December 24, 2012
By Kelli Dugan | kdugan@al.com
Jim Corman
MOBILE, Alabama – Of his 59 years, Jim Corman spent the first 53 in Atmore, happily starting telecommunications companies, selling them and starting over.
When he and his wife Jane found themselves empty-nesters six years ago, however, the serial entrepreneur and independent angel investor could think of no valid reason not to take a part-time teaching position in entrepreneurship at Auburn University.
A series of fortunate events and meetings have since inspired Corman to help give the Alabama business community that which it’s long-lacked and desperately needs: an statewide investor network respected across the Southeast for its depth and breadth of both intellectual and financial capital.
Of course, Corman is the first to remind budding entrepreneurs that success rarely happens overnight and often eludes even the most organized and well-intentioned startups.
“I started my first company as a senior at Auburn (University), but it crashed and burned,” he said, noting the enterprising spirit was too strong within him, and he went on to launch six more companies over the next three decades.
Two of those ventures didn’t survive, but four were successful.
“The largest of those companies grew from a startup with me and three ladies in a rented house in Atmore to 2,000 employees and 2.2 million customers nationwide,” he said.
Ultimately, Corman said he successfully exited the first profitable operation by selling to a larger, publicly-traded company, and he agreed to stay for a few years post-merger in upper management but learned quickly the environment was too slow and political for his taste, so he struck out and did it all over again – and again.
“I love building. I love creating, and I love the small-company environment, where you know the people and have a relationship with the employees and the customers. I just never got comfortable in that publicly-traded environment, and I never wanted to leave Atmore and south Alabama,” he said.
Following the first successful exit, however, Corman did ask his wife to set aside a portion of the proceeds to start investing in early-stage companies that weren’t their own.
“It’s the very definition of angel investing, and it’s at this point I started my dual life,” he said.
An entrepreneur's love story
Over the course of the next 24 years, Corman invested in 47 companies that were not his own – almost always as a passive, minority stockholder – and decided in 2006 to take the Auburn job and continue investing but resist the urge to start any more companies.
About three years ago, Corman was invited to speak to the Houston Angel Network and “fell in love” immediately.
The formal entity of angel investors, he said, gathers regularly, pays dues and then hires staff that leads the effort to find early-stage companies that need funding, screens and identifies the most promising contenders and then leads the necessary due diligence.
The successful companies are then asked make presentations during the monthly membership meetings, and every members fills out an assessment card rating the presentation.
“I saw three companies present that one day, and the quality of both the companies presenting and the due diligence that had already been performed on them was so much better than anything I’d ever been able to do as an individual angel investor. Then factor in that with such a large membership you’re not writing nearly as big a check, and I just fell in love with it,” Corman said.
Upon returning to Auburn, Corman contacted the national Angel Capital Association about starting his own local network and by 2010 he’d amassed a group of 38 investors.
The national association also put Corman in touch with Dick Reeves, who served as executive director of the state’s then-only angel network in Huntsville with about 60 members. Auburn’s network mirrored the Rocket City’s, hiring a part-time executive director who just happened to be Corman’s son, Clay, fresh off a stint with an Atlanta financial institution.
After comparing notes, Corman, his son and Reeves realized they were wasting hundreds of hours at each location via the executive director’ exhaustive role: find the companies and deals, evaluate them and identify which ones require due diligence, leading the due diligence team, organizing the necessary meetings and then coaching that management team on its presentation should enough interest be expressed to warrant one.
“With that structure, the average was only one to two deals per year nationwide, and we knew we could do it better,” Corman said.
The result was the formation of the Angel Investor Management Group, designed specifically to manage multiple networks and allow pooling of dues income in order to reach the critical mass needed to justify hiring full-time staff that could handle brokering seven or eight deals annually.
“And instead of being relegated to bringing deals back to one individual network, we could take them on a road trip to all,” Corman said.
A 'passion for helping entrepreneurs'
The AIM Group launched officially in October 2011, executing contracts with both the Auburn and Huntsville networks. Birmingham followed suit in April, creating the Central Alabama Angel Network and executing the same contract, as did Mobile’s existing Gulf Coast Angel Network.
Under the current structures, local executive directors operate as bird dogs, finding the companies in need of funding, and then the larger AIM Group serves as a central screening and due diligence arm.
With 58 members strong in the Mobile area, 35 in Auburn, 38 in Birmingham and as many as 60 in Huntsville, the AIM Group now boasts as many as 190 members statewide
“We have a passion for helping entrepreneurs in the state of Alabama,” said Corman, noting that five of the nine deals negotiated in 2012 were for in-state companies.
For the full report on the Angel Investor Management Group, click here.
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