🔒Top Gun program gives a leg up to innovators

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Susan MacKay and Bill Keleher spent two-plus months in the same Top Gun program, but it wasn't until the last class, when they heard each other's elevator pitch, that they realized they might be able to do business together.

“I pitched our membrane technology for a water filter that uses a natural product DNA, and Bill pitched a service to produce highly purified DNA using fish blood as a value-added material,” explains MacKay, CEO of Cerahelix Inc. in Orono. “Now they're on our potential supplier list.”

Adds Keleher, president and CEO of Richmond-based Kennebec River Biosciences Inc., “During the last class we figured out there could be synergies between the two companies going down the road.”

That's just what the Top Gun program intended, according to Don Gooding, executive director of the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development, which helps oversee the program started in 2009 to boost growth at promising Maine early-stage businesses with classes, mentors and networking. “Innovation often comes from unexpected intersections,” says Gooding. “Those kinds of intersections will continue to happen.” And it's one of the reasons the program was recently expanded beyond its roots in Portland and Bangor with the new Top Gun Prep course that will be run throughout the rest of Maine.

Unlike Top Gun, which requires participants to attend classes and activities in person, Top Gun Prep is an online course. Starting Sept. 19, it will include weekly webinars and interactive discussions on customer development, revenue streams and business model innovation. And because it is largely a preparatory course in business, it will serve as a spawning ground for future Top Gun classes.

The nine-week, $300 course, launched by MCED, Target Technology Incubator and the Foster Center for Student Innovation, is open to up to 100 participants. Blackstone Accelerates Growth will underwrite a limited number of scholarships for future entrepreneurial students at any Maine college or university. The program is a one-credit course that may be added to a student's transcript if their educational institution allows it. Also, Sunrise County Economic Council is working with MCED to expand the program into Washington County by offering 80% scholarships toward tuition to local businesses and residents, and by hosting networking events.

In a separate development, the Northern Maine Development Commission's Caribou Entrepreneur Program will pay for Top Gun Prep for three entrepreneurs.

“We're doing a program to get companies ready to present plans to local investors. Top Gun Prep will get them ready for that,” says Rod Thompson, Small Business Development Center director at the commission. Selected entrepreneurs can come into the commission's office for the webinars if they are within 50 miles.

Virtual entrepreneurship

Gooding notes that it is a challenge for entrepreneurs in Maine to launch innovative businesses when they are scattered all over the state. The Top Gun program, which typically admits companies in early product development up to $1 million in revenue, has a mandate to be statewide.

“By building a statewide community on a virtual basis, it can substitute for face-to-face meetings,” he adds. Unlike the startup accelerator TechStars, which has locations in Boston, Boulder, New York City, Seattle and San Antonio, Top Gun does not invest in its participating companies, he says.

Getting more people from more areas of Maine to participate via the new Top Gun Prep program is a good thing, says Top Gun graduate Ben Polito, president and co-founder of Pika Energy LLC, a Gorham-based developer of renewable energy sources for home owners and small businesses. He expresses some reservations, however, about the new program's virtual nature.

“Nothing substitutes for being there in-person,” he says, noting that virtual lessons do work in some cases. For example, during his Top Gun program, he found a virtual presentation by Silicon Valley entrepreneurship educator Steve Blank to be very useful, and would like to see more such talks. Blank's textbook is being used in Top Gun Prep. But the virtual sessions are necessary because of the large geographical area that needs to be covered, Gooding says.

The new program also will help entrepreneurs prepare for mentor relationships when they enter the Top Gun program.

“People get more out of mentoring if the [business] basics are covered, so Top Gun Prep will turbocharge the mentoring relationships,” Gooding says. “There are a number of companies that are not quite ready for mentoring, but they can get ready with the curriculum. We're trying to build a funnel.”

He adds that Top Gun will change the way mentors and entrepreneurs get matched. To date, the entrepreneurs chose their mentors, but now it will be the other way around.

“There will be a higher bar for entrepreneurs to make themselves available and actively go after mentors,” he says, “and the mentors will buy more into the relationships.”

The mentoring is a key draw of Top Gun. Keleher of Kennebec River Biosciences says his mentor, Biovation CEO Kerem Durdag, was great.

“If only to meet him, it was worth the whole Top Gun experience. We still keep in touch,” says Keleher. “He is a sounding board for a variety of issues, including growth, employees and marketing. It's important to find someone you trust and they can open up about their experience.” MacKay adds that it helps to work with the mentors because they have founded other companies.

MacKay and other Top Gun graduates say the Top Gun Prep courses are a good idea because they will help to get all Top Gun participants on the same footing. “We could have used a Top Gun class in accounting ahead of time,” agrees Pika's Polito. “That's what's great about Top Gun Prep. It's a basic program to give people background that is very helpful.”

But for Keleher, whose company was around for 13 years when he started the program, business classes weren't of as much interest as the opportunities to network with other companies and mentors. He says he also enjoyed the free flow of ideas, such as learning where to get services.

“And we met people we didn't think we'd meet except through happenstance, like Susan MacKay. Companies tend to work together out of necessity in Maine,” he says.

Growing past small

Keleher says the Top Gun programs add another dimension to the landscape in Maine's innovation, along with the Maine Technology Institute.

“It's almost like we are a backwater,” he says. “One of the fascinating things about being in Top Gun is seeing all the different innovative companies being grown in Maine. There is a nucleus and a developing innovative economy.”

MacKay says Top Gun was a catalyst for getting her new company, Cerahelix, off the ground. She attended Top Gun to figure out what to do with the ceramic nanofiltration technology that didn't quite fit into her first startup company, Zeomatrix LLC, and ended up forming Cerahelix to develop it.

“I was struggling with some decisions and I was feeling isolated. I didn't understand how to work with potential customers,” she recalls. “Top Gun helped me a lot.”

She adds that Maine is a great place to start a business because of resources like MTI and Top Gun, but once started, it is hard to grow the business to the next stage. That's an issue that is on the radar of Gooding, who says that Maine is the fifth most concentrated state in terms of small businesses of less than 10 people.

“Part of it is not thinking big, of not having a bigger vision and articulating that. It's not part of the business culture here in Maine,” he says, adding that the first session in Top Gun is “thinking big.” The modest character of Mainers plays a role, he says, as does the gap of knowledge in what it takes to build a big company. “People's attitudes will change when they start to see other possibilities,” he says.

That's what attracted Stephen Voltz to Top Gun. The co-founder of EepyBird, the Buckfield company that made the viral Diet Coke and Mentos videos, says that after two years of business, he and his co-founder realized they weren't controlling where the company was going.

“Our business started because we did a video and our phone rang off the hook,” he says. “But we basically ended up with a business where we did one project a year, then rowed out to sea to catch another whale. We needed business planning information about areas where we had blind spots, and to learn about different pricing models and cash flow issues.” He heard about Top Gun from his brother John, who is executive director of Blackstone Accelerates Growth.

“One of the issues for us and early-stage Maine companies is seeing a vision of how big you can be,” says Stephen Voltz. He received a lot of help at Top Gun from mentors Geoff Lamdin, a special projects consultant with Left Field Solutions, and Steve Koltai, senior adviser at the U.S. Department of States Global Entrepreneurship Program. It was Koltai's background at Warner Brothers, where he helped launch the interactive entertainment operation, that was the most helpful, Voltz says.

“We had a chance to have clients from all over the world. Koltai opened our eyes to this,” he says. “He suggested we use a studio model and build a collection of creative works to weather the creative bursts and droughts.” The company's videos help publicize corporate brands.

Voltz says mingling with other Top Gun participants also helped. “Even though our businesses were different, a lot of the problems were the same, such as health insurance, getting an accountant, pricing.”

And while the company is courting international clients, Voltz says Buckfield is the only place for it to be. The area is home to many artists, including the vaudeville entertainers and storytellers at the Celebration Barn in nearby South Paris. The local infrastructure of artists has the talent needed to produce the videos, he notes.

Pika's Polito also made a conscious decision to locate in Maine and tap the local talent pool. He is one of the many Mainers who left the state to attend college and start a business, but eventually returned last year. “I always wanted to come back to Maine to start a business,” says the MIT engineering graduate. “There's definitely a quality of life component to the decision, plus the quality of the work force. It's about creating a community and a group of people. And with the Internet, people really can start world-class companies out of Maine.”

MECD's Gooding says there's no reason to panic if talented people leave the state temporarily.

“The boomerangers are a model for success in the long term,” he says. Gooding says the next step with Top Gun Prep and Top Gun will be to market them outside the state.

“We are definitely on the path to becoming an entrepreneurial state. We're bringing in world-class ideas and providing world-class education in innovation,” he says. “We don't compare ourselves to Massachusetts and New Hampshire. We don't want to be them; that's why we're here.”

Writer Lori Valigra can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.