Pitch competitions stoke Maine’s startup environment

File photo / Tim Greenway Tom Rainey, executive director of the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs, and Sue Hanson, the center’s program manager.

Photo / Tim Greenway Bluet, winner of Greenlight Maine’s Season 2, makes its pitch at the finale en route to winning the $100,000 prize in the televised entrepreneurial pitch contest.

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By Laurie Schreiber

Maine has a flourishing support network for start-up and early-stage companies that’s rooted in the organic growth of industry clusters like aquaculture, electronic commerce, food and beverage, and financial technology.

Entrepreneurial pitch competitions like Top Gun, “Greenlight Maine,” and Gorham Savings Bank LaunchPad, offering awards of up to $100,000, are designed to provide new companies with capital they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access through traditional financing. Competitions, along with mentoring and training programs, provide a leg up to startups and early businesses as they travel the path from bootstrapping and sweat equity to becoming attractive to investors and bankers.

What may be more valuable than cash awards is the support network of mentorship and technical consultation that helps entrepreneurs achieve stability and grow in a sustainable way. The programs mitigate risks that traditional financial institutions face when deciding whether a new business is worthy of a loan.

Often, banks and investors steer start-ups to organizations like SCORE, a nonprofit that matches retired executives with entrepreneurs, and the Small Business Development Center, a program of the U.S. Small Business Administration. SCORE, founded in 1964 and relying on volunteers, is perhaps the granddaddy of business support. Small Business Development Center was established in 1977 to provide business advising, training and educational resources.

Maine Center for Entrepreneurs started in 1997 as a startup incubator. It began its entrepreneurial training program Top Gun in 2009. Since then, it’s helped accelerate the growth of over 200 startups. Recent notable “grads” include Garbage to Garden, a Portland-based service company that hauls away household waste that can be composted and brings back rich garden soil, and Bixby & Co., a Rockland maker of high-end chocolate bars. All together, graduates have generated more than $25 million in revenue, obtained $7.5 million in capital formation and produced more than 125 Maine-based jobs.

Beyond Top Gun, the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs offers one-on-one counseling, workshops and a Maine Mentor Network with over 100 volunteer business mentors.

As a result of Top Gun’s success, the center in 2016 launched a scale-up pilot program, called E*Next, to support the growth of more-established small and medium-size businesses. In 2017, MCE partnered with FocusMaine to adapt its scale-up program for a new one called Cultivator. Cultivator includes business assessments, action planning, coaching and mentoring, access to consultant support and industry-focused workshops, all designed to help startups get to next-stage growth.

Maine Venture Fund has also been around since 1997. Its mission is to provide resources to attract, support, and help develop eligible small businesses with the potential for substantial growth and success. Since 1997, the fund, a revolving “evergreen” fund created by an act of the Maine Legislature in 1995, has invested $20 million in Maine companies.

Those successes inspired other support programs. LaunchPad was founded seven years ago; Greenlight Maine is now in its fourth year.

The entities are synergistic. For example, Maine Venture Fund investors are more apt to invest in new companies that have been through programs like Top Gun.

Maine’s start-up environment is also seeing growth in business incubator and co-working spaces, which help business owners save on costs like rent, consolidate them for support services like coaching and business workshops, and promote collaboration between businesses. Ellsworth’s Union River Center for Innovation, for example, opened in 2016 with a focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) businesses. Its first tenant, GenoTyping Center of America, has since expanded to additional lab facilities in Waterville.

In 2018, Big Room Studios, a Portland software design and engineering firm, crafted a detailed, interactive map of Maine’s 200-plus startup businesses. One goal is to show how integral the startup ecosystem was to today’s giants, like WEX and IDEXX, long after they matured as companies.

Research and development team leader Emily Straubel says, “I hope visualizing these clusters on the map inspires leaders in those communities to collaborate and reach out to newer startups and help them grow.”