Images via Getty Images/Composition by Michael Burmesch
Gener8tor
Joe Kirgues remembers March 10, 2020, as if it were yesterday, and that’s a yesterday the Milwaukee native does not want to relive.
“I was returning from a presentation in Beloit, and I opened up the news to see that the world had shut down,” says Kirgues, cofounder of Milwaukee business incubator and startup accelerator gener8tor. “I was overwhelmed. My first thoughts were about our future and the futures of the alumni companies we had helped start. How were we going to survive this?”
Ironically, on that same day Fast Company magazine named gener8tor to its 2020 list of most innovative companies serving the music sector, helping musicians and groups navigate their industry, access resources, and create recognition among their various publics. Known as Backline, the 2018 Milwaukee program was created in partnership with 88Nine Radio Milwaukee and eventually gave birth to Motown Accelerator, which operates similarly in Detroit.
“Unfortunately, that was the world’s worst week to get press,” Kirgues says. His main concern then was how and in which direction to help his company and its alumni firms pivot to make the best of what for some he knew would become the worst possible situation.
“In retrospect, it was a real culture builder because we banded together with our community,” he adds. “In some ways it feels like we are still navigating through the pandemic. I will tell you one thing, the game certainly goes faster than the rules.”
Navigating the Digital World
Fortunately, gener8tor and its alumni were in relatively good position to operate in a world on lockdown. Founded in 2012 by Kirgues and several other partners, the company serves as a business startup and accelerator, matching entrepreneurs and investors in a dynamic environment designed to dramatically reduce the time from business inception to economic success. Patterned after similar firms in the Silicon Valley, Kirgues said the idea was relatively new to the Midwest.
“We got together because we wanted to write a love letter to Milwaukee and enable community members to create start-up businesses,” said Kirgues, a lawyer by training and an entrepreneur by design. “Venture capital is one of the best levers to enable growth in a community, and our process is designed to cross race and gender lines to speed the influence.”
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In that area, gener8tor has had some notable success. In November 2020, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance announced that it would, in partnership with gener8tor, dedicate $20 million of its venture capital funding to Black-founded businesses, which traditionally receive only 1 percent of available venture capital. The Northwestern Mutual Black Founder Accelerator began its first 12-week program earlier this year.
Gener8tor’s accelerators—methodologies that allow entrepreneurs to experience business growth in five to 12 weeks that otherwise might have taken 10 to 12 months—operate outside a purely venture capital environment. The firm’s mentorship program curates applicants so they are able to compete among the top five companies in their business lines. Weekly meetings with and advice from experienced gener8tor staff help entrepreneurial newbies sidestep the chronic self-doubt that can undermine new business owners and realize higher success levels.
Workwear Start-Up
In May 2019, with gener8tor’s help entrepreneur Anastasia Kraft started Xena Workwear, which provides women working in STEM jobs and manual trades with stylish and comfortable safety shoes and work wear, something she found lacking during her career as a consultant for Caterpillar Inc., a major manufacturer of construction and mining equipment.
“Many traditional safety footwear manufacturers applied the so-called ‘shrink it and pink it’ concept where they take men's boots, make them smaller and adjust the color,” says Kraft. “I believe that women deserve better products that are designed to fit our bodies.”
Xena experienced a slight downturn at the start of the pandemic when it was forced to cancel its live try-on events and women in engineering wound up working from home, but that trend has reversed itself and sales once again have increased, Kraft notes.
“We were happy about the fact that our team already worked remotely, and that our core focus was on the e-commerce side,” she adds. “Xena Workwear is doing great! We had an exceptionally strong summer, sold out of most of our inventory in July, which is a good problem to have, and this month will be launching a stylish lace-up safety boot with waterproof leather, ready to perform in any environment.”
Other alumni companies have similar stories to share. Originally targeted at startups in Milwaukee and Madison, gener8tor now operates 50 programs within 28 cities nationwide and has started receiving queries from overseas as well. It’s alumni list has reached 160 companies in its accelerator programs and another 300 for its gBeta plan, a free seven-week accelerator for early-stage companies with local roots. Most of its alumni companies are North America-based, but this past March the firm launched a partnership with Luxembourg to strengthen trade lines between the State of Wisconsin and the European Union country.
Earlier this year Fast Company named gener8tor a Best Workplace for Innovators. The fact that so much of its work is done online and through digital means from the start makes their training efforts and reach more effective and expansive. “We had a front-row seat in our shift to digital consumers, and some of our companies are seeing business growth through the roof,” Kirgues explains. “On the other hand, some of our founders are struggling with ways to staff their growth, while others are having some of the worst weeks out their lives. We’re helping them handle those challenges as well.”
Welcome to Pandemic 2.0
For gener8tor, the pandemic’s onset brought its own struggles. When the lockdown was first announced, the accelerator firm had to cancel five major stadium events as well as other live activities, which caused revenue percentage losses “in the high double digits,” Kirgues says. More and more of the firm’s work moved to digital platforms, which added efficiencies of time and cost, enabling the company and its alumni to better manage its resources.
“Our job was to help small businesses understand what they could do in the face to the pandemic,” Kirgues continuess. “There were a lot of one-to-many communications going on and thousands of one-on-one phone calls. March 2020 was a very rewarding, but a very difficult month.”
To help companies cope with pandemic restrictions and loss of sales, gener8tor added a workforce development initiative to its service portfolio. Being a startup company is difficult enough, Kirgues says, but doing so during a global health crisis adds a crashing wave that even many seasoned entrepreneurs were unable to ride.
“We had to create new ways to support businesses that did not qualify for bank loans or venture capital,” Kirgues explains. “We needed to reconsider how we deployed our efforts to enable virtual programming and invite those who don’t necessarily qualify for federal aid into the process.”
As part of those efforts, gener8tor in October 2020 partnered with Microsoft to offer an “upskilling” program that enabled participants to increase their technical skills and employability during a period when many businesses simply stopped hiring. The program, focused on the 10 most in-demand jobs in America, was piloted in northeastern Wisconsin, then expanded to locations in Indiana, Virginia and Wyoming with an eye toward further growth.
“It was unusual running a company that was an emergency response effort,” Kigues says. “But we’ve changed and have learned to run our accelerators in both an in-person and virtual environments. I think we’re one of the larger workforce development efforts in the country based on sheer volume.”
Business triage will continue to be part of economic development as the delta, lambda, mu and who know how many other COVID-19 strains continue to emerge. Gener8tor’s ability to operate virtually puts them in a unique position to serve a global community that increasingly exists online and whose participants operate remotely. Thanks to the pandemic, the economy and business worlds have changed and those who succeed will be the ones most able to change with it, Kirgues says.
“I have been shocked and awoken to what else is in the system needs to be changed,” he adds. “That, in turn, has changed me as a person in ways I would never have guessed.”
Michael Muckian was the banking and finance writer for the Milwaukee Business Journal and is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Financing and Accounting and The One-Day MBA in Finance and Accounting.
