her first business in 1993 — a coffee shop across the street from Warner Bros. Studios — she was winging it.

But after the business outgrew her 500-square-foot shop and she moved to a space double the size in the Magnolia Park District, Kroll set her sights on a opening a second location in the burgeoning downtown area.

"There's a lot of things I was not familiar with," she said.

"I know how to run a small two-person coffee shop, but my second location is huge, and I'm on a strip here where I'm competing against billion-dollar coffee businesses. So anything I can do to get that edge to compete with them — I just felt was definitely an absolute necessity."

To capture that edge, Kroll enrolled in Team Business, a Burbank program a coalition of business leaders launched in September 2004 to give fledgling entrepreneurs the resources, training and contacts to start or develop their own business.

Team Business is put on through a partnership of the Burbank Community Development Department, the Burbank Chamber of Commerce and the Small Business Development Center.

Under the structure of Team Business, instructors from local institutions like Woodbury University and the University of Redlands conduct a series of workshops, covering topics from accounting to marketing and pursuing business loans, city redevelopment project manager Scott McGookin said.

"Team Business is designed to empower small business to achieve its full potential," he said. "And so, for instance, the confidence that the individual classes offer to the business owners — whether they're start-ups or ongoing businesses — it enhances their level of confidence to either expand or locate their business in Burbank."

The classes are free to Burbank Chamber of Commerce members, with a $10 to $15 charge for non-chamber members.

For Kroll, who celebrated the opening of her downtown location Dec. 6, the workshops not only imparted useful information, but connected her with invaluable professional resources, she said.

"They have an extensive venue of things that you can utilize — resources and information that you wouldn't necessarily have at your finger tips," she said.

Faced with hiring more employees than she had in the past, for instance, Kroll was looking for strategies to weed out potentially undesirable job applicants.

Through a quick e-mail to her Team Business marketing teacher, she obtained a list of standard questions to structure her interviews.

"It was just a really great resource for information and a little insight and things that sometimes you don't think of," she said.

"There's a lot of tax issues and workman's comp issues and employee issues that sometimes you don't even know exist. A program like this is very beneficial for those things."

For more information, call McGookin at (818) 238-5180.