LANSING ? Two Michigan entrepreneurial groups became one last month when MIQuest was announced ? the merger of the Small Business of Michigan Foundation and the Great Lakes Entrepreneur?s Quest. Now their combined mission is to make Michigan one of the top states for entrepreneurs in the country.

SBAM President Rob Fowler said the Foundation had developed the Entrepreneur?s Scorecard a decade ago, and has served as an advocacy group in the Michigan legislature and elsewhere to shape laws that help entrepreneurs.

?We?ve helped shape the system of organization that supports entrepreneurs,? Fowler said. ?We helped change the conversation. GLEQ was in the business-plan competition business. It had a terrific track record of building advisors and mentors. We felt like putting these two groups together made a lot of sense. We?ve seen the evolution of the support structure in the state. Now we?re talking about coordinating, consolidating and collaborating for the state.?

Fowler added: ?We?ve talked about a big vision for the state. Return Michigan to place it once was as the entrepreneurial leader in the country and globe. We once were part of that culture. Entrepreneurs supported each other; the state supported entrepreneurs. We?ve lost that to a degree and now we want to get it back.?

The merger came together more than a year ago when the SBAM Board Of Directors decided it was time for the business trade group to do even more for entrepreneurs, said MIQuest President Diane Durance, formerly president of GLEQ. She said the Foundation wanted to develop more entrepreneurial support efforts.

She said the SBAM Foundation asked where the gaps were in the state? What is not getting done? The committee is composed of some of the top business and entrepreneurs in the state, including Fowler, Josh Linkner of Detroit Venture Partners, Bob Fish CEO of Biggby Coffee, and Yan Ness, co-CEO of Online Tech. They asked Durance to join them in the brainstorming sessions.

?Each region has its own stuff as well,? she said. ?Grand Rapids, downtown Detroit, there were a lot of good things already going on. During the course of that brainstorming, it became clear that the foundation and GLEQ had similar missions, but were addressing different audiences.?

Durance said SBAM supports MI Celebrates, 50 Companies To Watch, and the Entrepreneurial Scorecard. Those programs are aimed at more advanced second-stage companies. GLEQ works with first stage, concept and early startups, she said.

?We weren?t looking at the same companies or entrepreneurs,? she said. ?We weren?t redundant, or overlapping. It made a lot of sense to put the two organizations together. Both have events, audiences for distribution of information, yet the contacts are different. Both groups are statewide. Once we clicked, we were off to the races. Yan and Bob and whole group didn?t waste any time.?

Some four months later, the merger announcement was made on Jan. 30 at one of the top entrepreneurial events of the years, the Annual Collaboration for Entrepreneurship at Burton Manor in Livonia.

Now the hard work begins. Ness of Online Tech is the chairman of MIQuest and his job is to get MIQuest to critical mass so it achieves results ? making Michigan a more entrepreneur friendly state.

?There are a certain number of entrepreneurs we can touch every year,? Ness said. ?But we need more infrastructure. If we touch it the right way, we can raise revenue to support building the infrastructure. The question is how do we get there??

Within two to four years, Ness said he hopes to make MIQuest self-sustaining. Currently nearly all of its funds come from the Michigan Economic Development Corp. on a three-year grant that expires this fall. Ness said SBAM will commit funds to the business plan. But he also plans to touch foundations, and the state?s corporations, to cover what he expects will be a seven-figure annual budget.

Ness would like MIQuest to create a network of 2,000 to 5,000 entrepreneurs in Michigan. He?d also like MIQuest to do activities not done by either GLEQ or the SBAM Foundation. He?d like MIQuest to become the manager of some state programs done by others as well.

Those could include programs focused on helping find entrepreneurs, growing them to the next stage, promoting their success and measuring it all. He?d like to tap the SBAM membership to recruit thousands of new mentors and coaches for these nascent entrepreneurs.

Said Fowler: ?We what to make Michigan a top five entrepreneurial state. We hope we can drive entrepreneurial leadership and get better at things we currently lag in. Michigan had a great entrepreneurial ecosystem a century ago. We want to create that environment again with MiQuest.?

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