Access to capital, mentorship and business education continues to challenge entrepreneurs, particularly those building in underserved communities. One Emory University program is working to close that gap, one micro business at a time.
Start:Me Accelerator, housed at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, supports early-stage and scaling micro businesses across metro Atlanta. Erin Igleheart, who leads the program, joins the latest episode of Business Trends Today to outline how the initiative operates and why it continues to produce results more than a decade after its founding.
Who it serves
Start:Me targets small businesses with one to five employees and less than $50,000 in startup capital, which Igleheart calls “your local makers and bakers and fixers and doers.” The program operates on a place-based model, meaning Goizueta partners with trusted local nonprofits to deliver programming directly inside the communities it serves.
Current partnerships include Friends of Refugees, serving Clarkston and neighboring communities; the Eastlake Foundation, covering Eastlake, Kirkwood and Edgewood; Focused Community Strategies and Purposeful Schools Atlanta on the city’s south side; and the Growth Park Foundation on Atlanta’s west side.
According to Igleheart, community ties are a central part of the application process. Entrepreneurs must demonstrate a genuine connection to their neighborhood, via residency, employment, schools or faith institutions, which ensures that business success feeds directly into local economic health.
How the program works
Start:Me runs cohorts of 15 to 20 businesses over four months, pairing each group with 25 volunteer mentors. The curriculum covers foundational business content, the building blocks entrepreneurs need to operate sustainably. The program welcomes both early-stage startups and more established businesses that may have gaps in their foundational knowledge.
“Sometimes what you find is that maybe they built the house and skipped part of the foundation,” Igleheart said. “You can go back and shore up the missing pieces.”
At the end of each cohort, mentors and entrepreneurs jointly select grant recipients through a peer-selected capital model, meaning the community itself decides where the money goes. Start:Me distributes roughly $66,000 per cycle across four simultaneous programs, with individual awards ranging from $500 to $5,000. Recipients invest the funds in equipment, certifications and other business needs.
When businesses exhaust initial funding, Start:Me helps connect them to the broader capital ecosystem, including Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), credit unions and the Small Business Administration (SBA), rather than providing ongoing direct grants.
The role of mentorship
Igleheart identifies mentorship as the program’s most valuable component. Mentors commit to attending every weekly session and continuing to work with entrepreneurs between meetings. Many return year after year, some for a decade or more.
"Entrepreneurship is empowering. It's a passion project for many. It's such a calling, but it can also be really lonely... It's really helpful to be able to lean on a supportive pool of mentors who bring a wide variety of skill sets."
Igleheart notes that mentors come from both large corporations and entrepreneurial backgrounds, and Start:Me deliberately builds small mentor-entrepreneur teams designed to maintain relationships beyond the formal program.
Proven results
Since launching in 2013, Start:Me has run 37 cohorts and graduated nearly 600 local businesses. Approximately 70% of those businesses remain in active operation. Collectively, alumni employ 1,100 people beyond their founders, operate 113 brick-and-mortar locations and generate $36 million in annual revenue.
Notable graduates include Katmandu’s Dog Chews, a Himalayan yak dog chew company founded by a PhD chemist that has grown into a multimillion-dollar venture available through major retailers, including Chewy. Another alumnus, Con Artists, operates as a talent agency specifically connecting returning citizens and those in recovery to stage productions, television and other media opportunities.
How to get involved
Entrepreneurs, mentors and supporters can visit startmeatl.org to apply for the program, volunteer for business skills or browse and shop the products and services offered by Start:Me’s 583 alumni ventures.
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