Independent filmmakers have long faced obstacles to bringing their stories to audiences. Producing a film takes time and resources, and without a distributor, many projects face a net loss and limited viewership. According to Deadline, Zurich Summit panelists at the 2024 Zurich Film Festival reported that only one out of three indie movies makes money in America. This challenge is exacerbated by the market dominance of streaming services and subsequent consolidation of distributors.

Lindsay Hadley, the founder of Harbor Fund, is working to change that.

“Right now, it’s only a handful of executives that make a lot of the decisions about what gets green-lighted and what gets funded,” Hadley says. “The aim of Harbor Fund is to unlock new capital in a space where the industry is really struggling. We believe there are lots of patrons in the world that have resources sitting in their family foundations and donor-advised funds and can say, ‘I’d like to commission something that speaks to the human soul — something that makes the world better.’”

I was in a Hallmark Christmas movie... in Utah

In the summer of 2024, Harbor Fund became one of the first venture capital-shaped perpetual film funds that is a 501(c)(3). Its mission statement explains that Harbor Fund engages with industry professionals to support productions with charitable purposes, investing “into the equity or debt financing of the films, with any proceeds returned to a self-sustaining, evergreen fund. This capital is then reinvested in new social impact films in perpetuity.”

Hadley realized the potential for Harbor Fund when, after seeing success as executive producer for films such as “Uncharitable,” directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and featuring Edward Norton, she began getting calls to executive produce more films. As momentum picked up, Hadley connected the dots: Even when spearheaded by megastars, independent projects need funding to come to life.

“I am all in favor of anybody that’s trying to think about how you aggregate capital to support artists making films that are important,” says Geralyn White Dreyfous, Academy Award-winning producer and Utah Film Center and Impact Partners Films co-founder. Dreyfous is among an impressive roster of industry experts — including actor Gerard Butler, British television producer Mark Burnett, and founder of Priceline.com and Booking.com Jeff Hoffman — who serve as Harbor Fund advisory board members.

“Philanthropists have been donating and giving grants to documentaries because documentaries have a social element to it. [The] time has come to leverage philanthropic dollars for feature- and television-like scripted films,” Hadley says.

Dreyfous agrees.

“Great films, when they break out of documentaries into the feature space and have a contribution to make, they make a bigger difference,” Dreyfous says. “I mean, ‘Rain Man’ did more to explain what autism is than any documentary ever could.”

Within five months of becoming a 501(c)(3), Harbor Fund had raised nearly $5 million and deployed it in eight different film productions.

Five new productions approved for film incentives in Utah

“These smaller indie films and projects that are more cost-based and aren’t as commercially viable end up not getting bought or seen,” Hadley says. “[Harbor Fund is] trying to bring more capital to the table in independently made films [and financially] support films we believe will make the world a better place. It’s amazing the tailwind it’s had and the caliber of people galvanizing around it.”

Hadley describes the fund as a love letter to filmmakers and a way for benefactors to know their support helped bring these stories to life.

“All of us at Harbor Fund genuinely believe that the stories we tell are the most important things we do as human beings,” she continues. “Regardless of how jaded we can become about Hollywood, it is the most powerful PR engine in the world. Our view is to hijack that with benevolent benefactors to tell stories that actually matter [and] make a difference.”

An offer you can’t refuse

After the SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023, Daren Smith — the founder of Craftsman Films and general partner at Producer Fund — wanted to find a better way to make movies. His solution, Producer Fund I, aims to be a $10 million fund that will produce 10 films in the next four years that “change people for good.”

“The film industry is broken. … The studios took too much,” the fund’s thesis statement asserts. “There’s an opportunity to create a better film industry for creators to work in. To make more by taking less. Instead of the studio model, we use our leverage to create better working conditions, more profitable projects, and give equity to the hundreds of artists that work on each of our films.”

The minimum investment amount is $10,000, and the first two projects are slated to begin production later this year.

America’s film set

According to the Utah Film Commission, 47 projects with in-state production ties are set to film and/or release in 2025, including:

• “The Electric State,” starring Chris Pratt, Millie Bobby Brown and Woody Harrelson. This dystopian sci-fi film premieres on Netflix this month.
• The latest Marvel Universe addition “Thunderbolts” — starring Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Harbour — coming to theatres in May.
• “This Was the Place,” described on IMDB as “a visually captivating environmental thriller … exploring the disappearance of the Great Salt Lake through magical realism and a sociopolitical lens.”
• “The Wilderness,” a drama centering on troubled teens attending a Wilderness Therapy program in the Utah desert.

Ready for a road trip?

Visit Utah’s interactive map plots the locations of over 420 films with local ties, including scenes from “Hereditary,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” “National Treasure,” “Mission: Impossible II” and more. Users can filter locations by the top three most popular types of productions: holiday, horror and Sundance Film Festival selections.

[Utah’s] entrepreneurs are some of the brightest, smartest, hardworking and fearless individuals I have ever encountered.

Brad Bonham

Utah Business proudly presents this year’s cohort of our Leaders of the Year award. These 12 honorees represent accomplishments of Utah’s business community in 2024 and were selected by the Utah Business editorial team.

Brad Bonham

Entrepreneur-in-Residence | State of Utah

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Brad Bonham is convinced the world’s next biggest idea resides in Utah. His mission? To make sure the entrepreneur this idea belongs to has the tools they need to bring it to life.

“It’s not just the biggest idea,” Bonham says, “it’s the biggest and smallest idea. How can I give people the opportunity to break out for themselves and establish themselves as an entrepreneur to achieve their version of success?”

It’s a question Bonham has been contemplating since becoming the first-ever entrepreneur-in-residence for the state of Utah, an appointment made by Governor Cox in 2023. In the volunteer role, Bonham advises on entrepreneurship education, culture and resources within the state — as well as makes recommendations on how to enhance the state’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.

In April of 2024, Bonham unveiled the Startup State Initiative, a program designed to help startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs at every stage of business by bringing together the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and simplifying government processes. A key part of the initiative is startup.utah.gov.

“Startup.utah.gov was originally intended to consolidate resources. What it morphed into is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs to utilize,” Bonham says. “I’ve really tried to make it a weapon in the fight for entrepreneurial success.”

Bonham grew up watching his father start and run businesses, learning lessons along the way. In college, Bonham ran side hustles, buying and flipping car wheels and watches. The gigs gave him firsthand experience while allowing him to exercise his curiosity in analyzing trends.

“I was developing my own pattern of which products I wanted to go after … and that’s when we found furniture,” Bonham says. “It just so happened, especially in that period of time, furniture had extremely high margins.”

This discovery ignited the start of Walker Edison, a ready-to-assemble furniture business that became one of Utah’s fastest-growing companies.

“Walker Edison was the business highlight of my life,” Bonham says.

The success of Walker Edison has taken Bonham around the world, liaising with business leaders and consumers alike. But it’s Utah entrepreneurs that have his heart.

“Every time I go to a college or university here, the entrepreneurs are some of the brightest, smartest, hardworking and fearless individuals I have ever encountered across the world — and they’re right here in Utah,” Bonham says.

As Utah’s entrepreneur-in-residence, Bonham has spent nearly two years traveling the state to convene with entrepreneurs from all walks of life — and business sizes — to identify how Utah’s government can enhance the entrepreneur experience.

Utah is the highest-ranked state for starting a business, and Bonham can’t wait to see what its entrepreneurs do next.

“There are men and women here who have unbelievable ideas who don’t know where to go to start that idea,” Bonham says. “My impact, hopefully, as an entrepreneur-in-residence, is taking away some of those obstacles and enabling them to be more successful than they otherwise would’ve been.”

Education partnerships for businesses just might be the wave of the future. In the case of Utah-based lash company Borboleta, joining forces with beauty education company Milady is a lesson in how two companies with similar missions can empower future artists while encouraging sustainable company growth.

Since its launch in 2013, Borboleta has propelled its way into beauty schools and onto the eyes of those seeking longer, lusher lashes around the globe. The company was founded by Kimber Jaynes, a lash artist building a career in what she sensed was on track to become a booming profession.

From the beginning, Jaynes wanted to use a product she trusted completely — one that put the health of the lash first. But the lash industry was in its infancy, having made its way onto the beauty scene in 2010 with many artists being self-taught. In Jaynes’s opinion, a product to stand by did not exist. So, she set out to create it.

“Our founder started to produce … a safe lash extension product. But where we really grew is [when] we built the first education platform where we created a curriculum,” says Mike Alexander, CEO of Borboleta. “We had 70 educators — and we were certifying 400 students a month across the country as lash artists.”

For many years, beauty schools did not offer lash application training. Borboleta built a strong reputation among budding lash artists by filling the gap with a curated curriculum that paired with its trustworthy lash kits.

The Renaissance of lash education

As Jaynes had predicted, the lash extension industry boomed — and so did interest in pursuing it as a profession. Legislators began to notice. As a result, states around the nation began to require cosmetology and aesthetician schools to teach lash extension application as part of their programs. By around 2018, Borboleta found that, as a result of these mandates, they were training less. Artists were now getting their licenses in school.

“In 2020, we started to pivot,” Alexander says, explaining that Borboleta’s new strategy was to pitch its combined program and products to schools. “We started to see that model become successful but, … we felt [there had] to be a faster way — and the biggest name in professional beauty schools is Milady. Milady is recognized as a leading curriculum provider for cosmetology and aesthetic schools in the United States. Therefore, it’s highly likely that students pursuing a cosmetology or esthetics license will find themselves using Milady’s curriculum throughout their educational journey.”

Founded by Italian immigrant Nick Cimaglia, who launched a one-man barber supply company in 1927, Milady is a provider of beauty and wellness solutions for schools around the world. The company has historically remained product agnostic, meaning that it provides education, but students choose the products they learn with.

No stranger to designing state-approved beauty curricula, Milady saw an opportunity to add lash training to its beauty school programs.

In 2022, Milady debuted its lash extension curriculum, but schools wanted a product to go with it. Alexander says that Milady’s initial survey research indicated a strong desire from schools to pair Milady’s program with lash extension kits tailored to follow their curriculum. That’s where Borboleta came in. Not only did Borboleta offer high-quality lash kits and products, but they also brought years of training expertise, developed since the company’s founding. What once seemed like a distant goal for Borboleta now had real potential: becoming an official product partner with Milady.

A perfect pair

Alexander reached out to Milady, and he got a response.

“It was surreal,” he says. “Both of us were looking at the strategy and trends of the market, and both of us kind of identified each other at the exact same time, which was just really cool.”

Discussions began, and in May, Borboleta and Milady announced a partnership fueled by their shared desire to equip future lash artists with the skills — and supplies — needed to pursue a flourishing career.

“We knew there was going to be demand [from] schools who had never taught lashes before. … Milady has been able to come out and say, ‘We have the solution for you. We have the very best brand with our curriculum lined up together, and we have a team of educators that can come in and support you,’” Alexander says.

This proved to be an added bonus for the schools because, according to Alexander, they “didn’t have to put the resources in to start over.”

Two months into their partnership, Milady’s lash curriculum is now being taught in schools by their in-house education teams, using Milady X Borboleta lash kits. Borboleta offers private trainings to schools utilizing these kits, allowing them to train their education teams in the lash techniques of their choice, using Borboleta’s methods with one of Borboleta’s educators. This approach helps ensure schools, educators, and students are set up for success, with in-house lash experts leading their programs. As students earn their licensure, they are likely to take Borboleta products with them into their careers.

“For our business, it’s sustainable growth. We get the opportunity to teach the lash artist, let them use our products and then support them in their studios,” Alexander says. For the students, bringing “the very best brands together is going to set the lash artist[s] up for success and strong careers for a very long time — that’s what we’re excited about.”

/in/sdicaro

When Sophia DiCaro graduated from the University of Utah with her undergraduate degree, she had her sights set on law school. But then, an opportunity to intern in the governor’s budget office presented itself. Law school, she decided, would wait.

Over 20 years later, DiCaro has forged a successful career in budgeting and planning. She has worked for five of Utah’s governors and was elected to the Utah House of Representatives in 2014. After earning her master’s degree at the University of Utah, DiCaro was asked to teach budgeting and finance in the Master of Public Administration program, which she did for five years. Now, as executive director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget and senior advisor to Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox, she is the chief financial officer for the state’s executive branch.

“I was always interested in that legal path, but the work I did with compliance is all regulatory — interpreting regulation. I’ve been able to live in the world where you’re creating laws and regulations,” DiCaro says. “And I got to make laws without having to go to law school.”

Reflecting on her journey, DiCaro says it all comes back to community.

“That’s what motivates me to the core because life is short. What we do while we’re here on this planet, wherever we can, motivates me to be as impactful as I can and use my skills to try to do some positive things,” DiCaro says.

She has served on several boards and has been named one of Utah Business’ 30 Women to Watch, but chairing the Primary Children’s Hospital board of trustees is an experience that is particularly meaningful.

“It doesn’t get any better than improving the lives of children,” DiCaro says. “You’re really improving your future if you invest in kids.”

Service has remained a source of inspiration throughout her impressive career — one she believes has been successful because of those she has been surrounded by along the way.

“These roles in public service really are a way to do something bigger than yourself,” DiCaro says. “We work as a team to produce all the wonderful things that come out of this office. I would attribute that to not doing anything great alone. You do it with people who have similar motivations, and when we lift each other and match up with a lot of diversified skills and talents, you can really achieve some incredible things.” To Main Page

in/holly-waddington

Holly Waddington spent her childhood learning all there is to know about floors — a natural side effect of watching her parents operate their small business, Carpet Diem.

“I love the foundation that we were built upon,” Waddington recalls. “All of us kids joke that we were brainwashed. Flooring was the only way in our minds.”

After over 22 years working at Carpet Diem, Waddington, who is now the EVP, has helped grow the company from 10 employees to over 60. She has done everything from administration and operations to leading marketing and communications, but it was her time working as a full-commission, outbound sales representative during the 2008 recession that she says really impacted the trajectory of her career — and instilled a sense of grit and perseverance.

“For many years, I was focused just on outbound sales [and asking], ‘How can we bring value to the builders? How can we continue to grow our company?’” Waddington recalls. “Since 2016, I’ve been able to grow the business an average of 38 percent year over year.”

Waddington says the company strives to make builders’ lives easier during the homebuilding process, always remembering that a home is being built for somebody, and the floors are where lives are being lived. Her efforts have yielded incredible results, such as innovating and executing the company’s design studio that now accounts for $9 million of Carpet Diem’s annual revenue and being the recipient of many awards and accolades.

“I am definitely a visionary. I always want to go big, do it differently [and] be bold,” she says.

This spirit expands into service. Waddington is the board president for HomeAid Utah and community service chair for the Salt Lake Home Builders Association. She has designed diaper drives that have broken records and participated in a Professional Women in Building group where she collaborated with professionals across the industry to construct an entire house by all women — a movement that garnered national attention and became a children’s book.

“Utah’s construction industry is so unique in the way that people pull together. We have the privilege of building homes and neighborhoods,” Waddington says. “We also have the obligation to give back to those who are unhoused and aren’t fortunate [enough] to be building a home. We should be doing our part to help them get back on their feet. The more we grow, the more opportunities come that we can continue to give back.” To Main Page

In the early days of Cupbop, Junghun Song stood outside of his food truck hoping to lure hungry patrons over with the fragrant aroma of Korean cuisine. But food trucks often have lots of competition, and when there are multiple trucks in one location, aromas intermingle, leaving fate in the hands — or grumbling stomach — of the wandering customer. Song decided that wasn’t going to cut it. So he started dancing.

A breakdancer at his core, Song utilized his talents to quelch the boredom of waiting for customers while simultaneously drawing their attention. It worked. Very well.

Eleven years later, Cupbop has grown from a local food truck to a global entity. Along the way, Song partnered with Dok Kwon, who couldn’t stop thinking about the food truck and its entertaining owner while living in New York and working as an investment banker.

Through its expansion, Cupbop’s brand remained rooted in the playfulness that helped earn the company a loyal fanbase. It’s an authenticity that is deeply woven into the company’s culture.

“The Cupbop brand got on the map and got its beginning as this kind of fun, crazy food truck with these loud Asians. We want to keep that — and that’s something that we want to show by example,” Kwon says. “Brand and culture are everything. That is the only mode and competitive advantage that we have. Who we are at our core — our brand — is what makes us.”

Culture is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. Companies realize that, in order to keep employees in an ever-changing workforce, creating a culture that allows workers to thrive is key. An Arbinger Institute study revealed that, among leaders surveyed, 90 percent say the importance of company culture is increasing in today’s market. Yet, in a November 2023 article, Gallup wrote that only two in 10 employees feel connected to their organization’s culture. Buzzword aside, knowing what a culture can be is often very different from bringing one to life.

Practice what you preach

“Culture is very hard,” Kwon says. “But one thing we’ll never do is give up on creating better culture.”

Like most things in the business landscape, creating a culture where employees can thrive depends on a purposeful strategy and committed stakeholders.

“The reason why culture is so hard is because it’s so elusive. There isn’t a metric that really tells you, like it does with financials, how much impact we’re having. Sometimes that can be very discouraging,” Kwon says. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we need to put culture front and center over the long term.”

The culture at Cupbop encourages joy. It channels the early days of Song breakdancing in front of food trucks; playing games of rock, paper, scissors with employees; and engaging in hot sauce challenges. It ties back to a brand that was built with authenticity and a desire to connect. As Cupbop continues to grow, Kwon says egos need to be left at the door.

“We have a common goal. None of us are better than the other, and I think the more we try to frame things around what is best for the company as a whole, it helps eliminate a lot of silos and helps give perspective.”

Build trust by hearing hard truths

During the twice-weekly breakthrough groups at The Other Side Academy, residents sit in groups of 20 and prepare to call one another out on their behavior. No one, from the executive director to the newest resident, gets a pass.

“We are all held to the same standard. There is no favoritism. That’s what keeps the organization so healthy,” says Dave Durocher, executive director of The Other Side Academy.

Durocher describes The Other Side Academy as a 30-month residential life skills and training school for “the most lost among us. Our average student has been arrested 25.6 times. We’re dealing with a portion of the population that is very difficult to serve — the long-term drug addict coupled with the criminal piece.”

The Other Side Academy is free for residents — and it is independent from government support. “We take no money from the government at all so we can do what’s best for our students,” Durocher says. “We have social enterprises that generate our revenue.”

The Other Side Academy takes its inspiration from the Delancey Street Foundation in California, where Durocher lived as both a resident and then onsite manager for nearly a decade. In the nine years since The Other Side Academy opened its doors, it has graduated thousands of residents from Salt Lake — and the recently expanded Denver location — who have gone on to live healthy, successful lives.

Durocher says resident success is rooted in accountability. That means being able to call one another out when someone slips up and everyone owning their mistakes, even when the truth hurts. Durocher knows the tactic might feel uncomfortable to bring into organizations, but he believes it is a key component to building a culture where people can thrive.

“You hear organizations talk about accountability all of the time, [but] very few know what that means. At The Other Side Academy, it’s the lifeline of this organization,” Durocher says. “You can’t really have a thriving culture of accountability if you don’t allow your people to hold each other accountable. If you care about people, you tell them the truth.”

Forge connections

The words “I see you,” etched on the side of a cup, inspired the name of leadership consultant Julie Lee’s podcast. It was, Lee recalls, a reminder that she was supported. That someone had her back during a time of her life that she describes as rather dark.

“I was under some really toxic leadership, and I had a complete mental breakdown,” Lee recalls. “I had always been so outgoing. I just crumbled under this leadership and became so not confident in my abilities to do anything.”

Through the compassion of a different leader, Lee slowly revived herself, building up her confidence bit by bit. Her experience piqued her curiosity about workforce culture and behavior. She began inviting people with similarly life-changing leadership experiences onto her podcast. Two and a half years later, she was offered a book contract.

Now, Lee uses her experiences to address leaders who want to humanize their work culture by infusing connection into it.

“People don’t usually leave jobs; they leave bosses,” Lee says. “Connection needs to be a paramount priority in every organization for it to be successful. What I say to leaders is, ‘Happiness isn’t your business — it’s none of our jobs to make people happy — but connection is.’”

To encourage connection in the workplace, Lee reminds leaders that trust is crucial and hard-won. It all begins with clear communication.

“For an employee to thrive, they need to know what to expect,” Lee says. “They need to feel seen as a human, … [know] their strengths are actually being used and highlighted, and … feel trusted because they have a leader that’s willing to ask for help not just give help.”

Engage with the people and culture

After 25 years at Intermountain Health, Chief People Officer Heather Brace has not forgotten where she started. A first-generation college graduate, Brace began her career with Intermountain as a frontline leader. Now, she is responsible for Intermountain’s engagement culture for over 65,000 employees across seven states.

“A deep passion of mine is [thinking about] how we grow our own people because that’s been so important in my own journey,” Brace says.

In her experience, opportunity plays a considerable role.

“Thriving is about possibilities,” Brace says, adding that part of creating opportunities is intentionally engaging with employees to identify what opportunities would be beneficial.

“Engagement is simple but hard,” Brace says. “It’s hard because it requires someone to intentionally do the things. It usually comes down to communication, listening, authentically caring about people [and] connecting with people on a regular basis. Those are the simple things, but they’re hard because you have to do them.”

Brace and her team have found success in thinking about the continuum of caregivers within their organization — employees that range in age from 16 to mid-eighties — and striving not to take a one-size-fits-all approach where possible. This manifests in ways such as how the organization uses caregiver voices to inform policy decisions and offer education benefits that can be utilized by the employee or transferred to a child, spouse or partner. It’s a practice rooted in being authentically engaged — and it works.

“Engagement is two-way. [It] isn’t all about the benefit of the organization; it’s a relationship,” Brace says. “Find ongoing ways that you are connecting both individually and effectively with your team [until] it becomes a habit and a best practice. Ask simple questions. Become a leader that is not a telling leader — be an asking leader.”

Photo by Isaac Hale

Taylor Swift dominated the summer by reclaiming her music and producing a record-shattering tour. Fan or not, the power of her brand has yielded mind-blowing results for the economy. At a national level, the United States portion of the Eras tour is projected to bring in $4.6 billion to the economy. Cities lucky enough to be a stop along the tour have seen the value of the arts as they received a massive boost to their local economies, with places like Cincinnati, where Swift performed two nights, reporting a potential increase of $92 million to the region. 

Utah’s Swift fans know full well that the Eras Tour did not include a stop in the Beehive State. Why? Likely because the state doesn’t have a stadium large enough to accommodate the tour—consider Rice-Eccles Stadium’s seating capacity of 51,400 compared to the more minor stadiums on Swift’s U.S. leg of the tour that seat 70,000 or more. 

Bringing an NFL-sized stadium to the state of Utah could see an increase in megastars adding the state to its tour route (for what it’s worth, Beyoncé and Madonna aren’t stopping through either). Would a potential MLB stadium fit the bill? It’s unclear, but becoming a destination for meteoric performers aside, the summer of Swift is a good reminder of the power of the arts—not just in their ability to help drive the economy, but in the special way they create and build community. 

Economic impact of the arts

While the state might not yet have a mega-stadium, it does have a longstanding reputation for being a place that values the arts, and it’s no stranger to the economic and communal benefits that appreciation carries with it. 

“One in 12 jobs in Utah are cultural sector jobs; arts and culture are deeply ingrained in our society, going back from the original inhabitants of this land: the cultures and the beautiful music, dance, crafts and different artworks that have been created here for thousands of years,” says Derek Dyer, founder and executive director of Utah Arts Alliance (UAA). “Then, when the pioneers came into the valley, the first public building they built was a theater. [They] knew the importance of art on quality of life and building the community.” 

Twenty years ago, Dyer founded UAA with a mission to foster the arts in all forms to create an aware, empowered and connected community. To do this, UAA has theaters, galleries, immersive art spaces and six cultural facilities that focus on different presentations of the arts. 

UAA is behind Urban Arts Festival and Illuminate—both of which see visitors traveling from around the world to participate—as well as Dreamscapes, an immersive experience that oozes selfie opportunities. 

Dyer knows firsthand the economic impact the arts can have on communities, a topic of discussion when working with legislators or business developers. He says 13 percent of tourism in Utah is arts-related. 

Photo by Ross Richey

The 2021 Culture Report published by the Utah Cultural Alliance shares that cultural arts visitors—those whose primary or secondary reason for visiting is centered on a cultural arts experience—spend roughly $650 million annually in Utah’s economy. The arts’ economic impact makes a strong case for increased community support—not just for the money.  

Community value of the arts

“For me, as an artist and arts administrator, the big thing is the quality-of-life impact,” Dyer says. “I think that’s what a lot of people care about. We all think, ‘If I make more money, I’ll be happier because I’ll be able to do more.’ But at the end of the day, even the money is about getting a better quality of life. The arts give people that opportunity.”

Michelle Graves, deputy director of arts and events for St. George, has spent years developing and running programs and events to help build the community. Along with hosting community events, her team is committed to creating opportunities for local artists, such as grants for the arts or stipends from the city to bring in sculptures from the nonprofit group Art Around the Corner to enhance and beautify the downtown area. 

Southern Utah is no stranger to tourism thanks to its proximity to the Mighty 5 national parks, and the St. George Arts Festival has proven to be an added bonus. The festival takes place annually over Easter weekend. Graves says that of the estimated 30,000 people who attend, 30 percent are from out of the area. 

A recent economic impact study released in May and led by Dr. Kristy Grayson, assistant professor of marketing at Utah Tech University, revealed that the festival has proven to be an excellent way of creating access to art for all ages while bringing in a tremendous amount of money.

“The economic value to the community for the arts festival was $30,559,000,” Graves says. “It’s a big economic driver for a two-day festival.” 

Utah’s arts era

Even with its rich history of appreciating the arts, Utah has come a long way since its first performing arts venues were constructed. It has evolved into a place hosting Broadway tours, one of the world’s most recognized film festivals, a celebration of Shakespeare’s works brought to life and urban arts of all kinds. 

Murals, specifically, are bringing color and life to cities around the state; communities are thriving because of it. “Public art, generally across the state, is a good way to create some lively, good energy in certain areas that you may want to see some change happen,” Dyer says. “It’s a very affordable way to create a dramatic change in your community.” 

As Taylor Swift has reminded the world, strong support of the arts, whether through helping local organizations and artists or by building a mega stadium to house performances, has the power to unite—to bring people together for the purpose of shared love in an experience belonging solely to the present moment. 

“In today’s society, we hunger for the arts. We might not even recognize it, but we come out of a great movie, and we feel uplifted. The arts have a way of doing that,” Graves says. “We need that more in our society now than ever before.”

Photo by Jahmanz Williams | Unsplash

Honey and salt. Two simple nouns that, in Utah, can carry a lot of weight. Honey because the bees that create it inspired the Beehive State moniker Utah is known by. Salt for that famous body of water we so desperately need to save. Beyond symbols, the beehive and our state’s incredible supply of salt represent industries that many locals are active participants in—and make being sweet and salty a whole lot more meaningful.

A sweet ecosystem

Mike Browning recalls spending his summer months in Idaho learning the way of beekeeping from his grandparents. His initiation began at the age of three years old. Sixty-four years later, Browning still finds himself fascinated by the life of bees. 

Browning—who is the fourth generation of a five-generation beekeeping family—and his business partner, Cody Lott, are entering their fourth year of owning and operating Honey Bear Hives, a northern Utah beekeeping company. 

Honey Bear Hives has bee colonies placed in various locations throughout the state: near the Great Salt Lake, Davis County and Syracuse. Many of their colonies dwell on the land of local farmers and ranchers—rent paid annually in the honey they produce. 

“You get away from the hustle and bustle [of the] city. Some of the places we go are just so pristine and beautiful,” Browning says. “That’s one of the big aspects of it. The other part is the bees. Bees are just fascinating. Helping them survive and thrive as a colony is fascinating work.” 

Despite the romanticism that working among bees conjures, Browning admits that Utah is a less-than-ideal location for beekeeping. “The drought in the past couple of years has really affected beekeeping in the state,” Browning says. “When it’s too dry, we may have flowers, but they might not have any nectar.” 

Rain is an important factor in keeping bees alive and enabling them to pollinate. Bees derive nectar from flowers that rely on moisture to produce it. Without that nectar, bees don’t have anything to forage. Ironically, Lawn Love reported the Beehive State to be the third worst in the United States for beekeeping in 2023. 

“I would say that the reason people are beekeeping here is not because they sought Utah out as the place to do beekeeping,” Browning says. “It’s more they had an interest in beekeeping, and this is where they were.”

Utah State University reports over 700 beekeepers in Utah. A honey bee survey and report conducted by the National Agricultural Statistics Service estimated that, in 2022, 26,000 honey-producing colonies in Utah produced $3,588,000 worth of honey. Most of the state’s commercial hives are transported to California to provide pollination services for almond crops. NAS’s pollination report claims that, in 2022, the average price paid by California almond growers was $194—which suggests that the value of pollination services for almonds provided by Utah’s beekeepers in 2022 was approximately $5 million. 

Honey bees were introduced to the Salt Lake Valley in 1848, but there is still much to be learned in the way of data-gathering about how beekeeping truly benefits the state and its residents. One benefit is certain no matter how it’s measured: Bees are an important component of our ecosystem. “Bees are critical to pollination of a lot of plants that we need to grow food,” Browning says. 

Salt of the earth

Though he grew up near the Redmond Salt mines in Sevier County, Rhett Roberts didn’t necessarily plan to go into the business of salt. But in 1999, that’s exactly what he did. 

After years of providing consultative and management services, Roberts bought Redmond Clay and Salt from the Bosshardt family, becoming CEO and owner of what is now Redmond, Inc., a parent company with one of its subsidiaries being Redmond Real Salt. 

The Great Salt Lake may be Utah’s obvious landmark for all things salt (the famous body of water brings over $1 billion to the state each year through mineral extraction), but the Redmond Salt mines have been making rounds in headlines—both for its otherworldly surroundings 350 feet underground and the color of its mineral salt.

“It’s different than the salt that comes from the Great Salt Lake and has some different uses,” Roberts says. “It’s reddish in color because it’s full of trace minerals, so that’s why it’s really good for agriculture and human [use]. It also actually helps it perform better on the roads for wintertime road maintenance.” 

Redmond miners excavate salt from an ancient seabed that yields 50,000 pounds of salt per day. Roberts says that, though mining on the property may have started in 1925, there’s evidence to suggest Indigenous tribes that inhabited the area centuries ago were going to the deposit to get salt. “It’s been around a long time,” he says. 

Redmond Real Salt boasts of providing unrefined sea salt mined from a location safe from modern pollutants, a perk of being protected by layers of volcanic ash and clay. Salt mined at the Redmond mines offers excellent nutritional benefits due to the over 60 trace minerals it contains, but human consumption drives only a portion of Redmond’s production goals.

“We’re involved a lot in agriculture and the de-icing markets,” Roberts says.

The company also specializes in bath salts and body care products. Roberts says that part of what makes owning a salt company in Utah fun is being directly tied to one of the very things that make the state unique. 

“There are not a lot of places that have salt,” he says. “The Great Salt Lake is so unique in the world. The salt itself is important. It has unique properties and mineral qualities.”

The Utah Geological Survey Utah Mining 2021 publication reports that salt production amounted to about 3.3 million tons in 2021, with a production value estimated at $200 million. Of the seven salt mine companies operated in Utah, Redmond stands out as the oldest of only two that are homegrown, with Willow Creek Salt—which opened seven years ago—being the other. 

Down in the mines, temperatures hover at around 55 degrees year-round, and breathing in the salty air can have health benefits, which makes being a salt miner for Redmond a major perk. Roberts says that one of the company’s missions is to ensure that miners and all Redmond Real Salt employees love what they do. 

“If we can impact the way people experience work and do work, I believe work can be done in such a way that not only are you more successful economically, but that at the same time, it can elevate the lives of customers and employees just by the way you do business,” Roberts says.

Photo by charlesdeluvio | Unsplash

It’s no secret that the pandemic revolutionized the workplace by forcing organizations to rethink operational strategy when the world was shutting down. Pivoting became the new norm for companies and their employees. Some organizations benefited from the abrupt changes through their ability to adapt. But for many Americans—women in particular—adapting to a new norm meant leaving the workplace altogether. 

Between February 2020 and February 2021, a reported 2.4 million women over the age of 16 dropped out of the workforce, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A survey by the Utah Women & Leadership Project found that approximately 15.9 percent of respondents withdrew from their workplaces during the pandemic by taking a leave of absence, moving from full-time to part-time work, or even leaving the workforce completely. The reasons for this mass exodus vary, but if it could be pinned down to one buzzword, it would likely be flexibility—or the lack thereof. 

Now, companies are hard-pressed to bring women back to the workforce by making good on flexibility—and some Utah companies are well ahead of the curve. 

Modeling core values

Jennica Christiansen had spent enough time working in financial services to know the cut-throat environment wasn’t one she wanted to stay in. Work-life balance was unheard of, and being a real person with a backstory and experiences outside of the workplace felt out of reach. 

“It was like, ‘Oh, you’re a mom? We don’t care. You have demands outside of the office? We don’t care.’ I was looking for something that I felt could fit better in my life,” she says. Enter: CHG Healthcare. 

Christiansen began working at CHG over a decade ago. Her first role was in compensation; she now serves as head of people operations. Christiansen was drawn to CHG because of its mission to make a difference in the lives of those it serves. Ten years later, she appreciates how that mission bleeds into the organization’s culture by making a difference in the lives of those who help it thrive. 

“We have this saying, ‘Free to be me at CHG,’” Christiansen says. “I think, especially as a woman in the workplace, CHG has supported me in every phase of my life over the past 10 years. It makes it a place that you never want to leave.”

CHG, which has over 3,800 employees across 48 states, has long been celebrated for being a great company to work for. In January, the Inspire InUtah initiative recognized CHG as one of 100 Utah companies championing women through family-friendly policies and practices, such as fertility and adoption benefits, and its efforts surrounding pay equity.

Approximately 60 percent of CHG’s employee roster consists of women, and 53 percent of the company’s leadership roles are occupied by women. The company intentionally evolves its practices by going to the heart of the organization first: its people. 

“We survey our people throughout the course of the year,” Christiansen says. “My teams will go through that survey and look for trends. Our goal is always that the programs we provide are flexible and meet our people’s needs no matter their stage of life.” 

Communications specialist Liz Van Halsema says that, after eight years at CHG, she continues to be amazed by how she feels empowered as a woman to grow professionally and personally.

“CHG offers financial wellness classes to teach you about 401(k)s or savings and retirement in general,” Van Halsema says. “Growing up in North Carolina in the ‘90s, a lot of the women in my family didn’t talk about finances. I always saw it as something men learned. I went from knowing nothing about savings and retirement to geeking out about it and feeling empowered to be financially free and independent—and I can share [that knowledge] with my sisters.”

Photo courtesy of CHG Healthcare

Picking up where she left off 

Flexibility in the workplace looks different for every employee and every company. Some organizations can afford to offer more in terms of benefits, but how much a company offers isn’t always the point. It’s the creative ways companies begin to think about meeting employees where they are that can make all the difference. 

Sarah Taylor has enjoyed working in the performing arts as an employee of Ballet West since 2014. A year and a half ago, she transitioned from a director’s role in company and tour management for the regional ballet company to working as the director of business operations for the Fredrick Quinney Lawson Ballet West Academy. 

“One of the reasons I moved over to the academy is I was really excited with the female leadership that was already in place,” Taylor says. “I just thought, when in your career do you get to work on a team of women?”

Women hold 12 of the 17 full-time positions at Ballet West Academy, where aspiring dancers and hobbyists receive ballet instruction at four locations across the state. Many of the main company’s current dancers—75 percent, to be exact—moved through the academy on some level. In Taylor’s downtown office, five staff members work tirelessly to keep operations running and ensure students have everything they need to pursue their talents. They are doing so in an environment recognized by Inspire InUtah as one of 100 companies championing women. 

Ballet West Academy earned the accolade partly due to its workplace benefits, including flexible work schedules, remote work options, multiple campus locations and tuition offerings for full- and part-time employees. For Taylor, flexibility means more than what many have come to expect. 

“A lot of times when we say flexibility, it’s too easy to say that means the ability to work from home or the ability to set a schedule,” Taylor says. “Although those are things that we always work with, in our industry, we do have set class times, and we do have set performance times. For me, flexibility is focused on cross-training—making sure that if you need to leave, the team behind you is empowered to take over and fill in those gaps.” 

A mother of two young children, Taylor has experienced needing to leave work unexpectedly because of a sick child. She has also needed to bring her children to work with her to ensure the doors are open on time for students. But she also knows missing work isn’t always about sick kids or doctor appointments. Sometimes, it’s simply about being able to truly step away. 

In the United States, Americans are notoriously bad at taking time away from work. A 2019 LinkedIn survey reported that 59 percent of workers said they checked in with their bosses while on vacation. In 2021, 82 percent of 1,000 respondents in a study conducted by MyPerfectResume reported working on vacation, with 37 percent of them saying the need to “stay on top of things” motivated them to do so. Female workers are reported to be 20 percent more likely to feel guilty about taking time away from work than their male coworkers.

Allison DeBona with Peggy Bergmann Park City Campus Students. Photo by Logan Sorenson.

“One of our goals is to establish and set up times where people can truly take work off,” Taylor says. “For me, the big transition from Covid is that everything’s virtual. It’s very simple and easy to check-in. So, for women—and men—they’re trying to establish healthy balance. We have a generous vacation policy, but [we’re] actually encouraging people to take it.”

Taylor says as Ballet West Academy continues to evolve its cross-team collaborations, the anxiety that sometimes accompanies stepping away from work has lessened. “I can count about five times this year that one or the other of us has had to leave either for a kid scenario or a friend or had to do some elder care. It’s important to have a support team and a leadership team that works collaboratively enough that communication is happening across the board so someone can always step in for someone in a way that serves the organization and the employee.”

Allowing for the ebbs and flows of life

When Jonyce Bullock started interning at Squire and Company 24 years ago, she had no idea she would spend her entire accounting career at the company. Nor did she anticipate that in a little over two decades, she would become the first female CEO in the company’s history. “Flexibility has been the key from minute one,” Bullock says. 

By the time she earned her degree, the CPA firm had offered Bullock a full-time position. Having recently become pregnant with her first child, Bullock worked full-time until her child was born and then switched to part-time. And full-time again, then part-time again. She went back and forth for years as her personal needs changed—and she felt entirely supported by Squire the whole time. 

“The great thing is they were always investing in me—investing in my career,” Bullock says. “It might have been slower just because you need hours for experience, but overall, I wouldn’t say it slowed me down.”

Bullock navigated parenthood and working while also supporting her husband through the health issues he faced. At one point, they decided to make a switch: he would work part-time to help him more easily focus on his health while she would go full-time and focus on her career. “When we did that, my career kind of supercharged, but it’s been really nice because I think the flexibility’s been even greater,” Bullock says. 

By 2018, Bullock became Squire’s first female managing partner, a title that changed to CEO six months later. Five years into the role, Bullock says the company is ever-evolving, but flexibility is always top of mind. “We really trust people to take care of things,” she says. 

At Squire, consultants often make their own schedules—as long as they meet the looming deadline of April 15. “We let people come up with creative schedules and adapt to their family schedules,” Bullock says. Of course, no two roles in a company are identical, which means that some employees, such as assistants or receptionists, may need to be available during operating hours and can’t get too creative with their hours. In cases like this, Squire is open to ideas to help accommodate the needs of their employees, such as job sharing or working from home. 

Fifty percent of Squire’s 200 employees are women. In a state constantly ranked as one of the worst for women’s equality—in 2022, Utah was named the worst in the nation—Squire is actively working to be a place where women rise. Its Women Improving Professionally (WIP) program earned them a spot on Inspire InUtah’s 100 Utah Companies Championing Women list. 

The WIP program aims to provide Squire’s female employees with activities and programs that empower them to fulfill their professional ambitions. “It’s a group that’s run by mostly women,” Bullock says, “but we feel very strongly that men have to be involved as well. Several of our male partners and managers are on that committee.” 

Squire also runs a sponsorship program where women are assigned a sponsor in the firm who speaks up for them when they’re not in the room. “When you look at it, we have 27 partners, and only three of us are female. Without having some specific, assigned sponsors in the room, an affinity bias would say you’re most likely going to sponsor people who look like you,” Bullock says. “Women just naturally get fewer opportunities. The sponsorship program has helped us get equal access to opportunities like that.”

Being flexible along the way—adapting to the curveballs and changes that life throws—only helps. Because in the never-ending quest to achieve work-life balance, being at a company that encourages balance can be a game-changer.

“Flexibility is the ability for employees to work in the way that maximizes their alignment with the company’s needs and their own careers in a way that provides them with the greatest opportunities for personal satisfaction, career growth and even family,” Bullock says. “If I’m not allowing for flexibility that allows people to take care of [their] family in a way that serves [them]—and to get the greatest satisfaction from their career—then I’m going to lose them.”

“STRT is an economical solution to get your housing workspace, community space and all the services necessary to activate you to chase your dreams in one spot,” he says. 

The concept for STRT is reminiscent of artist lofts—affordable housing spaces often located in warehouse-type facilities where artists live and work. But while the goal is to make its living spaces as affordable as possible, what STRT will offer is distinctly different both in the demographic it hopes to serve and in its potential for longevity, Gill says. 

“It’s not just for artists. It’s for all creatives, all startups, all entrepreneurs,” he says. “If you look where artist lofts have been historically, those end up being some of the most culturally significant neighborhoods of any major city. But what ends up happening 10 years after they’re there is the artist lofts are gone—the area’s been gentrified. When we looked at STRT, we wanted to do something that had sufficiently large scale that it could endure even after the neighborhood’s made.”

As an adjunct instructor for the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, Gill has spent the majority of his career working in and around startups. After working in Silicon Valley, the epicenter for startup businesses, he returned to Salt Lake City and began teaching what he learned in the Bay Area to students hoping to bring their own ideas to life. Throughout the process, Gill identified a gap between graduating from college and launching into the world of entrepreneurship: a homebase. 

“The whole concept with STRT is the living arrangements are such that if you’re moving in from out of state, if you are someone that just wants to meet new people—and most of our creative, entrepreneurial, ambitious folks are—we can give you a much cheaper product because you’re sharing amenities with a group of others,” Gill says. “That’s way more economically effective for people that are looking at gap housing and more importantly, socially, it’s way more lucrative because now you start building relationships.”

Gill and co-founder Troy D’Ambrosio created STRT in 2019. Shortly thereafter, they partnered with Yazdani Studio of CannonDesign, working with the studio’s internationally renowned director, Mehrdad Yazdani, to design a new concept focused on the user experience of entrepreneurs and creatives. 

“Working with Troy, Victor and the STRT team to design these live/work concepts has been inspiring,” Yazdani said in a press release announcing the partnership. “They have a vision that will empower entrepreneurs and creative minds all over the country.” 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pandemic delayed the team’s plans for securing a physical location to open its first STRT City Living. However, they are currently exploring location options in downtown Salt Lake City with the hopes to open doors to residents in the near future. 

“I think the world’s best place to have a startup is in downtown Salt Lake,” Gill says. “We will get there. In the meantime, we’re really doing a lot of community support and activations—supporting other folks that care about creatives and entrepreneurs.”Though a timeline for opening a physical location is not quite locked in, Gill says that STRT’s future looks promising. The company recently announced its partnership with American Campus Communities, a private student housing company. Through this partnership, STRT is having discussions with universities around the nation to develop Entrepreneurial Living Learning Communities: STRT On Campus by American Campus Communities, residences that will offer housing accommodations, resources and programming to university student entrepreneurs and creators in one place. 

“The future, for now, is we focus on student housing,” Gill says. “We establish the brand in the student housing market, and then there’s an understanding of how and why it works. Then we go back and expand the product into city living.” 

While STRT is currently focused on housing for college students, Gill says the goal remains to create living and collaborative spaces in cities that help people afford to live, work and socialize in one place. STRT plans to cut costs for residents by offering month-to-month housing, providing furnished spaces and private bedrooms and including amenities such as utilities, which would be an additional expense in traditional monthly rental payments. 

“It’s a single check that includes internet and anything else that’s going to be necessary on the property—everything you need in a package at about 70–80 percent of the cost of a typical studio,” Gill says. “We’re trying to help [creators] progress to where [they] need to progress, and the way we do that is through shared amenities.”

By nature of its shared amenities and spaces, STRT also provides opportunities for residents to engage in social interaction, a desire for which Gill has heard his students repeatedly express in recent years. In his ten years as an adjunct instructor, Gill has started each semester by asking his students what kind of business they would start if their options were endless. For the first seven or so of those years, Gill says, there was a pattern in sustainability. Recently, the responses have changed.  

“In the last two years, it’s such an emphasis on human connection and community,” Gill says. “It’s heartbreaking to me because people tend to solve the problems that they have themselves, and what that tells me is these folks feel disconnected. They feel like they don’t have a real community. I think properties that encourage [us] to be able to see each other, hear each other and feel each other’s energy make a huge difference.”

Reports on how people are feeling lonelier and more depressed as a result of social media and other forms of online engagement have certainly been on the rise. Cigna’s 2020 Loneliness and the Workplace study indicated that 71 percent of heavy social media users reported feeling loneliness, and that 61 percent of Americans classify as lonely.  

Sapien Labs’ Mental Health Million project reveals that, across a sample of 47,000 participants, those who engaged in frequent face-to-face socializing had a mental wellbeing score of 66 points higher than those who were experiencing in-person interactions less often. The data from this report suggest that social interaction—or the lack thereof—has more effects on mental wellbeing than physical exercise. 

Gill sees STRT Living as a way to effectively address the pain points statistics like these reveal by providing the opportunity to connect in an environment fueled by creativity. “We really believe that STRT is important because, in this world of digital connection, real-life connection means so much,” he says. And with nearly two-thirds of Gen Z Americans starting or intending to start their own business, Gill feels confident that STRT will help meet the future entrepreneurs right where they are.

“There’s a need for this kind of product,” Gill says. “Housing is a major issue. It’s a social issue [and] an economic issue. There’s a massive economic necessity to provide affordable housing. We think once we get a teeny bit of traction, we are going to get a whole lot of traction.”

Patrons are spread out around the restaurant. Some are sitting bar-top watching the action unfold; others are nestled in tables by the fireplace in a space connected to a spacious patio—one of two spots in the fine-dining restaurant designed specifically to host events. 

Though busy, the atmosphere is calm and collected, comfortable yet glamorous. Dining inside of Urban Hill feels like being let in on a secret that soon enough, everyone will know. 

The anchoring restaurant for the up-and-coming Post District, Urban Hill is setting the standard high in its quest to help Salt Lake City stand out as a destination spot while it continues to make national headlines as one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. Urban Hill is the third establishment opened by David, Sherry, and Brooks Kirchheimer, the parent-and-son co-owners of Leave Room for Dessert Eateries, which introduced Park City to both Hearth and Hill and Hill’s Kitchen. Urban Hill opened on December 15, 2022, making its mark as the first business to open in the Post District. 

“As my dad and co-founder, David Kirchheimer, likes to say, it’s easy to be the second or the third at something. But it’s more challenging to be the first—and we take that challenge head on,” Brooks says. “Being the first to open at the Post District is really exciting to us and is also a great challenge. We’re honored to lead the charge of the retail community for the Post District.”

Located on 300 West and 510 South, the Post District is currently a block and a half of mostly construction. Cranes, fences, hardhats, dust and a lot of signs are a bit of an eye sore, especially when compared to the atmosphere Urban Hill provides within the confines of its 7,000 square-foot walls. But good things come to those that wait, and amid its rough backdrop, Urban Hill makes for a spectacular glimpse of what’s to come at the Post District as the year unfolds.The Post District is a $144 million project aimed at creating a residential and business community in an area Salt Lake developers see as a prime location in the ever-expanding downtown Salt Lake. “The Post District is an interesting opportunity because it’s in an urban core of Salt Lake City,” says Ben Lowe, co-owner of Lowe Property Group, a Salt Lake-based, family run real estate development and investment firm. “It’s an opportunity to shape a broad area. Post District is especially unique because it’s right off the primary entrance and exit to Salt Lake City. It’s the first thing you see as you come into the city and the last thing you see as you leave the city.”

Lowe Property Group is partnering with Salt Lake’s BCG Holdings, Bridge Investment Group and Denver-based Q Factor to bring the vision of the Post District to life. The district is meant to help turn the dilapidated corridors of 500 South and 600 South along 300 West into a vibrant area that creates a welcoming scene when commuters enter the state’s capital city. As part of this effort, the Post District will bring the once barren and broken-down concrete area to life through a 13-acre, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood that will become home to businesses ranging from shops, dining establishments and breweries. It will also include a place to live: the Post House, the residential portion of the Post District project overseen by Ben and his co-partner and brother, Alex.

“We are really creating a complete neighborhood within these blocks,” says Lowe, who adds that the majority of construction should be wrapping up by the end of this summer. The Post House offers 580 Class-A multifamily units spanning four apartment communities. And on its main level, next to the leasing office, is Urban Hill. 

Mixed-use neighborhoods like the Post District, which are designed to create a residential community that can easily engage with the amenities offered by a metropolitan city, is not a new concept—but it is a hot development trend happening around the nation. This is, in part, a response to both the work-from-home trends that took flight during the height of the Covid pandemic and the overwhelming need for housing. 

Lowe says that projects like the Post District aim to meet these demands. 

“We need more housing options to provide more opportunities for people. At Post District, we’re trying to offer a broad range of housing options,” Lowe says. “We think that for market-rate projects, it’s important to provide a range of alternatives within our properties for people who are all along the income spectrum. And at the same time, providing everybody living in places like Post District with amazing amenities.”

Salt Lake is consistently ranked as one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. In January 2022, the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Institute in the David Eccles School of Business released a stunning report revealing that Utah’s population is projected to increase by 2.2 million by the year 2060. The report also indicates that, along with the tremendous influx of residents, the state of Utah will experience an increase in employment opportunities through an addition of 1.3 million jobs. As the state grapples with how to accommodate this enormous population increase, businesses are well poised to seize opportunities this growth presents. For restaurateurs like the Kirchheimers, that means securing a spot in what FSR magazine lists as one of seven hottest areas for new and emerging restaurants: Salt Lake City. 

The team at Urban Hill embraces that projection. 

“Salt Lake City is obviously going through a big growth period,” Kirchheimer says. “The Post District is an area where it’s really cool to see the expansion of downtown. I think it’s going to be invigorating to the community—a showstopper and really unique. The Post District is going to be a fun place that basically has just about all of it.”

And while the Post District certainly offers housing for those moving into downtown Salt Lake City, it is also aiming to be a hotspot for surrounding neighborhoods, businesses and anyone—residents or visitors—spending time downtown. 

“It’s providing the people that live and visit Salt Lake City with so many new places to go and different experiences,” Kirchheimer says. “That’s what makes Salt Lake City so great, is its diversity—and not just in the people, but in the different restaurants it has to offer, the new hotels coming on the scene and all the different areas that people can live in.”

Lowe says that a major theme of both the Post House, and the Post District as a whole, is amenities. When looking at well-established metropolitan cities teeming with things to do, amenities are at the core of their success. This comes in the form of accessibility, walkability and options. Lowe says that creating communities that offer these amenities also encourages smart growth.

“It’s important that as we grow, that we’re not just growing out. Everybody’s having to commute in cars and sit on freeways all the time,” he says. “By having proximity to all these experiences and amenities—to shopping, entertainment, and social experiences that are close by—it really allows us to create community. It allows us to grow smartly [in a way] that’s less reliant on the car and long commutes. We’re growing up more than out so that we can create opportunities for people to be able to do all these things in close proximity to where they live or where they work.” 

Lowe adds that local government has been supportive of what the Post District aims to do for downtown Salt Lake. “The leadership of Salt Lake City government has been really fantastic to work with,” he says. “They’ve seen these visions and help encourage the vision of these complete neighborhoods.” 

Kirchheimer is looking forward to building a community of neighbors and friends—like he has enjoyed at the Hearth and Hill and Hill’s Kitchen locations in Park City—as more businesses open in the coming months. 

“Community is a big part of our culture,” Kirchheimer says. “It’s important to develop a sense of community amongst the restaurants and retailers that are in the same development so that we can support each other.” Confirmed neighbors that Urban Hill will see move in over the coming months include Traeger Pellet Grills, which announced at the end of 2020 that it will build its new and expanded headquarters in the Post District, and Level Crossing Brewing, which is undergoing construction now to open its second location there. 

“We’re excited to welcome with open arms the other retailers that eventually come in—to support them and give them some insight as to what we’ve experienced so far during our time at the Post District,” Kirchheimer says. 

Lowe confirms there are more businesses in the works that are preparing to open their doors in the Post District. “There’s a number of retailers we’re pretty darn excited about,” he says. “Announcements will be forthcoming in the coming months.” 

The retailers have their own plans for making announcements about their Post District location, but Lowe hints that locals excited for the names to be unveiled can look forward to high-end brunch, ramen, bakeries, sandwiches and a retailer with 10,000 square-feet of space to experience. 

Architectural renderings of the Post District paint a picturesque community that invites experience, whether that comes in the form of dining, shopping, living or simply exploring around the area. Truly experiencing the Post District will come with time, but if the Urban Hill experience is any indication, great things are on Salt Lake City’s horizon. 

“I really look forward to the Post District being the buzzing gathering spot I foresee it to be,” says Urban Hill General Manager Jessica Johns.

Johns has been on the floor engaging with customers since the high-end dining restaurant opened its doors, and she is pleased to find that she already has repeat customers—a sign for things to come as the Post District continues to evolve. “I think it will be such a great destination of residential, retail and restaurants in an area that hasn’t always had as much vibrancy,” Johns says. “Salt Lake City is growing rapidly, and I love that the west part of downtown is getting some exciting love.” 

Combined, these three events alone are projected to have brought $500 million to the state of Utah. That’s a slam dunk no matter how you look at it. 

“To see three of these [events] stacked this closely together, it certainly is exciting,” says Ryan Mack, director of media and communications at Visit Salt Lake. 

It’s been said time and again that the 2002 Winter Olympics put Salt Lake City on the map, and the capital city—along with the rest of the state—has grown massively in popularity in the two decades since. 

This kind of growth comes with some major pain points for residents and local government officials who are tasked with figuring out how to meet the demands of increased population. While there remains much to be solved for, there is a lot of good that comes with hosting events of this scale—and that largely comes in the form of money. 

Proximity is key

Visit Salt Lake has seen a dramatic increase in the number of events being hosted in Salt Lake City in recent years. In 2022, its sales team booked 870,000 room nights for future conventions—a record for the organization that represents a serious amount of visitor dollars being spent. 

“We anticipate that number to continue,” Mack says. “Every convention delegate that comes here, on average, spends $971. You multiply that by how many delegates are coming to a convention and that sort of gives you your economic impact of the convention. That is felt in restaurants and hospitality sectors at the hotels. And if people want to stay and go skiing another day, that’s just an added bonus for us.”

While these higher numbers are exciting, they shouldn’t be too surprising.  

“The 2002 Winter Olympics were responsible [in helping] fuel and create the Salt Lake that you see today,” Mack says. “We’ve proven that we can host these types of events and host them successfully. And I think more and more people are becoming familiar with that.”

That track record is partially what keeps event organizers coming back. 

The Outdoor Retailer Snow Show’s decision to leave Utah in 2017 was sparked by political tension between outdoor industry companies and the Trump administration, which sought to reduce several areas of Utah’s federally protected lands. While boycotts by some of the industry’s biggest names (think REI and Patagonia) are ongoing, Outdoor Retailer hopes to be more effective in pushing for protection of these lands through bringing its events back to Salt Lake City.  

“In reality, leaving after 2017 has not brought the change we had hoped for, so we will push back, not pull back. We firmly believe that staying engaged and collectively contributing to the ongoing discussion, no matter how difficult, is far more constructive,” the company stated in a press release announcing its return to Salt Lake in March of 2022.

In securing its return, Outdoor Retailer has signed a five-year contract with Visit Salt Lake to host three events in Utah per year, creating the potential for an even greater economic impact on the state. 

“We were super excited to be back this last January show. It felt really good. I mean, [Utah] had the best snow it’s had in 20 years,” says Marisa Nicholson, SVP and show director for Outdoor Retailer. “I like to think that Mother Nature did that on our behalf—but that has a lot to do with why we chose to come back to Salt Lake City. The ease and access for our community to recreate is an important factor.”

This year’s Snow Show took place at the Salt Palace Convention Center January 10–12. The National Centers for Environmental Information reports that the Alta Ski Area received an average of 11 inches of snow per day over the course of those three days—something that convention attendees took full advantage of. 

“Some people snuck up for a few hours in the mornings, where they actually could have meetings on the chairlifts, get a few turns in and be back at the show, and still get business done at the event over the next three days,” Nichols says. “That’s an incredible opportunity, and we really haven’t had that in the last five years. It was something the industry really missed.”

The proximity to those chair lifts from the Salt Palace Convention Center is exactly what prompted Outdoor Retailer to bring its fall and winter events back to Salt Lake City. The myriad activities that summer in Utah’s mountains offers also led to its hosting Outdoor Adventure X at Snowbasin, a two-day mountain festival that is open to consumers and debuts this June.

Salt Lake City’s access to outdoor recreation is arguably unrivaled, and the city itself is developing at an incredible rate to offer world-class amenities to travelers from around the globe. Many locals have traveled through the new international airport and have experienced the latest and greatest upscale dining establishments popping up around Salt Lake. New buildings are scraping the sky and there is always something under construction, promising more access to a metropolitan bursting at the seams to sparkle in the national spotlight. 

Tourism as tax relief

While new developments can feel painstaking to locals, they do serve a purpose. 

“It’s sort of easy to lose sight of [the excitement] as a local because we’re surrounded by it every day,” Mack says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s another building going up.’ But for someone who’s had a break from Salt Lake in that five or ten years, it almost looks like a completely different city now. It’s the hotels, the bars, the restaurants, the people living downtown—which is set to double in the next 20 months—that’ll create a whole new scene in the downtown area. It makes it a lot more appealing for people who want to host their events or conventions here. When you have more offering to provide them, they’re more likely to come.”

Nichols says that flying into the airport and arriving to stay at the recently opened Hyatt Regency downtown felt like entering a new city after being away for five years. 

“Building up that infrastructure to accommodate all of our customers coming into the city and the proximity of them to the convention center and the convenience of that has been incredible,” she says. “There’s been a lot that has changed so much that has really helped to make Salt Lake City a great destination for our community.”

Keeping that community of event and convention organizers and attendees invested in returning to Utah is, in fact, an investment in Utah. Despite the inconveniences that a developing city brings with it, there are silver linings for locals to consider—perhaps the brightest being in their own pockets. 

“It’s important to understand that not only is the tourism industry in Utah creating or supporting over a hundred thousand jobs, but also, visitor spending contributes to the tax base. We create a significant amount of tax revenue because of all the different sales taxes we have,” says Jennifer Leaver, senior research analyst at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute in the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. 

Leaver and her team analyze data to produce economic reports, many of which are about the state of Utah and how it is affected by factors such as tourism. In over a decade in her role at Kem C. Gardner, Leaver says that she has seen a major upward trend in money brought into the state as a result of tourist activities like skiing and visiting national parks. Aside from those, the annual 10-day Sundance Film Festival has 45 years of accounting for sizeable tourist spending. 

The numbers are not yet out for the 2023 Sundance festival, which marked the return of an in-person event after two years of being online. But according to Y2 analytics, a market research and data analytics group located in downtown Salt Lake City, the 2019 non-resident Sundance Film Festival attendee spending supported an estimated 3,053 jobs and generated a total economic impact of $182.5 million—data Leaver included in the State of Utah’s Travel and Tourism Industry 2019 report released in September of 2020.

Leaver points to Sundance as an example of how locals can identify the benefits of the influx of visitors to both Summit County—since the festival largely takes place in Park City—and in surrounding areas like Salt Lake City, where attendees can catch film premiers at various venues. “It’s going to bring in a lot of revenue for our hotels, our restaurants, our stores, our retail shops,” Leaver explains. “Sundance is going to bring money into the ski resorts up there at the time, or the businesses in the area. It’s going to then feed into our tax base and support jobs.”

An ever-evolving hub

It will be exciting to learn the final numbers from the two-month event blitz that Salt Lake just experienced and find out whether the three big events did in fact bring in $500 million in a mere 59 days. And if current trends are any indicator (let’s face it, they are), Salt Lake isn’t likely to slow down any time soon—though, Leaver cautions, we are facing a potential recession in 2023. “We know that [with] talk of a recession, one of the first things that’s going to go is tourism budgets for people,” Leaver says. “Overall, I don’t see any major changes to the upward trends.” 

That means good things to come for the local economy. Hopefully, as the city continues to evolve, Utahns will work together to address some of the challenges that arise along the way. 

“The only constant is change,” Leaver says. “We can’t always help growth, or we can’t always change what’s happening, but we can learn to adapt to it. We can try to problem-solve and figure out solutions. But it’s good to remember that visitors and tourism helps locals and local businesses thrive.”

While the inconvenience of longer waits at downtown restaurants and congested traffic leading into national parks and beloved ski destinations is certainly frustrating, Mack hopes that locals will find some consolation in the possibility of what these inconveniences mean for employees, taxpayers and businesses. 

“It means money in their pockets,” Mack says. “In Salt Lake County, [tourism] represents our eighth largest industry and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. It provides $1,238 in yearly household tax relief directly coming from tourism. It means more awareness of businesses, more awareness of our destination and a higher likelihood of people coming back—not just for business, but for leisure travel—because they have a great experience when they’re here.” 

Paid advertisement by Comcast. 

The road to 10G is paved with reliability—a theme that Comcast’s chief network officer Elad Nafshi honed in on during a roundtable discussion in Salt Lake City on Tuesday. 

It was a big day for Utah’s leading internet provider. Comcast has spent the past five years building the roadmap for creating a 10G modem that will deliver multigigabit speeds to tens of millions of customers. Earlier this year, Comcast announced plans to begin launching deployment of their multigigabit services, which is forecasted to be delivered to businesses and customers around the nation by 2025. 

On Tuesday, Salt Lake City officially became the first location for Comcast and Xfinity customers to access the company’s multigigabit tier and fastest upload speeds in the country. With 2 gigabytes per second (Gbps) of download speed and upload speeds up to 10 times faster, it’s a giant step toward 10G. 

“We wanted to really bring the latest and greatest technology through a network that is offering reliability like no other,” explains Nafshi. “It’s one that scales infinitely and provides the fastest loading times along with all of the services that our customers continue to rely on.”

Getting to 10G means standing on the precipice of cutting edge innovation. And as a leading provider for internet services, Comcast is up for the challenge. Five years in the making, the company is celebrating the construction and launch of an architecture that is standardized, scalable, and bandwidth expandable. 

It’s a technology that delivers on that reliability promise—while creating a smaller carbon footprint along the way—and it begins with what can be considered the brain of fiber technology: the headend.  

In Salt Lake City, Comcast’s master headend houses digital transmitters that create and manage broadband data used inside a console for approximately 600,000 devices. Each feeds between 10,000 and 15,000 devices. There are a lot of cabling connections to a digital transmitter required to create and manage the broadband data consumers use. Enter Distributed Access Architecture, or DAA. 

Pre-DAA, digital transmitters connected to bulky cables feeding fiber to around 16 nodes—those containers that customers get installed by technicians to serve as a connection point among devices and both send and receive data. Comcast delivers 700 miles of fiber in Salt Lake City and nearly 5,000 miles throughout the entire state of Utah. 

David Krook, Comcast’s senior director west division headend engineering, says that the new world of fiber delivery is DAA. In this world, digital transmitters are about the size of a pair of fingernail clippers and are consolidated so that each one feeds about 48 nodes, which individually feed about 21-33 devices per home. And the cables are much, much smaller.

“Instead of using all that cabling, we’re using fiber to go out to the devices,” Krook says. 

Comcast goes one step further by building housing containers known as racks for the new transmitters. In the new world of DAA, the racks, once black, are white—and take up much less space. “[White racks] create ambient light so we don’t have to use as much lighting. So in that spirit of being efficient—in going green—we’re trying to reduce our carbon footprint,” Krook says. 

And the physical footprint of the headend is also significantly reduced. “In [one rack], we’re feeding roughly 526 node areas or neighborhoods that would take about five racks worth of space in our other architecture,” Krook says. 

“Everything we do relies on the headend,” adds Nafshi. “The platform itself was architected and built for sustainability from the ground up, and now we’re able to reduce the overall power consumption required to deliver the capacity by 50 percent by the year 2030. This is not just the bleeding edge of technology. This is how we become more responsible citizens in the process of [creating that technology].”

More than 100,000 Salt Lake homes and businesses access Xfinity and Comcast for their broadband speed. Nafshi says that, when combined with Comcast Octave, the AI-powered platform deployed in 2020 to allow real-time connectivity monitoring, the new multigigabit tiers will be a game-changer for Utah businesses, individual customers, and low-income community members for whom Comcast has partnered with several nonprofits to provide digital literacy, connectivity, and equipment. 

“It will enable them to grow infinitely,” he says. “It gives us the ability to provide capacity speeds and latency like never before to more customers than ever before—and make that completely seamless. As businesses continue to grow, as needs continue to evolve, the network will always be there, and it will always enable them to enable us to service them with reliability like never before.”