“We are the Mill. We help make amazing stuff. We help you kick ass,” the Hamilton Mill proudly proclaims on its homepage.
It’s that simple attitude that guides the Hamilton, Ohio-based incubator’s work, all the way back to 2002 when it was originally established. Currently, HM offers mentorship, office space, funding and other resources to accepted participants, and serves as a sort of hub for entrepreneurs between Dayton and Cincinnati.
However, the Hamilton Mill as it is today is the enterprises' second iteration, said Antony Seppi, its community and economic development leader. For around 12 years, HM was known as Biztech. Although it was still an incubator, it was in "the valley of death," as Seppi called it, with more of a focus on professional services as opposed to helping startups develop their ideas.
“We completely blew up that whole concept in 2014,” Seppi continued." The city of Hamilton leadership and government sent me and my colleague down here to right the ship and start over, rebranding it as The Hamilton Mill.”
Seppi said that the rebranding was an effort to increase the enterprise’s focus, to examine the strengths of Hamilton and Butler County at large and to discover how the incubator could galvanize the efforts of entrepreneurs in both the town and the region.
“Ultimately, we want them to eventually graduate from this program with a viable business."
HM landed on being the go-to “small business incubator for green, clean, water, digital and advanced manufacturing technologies,” in part because of the city’s progressive attitude towards green tech.
“In the two or three years since we’ve done that, we’ve had tremendous success,” Seppi said.
Having such a specific focus was an intentional move. “We made a conscious decision not to be another ‘me too’ incubator/accelerator,” Seppi said. “We recognized that there were a good number of those around the region." Finding one's area of expertise and pursuing it would set HM a part.
One of the ways HM has done this is by including a brewery in-building. “It was one of the first projects when we came over here, my colleague and myself,” Seppi said. The duo wanted a brewery, so they worked on recruiting a team that was passionate about establishing one. Dubbed The Municipal Brew Works, it sits in the old firehouse of HM’s building, and it’s “going gangbusters from a growth perspective.”
Brewery aside, Seppi said that HM works with companies and startups that have moved past the idealization stage or who have a working product that the team can connect with pilot opportunities nearby. Currently, there’s around 15-20 startups represented in the HM’s main program and an additional six or seven in the forthcoming cohort of Pipeline H20, an accelerator program for water tech-focused companies that HM also manages.
HM participants can expect to “work on a product, test their product and hopefully end up with some paying customers,” Seppi said. “Ultimately, we want them to eventually graduate from this program with a viable business, a sustainable business, located here in the region, in Hamilton, in Butler County or Cincinnati, or Dayton. We’re pretty unselfish from that standpoint; we want the region to be successful.”
Seppi added that being able to help the founders who get into HM’s program is an enormous personal boon. “They have a passion about their startup, their business team; to be a part of that and connect them [and] help them be successful is pretty rewarding in itself,” he said. “That’s really what drives me.”
