Welcome to DI Squared….a ten-part weekly feature of KBOO News
DI Squared stands for “Dream it, Do it.” Our guests for this show are Eric Ufer, Pest Solutions, and Tony Campbell, City of Portland.
Is there ANYONEworking in a business, large or small, maybe a factory, or a store, or in the government, or maybe a radio station,…ANYONE…who hasn’t thought, and maybe even dreamed, of starting their own business, and working for themselves? ANYONE?
Maybe you’ve got passion and a vision to do something, but you’re in one of those minimum wage jobs where you struggle to make ends meet. Or maybe you’re a contractor in our gig economy where you get short-term contracts that pay okay but have no health care, no vacation, not even a desk. Not to mention a future…
You could be a company of your own.
This is the third of ten episodes. Each week we feature these three elements:
First, a profile of afeatured entrepreneur, someone who’s done it.
Second, a featured resourcethat you can use to find funding or get other types of help.
Third, a burning question of the weekfrom a listener.
The entrepreneurs we’re covering are all minority business people, most of them people of color, in the Portland area, and people who have created businesses that range from… asbestos removal to…. wine-making.
Maybe their stories will inspire you. Or maybe not. No matter, these are people who dreamed it, and then did it. And that’s what DI Squared is all about.
Today we’re speaking with featured entrepreneur of the week, Eric Ufer. Eric is passionate about bedbugs, cockroaches, rats and other critters that bug us. Six years ago Eric started Pest Solutions, Inc.
And a quick heads-up: if you’re a bedbug listening to this, you may want to get under the covers, there’s some bad news coming.
Here’s Eric to tell his story:
That was Eric Ufer, of Pest Solutions, a man who is passionate about…bedbugs.
Our special guest this week is Tory Campbell, Director of the Office of ___________________, part of Portland Prosper, the economic development arm of the City of Portland. Besides managing the City’s program to help entrepreneurs, Tory is an entrepreneur himself, the founder of ______________, a company that makes sauces….
And that brings us to our question of the week
QUESTION
Listeners, you can learn more about what the City has to offer by looking at the Prosper Portland web site, making contact with them and asking for the help you need. There are lots of resources out there that you can access in getting started.
Next week we’ll continue to explore what it is that makes a person likely to be successful as an entrepreneur. Just keep in mind that there’s no one "right" set of characteristics for being a successful entrepreneur.
But as we learned today, like many deep commitments, it starts with passion, what The City’s guy, Tory, called “hunger” ---even if it’s a passion whose object is the lowly bedbug.
That’s it for DI Squared for today.
Thanks for listening. If you want to review what you’ve heard just now, go to KBOO.com and look under evening news for today’s date.
And send your question to [email protected]. We’d like to make your questionthe featured questionfor one of our shows.
We’’ll be back in a week! Tune in then for the next episode of DI Squared----Dream it,Do it.
And bedbugs, watch out…don’t say we didn’t warn you…
From KBOO News, I’m Tom Flynn