Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Skip Simms, President And CEO, Ann Arbor SPARK — Ann Arbor, Michigan (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Skip: [The entrepreneurs that come to us], everyone’s a little different in their company growth. So, all of our programs are customized. We differ from many incubators in that regard. I think the kind of consulting services that we provide are custom, too; they are specific to particular milestones as opposed to being a generic milestone plan. You know, one lesson fits everybody … we don’t follow that model.

Irina: Where do you usually get the consultants from?

Skip: They are professional consultants who make their living consulting with businesses of all sizes. They have various areas of expertise, as you would expect. Some are more scientific driven. Some are experts in the IT space. Some are just general business consultants who provide core advice on the management and growth of your business.

Some specialize in marketing and provide marketing help, setting up your website, helping you conceptualize your message and getting it to the media. [They’ll] discuss with you how to position things, set up for public relations purposes, working with reporters, and so on, to get you exposure.

[They’ll] work with you on an overall marketing strategy on how to get into the market and talk through those things. We have several consultants, all with different expertise, and we connect them with the entrepreneur and pay for it.

Irina: Would a business use several such consultants?

Skip: Some do, some don’t. We’ve had clients who … the first milestone might have been more product development. When they’re finished with that, the next milestone might be help on their patent work and doing a freedom to operate. We’ll hire experts, sometimes attorneys or other consultants who are expert in patents of a certain type of industry or patents of certain types, who will help them with their freedom to operate to make sure that their patents are written properly so they can commercialize them.

Then, we may engage a consultant to do a market analysis, and engage them with another consultant to do strategic planning and thinking. There can be multiple [consultants] as we move along the growth continuum. The goal is to get to commercialization within a year. They could have two, three, four engagements with us.

Irina: What’s the range of the cost for the consultants?

Skip: It could run anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 per engagement, depending on what it is they’re having to do. We do cap it so that after you’ve had several engagements … we cap it at $50,000.

If you’ve used $50,000 worth of services that we’ve paid for, we say, “Stop. Now, it’s time you start paying for some of this yourself. Along the way, the entrepreneurs have to pick some additional cost on their own, in addition to what we provide.

Irina: What are the sources of your applications?

Skip: Well, the entrepreneurs come from the general area. Many of them are already in Ann Arbor. Sometimes an entrepreneur might be in an adjacent community, an adjacent county, and they feel that [with] the talent base, the growth opportunities, they need to be in Ann Arbor.

We’ll tell them [what’s] in their communities, where they are already; they don’t necessarily have to come to Ann Arbor. Granted, some of the services we provide we can’t give them from elsewhere. But there are other organizations throughout the state that can provide them with a certain degree of help and assistance.

Irina: How many applications do you receive per month?

Skip: We get about 20 to 30 a month. Let me back up one moment and say that a lot of these services, relative to the grants, apply to virtual incubators as well.

A company does not have to be physically in our incubator to get some of these services.  The business just has to be registered in the city, and they can still get some of those other services I described previously.

And then, out of the 30 – let’s say there’s 20 to 30 a month – that give us a call and ask for some kind of assistance, we will provide assistance to maybe five.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Skip Simms, President And CEO, Ann Arbor SPARK — Ann Arbor, Michigan
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