Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Chris Heivly, Executive Director, LaunchBox Digital (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Chris: The board of advisors for each company enrolled will include two LaunchBox partners and two to three outsiders, who will meet every week for an hour and help to drive this company through the 12-week program. It’s really great. I sit in on every one of those [meetings]. It’s just the most fun thing in the world.

In general, what we’re trying to do is – and this is a gross generalization – but we’re trying what we call the three P’s, where we’re working on their plan, which is about their business model, their product, and their pitch. So, plan, product, pitch.

In general, what we’re doing, in the first three weeks, is putting a ton of pressure on their ideas: how they’re going to go to market, how they’re going to validate ideas with potential customers, and how they’re going to develop revenue models that scale and makes sense.

That’s where that board of advisors can put pressure on and ask the questions that probably haven’t been asked yet. As the entrepreneurs morph out of the plan and start to build or change the product they’re envisioning that supports this plan, that board of advisors may bring in people who are specific to that company’s needs. That board of advisors is starting to look ahead and say, “We’re going to need a customer acquisition expert in health care. Who can we get to help out?” That’s the role of the board of advisors. That’s one leg of the stool.

The other leg is that about eight times over the 12-week period, we pull together a panel organized around a specific theme or topic. So, one of them may be about to run a board of directors meeting.

We do it early on so that these first-time entrepreneurs know how to sit in a room with five type A, very good serial entrepreneurs and figure out, How do I run this meeting? How do I get what I need to get out of it? We might have two or three people come in and do a quick one-hour panel on how to do that.

[We cover] topics like, How do you run a meeting? How do you make your first sale, if it’s more of an enterprise product? How do you protect your IP and generate contracts? How do you find contractors, if that’s what you’re going to need?

We run about eight of those themes over the 12-week period, and what happens in that three-hour period is we spend about 30 minutes as a panel of two or three experts. Then we stick those two or three experts each in a different office, and the companies cycle through to each of them.

That’s where they can get one-on-one ideas that are specific to their companies. At the same time, they also think about how many times they have to tell the elevator versions of their companies.

Three people times eight topics, that’s 24 times they walk through and say, “Who are you?” And [the companies] get to tell people who they are. That starts to build great practice over the 12 weeks.

The last leg of our stool is more informal and more fun oriented. Every Friday, we have a founder lunch and a happy hour. That’s when I bring in [people who’re] not able to give a ton of time. They’re currently involved in their second or third startups.

They may be on their first startups, but perhaps a step ahead. They’ve maybe raised a series A or B. I bring them to a very informal setting and we sit around and eat pizza. It’s not structured. The entrepreneurs ask questions: Who are you? What are you doing? How does this work? How did you get through this?

The object of that and of the happy hours is to connect them with the rest of community, and to show them that their fears, concerns, and challenges are very similar. They have brothers and sisters out there . . . cousins, if you will, in the community. These are people to whom they can reach out and say, “How am I supposed to think about this? And how important is this?” Those three legs of the stool connect each entrepreneur with somewhere between 40 and 50 people over the 12-week period.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Chris Heivly, Executive Director, LaunchBox Digital
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