MONEY

Michael Burcham leaves big shoes to fill at Entrepreneur Center

Jamie McGee
jmcgee@tennessean.com

Now that Michael Burcham has officially announced he will be leaving his role as CEO of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center next year, the question becomes who will replace him?

To say his successor has big shoes to fill at the Entrepreneur Center barely does justice to his achievements there.

"We need a rock star, who also is a professor, who will work 80 hours a week for very little pay, who is extremely creative," said Tod Fetherling, laughing at the standards Burcham has set. Until recently Fetherling chaired Stratasan, one of the first companies born out of the Entrepreneur Center.

Burcham, who has developed the center into a nationally recognized entrepreneurship hub, said Wednesday he is leaving his post to build his fourth health care company. Since the center was created in 2010, he has transformed it from a small office on Broadway into a 20,000-square-foot building bustling with entrepreneurs that has helped build more than 130 companies generating more than $100 million in revenue and $65 million in funding.

"Our entrepreneur center has become a model for the nation, and Michael's vision and leadership have made that happen," said John Ingram, chairman of the center's board.

Burcham plans to launch his new company this spring, one he describes as "putting the patient back at the center of the care process" that will be similar to palliative care. He says he will remain in his role until a successor is found and he still plans to be involved with the center, either as part of its board, as an entrepreneur-in-residence or as part of the 300-person mentor network that he helped build over the past five years.

He has said from the beginning that he would be with the Entrepreneur Center as long as it was still in its building phase. Once the center was established, it would be time for him to move on and build something else.

"I am committed to being a part of this for a long time to come," Burcham said. "I am deeply committed to what the Entrepreneur Center does. ... What I was brought to do, I've done."

The tall task of finding the next CEO is assigned to Ingram and Mark Montgomery, board member and founder of FLO|CO (formerly FLO{thinkery}). The search for candidates will extend beyond Middle Tennessee's boundaries and include those building names for themselves nationally, even internationally. Deep passion for creating companies and start-up experience is a must, Montgomery says.

The good news for Ingram and Montgomery is that Burcham built a national profile for Nashville and the Entrepreneur Center as a start-up destination, making it easier to lure a qualified leader from more established markets. Five years ago, that would have been a much bigger challenge. While there were new companies being built, especially in health care, the city lacked a central location for all of its start-up activity. The center has since become that starting point for entrepreneurs, helping provide resources, mentoring and funding to new start-ups, as well as attracting those outside of Nashville to the area.

The next CEO needs to be someone who can work with the local business and government leaders and who has had a successful exit as an entrepreneur, Fetherling says. (He said he already has a job starting a new company and is not interested). That experience is necessary, given it's easier for someone to talk about how to start a company if they have actually done it and been through the struggle.

Another challenge for the search committee is the center is a nonprofit, meaning the next CEO would have to be willing to forgo bigger salaries found in the private sector.

Sam Lingo, who has been the second-in-command since the Entrepreneur Center was launched, is chief operating officer and could be a possible contender. Both Marcus Whitney, who just became president of Nashville business accelerator Jumpstart Foundry, and Beth Chase, founder and CEO of c3/consulting, could be considered and, if chosen, would send a strong message about the value of diversity within the start-up community.

Given Whitney's new appointment and Chase's commitment to c3, it's unlikely either will be the next CEO. Similary, Vic Gatto, co-founder of Jumpstart Foundry and a local investor, says he's focused on the private sector.

A local person, already with relationships established in the region's private and public arenas, could hit the ground running, but someone from outside of Nashville may bring new opportunities and new energy, as well as additional recognition to the activity underway.

No matter where the candidate comes from, the job description will be vastly different than what it was for Burcham, who built the center from a vision illustrated with a PowerPoint presentation, as Ingram describes it. With the center already established with a gleaming facility, a track record and a community of mentors, the new CEO will have a different focus.

"Really the EC was a start-up," Montgomery said. (He also already has a job, he says). "You need different kinds of skills for different phases of a company's existence. Michael, in a superhuman way, built something that no one expected to go as far or as fast as it did. He exceeded all expectations of getting the thing up and running and truly meeting its mission. … It gets to be a very different thing when that operation becomes successful and recognized."