Factory Manager Shares Bloomington Center Priorities and Goals

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Earlier this month, I summarized The Mill and our startup’s 2022 achievements. It’s great to look back on big wins and get motivated for the next year. So what does our future look like? Our four top priorities and goals for 2023 are:

hire new staff

The Mill has a very hard-working staff and needs more talent to fulfill its mission to launch and accelerate startups and its vision of becoming the center of entrepreneurship in Indiana. am. With 12 he started the year. 8 full-time and 4 part-time. This year, we plan to hire 4 full-time employees and 1 part-time employee for a total of 5 people. Some of these include a dedicated venue manager, a dedicated community manager (previously these two roles were combined for him), and his startup coach.

This last one is essential for founders and has the most direct impact. Building a company can be difficult and a lonely journey. Founders need all the advice and support we can provide. In addition to your existing paid and volunteer mentors, you need a startup coach to work with founders to help uncover blind spots. Ideally, find someone who has left the company. He may also combine multiple people who can specialize in one topic, such as fundraising, go-to-market, sales, and finance. Founders can “choose their own adventure”.

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Selling additional services

The Mill generates revenue through a variety of sources including coworking memberships, event rentals, corporate sponsorships, individual donations and grants. We are also selling some of our services and hope to offer even more this year.

We sell services like Flywheel Fund. Investors pay us dues to participate. We run our own startup pitch contests, so we have the knowledge to run them for other cities. It manages pitch competition for the City of Fort Wayne.

There are also opportunities to sell pre-accelerators to other organizations, especially universities. Think of pre-accelerators as a class on how to get your startup up and running. He typically runs for an intensive period of 6-12 weeks and is led by an instructor who teaches the curriculum and introduces founders to mentors and investors in a variety of activities.

Last year we had great success with our three pre-accelerators. One of them is the Office of Innovation and Commercialization at Indiana University. Most universities have technology transfer offices that try to build companies on the intellectual property created by professors. The pre-accelerator acts as a coercion mechanism to pull some faculty members off the sidelines and otherwise join the technology transfer office.

build a tech center

This week, the City of Bloomington and the Mill announced an expanded public-private partnership. This will boost Bloomington’s innovation economy, attracting cutting-edge companies and creating high-paying jobs. The Mill will manage the development and marketing of the Trades District, a 12-acre portion of the Bloomington Certified Technology Park.

The first order of business is to hire executives to market and develop your trading district. The hire also finalizes the vision of the Tech Center, a corner building at The Mill. They oversee its construction, solicit tenants, and build collaborations and partnerships with key stakeholders.

Construction of the Tech Center is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2023. In 2021, the Economic Development Authority (EDA) awarded his $3.5 million CARES Act Recovery Assistance grant to the Bloomington Redevelopment Commission (RDC) and Bloomington Economic Development Corporation. tech center. RDC, acting on behalf of the city, pledges her $1.6 million to the project, matching the federal investment.

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Extend your programming

We’re constantly improving and improving our programming, but there are some specific enhancements we’ll be focusing on for 2023.

Code/IT Academy, a code school for the unemployed and underemployed, will expand to Washington and Crawford counties. In partnership with Ivy Tech, we are already conducting three cohorts each year for Monroe County residents. Focuses on CompTIA Security+, Intro to Web Design, AWS Cloud Practitioner, and more.

Bloomington Remote moved 24 people to Bloomington last year. These people, in his first year he generated $1.7 million in economic impact. This increases year by year and generates tax revenue for the city. They bought homes (half of the new hires bought homes; the average is $457,000 compared to the citywide average of $300,000), supported small businesses, and kept the city vibrant. contributes to One of his first recruits, Pablo Fuentes, served on the board of Buskirk’s Chumley Theater and founded the Cosmic Songwriters Club, where singer-songwriters perform original works.

It also expands Flywheel Fund into Greater Lafayette and South Bend Elkhart. We’ve already invested statewide, but what does it really mean to ‘open a chapter’? We also give our thumbs to the scale of local businesses to ensure we source and develop startups that meet our investment criteria. We aim to invest one-third of our capital in local startups and the rest throughout Indiana.

We are excited about our plans for 2023. If you would like to participate, please email us at pat@dimensionmill.org.

Pat East is the Executive Director of The Mill. The Mill is a non-profit entrepreneurship center with a mission to launch, accelerate, and ultimately become the center of entrepreneurship in Indiana.

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