Every small business starts somewhere, and in downtown Mobile a growing number of them start on St. Louis Street. The Innovation Portal, a nonprofit business incubator and accelerator operating out of a renovated former car dealership at 358 St. Louis Street, has spent nearly a decade helping Coastal Alabama entrepreneurs turn ideas into companies — more than 400 of them by the organization’s own count, along with thousands of community members who have come through its programs.
Its executive director, Todd Greer, describes the work in disarmingly simple terms. “The first step is getting started, and often it’s as simple as raising your hand,” he says. “That’s why we are here: to determine your first step.”
More than a coworking space
Visitors who assume the Innovation Portal is just a shared office are missing the point. The facility does offer workspace — membership levels run from a $50-a-month mailbox membership up through community memberships, 26 private offices, and team-level company memberships — along with furnished conference rooms, fiber internet, phone booths, a kitchenette and free parking. But the real product is a structured pathway from idea to operating business.
That pathway begins with a free intake mentoring session. “We want to understand their venture, what they have done so far, and where they want to go,” Greer says. From there, staff help founders work through the questions that decide whether a business can exist at all: Who is the customer? What problem are you solving for them? What outcome is the customer actually buying?
The process is deliberately gate-checked. Entrepreneurs move through a discovery phase, then arrive at a decision point — continue, or redirect. “We usually know within 18 months if a company has what the customer wants, and it’s a viable business,” Greer says. Along the way, the Portal connects founders with legal and financial guidance, helps them understand the funding landscape, and coaches them on how to present to investors and partners. “We help cultivate the process,” he says.
The man behind the desk
Greer’s route to running an incubator was anything but linear. Born in southeastern Michigan, in a town wedged between Toledo, Detroit and Ann Arbor, he earned a communication studies degree at Defiance College in Ohio, picked up graduate hours in organizational communication at Wayne State University, then pivoted to ministry — a Master of Science in ministerial leadership from Amridge University in Montgomery — before completing a Ph.D. in organizational leadership at Regent University in Virginia Beach.
“I love to learn. I like to meet interesting people. I’m curious and enjoy growing my knowledge base through interacting with people, especially from a business perspective,” he says. Earlier in his career he ran the SynerVision Leadership Foundation, a Virginia-based nonprofit that helped other nonprofits build capacity through content channels and regional seminars.
He and his wife Chelsea, a counseling psychologist who joined Spring Hill College’s faculty in 2014 and now serves as training director for the University of South Alabama’s counseling center, moved to Mobile in the summer of 2014. Greer went looking for a coworking space to run his nonprofit remotely — and found there wasn’t one. Working with commercial realtors John Peebles and Allen Cameron, he helped launch Exchange 202 in the former Red Square Advertising building on Government Street, timed to a wave of community interest that followed the Mobile Chamber’s Leaders Exchange trip to St. Louis.
In 2015, Greer became managing partner of Exchange 202, and a Chamber-led group under Hayley Van Antwerp was simultaneously sketching plans for a full-fledged incubator. The two ideas merged: the incubator took shape inside Exchange 202 under the name Innovation Portal. “The pathways to launching a new business were deeply intertwined in the two organizations, and we wanted to help budding entrepreneurs determine if they have a repeatable, scalable business,” Greer says.
A permanent home and a new identity
The Mobile Chamber founded the Innovation Portal in 2016, and for years it operated as a Chamber program. In 2020 — in February, at the height of the pandemic — it opened its own renovated facility on St. Louis Street, a building that had spent earlier lives as a car dealership and, more recently, as the home of Threaded Fasteners. The expansion was powered by a $4.8 million Economic Development Administration grant secured with the Chamber’s leadership.
In 2023, the Portal crossed another milestone: it became a fully independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It still partners closely with the Mobile Chamber, along with the City of Mobile, Mobile County and a roster of private foundations and sponsors. “This work couldn’t happen in our community without the support of the City of Mobile and Mobile County, as well as numerous other private foundations and partners,” Greer says.
The organization has also been named a member of the Innovate Alabama Network, the first statewide public-private partnership focused on innovation and entrepreneurship — a credential that ties downtown Mobile’s incubator into a broader push to keep homegrown startups in state.
Higher education detour
Between the coworking launch and his return to the Portal, Greer spent five years in academia. In 2017, the University of Mobile recruited him to serve as dean of its business school; two years later he moved up to vice president of academic affairs. “Much of our focus was on what business students need in the 21st century,” he says. He and his colleagues built an advisory board of working business leaders to press the curriculum toward real experiences, outcomes and connections. When the Innovation Portal’s board asked him to become executive director in 2022, he left the university for the job he had effectively been preparing for since 2014.
“It’s been an incredible experience,” he says. “Emerging from Covid, there was an explosion of interest in entrepreneurship and new business starts, and maturing our own high-growth companies.”
A startup boom, by the numbers
The moment favored the Portal’s mission. From 2020 to 2022, Mobile County recorded the second-highest number of new startup formations of any county in the United States — a statistic Greer cites with pride but not surprise. “Covid certainly changed the environment of how people work, but it was being re-evaluated way before that,” he says. “Across every demographic boundary, the workplace entry barrier has never been lower. It’s still evolving. Technology is a major influence, and it’s readily available all across the globe.”
The Portal’s staff — Greer, program manager Nick Hampton, who holds a master’s in communication and leadership from the University of Mobile, and Khadeeja Ahmaad, who studied information sciences at the University of Alabama — work as what Greer calls outside problem-solving partners for member companies. The board, drawn from business and civic organizations across the region, supplies the community connections that early-stage founders usually lack. That network, Greer argues, is the real product: the gap between a good idea and a viable company is usually a gap in relationships.
More than 80 companies now work from the St. Louis Street facility in various stages of growth, from solo founders in the community membership to teams renting private offices — including GoodGiant, the design firm founded by Rich Sullivan that grew out of the old Red Square operation.
Why downtown matters
Greer is unambiguous about where he thinks this belongs. “We love being Downtown, and it’s a great time to be in Mobile,” he says. The St. Louis Street corridor has long been discussed as a future high-tech corridor for the city, and the Portal positions itself as a centerpiece of that renaissance — a place where someone with an idea and no connections can walk in, raise a hand, and walk out with a plan.
For a region whose economy has historically run on shipbuilding, aerospace, chemicals and the port, the bet is that the next generation of jobs will be invented as often as recruited. If the past several years are any measure — hundreds of companies served, a federal grant converted into a permanent facility, and a county that keeps ranking among the nation’s startup leaders — that bet is paying off, one raised hand at a time.