It's Your Business: Top priorities, objectives for The Mill in 2023 shared
Earlier this month, I summarized The Mill's and our startups' accomplishments for 2022. It’s great to take stock of the big wins and get motivated for the upcoming year. With that, what does our future look like? Here are our top 4 priorities and objectives for 2023:
Hire new staff
The Mill has an extraordinary, hardworking staff, and we need more talented folks to help us fulfill our mission of launching and accelerating startups and our vision of becoming Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. We began the year with 12 folks — eight full-time and four part-time. This year, we plan to hire five folks — four full-time and one part-time. Some of these include a dedicated venue manager, a dedicated community manager (previously these two roles were combined), and a startup coach.
This last one is vital for our founders and most directly impacts them. Building a company is hard and can be a lonely journey. Founders need as much advice and support as we can provide. In addition to our existing paid and volunteer mentors, we need a Startup Coach who can work hand-in-hand with our founders and help expose blind spots. Ideally, we’ll find someone who has exited their company. We might also combine several folks who could specialize in single topics like fundraising, go-to market, sales, finance, etc. Founders could “Choose Your Own Adventure.”
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Sell additional services
The Mill generates revenue through a variety of sources: coworking memberships, event rentals, corporate sponsorships, individual donations and grants. We also sell some of our services and want to do more of that this year.
We sell services like Flywheel Fund; investors pay us a membership fee to participate. Because we run our own startup pitch competitions, we have the knowledge to run them for other cities; we manage the city of Fort Wayne’s pitch competition.
There’s also an opportunity to sell our pre-accelerator to other organizations, specifically universities. Think of pre-accelerators like a class on how to launch and accelerate a startup. It takes place over a concentrated period of time, usually 6-12 weeks, is led by an instructor who teaches a curriculum, and we introduce founders to mentors and investors, among various activities.
We experienced great success with three pre-accelerators last year, one of them with Innovation and Commercialization Office at Indiana University. Most universities have a tech transfer office, where folks try to build companies based on intellectual property professors create. Pre-accelerators act as a forcing mechanism to get some faculty and staff off the sidelines and into the tech transfer office when they might not have otherwise.
Build the Tech Center
This week, the city of Bloomington and The Mill announced we’ve expanded our public-private partnership. This will expand Bloomington’s innovation economy, attract cutting-edge companies, and create high-paying jobs. The Mill will now manage the development and marketing of the Trades District, a 12-acre portion of the Bloomington Certified Technology Park.
The first order of business will be to hire an executive to market and develop the Trades District. This hire will also finalize the vision for the Tech Center, a building that will be catty-corner to The Mill. They’ll oversee its construction, recruit tenants, and build collaborations and partnerships with key stakeholders.
Construction on the Tech Center is expected to begin in the fall of 2023. In 2021, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) awarded the Bloomington Redevelopment Commission (RDC) and the Bloomington Economic Development Corp. a $3.5 million CARES Act Recovery Assistance grant to build the Tech Center. Acting on behalf of the city, the RDC will match the federal investment with a $1.6 million pledge to the project.
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Expand programming
While we’re always improving and refining our programming, there are a few specific expansions we’ll focus on in 2023.
Code/IT Academy, our code school for the unemployed and underemployed, will expand into Washington and Crawford counties. With our partnership with Ivy Tech, we already run three cohorts annually for Monroe County residents. These focus on CompTIA Security+, Intro to Web Design, and AWS Cloud Practitioner among others.
Bloomington Remote moved 24 people to Bloomington last year. These folks generated $1.7 million of economic impact in their first year, which compounds annually, and generates tax revenue for the city. They buy homes (half of our recruits have purchased homes; the average is $457,000 versus the citywide average of $300,000), support small businesses, and contribute to the vibrancy of our city. One of our first recruits, Pablo Fuentes, sits on the board for the Buskirk-Chumley Theater and founded the Cosmic Songwriter's Club, where singer-songwriters perform their original works.
We’ll also expand Flywheel Fund into Greater Lafayette and South Bend-Elkhart. Since we already invest throughout the state, what does “opening chapters” there actually mean? We don’t have investors from those area, so transforming high net worth individuals into startup investors is one objective. We’ll also put our thumb on the scale for local companies, ensuring we source and develop startups to meet our investment criteria. We’ll aim for one-third of the capital to be invested in local startups with the rest throughout Indiana.
I’m excited about our plans for 2023. If you’d like to participate in any of them, please email at pat@dimensionmill.org.
Pat East is executive director of The Mill, a nonprofit entrepreneurship center on a mission to launch and accelerate startups, and ultimately to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: The Mill director shares priorities, objectives for Bloomington center
