What constitutes success for a pre-seed or start-up company? Or, for that matter, an established manufacturing company?
Unlike a sporting event, where success is determined by points on the score board, a start-up’s measure is open-ended and can take any number of routes: New infusions of investment. New grants. A merger. Acquisition by a larger entity. The hiring of additional employees.
For an established manufacturer, who’s been in the game for years, success is largely determined by increased revenues and profits from new products and refined processes.
To date, HTR has incubated more than 75 companies and worked with dozens of small to mid-sized manufacturers, offering extensive hands-on coaching, mentoring, and other assistance to accelerate their business growth.
To “graduate” from HTR’s mentoring and incubator programs, companies must have achieved customer validation in the way of purchase and use of their product or service, and they must have raised sufficient capital to sustain their business going forward.
Following are a few of the success stories HTR is proud to be a part of.
CaterTrax is a successful growing technology company today because we were able to learn while in residency at HTR how to translate our passions into actionable business plans that provided repeatable, scalable processes for improvement, growth and client acquisition. - Rich Rund, Co-Founder and CEO
Lumetrics took up residency at HTR in 2003, graduated in 2008 and moved to its own facility in 2011. With HTR’s help, the company licensed thin film measurement technology from Eastman Kodak and created OptiGauge, a new approach to non-contact optical measurement of multi-layer materials that is fast, accurate, flexible, and scalable to almost any QA laboratory or manufacturing operation. OptiGauge systems are in daily use at Fortune 500 companies in the medical, pharmaceutical, food packaging, eye-care products and coatings industries and currently counts among its customers six of the top 11 medical device manufacturers in the world.
Lumetrics really benefited from being at HTR’s Lennox Tech Enterprise Center. Working with other start-ups allowed us to learn from each other’s mistakes. In addition to the simple yet critical things like easy access to copiers, internet access, conference rooms, and over-head projectors, we had the experience of coaches with real world experience in our field. Having these coaches allowed us to reach not only the right customers but also investors for later rounds of financing. We even created relationships with parts suppliers that have lasted through our move from the tech center. I believe that this model is a tremendous engine for growth in the Rochester area. - John Hart, President and Co-Founder