SIDNEY -- The E3 group held its first Business Plan Workshop Thursday, September 21.

The workshop was held at Western Nebraska Community College's Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center.

The Business Plan Workshop was designed to help business owners and entrepreneurs write a proper business plan. The workshop also offered an opportunity to work with resource partners and learn about financial assistance opportunities.

"Last Thursday, September 21, we hosted our first Business Plan Workshop at WNCC in the I & E Center. We had a great turnout. We had 23 total attendees. That was split up into two sessions, but overall traffic count, we had 23 individuals," said E3 Navigator Alisha Juelfs.

Juelfs said the workshop had representatives of eight resource partners. In addition, she said there were three people present to support the workshop. She said overall, the event was very successful. It is the first Business Plan Workshop hosted by E3. 

"We're really looking forward to getting more in the books and continuing to add this to the calendar every quarter. As a recap of those big resources that we provided, we did have different resource partners provide presentations of different services that they provide. The biggest one that drew people in was the NBDC LivePlan Platform, which is a business plan writing tool. They talked about the importance of a business plan, but they also showed the ease of the platform, how you can break your platform into multiple sections, how you can use AI to help you write and also have a representative look over your notes and review them if you have any questions," she said.

She said E3 learned NBDC (Nebraska Business Development Center) also has Excel spreadsheet templates that can be used for financial planning.

"If you feel confident with the writing portions, but really need to dive into the financial and marketing part, NBDC can assist with that process as well. Grow Nebraska talked about a new grant that is open to start-up to five-year-old businesses. Then the Chamber talked about a ton of resources available through their Business Resource Tab on their website. They talked about SourceLink Nebraska action plan, but they also talked about in general the services available to businesses," Juelfs said.

She said services offered by the Cheyenne County Chamber of Commerce include the Community Calendar, Business Tab, and a variety of assets. While at WNCC, attendees were offered the opportunity to tour the campus and learn of its assets. To learn more about the resources at WNCC Sidney, contact Regina Kuhns or Juelfs at the college. 

"Next time, we plan on having more printed resources available so that if you come in ... It's hard to give a lot of information in a short amount of time, and it was come and go, but if you missed a portion of a presentation that you were really banking on getting information, we want to make sure we have printed materials available. Anyone that came, got a folder full of information. We even gave a worksheet for your business plan with them. But the hope is that next time we have even more information stacked into those folders. So if you only have 15-20 minutes to stop in, you're still leaving with more information than you came," she said.

Juelfs said she is available by phone or email. She prefers to make appointments but is based at WNCC in Sidney. She said she and Chamber President/CEO Toshia Jones share many of the same resources.

Juelfs can be reached at navigator@sidneye3.org or 308-249-7446.