President Jim Ruble called the meeting to order promptly at 12:28, with the ring of the bell and welcomed everyone to today’s meeting.

Susie McMurry and Dan Odell were the greeters today, and Dan introduced the members who brought guests:

Mark Owens had us all stand and lead us in singing “We Shall Overcome”

Brad Bodoh, received his Blue Badge today, great job Brad!!

Jeff Edgens, sponsored by Dale Bohren, then gave his classification talk and told us a little about himself. He is the UW Casper Director and has been in WY since mid-May. He is also the associate Dean of the outreach School. He started his career in Michigan and got his PHD at Michigan State University in Natural Resource Management and did his dissertation on private property rights and the importance to property ownership. He worked at the University of Kentucky as the Natural Resources extension person. From there he has spent his career in administration with both 2 year and 4 year institutions. He has two children his daughter Savannah is 20 and his son Kip is a senior in HS. His wife Janie is from SC and they met in college. His hobbies are golf, shooting and hunting and he is an Eagle Scout. He also used to teach conceal carry classes in Georgia and Kentucky. He is really loving Casper and the winter to him is much better than the winters in Michigan because we get days that have sunshine unlike back in Michigan.

President Jim said that Dan Odell has cards going around for Brenda Peters and Martha Rakestraw. Jim spoke with both of them and they were doing better.  

 

PE Richard Schwahn introduced our speaker today, Jerad Stack, from Breakthrough 307. Breakthrough 307 is a group of private investors whose aim is to help new businesses get a good foothold in the business arena. With the changes that are going on in the world with the way business is changing in about a dozen industries and the way the consumer has changed the way and where they shop and how technology has changed there is a need to help create more innovative businesses. The way products are being made and who is buying them has made it to where it does not matter where the product is produced. New innovative startups can be anywhere so why not Wyoming. Jerad teamed up with Charles Walsh to put together this idea. They started doing research and found a couple of things that Wyoming needed to improve in order to have more businesses here. The worst is access to capital, Wyoming is dead last for access to capital and we are 48^th for technology and innovation. The rest of the rankings we are in good places so the bad areas are where they decided that they should focus on improving. Wyoming has people who want to create business and invest in new businesses but there was no vehicle to help make this happen. They also discovered that there are not enough places where entrepreneurs can go to have a mentor to help them know what challenges they will face and what to do in order to overcome those challenges. There are some groups around the state and so they are working to try and get them to work together in order to have a better network for the new entrepreneurs. They are also putting together a group of service providers like CPA’s, bankers’ etc. to better help and they are putting together angel investors so that with all of these connections maybe more of the startups will be able to survive and prosper. They decided that they need to put together a fund to provide seed financing at early stages to get the business off of the ground. So they put together a group of 20 investors to create this fund and they did it in six weeks. They are looking for companies to come pitch their ideas and then they take a vote on which ideas they want to invest in so they can get the company to a profitable place and then hand them off to banks or other investors to make them grow even more. With the group of 20 investors they are able to be diverse in what they invest in and are able to provide expertise in many different areas of business to also help grow these new companies. They are wanting to target four industries that they feel would be what they want to invest in that they have expertise and that they feel will be successful in our area, those four are, Technology companies, medical or biomedical companies, energy technology and manufacturing. They have a fund of 2 million however they do have access to neighboring states that have similar groups that they can turn to for those times that more capital is needed. They also allow any of the 20 investors to put in more money if they want. You can get more information at www.breakthrough307.com; they also try to work with the incubator to get more help for the entrepreneurs and also get referrals from the business incubator.  Everyone that they have spoken to wants to help; he said that Wyoming really has a big family of very supportive people.

 

President Jim Ruble concluded the meeting at 1:06 letting us know that next week we are back at the Parkway Plaza and the speaker will be Chad Nelson talking to us about Wyoming Health Fairs.