Elisa Miller-Out spoke on the Business and Entrepreneurship Panel at the We Live NY Summit last week in Ithaca. The Ithaca Journal ran this article by Aaron Munzer on 3/26/11 covering the event. If you didn't catch the print version, there was great photo by Simon Wheeler.

ITHACA -- Young and successful entrepreneurs, facing a panel of hopefuls in the audience at the WeLiveNY Conference Friday at Cornell University, discussed the challenges they have faced in starting a business and how to remain flexible under pressure.

As part of a six-person panel, individuals such as RJ Sherman, chief technology officer of brandyourself.com, detailed their own journeys into the world of business, and the often-new title of entrepreneur they had taken to wearing.

The conference this weekend is dedicated to helping young business entrepreneurs network in their home state.

"I didn't even think about myself as an entrepreneur until college, I just thought that I had started a business," he said. The business Sherman helped start at Syracuse University helps customers manage their online identity and what comes up in a Google search for someone's name. He freely admitted that his Syracuse-based company had made a number of mistakes through its inception, but that their perseverance in correcting their coding paid off.

"I think being an entrepreneur is learning from your mistakes and adapting to them," he said. "You learn, you adapt and you grow."

Other panelists, such as Progressive Expert Consulting Inc.'s Director of System Integration Mike Feng, are managing complex companies with dozens of employees. Feng's company provides online virtual classrooms to the military for training service members in foreign languages. Feng graduated from Cornell and then went to work for the U.S. Air Force before becoming an entrepreneur in Syracuse, which he called a "very different environment" from the bureaucracy of the military.

"Having been a small cog as part of a large wheel in the Air Force, moving from that into a very small, agile company is much more exciting, more interesting," he said.

Feng recommended honing in on a certain niche area that others in a specific industry aren't focusing on, like Internet language training, which can be a complex challenge but lucrative if it can be mastered.

"We felt language was the most difficult thing to do online," he said, "But we've really been able to write the book on this now."

Although panelists differed on a number of critical issues, such as how to assemble a good leadership team or how to hire employees, there was a consensus among them: to succeed in entrepreneurship, understand relevant technology, be flexible and willing to change, learn from mistakes and use them to grow, and be cautious about courting outside investment.

Finally, panelists offered quick tips for any number of challenges, such as making sure to have an "Excel spreadsheet monkey" on a management team, or to offer standardized tests during interviews to get a better sense of the ability of potential hires, according to Elisa Miller-Out, the CEO of Singlebrook Technology, Inc.

"Hire the best writers no matter what the position," she said. "It says something about the person's thinking process."

Adam Megivern, the executive director of the Cortland Downtown Partnership and an advisor to the conference, said regional networking events such as WeLiveNY have a serious impact.

"Anytime you can bring a lot of people with shared interests together, it's very powerful," he said. "There's an incredible amount of information that I hope will be brought back to communities all across the state."

Michal Kuklis, an audience member and graduate of Cornell, was at the conference to get inspiration and advice for his own fledgling company, Menagerie Vet, which manages a veterinarian's work flow for greater efficiency.

"My partner, Aaraon Hamid, and I started a small business a few months ago, but we're both tech people trying to get as much experience with business as possible," he said. "(The conference) is exciting for this area, and I'm glad it's happening here."