Business Incubator Series: Troy Henikoff, Excelerate Labs – Chicago, Illinois (Part 10)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What are your daily personal challenges? What do you think could help you to be more effective?

Troy: You mean other than having 48 hours in the day?

Irina: Yes, other than time limitations.

Troy: My role is overseeing the operations of Excelerate. More important, it’s working one-on-one with the companies. I have weekly meetings with the companies that are formalized.

You can picture an hour-long meeting with each company. What I love to do is roll up my sleeves and get involved and help the companies in a meaningful, hands-on way. Whether that’s digging in on their SEO strategy, because I have a lot of deep knowledge of SEO, tearing apart the financial model, or making introductions to potential investors and mentors, that’s the stuff that I personally do.

We have a larger staff than we did last year. We have more volunteers and interns than we had last year. I hope that I will be able to spend more of my time on those value-add projects and less of my time on the logistics of Demo Day and dealing with the House of Blues; or the logistics of putting together a meet-up for mentors and companies. We have a little more help on those things.

Irina: Is there anything that you’re going to be doing differently over the next five years? What does the future look like for your accelerator?

Troy: Last year was its first year. Our accelerator was on the scene for three months and then disappeared. We had offices space for only three months, because that’s all we could afford.

I think we did a nice job in those three months of prepping the companies. We had an awesome Demo Day. We didn’t have a lot of presence in the community until this year.

One of the things we’re trying to do is figure out how we can have a more lasting presence in the community year round. That might be by having space year round, not just for three months. When holding events, we may do seminars. We may do open office hours in the off-season. We’re talking about experimenting with a number of other things so we can have a bigger impact in the community than on just 10 companies once a year.

Irina: Have you thought about how you could do that?

Troy: Our focus is going to continue, at least for the near future, to be on 10 companies a year. I think there are ways that we can reach the larger community with some of the meet-ups that we talked about, whether we put on seminars in the off-season, or have open office hours that are consistent with our message. It’s actually a form of recruiting for next year’s class and letting people know what we do as well as helping other companies with networking and learning along the way.

Irina: Thank you, Troy. I really enjoyed learning about your work.