Cy Megnin’s entrepreneurial career profited when he was just a young boy.
Mowing lawns, cleaning gutters, selling T-shirts and buying candy bars for a quarter just to resell them for $1 — Megnin always found a way to make money.
“Entrepreneurship is in my DNA,” Megnin said. “I’m not sure where that came from. It was just ingrained in me from an early age.”
Megnin’s resume extends far and wide. Since 2006, Megnin has founded four startup companies along the West Coast and in the heart of Texas. He mentored other entrepreneurs who stepped out on a limb to start their own companies. Now at 44-years-old, Megnin is turning his passion for business into a new kind of service.
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Megnin added a new bullet point to his resume this month, one that brought him back to his hometown of Bloomington. At the beginning of July, Megnin stepped into the role of entrepreneur-in-residence for Velocities, a partnership between Elevate Ventures, Bloomington-based incubator The Mill and the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce.
The partnership, formally announced in December, is designed to develop an entrepreneurship-minded culture and infrastructure in the south-central Indiana area. Included in the partnership was the hiring of an entrepreneur-in-residence who will work with fledgling companies and advise them on next steps in bringing their idea and company to fruition, said Cindy Frey, Columbus chamber president.
“Cy is a serial entrepreneur who understands the unique approach that innovation-driven entrepreneurs take with funding their companies,” Frey said. “We’ve not had someone with deep understanding of the world of angel investors who ventures capital, and that’s what Cy brings.”
Frey said innovation-driven companies are different from small businesses because they often require someone buying into an idea and it’s a riskier investment that may not see a payoff until the concept is proven.
These are companies, Frey said, that serve customers around the world with innovation at the core.
“The role is basically to help entrepreneurs build their company,” Megnin said. “There’s not a playbook where you Google, ‘How do I start a high growth company that’s doing X?’ I’ve started so many companies and I’ve seen so many others — the good, the bad and the ugly. Entrepreneurship can be hard and I wish there would have been somebody like me to shepherd me through all of that red tape.”
Before discovering this position earlier this year, Megnin said he always felt like he had a weird leadership skill set — different from the type of servant leadership he said is discussed in church — that he never knew what to do with.
Now, he said he’s found a job that was stamped out specifically for him.
As an entrepreneur-in-residence, Megnin will be available as a guiding hand to anyone in the Columbus-Bloomington region who is interested in navigating the business world as an entrepreneur. He will show aspiring entrepreneurs, or anyone for that matter, how to raise money, how to create a pitch, how to evaluate a company, how to determine a market and more.
Megnin said the goal is to create jobs internally by helping someone start a business. When they start a business, he said they will inevitably hire more people. After the company takes off, Megnin will be available to help the founder have a successful exit, whether that’s selling the business to somebody, being bought out or creating a lifestyle business.
“People that are on that rocket ride, that kind of creates that drive for entrepreneurship in themselves just like it always has for me,” Megnin said. “You have this effect where this person started this company and she sold out and created 10 millionaires. Those 10 millionaires are going to go out and create their own company, and now you have 10 companies under each one of them. It creates this effect where people want to stay in that ecosystem.”
Megnin said Columbus and Bloomington offer a vast landscape of resources for aspiring entrepreneurs, including the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce and the Indiana Economic Development Corp. His job, Megnin said, is to get everyone — the entrepreneur and the resources — to “row the boat in the same direction.”
“We all want the same thing — we want these areas to grow,” he said. “There are all these assets in both Columbus and Bloomington. Now let’s see where the gaps are and help fill those in.”
Elevate Ventures extends throughout the state with five partnerships in five different regions, including South Bend, Jeffersonville-New Albany, Evansville, Indianapolis and Columbus-Bloomington. Elevate Ventures is currently hiring an entrepreneur-in-residence for Fort Wayne.
The entrepreneur-in-residence can be accessed by anyone at no cost. Megnin said it’s typically when people are stuck that they seek out help from local resources. That’s how he’s connected with other entrepreneurs.
Since arriving in Columbus earlier this month, Megnin said he’s already met several entrepreneurs and has learned a little bit about what they’re doing.
“People are working on big ideas in this city and they just need some help,” Megnin said. “Everybody needs to work in the same arena. For so long, people say, ‘I see that stuff happen,’ or ‘I watch the show “Silicon Valley,” but this is Columbus. That stuff doesn’t happen here.’ It does. It just doesn’t have the exposure it deserves.”
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Age: 44
Hometown: Bloomington
Education: Bachelor of arts in GS Quantitative Economics – IUPUI, 2006; Master of business administration – Baylor University, 2011
Family: Wife, Andrea; son, Jack
Career: Account executive, Data Processing Sciences; regional account development manager, BroadBand Office; vice president of marketing and business development, HomeYeah.com; co-founder, Trugets; co-founder, CloudCoreo; CEO and co-founder, PrepFlash; founder, OCPS
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Velocities is a partnership between Elevate Ventures, Bloomington-based incubator The Mill and the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce.
The partnership is designed to develop an entrepreneurship-minded culture and infrastructure in the south-central Indiana area, including investing in local high-potential and high-growth businesses, portfolio services, educational events for entrepreneurs and investors, marketing support coaching and more.
To learn more, visit velocitiesin.com.
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