Buzzy Thibodeaux, the executive vice president of Junior Achievement USA, notes in a Business Report guest column that Louisiana had 59 professional football players on NFL rosters on opening day this season, making the state the nation’s top producer of elite football talent per capita.
Of course, earning this distinction does not happen without a significant investment in talent, Thibodeaux writes. Millions of dollars and countless hours are invested each year in identifying, nurturing and recruiting elite talent in our football-crazed country.
“If a parallel can be drawn to developing world-class athletes, why isn’t our community and our state more focused on identifying, nurturing and recruiting elite entrepreneurial talent that has the ability to provide rocket fuel to our economic engine?” he asks. “We know we need jobs and those jobs need to be good.”
Louisiana needs to generate 3,500 jobs per month over the next 33 months just to remain status quo, according to the State of Working Louisiana 2017 Report. But Thibodeaux says status quo shouldn’t be our aim.
Instead, we should want “championship-caliber jobs created and filled by championship-caliber individuals,” he writes.
And the benefits of creating remarkable entrepreneurs and entrepreneurially-minded leaders have been well documented, Thibodeaux says, adding that entrepreneurs generate wealth and wages, solve problems and change cultures to elevate quality of life.
“Baton Rouge and Louisiana have some unique assets and support vehicles, which collectively have the potential to create a rich, world-class environment for entrepreneurial success,” he writes. “That said, there is an urgent need to align those assets and vehicles to create a cultivation continuum of experiences that nurtures talent through the pipeline. A passive, parochial approach will cause us to lose and in Louisiana, we don’t like to lose.”
Read the full column, and be sure to check out the cover package on Baton Rouge’s entrepreneurial ecosystem in the current issue of Business Report.
