The entrepreneurial training program has helped cultivate over 240 startups since its founding in 2009, creating a supportive “ecosystem” of both fledgling businesspeople and experienced mentors.
Get Instant Access to This Article
Subscribe to Mainebiz and get immediate access to all of our subscriber-only content and much more.
- Critical Maine business news updated daily.
- Immediate access to all subscriber-only content on our website.
- Bi-weekly print or digital editions of our award-winning publication.
- Special bonus issues like the Mainebiz Book of Lists.
- Exclusive ticket prize draws for our in-person events.
Click here to purchase a paywall bypass link for this article.
In 2016, Amanda O’Brien was a new entrepreneur who had started a business to make wine out of Maine-grown rhubarb.
Calling the company eighteen twenty wines, she decided to enroll in Top Gun, an entrepreneurial training program of Portland’s Maine Center for Entrepreneurs. The goal was to learn business basics and ramp up operations.
“We were looking for a location where we could do production. We were establishing our brand and figuring out our sales channels,” she says. “It’s a unique time to go through the program, because it makes you realize how many things you don’t know.”
Through Top Gun, O’Brien took classes on topics like non-debt financing, customer discovery and marketing, and immersed herself in a network of peers and mentors.
“I didn’t have anyone in my social circle who was starting a business,” she says. “I was insecure and scared, but you don’t want to show that. So it was nice to find a peer group to talk about how hard it was, what didn’t go well, what bank they used.”
Wine and pie
The experience helped her make key connections. Since then, O’Brien established her production space and tasting room in Portland, is selling through other retailers, has four part-time employees, and partnered with other Top Gun students who run bed-and-breakfasts and offer her wines. Just before the pandemic, she was preparing for her best year yet with numerous large events planned, such as farm-to-table dinners and wine tastings.
The pandemic caused a pivot to delivery and pick-ups. She’s partnered with other entrepreneurs, such as a cheese company and a bakery, to create packages like “wine and pie,” to market experiences rather than single products.
“We had one woman who bought five of the wine-and-pies, and she and her friends had a Zoom happy hour and ate them together,” O’Brien says.
The company’s evolution and its ability to pivot hark back to an essential lesson learned through Top Gun.
“It’s about not being afraid to ask others in the entrepreneur community for help and advice,” she says.
Continuum of care
Eighteen twenty wines is one of over 240 startups that have gone through Top Gun since its founding in 2009. Companies enter the program at various stages of growth. Many are already generating revenue, most are in product and business model development, a handful are still in the research stage.
Top Gun matches entrepreneurs with mentors and offers learning sessions to help them make decisions at pivotal junctures in the development of their startups, and to create and target specific pitches to potential customers, employees, partners and investors.
Entrepreneurs credit the program for fostering an ecosystem that does exactly what O’Brien suggests — encouraging participants to ask for help and advice and thus helping them accelerate growth.
Like O’Brien, many simply don’t know what they don’t know.
They find the classes and a deep bench of mentors key to their company’s growth. They become part of an ecosystem that includes peers, mentors who are experienced entrepreneurs and professionals who donate time and expertise. They also become part of a startup community that includes programs such as MassChallenge, CleanTech Open, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses and Scale Up America — some of which they enter.
Possibly most importantly, they get increased access to funding.
“I like to think of it as a continuum of care” that together contributes to a company’s success, says Tom Rainey, executive director of Maine Center for Entrepreneurs. “Once you’ve formed a company and want to get your boot camp in along with a cohort of like-minded individuals and tap into network of mentors, that’s when you go through Top Gun.”
New perspectives
“For me it was about connecting with the entrepreneurship community,” says Heather Chandler, who founded the SunriseGuide LLC in Portland in 2006 and has taken part in various entrepreneurship programs since then, including Top Gun in 2014. The company publishes a coupon book that steers consumers toward local businesses with a low impact on the environment.
Top Gun helped her expand to online publishing. One mentor changed her perspective on how to hire.
“I had this idea that salespeople needed to be gregarious to be successful,” she recalls. Instead, she learned how to develop different hiring matrices that included varieties of characteristics, ultimately hiring someone quiet but persistent.
“She turned out to be great,” she says.
In tandem with Top Gun, the company had one of its biggest years ever with the launch of new print and digital publications, growing revenues 30% from 2014 to 2015 and 40% overall since then.
“I always felt fortunate to have started my business in Maine,” she says. “You often hear people saying Maine is not friendly to business. My experience was completely the opposite. There’s an incredible support system for entrepreneurs here.”
Defining a business model
Many graduates say the mentorship network is the best part of the program, and continues to be long after graduation. It was critical to partners Stacy Moore and Ashley Lenz, who own Healing Harbors, a Brunswick startup that produces hemp-infused body and pet care products and coffee.
In the 2000s, Moore, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and health care giver, began creating hemp-infused salves designed to help relieve pain. She was approached by Lenz, who came from a career in marketing and was interested in Moore as a potential client.
Instead, in 2017, they became partners in the fledgling business.
“We have complementary skills sets,” says Lenz. “I’m about marketing, branding, social media, business pitch decks. She’s brilliant at understanding the plan, caring for people and being the heartbeat. So we joined forces.”
An early decision, in 2018, was to enroll in Top Gun. Lenz had experience with sales forecasting and budgeting, but none with bookkeeping and hiring. Moore had many products in one store, but no defined business model or even a website.
“We needed to define the product line and go with the things that were most effective and most scalable,” says Lenz.
They learned how to create a system that tracked product sales and analyzed cost of goods.
“With that, we were able to make educated decisions about which products could go away and maybe come back later, and which products needed to stay and be promoted harder because they would be best sellers,” she says.
They rebranded the company, created a tag line and built an e-commerce site. They recently moved operations from Lenz’s home to a new shop and spa in Brunswick. They hired two part-timers and expect to hire another. They’re now selling direct to consumers and have expanded wholesale to over 50 stores, mainly in Maine but also Oregon and Atlanta, where Lenz is originally from. During Top Gun, they set an aggressive sales goal to go from $37,000 in 2018 to $160,000 in 2019. By year’s end, they reached $216,000.
Despite the pandemic, revenues remain steady.
“We’ve done a pretty good job of grabbing what we need,” Lenz says.
Works in progress
The educated decision-making Lenz refers to is central to Top Gun’s mission, says Kay Aikin, who founded Portland software development company Introspective Systems in 2010 and enrolled in Top Gun two years later.
Top Gun “lets you look at your idea critically and really dive into it,” she says. “So many entrepreneurs have that, ‘Well, I thought of it; it’s got to be phenomenal,’” she says. “It’s not. It’s a work in progress. I’m still learning new things.”
“The best piece of the program was to have a mentor to walk through everything with me,” says Heidi Vanorse Neal, co-owner of Loyal Biscuit Co., a dog and cat supply boutique with seven Maine locations. She is a 2020 Mainebiz Women to Watch honoree.
Neal enrolled in Top Gun in 2014, when she had three stores. She was trying to figure out why one wasn’t doing as well as the other two. Conversations with a mentor helped her realize that, although the stores were within a 20-mile radius of each other, the markets were vastly different. She learned how to gather and analyze input from customers, break down the types of services and products they were looking for, and create separate marketing plans.
“It set the stage for not only growing my business but also growing myself, because after that course and through other participants who were in it at the same time, I learned of other opportunities,” she says. For example, after Top Gun she enrolled in other business education programs.
The common theme?
“Without them, you get stuck in the day-to-day trenches, putting out fires,” Neal says. “For me, one of the best things was the ability to sit down and write a plan, with goals and action items, which I would never have taken the time to do otherwise. Stepping away and having assignments that need to be done and growth plans that need to be submitted, and having someone hold you accountable, makes you look at your business in a different way.”
