An Interview With David Monkman, President And CEO, National Business Incubation Association (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How else do you work with your partners?

David: Like any trade association, we depend on partners to help sponsor NBIA and our members. Typically, what we do is we have a level-based sponsorship model. For certain advertising rates, we will promote a partner’s product to our members.

For higher levels of sponsorship, there would be more advertising channels employed and a greater number of impressions sought. So, for example, the cost per impression for a $5,000 sponsorship would be close to 30,000 impressions.

A $50,000 sponsorship, just to give you a sense of how large the range can be, would involve more than 1 million impressions. So, we try to be an advertising partner for vendors that want to provide services to incubator managers or their clients.

We don’t currently have a revenue-sharing model we employ. It’s something that we’ve considered. About three years ago, we tried it, and what we found was that it was very difficult to have, concurrently, a level-based sponsorship approach and a revenue-sharing approach because everybody who was in one camp preferred to be in the other.

So, for example, if by special invitation we worked with somebody whom we thought had tremendous prospects and we really wanted to endorse, even if they would go so far as to have a white-label solution for us so we could have an NBIA brand featured, we found that it ended up cannibalizing the other sponsors who participated more conventionally.

There is a knowledge services division that is currently reviewing client service models to see if we can come up with a set of vendors that have products that might be good products to feature in a novel way, including revenue sharing. I’m not sure if we’re six months away from that or 12 months away, but it’s not an immediate opportunity.

We’re hoping to have our new director of development join soon. We want to be committed, and the revenue-sharing model is a new approach, one that we found to be a little problematic in the past. We’re going to continue to explore how we can modify it to make it more effective.

Irina: What about training for entrepreneurs?

David: Well, the tools that incubator managers often use are FastTrac and NxLevel. As you can imagine, it varies considerably from place to place, but I would think that those are the ones that feature quite a bit among the people I’ve talked to.

Irina: I am familiar with FastTrac. It is developed and licensed by the Kauffman Foundation, right? How is it priced for incubators?

David: I know that it’s expensive. I don’t want to say something that’s factually wrong, but I think that it was priced as something like a 13-week event.

I think the challenge that some people have with it is that it’s such a long program. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach. This is another concern people have shared with me. The prices recently increased remarkably. So, I know that clients are being crowded out [because of] the change in price structure.

I know that they have a training-of-trainers program and, typically, they work through the SBDC (Small Business Development Centers) network, if I’m not mistaken. I think that a lot of FastTrac and NxLevel training also gets deployed through that channel.

So, you have licensed trainers administering the education. I don’t know how much they charge attendees to participate. I think it varies from place to place.

You might also want to look at programs like TriStart and you might want to look at Startup Company and their product called StartupWheel. They’re sponsors of NBIA.

They’re of interest to us because they are playing in this important space that we want to play in, the client services space. We want to introduce a rich set of vendors to help in that entire process.

Irina: Thank you, David. Fantastic insights.

This segment is part 4 in the series : An Interview With David Monkman, President And CEO, National Business Incubation Association
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