Tech-powered initiative aims to boost Black-owned firms

A group of Indianapolis-based organizations has come together to create Indy Biz Pass, which the organizations describe as a first-of-its-kind network designed to support local Black-owned businesses.

“Nothing like this exists anywhere that we’ve seen around the country,” said Emil Ekiyor, founder and CEO of Indianapolis-based Innopower, the entity at the heart of the project. “People have different tools, but nothing has been customized for a specific demographic within a specific community.”

The initiative’s centerpiece is IndyBizPass.com, a website that launched publicly this month. Supported by $440,000 in grant funding from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, it serves as a sort of one-stop shop for Black-owned businesses to learn about and connect with a variety of resources, including funding sources, business accelerators and training providers.

“We believe there’s so many resources, but people just don’t know how to access them,” Ekiyor said.

To date, 39 organizations have signed on to the platform. Ekiyor said his goal is to bring that number to 100 within 12 months and more after that. “The tool is just at its beginning stages now, and it will continue to morph.”

Innopower aims to accelerate growth in Black communities through entrepreneurship, talent development and social impact.

The Indy Biz Pass website uses a platform from Metaimpact, the Indianapolis-based startup co-founded by longtime local tech executive and entrepreneur Scott McCorkle. Indianapolis-based think tank Sagamore Institute is also involved with the effort.

The project’s roots date back to 2020 with the release of a JPMorgan Chase & Co.-funded report titled “The Indianapolis Small Business Ecosystem Assessment.” That report, one of nine such efforts in cities around the country, focused on how the pandemic and racial injustice affected Black- and Hispanic-owned companies in Indianapolis.

New York City-based Next Street and Oakland, California-based Common Future produced the report based on research conducted from July to October 2020. The report defined small businesses as those with 50 or fewer full-time employees.

Among the report’s big takeaways: Minority and immigrant businesses might not know about or be able to access existing resources. And, in Indianapolis’ relationship-driven business environment, minority entrepreneurs might miss out on opportunities because they are not part of these social networks.

“There is a need for deliberate relationship-building between businesses owned by [people of color] and decision-makers in the city, with particular emphasis on procurement and capital,” the report noted.

Finding, using, prioritizing

Those conclusions resonate with Jean Poole, founder and CEO of Anderson-based business coaching and consulting company E Cubed Performance.

Poole, who is Black, had years of business experience before founding E Cubed five years ago. She previously owned a State Farm insurance agency and, before that, held a variety of corporate training, sales and marketing jobs in the Philadelphia area.

Poole said entrepreneurs without that kind of experience might struggle to find the business help they need.

“There is no shortage of resources,” she said. But “people don’t know where they are. And when they do find them, they don’t know how to use them. And when they do know how to use them, they don’t have enough time and don’t realize how to prioritize which ones are most important for them based on their stage of business activity.”

To address some of the concerns uncovered in the 2020 report, Chase turned to Innopower and Sagamore, organizations the bank had worked with on previous projects. Out of those conversations, Indy Biz Pass was born.

Chase provided an initial grant of $140,000 in October 2022 and a follow-up grant of $300,000 in October 2023.

“We thought it was an incredible, great investment,” said Phylicia Manley, Chase’s vice president of global philanthropy. Manley is based in Chicago, but her service territory includes the Indianapolis market.

Manley said Chase might offer additional funding for the Indy Biz Pass effort.

Sagamore Institute, which has helped Innopower and Metaimpact build the Indy Biz Pass website, is the recipient of the Chase grant. Sagamore, in turn, is using the grant to pay Metaimpact and Innopower for their work on the project and for the costs of events and marketing associated with it.

Project stages

To lay the groundwork for the Indy Biz Pass website, organizers first needed detailed information about the resources local Black entrepreneurs were seeking.

So for the first phase of Indy Biz Pass, Sagamore Institute secured a $435,000 grant from the Indianapolis African American Quality of Life Initiative, which itself is a partnership of the National Urban League, the Indianapolis Urban League and the African American Coalition of Indianapolis and is funded by the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc.

That $435,000 grant, awarded in April 2023, provides low-cost, one-year co-working memberships to 200 Black entrepreneurs whose businesses generate annual revenue of less than $80,000. The first 100 entrepreneurs entered the program in August 2023, and a second group of 100 will enter the program this August.

The selected entrepreneurs pay the deeply discounted rate of $25 per month to access any or all of three local co-working sites: Co-Hatch at 6151 Central Ave. in Broad Ripple, Maven Space at 433 Capitol Ave. downtown, and P30 Indy on the far-east side, at 3039 N. Post Road.

The goal, said P30 co-founder Tamise Cross, is to introduce Black entrepreneurs to the value a co-working space can offer—especially for those who might feel alone in their ambitions. Then, after that first year, some of those entrepreneurs might sign up for full-price memberships.

“They go to different co-working spaces where they’re able to network with other Black entrepreneurs that have already gone through the same experiences,” Cross said. “They’re able to see these people in those spaces, develop relationships and increase their network, increase their social capital.”

Cross said the program already has a waiting list of interested entrepreneurs for the second year.

Those first 100 entrepreneurs, Ekiyor said, also served as a sort of focus group for the Indy Biz Pass website. They provided input on what type of resources the site should highlight and are expected to be among IndyBizPass.com’s earliest users.

The featured organizations and resources aren’t new, but what is new is that Indy Biz Pass has pulled them together in one easy-to-find spot.

The technology

Another new feature is the capability of the site itself.

Metaimpact, which launched out of Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha in December 2018, offers a platform where customers can build online networks of collaborators working together to address complex challenges. The platform is intended as a third-party, neutral space where users can share information as they work toward a common goal.

“Connectivity is key because the problems we’re talking about, their scope, can’t be solved by any one organization,” said Metaimpact CEO McCorkle. “We have to create a collective impact, and that’s the foundation of what we’re doing.”

The concept can be difficult to grasp in the abstract, but here are a few examples.

One customer, the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, is using Metaimpact to coordinate its work on the Drawdown Georgia Business Compact, a statewide effort to bring carbon emissions to net zero. Dozens of organizations of varying sizes, including The Coca-Cola Co., Delta Air Lines Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Norfolk Southern Corp., are part of the effort. All members of the compact can use Metaimpact to collaborate and coordinate their efforts toward that larger goal.

In another example, Indianapolis-based TechPoint is using Metaimpact to coordinate efforts for its statewide tech workforce growth initiative called Mission 41K.

While IndyBizPass.com might look like a regular website to its users, on the back end, all participating organizations can connect with one another, learn who’s doing what, and discover where service duplications and gaps might exist. The platform also provides those organizations with information on user metrics, including which resources they’re seeking on the website.

“It makes it so much more dynamic than doing a static directory,” Ekiyor said.

He said the Indianapolis Foundation is working with the Indy Biz Pass effort to help participants set specific goals.

Still to come for the site: adding resources to help Black-owned companies win business contracts.

The city, the state of Indiana and some local businesses have set supplier diversity goals to increase the number of contracts they award to minority-, woman- and veteran-owned businesses.

This represents significant opportunity, Ekiyor said. But “to be able to bid and compete for these contracts, you have to be prepared,” he added.

To that end, IndyBizPass.com plans to add resources on topics such as how to become certified as a minority-owned business, prepare a bid and build the business capacity to execute a government contract. Those resources should be on the website by October, Ekiyor said.

Sagamore Institute also has a longer-term goal in mind.

Rob Panos, Sagamore’s chief of staff, said that once Indy Biz Pass scales up and gains traction with organizations and entrepreneurs, the concept could be replicated elsewhere.

“Ultimately,” he said, “we hope this can be a model for other communities where we could go to Gary or we could go to Evansville, or wherever, and bring a similar approach.”•