The Regional Business Council has matched 15 member organizations with 15 entrepreneurs for a year of mentoring and guidance. This year the Entrepreneur Connector Initiative has teamed up with Arch Grants, Brazen St. Louis, and Cultivation Capital to assist with identifying and hand-picking promising start-up leaders.
“The Regional Business Council is a consortium of hundreds of CEOs of large companies, and what we want to do is really help the entrepreneurial sector,” Kathy Osborn, president and CEO of the Regional Business Council (RBC), said at a recent reception at Washington University’s Knight Center. “So what we’ve done today is brought some of our CEOs together with a group of our entrepreneurs that are matched and they are going to be working together over the next year.”
Participating entrepreneurs benefit not only from direct coaching with CEOs but also from the chance to grow their professional networks among RBC’s business community.
“What we hope is to help to encourage the new entrepreneurs,” Osborn said. “Also, if there are some skills that we have that we might be able to impart, we certainly want to do that and learn more about these companies and hope to help them grow.”
The RBC, founded in 2000, is a consortium of presidents and chief executive officers of mid- to large-sized companies in St. Louis. These companies collectively employ over 120,000 people and generate over $65 billion in revenue annually.
The mission of the RBC is to unite and engage members to act on high-impact business, civic and philanthropic affairs for the betterment of the St. Louis region. With the Entrepreneur Connector Initiative, the RBC encourages the healthy growth of new businesses and supports the future of St. Louis’s new economy.
“Kathy and I were discussing how can the RBC help startup communities,” said Brian Matthews, founder of the Initiative and CEO of its partner Cultivation Capital. “We thought of a mentorship program where we connect the larger companies to these earlier-stage companies to help them grow their business and make business decisions by introducing them to other companies, customers, or potential employees.”
Cultivation Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in accelerator programs and establishes seed funds for start-ups, like the Spirit of St. Louis Fund 1, which they helped establish in 2017.
“It’s a very serendipitous thing,” Matthews said. “You never know when that introduction or that advice that seems so normal to a person with gray hair could change the trajectory of a company.”
Cultivation Capital and Arch Grants both invest in the futures of St. Louis start-ups. Arch Grants offers $50,000 equity-free grants and other professional support to early-stage entrepreneurs.
“For us the key to that is making sure the entrepreneurial community and the established business communities are not only interacting and know each other, but they are actively working to build one another and particularly for the business community to help to build the startups and the new companies that are coming here,” said Emily Lohse-Busch, executive director of Arch Grants.
The initiative’s partners have selected a variety of start-ups, ranging from new clean-energy technologies to fashionable swimwear designers. For example, Shayba Muhammad is the designer and founder of Mahnal Jewelry. She recently won the Brazen St. Louis pitch competition and was recommended for the program by Brazen.
“I’m just hoping I can make some valuable connections and learn a lot and take it with me to grow and scale my business,” Muhammad said, “but also everything that I learn will fall back into the makers program and offering it back to other people.”
For more information on the RBC and its initiatives, visit http://stlrbc.org, email rbcadmin@stlrbc.org, or call 314-225-2100.
