Roundtable: The state of manufacturing amid tech advances and a changing workforce

Jowanza Joseph originally sought to build a company that helped people in the Caribbean, so he identified a bird common to the area: the parakeet. While not all parakeet species are native, the small green birds are everywhere. As his company evolved, its name took on added meaning.

Parakeets are very good at imitating. They can copy voices, learn instructions and memorize hundreds of words. Above all, they possess the twin abilities to learn and mimic. And that parallels what Joseph has set out to accomplish.

“We’re building agents that learn from and mimic risk managers,” Joseph says.

AI agents are autonomous software entities that perceive an environment, reason through complex objectives then take actions to achieve specific goals, all with minimal human intervention.

“These agents take tasks inherent to the job of a risk manager, using multiple tools to give a full picture of the risks they’re incurring,” Joseph says. “Any task that can be done with a human in this area, we believe we can do it with our agents, which we call our parakeets. Think of them as a fleet of mimicking birds that will do things exactly how you would want them to.”

An idea is born

Joseph founded Parakeet Risk in 2024, an AI-powered continuous monitoring platform for industrial companies — especially those involved in the manufacturing, logistics and construction sectors — designed to identify, manage and mitigate third-party risk.

After over a decade plus in the tech industry, Joseph had a respectable career, with a resume filled with familiar names like ZAGG, Inc., Adobe and Finicity. He didn’t know it right away, but his journey was leading him toward his true passion.

A light bulb moment happened when Joseph left Finicity for a startup founded by a former boss.

“I realized I had something inside of me to be a founder and start my own company,” Joseph says. “I’d been a founding engineer and an early employee. Neither was being a founder, though. I wanted that all-the-chips-on-the-table feeling, and I started the journey toward finding whatever it was I would put my whole self into.”

A business idea surfaced, thanks in part to his wife. She was connected to many professionals in the construction, manufacturing and industrial sectors. As these were industries he was unfamiliar with, he recognized he was an outsider right away. He spent the better part of 2023 changing that — asking questions, attempting to identify top issues, what they most cared about. In short, how could he improve how they worked?

“I had to learn how to build that culture. I’m not a fluffy guy; I like computers and math. But I can’t deny that where we are now is 100% better than where we were before.”

Jowanza Joseph

It wasn’t the greatest way to start building a company, Joseph says. He filtered through a lot of answers.

“Writing them all down, though, they took on a common thread, this idea of risk management and risk engineering,” Joseph says. “The industry operates on thin margins and depends entirely upon everything going right. If it does, bases are covered. If one thing goes wrong, however, it could mean company bankruptcy. I needed to build something toward solving that.”

He shadowed risk and procurement managers in construction and management, attempting to better understand their jobs and identifying pain points.

“I could build a product that lowered the cost of third-party due diligence activities and automate it,” Joseph says. “Kind of a three-prong approach: being able to automate getting insurance, identity verification and references.”

The more he researched, the more he learned how financially destructive it could become for companies without implementing a system to keep them in check. For example, a single incident gone awry could cost a company an average of $260,000, with noncompliance fines climbing past $2.5 million. Recovery times were especially lengthy, lasting 18 to 36 months. These stats are echoed on the Parakeet Risk website, any of which could be detrimental to a company’s viability and survival.

A better way forward was needed, and in 2024, Parakeet Risk was born.

A global presence

One of Parakeet Risk’s earliest customers is a large global manufacturer headquartered in Trinidad and Tobago — in the Caribbean, where Joseph’s parents hail from. It regularly employs skilled tradespeople, such as contractors, plumbers and electricians.

With a vast network of over 100 third-party providers, the company needed to constantly collect insurance and liability records. If an electrician were injured on the job and the records were out of date, the company could face extreme liability. The company was stressed, and understandably so.

Parakeet Risk took over the painstaking process of getting every contractor onto its platform. Signing them up. Getting documentation submitted. Tracking insurance statuses. Before they were through, nearly 60 contractors were flagged in various states of expiry.

“Now, instead of this constant process of trying to see if everything is up to date every time someone comes onto their facility, it’s created this heartbeat, where every day they get alerted about possible issues,” Joseph says. “The company has moved from a position of not understanding how much liability was at stake to one where they have full visibility.”

As the only local person on his growing team, Joseph’s company includes employees all over the world, including South America and Europe. One is Andrés Ramos in Monterrey, Mexico. A former logistics software developer, he serves as the company’s lead full-stack AI engineer and product technologist. He joined nearly a year ago, he says, partly because of Joseph’s effective communication and problem-solving skills.

Although Ramos was new to the industry, he was quickly persuaded to make the leap, leaving behind a full-time job of moving cargo all over the world.

“In simple terms, we’re trying to reduce the amount of people that can get injuries and reduce how much money is spent,” Ramos says. “Even though I’d never done this before, I quickly fell in love with the leadership Joseph brings to the company.”

As Parakeet Risk continues to target ever-larger companies within its industry, the number of its own employees is expected to more than double to keep pace with its growth. The company grew from $2 million ARR in its first year to 3x within the second. In 2026, the goals are even loftier, as Joseph plans to go 5x with its growth, up to at least $30 million.

Everyone’s a team player

Having employees who could work with one another successfully was imperative to the company’s success.

“The most important thing you can do is build a harmonious team, one where everyone understands what the end goal is,” Joseph says. “When I built this company, I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to get everyone up to speed on everything that was in play, and I learned that was a big mistake.”

Now there are weekly meetings sharing industry articles, discussing how to demonstrate their expertise and how their product fits, or should fit, into every presented scenario.

“It’s been a game-changer. Now we’re all marching to the beat of one drum. The earlier you can get that to happen, the better,” he says. “I had to learn how to build that culture. I’m not a fluffy guy; I like computers and math. But I can’t deny that where we are now is 100% better than where we were before.”

For all the issues that Parakeet Risk solves and the processes it seeks to improve, its story is also one about purpose, both in seeking and finding it. Joseph understands that.

“This space is a convergence of a lot that I’ve always wanted to do. I found my thing, and I’m obsessed with it,” he says. “Everyone looks for what they want to work on for the rest of their life, and this is that for me.”

In a state known for its ‘cookie wars,’ RubySnap takes the road less traveled

When Jon Cheney founded Seek in 2016, he raised $13 million in venture capital over a few years for the augmented reality social platform. It was ambitious, but it paid off with an acquisition shortly afterward.

Utah’s AI momentum accelerates

The experience is in stark contrast with his latest venture, General Artificial Intelligence Proficiency Institute (or GenAIPI), a company he started last year with impressive results. By harnessing AI, he built software over a weekend and landed his first customer within a week.

What’s more, it only cost him a few hundred dollars to do it.

Cheney was inspired by his own Payson-adjacent neighbors, who ranged from successful cattle herders to construction company owners, often with an average annual company income between $20 and $50 million. While they had regular income, he noticed they were not using AI in the ways he knew it could benefit their enterprises. And when he learned many weren’t even using ChatGPT, it prompted him to do something about it.

“I needed to push GenAIPI out there and help these amazing business owners,” Cheney says. “They were going to get beat. AI was going to smash them if they weren’t ready to defend it.”

There was a significant gap in knowledge about AI between Cheney and other business owners. If they could understand it better, it would mean reducing busywork and increasing efficiency and output. They would have a chance at staying competitive in a changing landscape.

To that end, he spent three days and nights creating course content to train business owners. He then posted ads in the form of quizzes on Facebook and Meta, piquing curiosity when people discovered how much they did or didn’t know about AI. Inevitably, this led them to his site. The ads garnered a lot of visits, but no sales immediately followed. Since his company was prepped and ready for customers, he got proactive instead — and it worked.

Considering the staggeringly rapid rate of businesses adopting AI across the country, GenAIPI is positioned to grow along with it. A 2025 AI Index Report shows that 78% of companies nationwide use AI, which has undoubtedly increased since. Even more eye-opening: The AI industry is projected to add nearly $16 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

These large numbers are capturing the interest of people like Jake Merrill, co-founder of Infinity Pools. Now a GenAIPI client, he’s in the process of heavily implementing AI into his marketing and social media processes, and hopes it’ll help him reach his goal of growing into a $100 million business in the next five years. After seeing Cheney post on LinkedIn — and already being familiar with his past success at Seek — he wanted to see what his latest company could do for them. It’s still in its early stages, but he thinks they’re headed in the right direction.

“There’s so much I don’t know and understand yet, and I’m down the road of running my business and trying to keep growing. I’m not an AI expert — nor do I claim to be — but I’m learning,” Merrill says. “Relying on [Jon Cheney] to help us get those tools in place will be big for us.”

The smartest AI strategies don’t start with chatbots

AI is opening opportunities for existing companies to become more efficient, and new companies to start for next to nothing. When Cheney analyzed all he’d built within a few days, he discovered it would have cost him far more to create his company 10 years ago, approximately $3.2 million in 2016. This would include the amount of coding, paying for the educational content he created and more.

“A year and a half [can] change to three to five days. The decrease in the amount of effort, risk and money is 99.9% lower at this point,” Cheney says. “For a guy who has a lot of ideas, that’s cool.”

When it doesn’t cost much to test an idea, not only is the risk reduced, but it also dramatically shortens the time between an idea in the shower and the ability to initiate it.

“Putting capital into startups is risky because you have to spend so much money in order to get to the point of proving the model. With AI, that entire paradigm is flipped on its head. It doesn’t apply anymore,” Cheney says. “A software business in Utah can be built in a weekend for a few hundred bucks, and it can have customers by the following week.”

Still, the principles of entrepreneurship have not changed, Cheney says. Learning how to run a business efficiently is a first step. Remaining consistent is another.

“It’s not just about AI quickly bringing the idea to life. Yes, I can [help you] do that, but customers still have to be entrepreneurs and follow through,” Cheney says. “There’s a smaller percentage willing to do so and make it happen.”

Cheney explains he wants to help the world successfully navigate the steep curve of AI acceleration.

“A lot of people will lose their jobs because of AI. It’s already happened, and it’s going to get worse. That scares me. I believe in the power of AI. It can do so much good. It can enable entrepreneurs like me to do crazy stuff with unreasonable timelines, but there will be collateral damage. The best way to fight that is to help as many people as possible to understand it, learn how to use it and then partner with it. That way, everyone increases their capabilities.”

AI isn’t replacing workers — it’s changing who gets to participate

Founder Amy Lund was constantly disappointed by every cinnamon roll she ate (dry, tasteless, never enough filling), and because her expectations were lofty opposites (she wanted them gooier, more flavorful, topped with plenty of cream cheese), she started tinkering with a recipe. She started baking her own.

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“I’d been baking them for years when [my husband] Eric and I saw a gap in the market,” Amy says. “Nobody was doing frozen dough.” Besides, their kitchen was too small for baking in large quantities. Together, they decided to create and sell frozen cinnamon roll dough.

For most of 2020, Amy worked remotely for a healthcare company and was going more than a little stir-crazy at home. Then in mid-November, she and Eric launched their business at a nephew’s basketball game, publishing their first Instagram post from the parking lot.

It was uncomplicated and unattached to much of a strategy. They figured it’d be a way to provide sweet treats for friends and family, while allowing Amy to get her occasional baking fix. It’d also give the newlyweds an extra income stream, a side hustle fueled with passion.

Their fast success with frozen dough gave way to baking them fresh at home. Amy and Eric would finish their jobs at 5 p.m., bake for hours on end (often until 2 in the morning), then proceed to do deliveries around the time the sun came up.

As they adapted to that rapid growth, additional change was inevitable.

“We replaced our dining room table with industrial tables,” Eric says. “We emptied our home freezer and filled it up with frozen rolls. [We bought] a garage freezer, and filled that with rolls.”

Eventually, it allowed Amy to leave her desk job, and Eric followed a short while later. Their side project quickly evolved into one that entirely supported their family. Now, instead of existing largely as an online phenomenon, they have their own brick-and-mortar location in Millcreek, which Amy considers the realization of a dream.

Waiting to exhale

Getting to do this most days of the week feels like being allowed to exhale, Amy says — and that’s despite the many 80-hour workweeks and added stress of managing a 20-person team of makers and bakers. The evidence they’re needed is clear from the long lines of customers winding through the parking lot and around the block, and selling out in under 90 minutes during the holidays.

In the days leading up to Christmas, the demand for their wares — a short list including cinnamon rolls, cookies, bread pudding, cookie and dinner roll dough — outweighs what’s normally their maximum capacity.

“To put it into perspective, everything we made and baked in the entire 2020 season, we made that same amount in a day this past season, even double that some days,” Amy says.

As it’s grown — surpassing even their own projections — so too has their pervasive online presence. Dough Lady recently surpassed 30,000 Instagram followers eager to hear the surprise weekly specials or learn that a sell-out is imminent. Customers also like sharing their own stories of what Dough Lady means to them, both online and in person.

For instance, their cinnamon rolls remind some customers of the same ones their grandma used to make. One woman who lost her mother shared that the rolls are the only treats that come close to her reliving those memories. Hugs are often shared. Tears are often shed.

“Besides incredible cinnamon rolls, what Amy’s done really well is create a brand,” Eric says. “Utah loves to rally around something homegrown, and that’s been really impactful.”

Dough Lady’s connection to the community extends well beyond earning repeat customers. Other businesses took an interest in the bakery early on, including Roots Coffee & Co. owner Ginalen Soto. Since Dough Lady’s first pop-up experience at one of its three locations, cinnamon rolls have been a regular addition to its offerings, and they sell out regularly.

“Their cinnamon rolls have been such a meaningful addition to our business,” Soto says. “They elevated our pastry offerings early on and quickly became something customers looked forward to.” Soto adds that it took just one taste to know Dough Lady had created something special. “Beyond the product itself, working with Amy and Eric created an organic, community-driven connection that reflects all we care about at Roots. We love supporting local businesses, especially when they’re run by people as hardworking and kind as they are.”

Roots never charges vendor fees, because Soto says it’s about “building each other up and watching our community grow together.”

Your lab is your kitchen

Growing up, Amy remembers Sundays being set aside for baking, which naturally led to experimenting. As the middle child of three sisters, Amy became accustomed to exploring the kitchen, a space her mom, Janene Southwick, likened to a lab. With a wheat grinder on hand, they made everything from scratch, whether it was bread, pancakes, graham crackers or muffins.

Cinnamon rolls came later, Southwick says — a creation Amy came up with on her own.

“At this point, [Amy] certainly seems to have found her passion, but her years in the corporate arena gave her valuable experience,” Southwick says. “Now she’s just channeling her positive energy in a different direction: her own.”

While the goal isn’t to expand to a second location just yet, there’s a reason for that: Being the only neighborhood bakery in town means they won’t lose the warmth that people feel when visiting. They remain local. They become familiar faces.

“I think cinnamon rolls are starting to have a moment. There’s a lot of other bakeries like ours popping up, many in New York, but they’ve yet to make it to Utah,” Amy says. “Utah has such a talented baking scene, and I have so many favorite bakers here. This state has a very underrated food scene. So many favorite treats, and so much talent. As for me, I’m just a girl trying to do my best.”

One thing’s for certain — as long as Dough Lady exists, nobody will have to face cinnamon roll disappointment again.

Spylt is making chocolate milk cool again

When I caught up with ERC Specialists’ co-founder Josh Zieglowsky, I wanted to learn more about how he and his partners managed to do over $1.7 billion in sales in three years’ time, helping over 73,000 companies save hundreds of thousands in the process. Lucky for me, Zieglowsky was eager to share how the company differentiates itself from the competition.

2026 Leaders of the Year: Jorge Barragan

How did ERC Specialists start?

I’ve been in commercial real estate and real estate investing for 23 years. I started getting into the oil business in 2018 with my dad and in 2020, we acquired a bigger conglomerate where we had a master service agreement. The business was suffering, and I was trying to find extra stimulus for it. We did PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] loans and, in 2021, the ERC program [Employee Retention Credit] came out, a COVID relief fund. My CPA couldn’t help me, saying it was a payroll credit. My ADP rep wouldn’t amend quarterly returns either and said I needed to talk to a third-party service. Over time, I felt like I could just do this on my own.

Two friends became partners, and we adjusted to the way the market was doing it, which no one really knew about. We assisted companies on a contingency basis: If we were able to get you money, we got paid. We started with a couple of us and the business grew into employing 285 employees. In 2022, we were the second fastest-growing company in Utah and the largest in the country for that niche. We did over $1.7 billion in sales in three years, helping 73,000 companies. We also had 50,000+ affiliates, or business-to-business sales associates, and learned a lot about scaling a business to work with an affiliate base, which has allowed a few of us to pivot into other like-minded ventures.

How were you able to scale so quickly?

It was all because of my awesome partners. My partner in charge of our tech, Justin Atkinson, was very good at seeing all parts of the company and what it needed. His system was like the Henry Ford conveyor belt, where the same employee put tires on every day or the same person put on the windshields every day. Justin had the mindset of seeing every piece of the cog and how it needed to work. Our CEO, Mark Sullivan, was one of the best at seeing what we needed in different departments and handling issues we had over our first few years. It was a baptism by fire. We were helping with this credit that was going to last three years, and the clock was ticking.

Rather than figuring out how to do things, we figured out either who to do them with or who could do it for us. Every partner was an expert at what they did.

When you approach businesses, what do they most misunderstand about this credit?

Good question. People didn’t know what this company was that had only been registered for two months [shortly after the credit came out]. They didn’t know if they wanted to send their quarterly returns to this company in Utah. They wanted a CPA — only, CPAs weren’t doing this. It’s a payroll credit. Payroll companies and CPAs are two different things. CPAs want to take care of your 1040s and 1120s, whereas quarterly payrolls are doing your 941 reports. I talked down on CPAs at first; I’d say, hey, if your CPA hasn’t told you about this, you should be concerned. Only, that message didn’t resonate.

Instead, I began to emulate CPAs and say, hey, he or she is really good at your taxes, but we’re really good at this specific credit. We don’t want to do your taxes, but we do want to work together on this credit. Business skyrocketed when we took that approach. We reached out to CPAs and payroll companies. CPAs didn’t want to do what we were doing, but they wanted their clients taken care of. Once they understood who we were and what we were doing, they’d give referrals of, oh, 200 more clients that we could probably help.

If you’re offering a specialized service, it gives you a leg up on competitors, yes?

Yes. About a year and a half into the business, I started hearing about more ERC companies, only we were way ahead of the competition. Our tech was far more advanced. For instance, we would notify our customers when a letter was going to be sent to them from the IRS before they received it in the mail. If you suddenly receive a letter from the IRS, there’s some anxiety involved. But if you know two weeks in advance that a letter is on its way, that’s huge. We were often able to tell them to rip it up, because we had already taken care of things for them.

We didn’t have that in place during our first year, and got a lot of customer service calls. We cleared things up, but there was still anxiety, right? Once we received that API [application programming interface], however, our customer service calls went down almost 60 percent.

You’re able to not only help companies save money on taxes, but you’re also helping remove anxiety by providing that added knowledge. That’s a win-win.

I told my CPA I made a lot more money this year than I did last year. I wondered what I could do to save money on taxes, and he said that wasn’t his job. I was really upset. Knowing what I know now, I understand it really isn’t his job. Here’s a good way to think about it: If you’re going through a divorce, do you call a real estate attorney or a divorce attorney? CPAs specialize in taxes or audits or cost segregation. They’re all accountants. They’re all licensed. But they all specialize in different areas. People often think their CPA knows everything. That’s like asking an attorney: I know you do real estate, but can you defend me in my divorce? Totally different.

Did your company grow faster than the original projections and goals you had for it?

When you start a new business, you put a performance plan together. When we first started, I wanted to make $40,000 a month, but that was short-sighted — it turned into a company with $1.7 billion in sales. We grew well past my original projections. I’m grateful and blessed.

Did your past experience with real estate lead you in this direction?

Great question. It did. In commercial real estate, let’s say I’m buying a shopping center. There’s a guy that does acquisitions — me. I’m the one calling and negotiating. I’m getting the contract together. Once I have it, I hand it off to my partner, who’s an underwriter. He’s over analytics. He comes back to me and lets me know they don’t have a tenant, for example. He discovers if we have cash flow and if we can pay investors. Then, we talk to another person who knows how to raise money, and another partner is added. It’s the “who, not how” mentality. I have talked to people on the commercial real estate side that say they don’t know how I do it, because it’s tough. I look at it like, I think it was Jay Paul Getty who said, “I’d rather make 1 percent of 100 people than 100 percent of myself.” Part of that is having an abundance mindset. I want more people around me to be successful as well. It’s a go-giver mindset, really. I was already doing that, but when I read the book, that dialed it in for me.

What’s the future look like for the company?

There’s a couple of things I’m doing; The sky’s the limit. There’s no one in the industry doing something like this. I’m optimistic about it. If we had enough users on it over time in three to five years, it’d be a multibillion-dollar exit. I compare it to Credit Karma; although they had millions of freemium customers, there’s not an added value.

But there is with our product. It’s helping people save money versus suggesting you go get a credit card that I can recommend. How many customers do we need to be at a valuation of a billion? Once we have that number, we’ll have our goals in place. And Credit Karma was bought for 7 billion in 2019, well before AI, so I’m pretty optimistic about it. It’ll be my biggest venture for sure.

Michael Broussard ventures from Utah to Saudi Arabia’s hospitality sector

The game has evolved. The paddles have evolved. It’s even gotten faster. But it’s made it more exciting. It’s always what I envisioned [for the sport].

Jorge Barragan

Jorge Barragan

Co-Founder & CEO | The Picklr

Jorge Barragan transformed The Picklr from 27 locations to 64 in a single year, earning the Utah-based indoor pickleball franchise the #43 spot on the Inc. 5000 with an astonishing 6,124 percent three-year growth rate — and with plans for 150+ new locations by the end of 2026.

Jorge Barragan deserves to take a break.

At the start of 2025, The Picklr — a franchise of indoor pickleball facilities offering everything from court reservations to tournaments — already had 27 locations throughout the state and country. An impressive feat, especially considering the company only opened in 2021. The company went on to more than double that number to 64 by year’s end.

Barragan confirms that new Picklr locations are set to open in Japan, New Zealand, Australia and Canada in the coming months. He and his team are looking into building in Dubai, Malaysia and Vietnam next. Worldwide, they’re projected to have 150+ new Picklr locations open before the end of December 2026 and a whopping 387 in the next five years.

“A year from now, we’re going to help dictate pickleball worldwide,” Barragan says.

The drive to build is part of Barragan’s overall plan to get more people — millions of people — off their couches and onto pickleball courts. To say it’s working in his favor thus far is an understatement. The Utah-based company recently ranked No. 43 on the Inc. 5000, an annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. The publication reported the company’s three-year growth at an incredible 6,124 percent.

As much as Barragan tries to keep pace, the sport of pickleball itself is poised to grow even faster than he can fully keep up with, and he embraces that challenge. When the Pickleball World Cup happened in Florida last year, for example, 80 countries were represented. The year prior, The Picklr was a sponsor, and only 32 countries participated.

An uptick in numbers means more opportunity for the sport, and Barragan is cognizant of that. He’s as much a budding leader as he is an active cheerleader for pickleball. He wants it to be included in the Olympics, possibly as soon as the 2032 Games. That would allow it to be viewed as more than a high school club sport, but rather one that could include future collegiate scholarships.

Because he was so focused on new growth, Barragan was unable to play the spot as much last year as he normally does. During one of those games, however, he lost to an 11-year-old. He wasn’t mad about it. It represents an expanding interest in the sport, which bodes well for keeping current and future Picklr courts busy.

“The game has evolved. The paddles have evolved. It’s even gotten faster. But it’s made it more exciting,” Barragan says. “It’s always what I envisioned [for the sport].”

As for being recognized as a Utah Business 2025 Leader of the Year, Barragan is quick to point the spotlight away from himself.

“Behind every individual award is a team helping accomplish everything. Every quarter, we’ve had a dual theme of ‘change equals opportunity’ and ‘pressure is a privilege,’” Barragan says. “The team has adapted to so much, sometimes having to open an average of one new location a week. All our progress was inspired by a lot of people who came together and said they were willing to do what’s needed and best for the company.”

He looked at the two drinks he had nearby, a chocolate milk and an energy drink. Why didn’t caffeinated chocolate milk exist yet? And why couldn’t he be the person to make it a reality?

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Mendenhall had already worked at two Utah-born companies, Entrata and Pattern, helping build Entrata’s brand before taking Pattern’s team from a singular creative — himself — to one with 25. He was coordinating daily with videographers, copywriters, producers and project managers. For the seven-plus years he was there, they developed the talent and know-how necessary to produce all their creative assets in-house. That was his world.

“And I felt like I could do this thing,” Mendenhall says. “I could create a brand.”

While still working full-time at Pattern as the company’s chief creative officer, he started building out his caffeinated chocolate milk brand idea on nights and weekends, mocking up logos on cans and creating a website. He called it Spylt.

A bold brand and authentic storytelling

Poking around on LinkedIn looking for local dairy farmers led Mendenhall to connect with Dairy West and the Dairy Farmers of America, allowing him to learn a lot about milk, including the best ways to pitch a business idea within the dairy industry. When he learned of a contest called NY MilkLaunch, “an innovative dairy product accelerator driving milk and milk-based product consumption for Generation Z (ages 10-23) with a focus on sustainability, commercialization, and diversity,” according to its website, he wanted to take part.

Entering the contest meant he had to quickly create his first 50 cans of product in three months’ time. Mendenhall drove to work every day, passing a Quick Quack Car Wash being built. It had a COMING SOON sign draped across it, along with the date it would be finished.

“Their grand opening coincided with the same time I needed to have my cans done. And if they could freaking build a car wash, I should be able to put caffeinated chocolate milk in a can,” Mendenhall says. “It became my thing. I had to beat Quick Quack.”

His efforts paid off. Mendenhall both entered and won the contest. The $150,000 grand prize enabled him to go even further with his budding brand. It got him closer to making his company more of a reality than a mere idea, an opinion also shared by Fred Schonenberg, CEO of VentureFuel, which ran the 2022 NY MilkLaunch Program Spylt won.

“Spylt took the best of what makes dairy special — its natural nutrition, protein and taste — and turned it into a smart, modern alternative to energy drinks. They built a bold brand with authentic storytelling that resonates with younger consumers,” Schonenberg says. “Our team evaluates thousands of startups a year, yet Spylt stood out for its power to disrupt a category that’s craving something genuinely better-for-you with the taste and cultural cool to scale.”

A trillion-dollar industry

The food and beverage industry is a highly competitive field to get noticed in, and it’s one of the largest industries in the United States. Globally, packaged food and drink reached an estimated $7.22 trillion in 2023 alone. With that in mind, Mendenhall got some help.

Partnering with Nick Greer, founder and CEO of Built Brands, helped Mendenhall sell products faster; once, they even sold out of $60,000 worth of product in 12 hours. Ultimately, the partnership helped them transition from selling online to establishing a presence in retail locations across the state, and Spylt officially launched in Harmons Grocery in 2024.

“There’s only so many linear feet of shelving with retail. Monster [Energy] gets more shelf space, but they’re paying a lot to have more. It’s competitive in that way,” Mendenhall says. “Our product tastes very good, but getting it on the shelf and keeping it there? You need to make sure your brand performs better than the one leaving ahead of you.”

Before the Built-Spylt partnership was formed, Greer’s team was already looking for brands to partner with. When Spylt surfaced as a possibility, he took action.

“The brand was an immediate slam dunk, an easy choice, and I told Josh we needed to do this together. From that point on, it was a match made in heaven,” Greer says. “We knew we had captured lightning in a bottle with Built; now we had lightning in a can with Spylt.”

Spylt launched hard within the state and now has national distribution. By strategically hiring those who already have working relationships with retailers, caffeinated chocolate milk is landing everywhere — at Kroger stores across the United States, Albertsons, and H-E-B.

Spylt is growing quickly, but Mendenhall believes stronger brand awareness could mean faster growth.

“So many people are trying to sling a drink, but we’re trying not to just be a product. We’re trying to be a brand, and we’re focused on what our brand represents,” Mendenhall says. “So many people say, ‘Man, this reminds me of when I was a kid.’ And that’s the entire brand ethos. How do we lean into that idea even more?”

“Spylt is about building brick by brick, and it’s a brand you want to be connected to. That’s what gets us excited about what we’re building. It’s so much more than plain old chocolate milk. Anyone can create chocolate milk.”

Nick Greer

Nostalgia is sweet

One of the ways they’ve leaned into it? Advertising.

The company has a spot on YouTube surrounding a fictional institution called Spylt Academy. There’s hardly a mention of the product; instead, it focuses on what the energy drink alternative makes someone feel after having it. The general concept: You’ve lost your fun. You’ve got a nine-to-five and bills to pay. The videos urge viewers to remember what it was like to be a kid, when chocolate milk was a norm.

By capitalizing on a feeling that allows Spylt customers to revisit their childhoods for the few minutes it takes to finish drinking it, they’re no longer just selling a product they hope others will enjoy. They’ve provided a brief escape hatch to a time gone by.

“The idea of spilled milk is part of that,” Mendenhall says. “It’s OK to mess up. It’s OK to take things less seriously. It’s OK to cry over spilled milk. It happens, and it’s part of life.”

Greer recently offered a can of Spylt to an associate visiting from New York. After taking his first sip, his eyes widened. The taste immediately brought him back to his childhood days.

“People often say it reminds them of Yoo-hoo or Nesquik but all of a sudden, they do feel like a kid again,” Greer continues. “And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re taking our customers back in a nostalgic kind of way.”

Brick by brick

Greer’s vision for Spylt is that they’ll grow over the next few years, much in the same way they have already, taking the time to grow sustainably. A brand designed to last can’t be built overnight.

“Spylt is about building brick by brick, and it’s a brand you want to be connected to. That’s what gets us excited about what we’re building,” Greer says. “It’s so much more than plain old chocolate milk. Anyone can create chocolate milk.”

Over the next 12 to 18 months, Greer says their product will start surfacing in “every single store” across the state and beyond. Making that happen will have been nearly four years in the making.

Mendenhall sees what’s possible: replacing energy drinks with an alternative that’s actually nutrient-rich and good for you.

“I want to own X Games to the point where you don’t even see Monster advertising anymore. All those athletes wear Monster. They wear Red Bull,” Mendenhall says. “I want to have hats and be on their heads. I want to be on the bottom of snowboards. I want Spylt to be a brand people are into like that. We have a good product, but we’re trying to build a brand.”

Part of that, of course, is making sure they bring on the right kind of talent. Spylt has brought on what Mendenhall refers to as “game changers” in the field, including one employee with 30-plus years of experience in beverage and retail, specifically Coca-Cola. According to Mendenhall, he’s a game changer. The person spearheading their operations? Their finance guy? Game changers, both.

“Every time we hire someone, we level up and get better,” Mendenhall says. “It’s about learning. I learned so much at Entrata. I learned so much at Pattern. But it’s learning, learning, learning. If you want to see how good you are at something, though, you start a business. Everybody who works for Spylt has that same sense of ownership. They can see how far we need to go versus how far we’ve already come. But we’re building this, and that’s why many of them have come here. They want to know how good they are, to really see if they can do this. So far, everybody has.”

The Xlear path to better health

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Even though the company is celebrating a quarter century in business this year, Xlear President Shad Slaughter is used to managing that ambiguity.

“Sometimes there’s skepticism, and maybe where we’re located doesn’t help that. But based on our address, there are a lot of assumptions we’re multi-level marketing,” Slaughter says. “The products we make have decades of research and support from the medical community.”

Today, Xlear, Inc. — pronounced “clear” — is a leading manufacturer of xylitol products in the United States and has nearly 100 employees. In its earliest days, though, it had one employee: owner Nathan Jones. After his father, Dr. Lon Jones, discovered what xylitol could do by researching studies conducted in Finland, he formulated a nasal spray using the ingredient. He tapped his son to build the company, which promotes natural ways to clean the nose airway in a variety of ways, protecting against everything from allergies and asthma to ear and sinus infections.

The presentation that started a company

In the company’s infancy, Nathan had a small office that didn’t allow for many niceties. There was a futon with xylitol products shoved underneath it, and a desk and computer he used to broadcast xylitol facts. And when he wasn’t in the office, he was traveling, spending most of his time at medical conventions for nurse practitioners and physician assistants, telling doctors and dentists about xylitol research and the sugar substitute’s benefits to dental health.

“When you’re talking to a person who is educated in healing, you can say a lot more than what you’re allowed to say to end consumers,” Nathan says. “Because enough of them told their patients about it, we’re in business today.”

The evidence that xylitol works well for a variety of issues is substantial. One review published in the Journal of International Society of Preventive & Community Dentistry, for example, notes adding just five to 10 grams of xylitol products per day to an everyday routine — including lozenges, chewing gum and toothpaste — can significantly prevent cavities and tooth decay compared to products with no xylitol.

Over 20 years ago, Nathan was at another convention to introduce his company, Xlear, and talk about how xylitol promotes oral health. Dr. David Williams was in the audience. Dr. Williams liked what he heard so much that he returned home and promptly wrote eight pages about what Nathan had presented. Williams shared what he learned about Xlear’s products in a newsletter sent to 250,000 people, which was a pivotal event in the company’s growth.

“Because he was already familiar with xylitol and the way it worked, it made sense to him,” Nathan says. “I’ll be ever thankful to David Williams.”

Before Williams even sent his newsletter out, calls were starting to trickle in at Xlear, an early sign of what would follow. The first caller said he’d read the newsletter and wanted to buy products. The next day, three others made similar requests. A day later, four people

A full week went by and Williams phoned Nathan about what he expected was about to happen. Interest was growing — quickly — and that was a problem.

“All the employees at the publishing company for the newsletter had read about Xlear and placed orders, and that newsletter hadn’t even been sent yet,” Nathan says. “Our nasal spray was one of the first products nearly all of their staff had unanimously bought … and now they were about to send it out to a quarter of a million people.”

The issue: If demand was already that strong, people would have a hard time getting through to place their orders. To combat that, Nathan took immediate action. With just 10 days left to go before the newsletter was to be sent to a lot of mailboxes, he withdrew cash from his retirement fund, borrowed additional funds from his brother, bought and installed more phones inside a storage unit, and ordered 100,000 additional bottles of nasal spray.

“A day later, my phone started ringing. Then again that night. Then it was ringing all day,” Nathan says. He eventually steered incoming calls to a call center of eight to manage the influx.

With large nationwide customers now regularly ordering everything from Xlear’s nasal spray to sugar-free cough drops from the Utah-based manufacturer, the demand for xylitol products has continued to grow steadily over time. While exact sales numbers weren’t shared, Slaughter says the company dispatches an average of 15-18 semitrucks of its products out from its 60,000-square-foot facility every week.

Sometimes that means demand outweighs how fast they’re able to produce, Slaughter says.

“Our cough drops got way more attention than we were expecting. We thought we were going to scale up into it,” Slaughter says. “Our first real customer to place an order was CVS for 2,000 of their stores. Following right after them was Sprouts. Then Natural Grocers. Now Walgreens wants them, but we can’t supply them quite yet. I’m figuring that out.”

In search of better health

In the late 90s, Nate’s father was a retired osteopathic physician based in Plainview, Texas, who focused primarily on children’s ear infections. His father’s then-girlfriend and future wife, Jerry Bozeman, had a granddaughter suffering from chronic ear infections. In his search for a solution, he repeatedly came across dental studies stating that natural sugar alcohol reduces cavities. In one study, kids who used xylitol in the test group experienced approximately 42 percent fewer ear and upper respiratory infections. In 1998, the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy showed why that was the case: xylitol blocked nasal pathogens (or viruses) from adhering to the tissue.

Finnish researchers showed that kids who chewed a xylitol gum to prevent tooth decay had 40 percent fewer ear infections, Lon says. The problem was that many small children suffering from ear infections hadn’t mastered the mechanics of chewing gum. There had to be an alternative way to provide the same kind of results or benefits.

“The authors of that finished study said [xylitol] worked on bacteria, and bacteria causing ear infections live in the back of the nose, so I put it [in a nasal spray],” Lon says. “That helped 10 kids in my practice who had the same problem as our granddaughter. I watched them for a year after they started using Xlear, and the number of infections dropped by 95 percent.”

Shortly after the nasal spray was patented, Xlear was built. Lon named the company, noting that the “X” in its name is for xylitol and its products serve to clear the nose.

Honesty breeds authenticity

Not everyone has agreed with how Nathan’s company promoted its products, including the federal government. When the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit in 2021, the organization contended that Xlear was deceptively marketing its products. It took four years for the team to prove they had not shared anything they couldn’t back up with multiple studies. Charges were abruptly dropped earlier this year. Cleared of wrongdoing, Nathan sees those results as a chance for his company to be even bolder in sharing what their xylitol-based products have been proven to do.

“Because of the way we won that lawsuit, we’re making a lot stronger claims for our products than we have in the past,” Nathan says, which includes a shield on its packaging that states it blocks bacteria and viruses. The company wants to continue to offer effective health and hygiene solutions in the simplest way possible, making it easier for consumers to follow.

“The trick is to make it simple. If a health protocol or routine is hard to follow, you’re going to get very little compliance with it. Making it as simple as, ‘Hey, you want good breath after you eat a meal, pop in the right kind of gum,’” Slaughter says. “Candidly, there are other gums that do what our gum does. We’d like you to use ours, but that little act of chewing xylitol gum versus another type of gum is going to give you the benefits of better breath. It’s going to make your mouth feel clean, and it’s actually going to help versus just masking.”

If there’s a message Nathan would like more people to understand, it’s that a person’s mouth and nose are the gateway bionome — a community of microorganisms including fungi, bacteria and viruses. Keeping that area clean and moist is integral to keeping bacteria out and maintaining overall health, which is precisely what his products do.

“[Considering the] thousands of studies published in medical literature [stating] that your oral microbiome is important to your health, the way dentistry treats tooth decay is absurd. It’s absurd beyond belief. What have they told you in your life, other than fluoride, fluoride, fluoride?” Nathan says. “Fluoride works to make your enamel stronger, but tooth decay is caused by a bacterial infection, which can create acid and cause inflammation.”

“Why not treat the bacterial infection instead of just making your enamel more resistant to the acid created by the infection? Dentists know how to treat bacterial infection, but they don’t. It makes the argument for fluoride a flimsy one. It’s an example of how our healthcare system treats the symptom and not the cause.”

As Xlear’s family of products continues to grow, so does the public’s understanding of what it is they’re trying to accomplish. It’s proof that better hygiene can make all the difference in someone’s health.

Happy Tooth: Fluoride-free toothpaste that kids actually want to use

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In 2014, Clark began the company by creating hand-stamped jewelry. She hammered letters, numbers and symbols into metal pieces, assembling them onto chains or hooks. She spent a lot of time on her kitchen floor.

When she opened an Etsy shop to sell her wares, it was late in the year, already November. She thought people had probably already purchased their Christmas gifts, but she decided she’d take her chances with less-than-perfect timing anyway. That gamble worked in her favor, and she promptly received more orders than she could easily keep up with.

“It blew up,” Clark says. “Even when I had to go to bed at three in the morning and wake up at six to create more orders, it was a thrill connecting with my audience that way.” Taking her shop offline to catch up was always a looming possibility but never an option she used. She didn’t want to stop what was building. Momentum was a good thing.

As her kitchen-floor work continued, her Etsy shop audience grew. Her business and life continued to intertwine and started to evolve into other interests. What she wanted to offer under The Dainty Pear Co. name started to broaden. A kitchen line was an early idea that would allow Clark to include her lifelong passions for cooking and baking in her business. Actually making that shift, though, took time.

“I was so focused on doing jewelry, I wasn’t sure people would accept it if I switched lanes,” Clark says. “It created a mental block for me for a while. But, as soon as I did it, it felt like I was where I wanted to be.” After she had her fifth baby, Clark says she decided to “hang up jewelry and go all-in on a lifestyle blog and cooking.”

From good taste to great flavor

Those already close to Clark seemed poised to accept the new direction.

“My grandma always cooked, and our moms cooked. Once we got married and learned how to cook, we already had great examples to look to,” says Valory Dahlin, executive administrator at The Dainty Pear Co. and a cousin. “The direction Sarah took — switching from jewelry to recipes and curating for her shop and so on — is not even a little bit of a surprise.”

Dahlin shot all the photography for Clark’s cookbooks. Often a guest for their Sunday night family meals, Dahlin was the first to suggest that Clark create recipes for her meals so others could enjoy them.

“She’d make smoked pork loins, marinating them overnight, and they were always delicious,” Dahlin says. “I’d ask what she put in her marinade, and she’d never know. She was prone to making things up along the way.”

Clark started sharing videos of meals she made on Instagram when she began the culinary side of her company. Although her online following initially centered around her jewelry, people were intrigued by Clark’s food content, often asking questions about her techniques and recipes. At first, she struggled to answer them — she never followed recipes in the kitchen — but she started jotting down notes about the dishes she cooked and baked.

Clark spent the next three years creating and releasing two self-published cookbooks, each interspersed with photos of her family. She’s currently working on a third installment, GROUNDED, which is likely to be released in 2026.

As Clark dedicated more time to her cookbooks, she felt she was exactly where she needed to be. Her growing business and readership reflected that. “It’s kind of funny how we tell ourselves who we will or won’t be when we’re young,” Clark says of the shift. “But this made sense to do.”

From books to storefronts

Now, she just needed a store for people to gather and find her products in. Attempts were made for a few different properties over several years before Clark secured the spot where The Dainty Pear Co. lives today. When the barn where the All That Stuff In The Barn store used to be became available, she didn’t hesitate to put an offer down.

Once she’d secured the building, Clark began renovating using reclaimed wood from Fort Midway that dates back to the 1850s. She kept the property’s working-barn history intact by preserving the restaurant built into the old milking barn area behind the structure. Her team covered all external wood in a special shell to protect it from the elements.

Inside the store today, there’s a section for gourmet groceries — what Clark calls the store’s top-selling area — including various ingredients for her cookbook recipes. There’s a tinned fish section. There’s a wide variety of imported black licorice. There are even penny candy bins, allowing you to buy confections in bulk. Another local mercantile store started the penny candy tradition, and Clark’s decision to bring it back helps make it a memory for the newest generation.

“We need to safeguard that nostalgia or it gets lost,” Clark says. “I want people to have an experience [at the store], whether it’s a conversation with a friend they normally wouldn’t have had elsewhere or dinner with their family using olive oil they discovered and brought home. I envisioned people going in, having a coffee and food, chatting with their friends, all while connecting inside this historic space, one with so much warmth and history.”

She describes her store as a gathering spot for the community, which is set to grow with a cafe scheduled to be completed in 2025. Cooking classes have been requested, and monthly classes are set to follow. There are soft plans to allow for live music in the future and an area to write and send stamped letters, possibly connecting with a nearby nursing home as recipients.

The ideas point toward a community that needs a space to gather together. Clark believes her store can help fill that void and already does.

Kari Baltz, COO of The Dainty Pear Co., agrees, “With the area growing so quickly and a lot of new people moving in, the community has been waiting for something like this: a reminder of their own travels around the world, of nostalgia, of yesterday — with a bit of a small town feel to it.”

While commerce will always loom, peddling wares doesn’t serve as Clark’s core driver.

“This business is bigger now than I ever thought it would be. It brings me joy, even when it’s stressful,” Clark says. “Believing in it allows me all the fuel I need to keep going.”

“I’ve talked to Sarah and [her husband] for years about their vision and all they’ve wanted to do,” Dahlin says. “I’m seeing their dreams come true after a lot of sleepless nights.”

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From the beginning, as a pediatric dentist in the Millcreek area since 2021, Hanks was already pushing against dentist stereotypes. Creating oral care products that reflected his values and overall vision to “do dentistry differently” took time.

“I built a practice with a mural that says ‘BITE ME’ on the wall right when you walk in. Anything the dentistry industry was doing, we tried to go the opposite way,” Hanks says. “Our toothpaste is doing the same thing. Where a traditional toothpaste tingles and foams and burns and has a ton of nasty chemicals in it, we wanted to create a clean toothpaste that was fun and tasteful and effective for kids and their parents.”

Hanks needed someone to rely on to accomplish this mission, and it was as easy as calling his old friend, Jeremy Nef. The two first met in 2007 as Southern Utah University roommates and have remained in contact ever since.

The duo got serious about providing a safer toothpaste to include in dental checkups and to use at home. First and foremost, it wouldn’t contain fluoride.

No more fluoride

Because too much fluoride can lead to a number of side effects — including dental fluorosis and neurological problems — Happy Tooth’s founders decided to axe it altogether. Besides, fluoride could be toxic in large doses, and when children are first learning to brush their teeth, they often accidentally swallow toothpaste. Not including it would keep young teeth brushers safer, so they replaced it with an even better ingredient: calcium hydroxyapatite.

“We wanted to use calcium hydroxyapatite instead of fluoride, as fluoride continues to be more problematic. Studies come out about it almost every week, signaling to us it was worse than we even thought it was,” Nef says. “From a teeth-strengthening and remineralization standpoint, hydroxyapatite is as effective as fluoride, and it’s also biocompatible and safe to swallow.”

By also creating a wide variety of flavors geared specifically to kids, the unexpected choices are as untraditional as Hanks’s dental practice, with choices like Vanilla Frosting, Lemon Twist, Sweet Orange and Mint Brownie.

Combining better ingredients with more enticing flavors, the company began receiving reports that kids who brushed with the toothpaste didn’t have any cavities after using it regularly. Customers started sharing stories about their children who now looked forward to brushing. With results like that, the small e-commerce company saw its sales grow by more than 100 percent every year since it launched three years ago, and Happy Tooth is currently the No. 6 bestselling children’s toothpaste on Amazon.

On a larger scale, sales for fluoride-free toothpaste are trending upward. Since the start of 2024, sales for toothpastes that don’t include fluoride have grown by 16 percent every month through April, according to NielsenIQ data, while fluorinated choices only increased by 2.4 percent.

Nef has been paying particular attention to statistics like those.

“Three years ago, hydroxyapatite was a pretty niche ingredient coming to market. We were one of the first kids’ toothpastes to have it in the country, and now there’s insane tailwinds,” Nef says. “We’ve been fortuitous in being early to market and have been able to ride this wave upward. We’re experiencing an industry shift. Even the No. 1 selling toothpaste on Amazon is a hydroxyapatite toothpaste, so it’s becoming more and more common.”

Hanks echoes Nef. He even uses the product himself.

“I am not anti-fluoride, but I am ingredient aware,” Hanks says. “I’ve heard it said that Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use Macs. But as soon as we made this [toothpaste], both of us switched. It’s what our kids are using. It’s what I am using. Three years in, I feel really good about that.”

Walk into the grocery store today and the majority of toothpastes will fall into one of two categories: either they’ll a) have fluoride or b) be a natural toothpaste that eschews both fluoride and hydroxyapatite. And that’s a problem: a third option needs to exist among those others.

“There’s nothing in there to mineralize [the teeth]. You have to strengthen your teeth, not just clean them temporarily,” Hanks says. “You’re eating all day long. Not only are those carbs and sugars breaking down your enamel, but you’re also getting microabrasions and chips from wear and tear, even simply putting your cup up against your teeth. You need a toothpaste that will remineralize your teeth consistently to keep them strong. With no remineralization agent, you’re just brushing with tasty water.”

In it for the long haul

While Hanks lives his brand loudly — often posting short, funny videos to his social media accounts — customers don’t always find his products that way. Sometimes they do their own research.

Longtime Happy Tooth customer Annakaren Echeverria discovered the toothpaste when researching products that might be best for her young son. Because he was born with a cleft lip and palate, she was advised early on that his teeth would likely decay at an accelerated pace and that she needed to be cautious with whatever she used to brush his teeth with. After Echeverria placed her first order and tested it out, she never stopped ordering.

Three years later, she’s still ordering, only now it’s in larger quantities. What was originally meant for her son has become a favorite of the whole family. When her folks visit, they’ve started asking after it by name. She’s a fan, and more importantly, so is her son.

“I was dedicated to finding something that would be safe for my son, either in the long or short term. When I learned their products were healthy and all-natural, all my concerns went away,” Echeverria says. “He started brushing with Happy Tooth and, when I took him to the dentist for his checkup, the dentist had no concerns about his teeth. He loved the results we received so much that he asked what product I was using.”

“We haven’t needed to sacrifice our integrity or vision because we’ve been OK growing slow. It’s not growing slow, to be frank, but we had no investors to pay back. We weren’t in any rush to get to market.”

Tyler Hanks

Small but mighty

So far, there aren’t many employees on the Happy Tooth product team. Sam Spendlove was brought on as the company’s e-commerce operator in 2023, the company’s third-ever hire. She witnessed firsthand how their product business was able to springboard off of Hanks’s dental practice, and believes having that credible backing in place helped them to get a proper head start. Spendlove calls it a lucky part of their overall success.

Now, as their trajectory points upward — and especially over the past year, she says — the company is focused on dialing in the best all-around toothpaste they can manage to make. There is talk of making tweaks to a select few ingredients in the current formula in order to get them to that point. And while there’s no such thing as a silver bullet, she says, they want to get as close to having a perfect toothpaste as possible.

“It seems silly. It’s toothpaste. It’s brushing teeth. But, as a mom, the last thing I need is another issue to fight with my kids about,” Spendlove says. “To be part of removing that one fight for families at night, when parents are completely depleted — or in the morning and trying to get out the door — is pretty rewarding.”

Spendlove fully believes Happy Tooth is on its way to becoming a household name. Because she also manages customer service for the oral care company, she’s in a unique position to hear both what customers have enjoyed and suggestions on what they’d like to see in the future. The company is fully invested in making its toothpaste even better than it already is in hopes of serving an even larger audience.

“It’s tricky, because if you sacrifice one thing, you end up sacrificing something else. Take away what one person doesn’t like, and another person will like what’s taken away,” Spendlove says. “No matter how perfect the formula is from a health-conscious perspective, everyone’s mouths are different. Everyone’s genetics are different. Everyone’s diet is different. All of those parts play into oral care. Still, we do the best we can from our end.”

To no cavities and beyond

For Hanks, this journey started as a more affordable toothpaste he could provide to patients, a product he could hand out on their way out the door. The overwhelmingly positive feedback led the duo to market to an even larger audience. Now, customers from states outside of Utah are their most consistent customers.

Happy Tooth has evolved to far more than just toothpaste. Offerings include mouthwash, floss, toothbrushes and even whitening strips.

“Because we didn’t get private equity involved, we were making less than a dollar a tube to start, and sometimes even losing money through marketing,” Hanks says. “But that toothpaste formula worked. We haven’t needed to sacrifice our integrity or vision because we’ve been OK growing slow. It’s not growing slow, to be frank, but we had no investors to pay back. We weren’t in any rush to get to market.”

With rapid growth still taking place, it’s difficult to say where the company might be even a few years from now. The adventure is still taking shape, and both founders are invested in where it’s headed.

“My wife asked my daughter what she wanted to be when she grows up, and her response was, ‘I want to be a toothpaste maker,’” Nef says. “And I’m like, yeah, we want to keep being toothpaste makers.”

Film Is Not Dead: How Jonathan Canlas built an analog empire in a digital world

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The eatery was a coffee warehouse in the 40s, and has a fading mural on its outside bricks as evidence. It became an auto shop, closed, and was revamped into the historic establishment it is today, complete with concrete floors, exposed rafters/ventilation, and plenty of natural light to shoot photos in.

The old-made-new surroundings mirror a message Canlas has long preached: Newer doesn’t always mean better. When the world collectively decided to switch from analog camera shooting to digital photography, he chose otherwise and stayed put, teaching FIND (short for Film Is Not Dead) workshops to those wanting to either learn or better their craft all over the world. The demand for what he offers — quality processing coupled with education — led Canlas to open a film processing lab in Orem in 2011. A second space on a busy corner of Provo’s Center Street followed in 2024, and his Salt Lake City lab opened its doors in early 2025.

“Young kids love finding their parents’ camera and slowing down,” Canlas says. “The difference between shooting film and digital photography is the difference between being present and showing up. With film, you have to think about what you’re doing; you’ve got 10-36 photos available to you. On a digital card, you have 5000. I’m telling you right now, you don’t have 5000 ideas — let alone 5000 thoughts — in a single day.”

As his newest location quickly finds its feet in Salt Lake — receiving over 100 rolls of film from customers some days —it is confirmation that even though digital photography is the easier route, the ongoing trend toward creating tangible keepsakes hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s growing. Canlas compares it to those who choose buying vinyl or cassette tapes at independent record stores over streaming: convenience is hardly the point.

“Digital photography has its place, but I love the intentionality of shooting with film. It allows people who’ve burned out to get the fire back under their mind again,” Canlas says. “I know a lot of digital photographers who don’t even want to pick their camera back up when they’re done shooting because it feels too much like work. But whether you pay me or not, I’m going to shoot because the act of shooting film is amazing.”

Canlas has shot film photography since 1999, leading him to conduct photography workshops sharing his techniques with others worldwide, in places like Cuba, Australia and Japan — but that’s not how he got started.

A workshop goes worldwide

In the onset, Canlas cut his teeth in the industry in related-but-different ways; shooting weddings was his “bread and butter” for nearly two decades. He shifted to doing family sessions — which is what he mostly does now — and he taught workshops, lots and lots of workshops. In fact, the monthly Film Is Not Dead workshop began in 2008 as a way of promoting film photography through 2015 before he ended it, the final four workshops taking place in Berlin, Mexico, Hawaii and Australia.

Doing his workshops has yielded big results, especially for those who’ve taken his shared knowledge to heart. One workshop affected an attendee so deeply that it proved pivotal in her own career. After Utah-based photographer D’Arcy Benincosa participated, she learned how to better establish her style, and it ultimately allowed her to part ways with school teaching and embrace a new path in photography.

“[Canlas] also took us behind the scenes on how much money he was making and that blew my mind,” Benincosa says. “He was making six figures in print sales, and I didn’t know that was even possible, that you could be an artist and earn that much. If he could do that, I thought, so could I, and I made [photography] my career.”

Part of Canlas’ decision to call it quits on the workshops was because it was taking away from his six children far too often. Being gone for up to two weeks every month caused him to feel like a tourist in his own home. So, he shifted his workshops into an online experience to still allow others the opportunity.

Now that his children have grown older, the winds of change are shifting all over again. After not doing in-person workshops for over a decade, Canlas is bringing it back this year, an experience he’s calling Film Is Not Dead 2.0, with workshops scheduled throughout the rest of 2025 locally in Utah, California, New York City and many others planned worldwide.

Outside of creating opportunities for film enthusiasts to learn how to shoot film better, Canlas is busy creating his footprint in Utah as a way of establishing greater opportunities for photographers locally. Even though he admits he’s doing it backwards — having already taught film workshops on other continents — it’s connected to a larger plan to establish his brand in this state.

“I’m giving people access, that’s it,” Canlas says. “That’s all the FIND lab is, really: it’s a presence. Here’s a cool thing I believe in that’s amazing. Interact with it however you want.”

As workshops and physical locations increase, so do opportunities to discover, ask questions about and explore the world of film photography.

“Slowing down cleans up my edits, allowing me to be exactly where I want to be: behind the camera. I don’t consider myself an artist. Artists come up with concepts. I’m able to show up and see beauty.”

Jonathan Canlas

Location, location, location

But initially, building a photo lab was a way to save money.

The genesis story goes like this: Canlas used a photo lab in Provo called Campus Photo, right up until it went out of business. He bought their scanner and developer as a way to cut costs, as he wanted to do away with needing to pay $15 per roll hundreds of times over to have them developed. After that, he hired employees to scan and develop for him.

In 2011, photo labs were going away altogether, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get film developed. Costco was getting rid of that service, as was Walgreens and CVS. A select few larger labs were available, but amateur photographers just starting out couldn’t always afford to pay for their services, Canlas says.

According to the company’s site, theFINDlab began as an extension of the FIND workshop to create as much opportunity for attendees to shoot as much film as possible. While the lab’s services were only available to attendees of the FIND workshop at first, demand led Canlas in a new direction, and services were opened up to all film shooters.

“I was a trusted person in the industry at the time,” Canlas says, mentioning that he was sponsored by Fuji and Kodak then. “I was the film guy. The workshop grew, and a lot of current established shooters got their start coming to my workshop.”

The Provo location didn’t open until 2024, and it was a personal choice to put roots down there. Canlas spent seven-and-a-half years at Brigham Young University, and he wanted to provide a chance for university students and other locals to learn what he wasn’t able to when he was their age.

Now he’s able to actively provide opportunities by creating a community of photographers, showcasing art shows every 45 days, taking photo walks, and doing free events. Sometimes it’s as simple as handing someone an analog camera, just to see how they react to it.

“I don’t know if they’ll be into it or not. Maybe they’ll like it and maybe they won’t. But if those kinds of opportunities don’t exist, they’d never know one way or the other,” Canlas says. “Film is super niche, but if amateur photographers can get aligned with the right opportunity, they can also learn the basics, and have the chance to go their own way.”

Caleb Clark, who manages Salt Lake’s theFINDlab location, echoes Canlas’ sentiments. He also sees the rise in the next generation’s hunger for shooting film, reverting to film over digital photography. He agrees the timing was just right and that the location has only added to the success of the company they are seeing.

“If a place like what we have created in Provo existed while I was there, it would have changed my trajectory. I tell my kids the reason you go to college is to network. Unless you’re becoming a doctor or learning a trade, you’re there for the experience,” Canlas says. “No one ever hired me because they looked at my degree first. It’s because they saw my photos.”

Slowing down for beauty

With three successful locations, Canlas is considering a fourth store. Adding a spot in Ogden would allow him to provide educational opportunities to university students in nearby Weber State University, also making it close enough for students in Logan attending Utah State University to visit.

Nothing will take place until 2026, but securing a large studio space — perhaps near the train station on 25th street — would be a solid addition to that community.

For now, Canlas is largely considering his Provo location, where he plans to bring in a slew of used digital cameras, including camcorders and Super 8s. After being in that space for more than a year, they’ve learned what their clientele wants. Because other nearby stores aren’t catering to those needs, he’s going to.

“What we offer doesn’t have to be just film, though film will always be the base of it. That’s the start of the creative process that will allow our customers to branch off and do whatever they feel appropriate,” Canlas says. “I don’t want to change anyone. I want you to come in and I’m going to present this idea to you. Take a look and react however you want.”

If nothing else, he hopes to get people to slow down, shoot more and edit less. Period. Going out and taking photos is always the end goal, and it amounts to a lot of people watching.

That’s just how Canlas likes it, and he believes others will, too.

“I never signed up to be a photographer to sit in a chair in front of a computer. Film, when exposed, developed, and scanned correctly, requires little to no effort on the back end,” Canlas says. “Slowing down cleans up my edits, allowing me to be exactly where I want to be: behind the camera. I don’t consider myself an artist. Artists come up with concepts. I’m able to show up and see beauty.”

How Allyse Jackson turned preparing freezer meals into a multi-million dollar business

Force of nature: Trailblazing mountain biker and public land advocate

Instead of waiting for what felt inevitable, Allyse brainstormed an alternative way forward.

“I asked myself what I was good at that could also make money, and started a list,” Allyse says, admitting that most of what she wrote down centered on homemaking skills like crocheting.

Near the top of that list was batch prepping and creating freezer meals, something she’d done so often throughout her marriage that it was practically second nature. Leaning on recipes passed down by her mother, she’d combine raw ingredients (such as chicken, potatoes and spices) in a Ziploc freezer bag and store it in the freezer for later use.

It was an easier way to tackle feeding her family and a predetermined answer to “What’s for dinner?” Because it had worked so well for her small family, she thought, maybe other families could use help, too. Using stock photography and a few tested recipes, she posted to a local Facebook group of moms, offering to shop, compile and deliver ready-to-cook meals to their homes.

“Within minutes, the commenting started,” Allyse remembers, and moms started hitting the “like” button. Not only did they take to her idea and praise her for it, but many wanted what she was selling. By the end of her first day, she’d done $10,000 in sales.

First-time customers turned into repeat shoppers. Month after month, Allyse’s expected short-term solution turned into a more permanent one. Just a few months after starting her business, Allyse hired a few employees to help with demand. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 — when grocery store shelves were often bare and uncertainty was at an all-time high — Beehive Meals saw an unexpected surge in growth.

More than five years later, momentum hasn’t stopped.

“When I started in 2019, by the end of that year, I’d produced and sold 1,500 meals. In 2020, we produced 50,000+ meals. In 2021, we did 400,000 meals,” Allyse says. Now, the company has ballooned to employing a staff of nearly 100, many of whom are female, formerly stay-at-home moms. The company has evolved to service 12 states and is on track to sell more than 1.5 million freezer bag meals before the end of 2025.

Because the company was initially intended as a short-term solution, Allyse says, she and her team responded to growth as it happened. When Beehive Meals needed another employee, they hired one. When more meals were being made, another freezer to house them was purchased. Growing incrementally allowed the company to pay along the way without ever taking on investment dollars.

“That entrepreneurial scrappiness is what allowed us to grow whenever we needed to grow,” Allyse says.

Proof of concept came easily

“[Freezer meals] were top of mind because she’d done it before,” says Allyse’s husband, Adam Jackson, who also serves as Beehive Meals’ chief commercial officer.

As far as Adam is concerned, the company’s proof of concept — or collected evidence that the idea would work — actually surfaced a few years before in 2016, just before the couple’s first daughter was born. Allyse was deep into her nesting phase at that time, preparing for their new addition. One way Allyse prepared was by creating freezer meals for her family to use later. By the end of the week, she’d prepared nearly 80 meals, filling her and Adam’s deep freezer with mostly chicken-centric dinners that were ready to heat and serve.

“Once the baby came, it was still just Allyse and I [eating them], and she discovered she’d overprepped,” Adam says. That led to sharing whenever the need arose. Allyse began dropping off a couple of meals at a time around her neighborhood, providing welcomed assistance to new moms and church members, whoever needed them most. By the time she landed on the company idea, she had a treasure most new business owners would pay handsomely for: proof of concept.

“The more I get into this, the more I discover it’s more stress and hours than I originally intended, but the impact I’m able to make on my own family, employees, and the community is so much bigger than I ever planned for.”

Allyse Jackson

Out of the home, into the office

For Allyse, beginning a business as a mother with no formal business background took some getting used to, and she admits she has sometimes felt out of place. She never finished college. Her one-time plan to become a dental hygienist never gained appropriate traction. The unpredictable feast or famine mentality nearly soured her on ever wanting to begin a business herself.

But Allyse has since discovered that being a mom has worked as a secret weapon. It’s allowed her to offer opportunities to other stay-at-home moms, as many of her longtime employees are. They have returned the trust she’s placed in them with a similar trust in the direction she’s leading them.

At first, Aubrey Christensen, a mom of four and Beehive Meals’ current director of operations, was only working part-time doing what was needed, whether that was printing labels or prepping delivery for the nearly three dozen routes scheduled for the following day. She worked nights and attended to her kids during the daytime, the youngest being newborn twins.

“Early on, I recognized [Aubrey] as someone with a lot of untapped talent,” Allyse says, and she asked Christensen to consider a full-time role as her office manager. She said yes. The ability to develop and grow has kept her at Beehive Meals almost as long as the company has existed, allowing her to switch from simply supplementing her family’s income to actively pursuing a now flourishing career.

“I’ve become so much more empowered,” Christensen says. “I work for a woman. I’m a woman. I love that my leadership team is made up of mostly women. I know that we can do amazing things together. With Allyse as a mentor, I can be a mentor to my team in turn, and both of us learn together as we go. Whatever is needed, we’re able to figure it out.”

Impact has no expiration date

Allyse is proud of the impact she makes. She’s proud of the financial stability she’s providing her immediate family, and she’s able to set an example for her daughter. She invests time, resources and money into her staff, helping improve their lives.

One of the biggest ways Allyse has influenced her own community, however, is by donating what amounts to “hundreds of thousands of dollars” worth of meals via Utah Foster Care and a partnership with Utah First Lady Abby Cox and her Show Up Utah initiative.

Cox says the partnership formed through a shared desire to both support and uplift Utah’s educators.

“As part of that initiative, we were looking for meaningful ways to show appreciation for teachers and administrators who work to support our children. Beehive Meals immediately stood out, not only because of their product, but because of their heart for service,” Cox says. “They partnered with us at the Show Up for Teachers conference to provide five frozen meals to every teacher and staff member at five local schools, and have returned to do so over and over, again and again. … I am blown away by their generosity. From the beginning, it was clear that Beehive Meals is a company that understands the power of bringing people together and making community a priority.”

Cox points out that Beehive Meals is doing more than providing dinner options — they’re delivering peace of mind, quality time and connection for families.

Alleviating mom guilt for good

For as much as Beehive Meals has already grown, Allyse hopes to continue delivering frozen meals to even more homes and states. This might mean purchasing additional freezers, a larger space, or hiring more employees. The end goal? Allowing even more working parents to be relieved from deciding what’s for dinner every night.

As a working parent, Allyse knows firsthand the kind of “mom guilt” that can coincide with getting home exhausted after a long day at the office, knowing you still need to feed your family. It’s a feeling she’s familiar with, but one she no longer experiences, as her family eats Beehive Meals a few times a week.

“Customers come up to me, just in tears, saying I’ve made them feel like they’re a good mom,” Allyse says. At the Beehive Meals Layton headquarters, where we’re speaking, there’s a playpen in the corner of her office and a few stuffed animals and toys inside. It’s evidence of her blended worlds, of sometimes needing to bring home to work, and vice versa. And that’s exactly as she’d have it.

“The more I get into this, the more I discover it’s more stress and hours than I originally intended, but the impact I’m able to make on my own family, employees, and the community is so much bigger than I ever planned for,” Allyse says. “I wouldn’t change any of it, and that includes all the failures we’ve experienced. They’ve happened for a reason and have allowed me to grow personally and professionally. … I love the journey.”

Finding yourself in the freezer aisle

Sometimes, inspiration for a good company mascot is grazing a few steps from your front door.

Blue Unicorn co-founder Meradith Christensen had alpacas on the brain. Five of those constantly curious South American animals live in their nearby pasture, where her family has raised them for the past couple of years. They collect their hair to make yarn, occasionally rent one of the friendlier ones out to kids’ birthday parties, and give their teenage daughter a chance to learn responsibility by taking care of them.

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“We decided we could do some out-of-the-box thinking with our mascot, and it didn’t have to be a traditional unicorn,” Meradith says while hosing down the big-eyed animals with cool water. “A unicorn is something you don’t believe exists. When my husband Jason first tried this bar, he called it the ‘unicorn’ of protein bars — a fusion of taste, texture and nutrition. Nobody thought it could even exist, yet here it was. That’s how it began.”

When the opportunity to partner surfaced, Jason wasn’t necessarily looking for it. It had been a decade since he sold North Star, the company he started, which he grew from thousands of employees and even more customers in 30 states. He spent nearly 20 years in that industry before selling. He then started teaching at Brigham Young University, where he’s still an adjunct professor in its entrepreneurial management department, teaching entrepreneurial sales and persuasion.

Curiosity led him to meet with his now-partner, Luke Tolley and try the bar he’d invented. It shocked him; it was like nothing he’d ever tasted. He was immediately hooked.

“I don’t know how many people get to be involved with a product that they’re passionate about,” Jason says. “I liked what I did before … but it’s unique to be a part of something you genuinely love.”

No more half-eaten protein bars

While Jason never worked in consumables before Blue Unicorn, he had many years of experience with protein — and protein bars, specifically. After eating thousands of them in his lifetime, Jason believed Tolley’s creation surpassed them all.

Jason was 25 when he learned what protein could do for his body. He was living in Arizona, working for Intel. He filled his refrigerator with cans of Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew. Before he went to work, his first meal was always a bagel with cream cheese and a 32-ounce Coke. The rest of the day, fast food was his mainstay. “It had been years since I tasted water,” Jason says, only half joking. Chronic heartburn was an everyday reminder of all he ate, and a bottle of Tums was never far.

When his company offered body fat testing to its employees one day, Jason measured over 33 percent, bordering on morbid obesity. He hated how he looked and subsequently felt. When a roommate introduced him to Bill Phillips’ Body For Life program — a 90-day body transformation challenge offering prizes for the most dramatic body change — he threw everything in his fridge away, started a new meal plan and supplemented it with daily protein bars and shakes, quitting soda cold turkey. After making incredible progress, he dropped to 10 percent body fat, and protein became part of his daily nutrition. Even though he never enjoyed eating a protein bar, he did it for the results.

When Tolley told Jason he had an idea for an innovative protein bar, he was all ears; however, he wasn’t expecting to like what he tasted.

Knowing the bar’s contents — high protein, high fiber, and low sugar — Jason was skeptical. He thought if it was this good for you, there’s no way it would taste good. He was proved wrong right away and took as many protein bars as he could get away with to share with his family.

“Our kids started asking for them nonstop after that, which was a huge deal to me. I buy the groceries in our home, and nutrition has always been important for us,” Meradith says. “That means getting sugar down and protein up. The bars check those boxes and have seven grams of fiber. As a mom, oh my gosh, it hit all the areas I cared about as a consumer.”

Jason and Tolley agreed on a partnership, and a business name evolved simultaneously. The bar was highly desirable yet difficult to create. In other words, it was a unicorn.

Jason refers to Tolley as a real-life Willy Wonka, and there’s more than one reason for that.

Beyond Oompa Loompas

From the time Tolley’s mother urged him to try making cookies when he was a boy, he developed a love for the science and art of baking, even baking wedding cakes by request and pouring chocolate. He started to tap into various regions of the world, including Fiji, which has cocoa beans with a strong caramel taste. Even though Tolley became known for his culinary delights, it remained a part-time passion. Professionally, he focused on electrical engineering, designing analytical chemistry devices, and was also a chemistry professor.

“Sixteen years ago, a weightlifter friend called me up. He said, ‘Look, I know you bake well and know you know chemistry. I need you to invent a new protein bar for me,’” Tolley says. “I turned him down.”

The friend persisted. He bought one of every kind of protein bar that existed then and sent them over. After Tolley received them in the mail, he and his kids tasted each one. Knowing what was in the market, he was confident he could do better. The more he experimented, the more his confidence blossomed. While the project with his weightlifting friend never progressed, he learned there was so much room for improvement in the world of protein bars.

Tolley decided texture was the first area that needed help. In his mind, there were two types of protein bars: one resembled dried-up Play-Doh and the other was like cookie crisps glued together with syrup. Either option gets stuck in your teeth and requires a lot of water to wash down. He wanted to change that.

Tolley read an article that rated protein bars against one another, and the crowd favorite was the only one almost no one dreaded eating. The standard for protein bars was low, and he knew he had the chops to create the ultimate recipe.

“A lot of that [confidence] comes from my chemistry background, being able to understand how the molecules interact and how that translates into texture and a more pleasant eating experience,” Tolley says. “I thought about it for years, simulating how it would work. Once I figured it out, I did it. It’s not just messing around in the kitchen.”

While Blue Unicorn remains Tolley’s primary focus, it’s not his only one. A continual invention process has surfaced, allowing him to improve on the areas that need it. He’s developed prototypes with a protein Twinkie-like product that has been surprisingly successful. He’s excited about what’s possible with this new product as he blurs the line between dessert and good nutrition.

“That’s the American dream, right?” Tolley says. “Just imagine! A healthy Twinkie!”

A future still untold

Blue Unicorn experienced success before they knew what to expect.

Jason met with Todd Humphrey, the CEO of Good Earth, before his company produced even 100 bars; they had more packaging created than completed products. Still, he wanted to gauge interest. Humphrey asked him questions he didn’t have answers to yet. When the store owner ultimately liked the bar and bought 21 cases (over 3,000 bars), Jason experienced some internal panic. However, they completed the order the following week, and their bars are a staple at Good Earth stores across the state.

Knowing they had something worth sharing, Jason and Meradith attended farmers’ markets and conferences once or twice a week to encourage people to experience Blue Unicorn for the first time, something they continue to do.

Jason’s vision for Blue Unicorn’s future is vast. He’d like to see their bars in stores throughout the country. As their family of products evolves, Jason is eager to see what accessible nutrition solutions they add next.

“It’s exciting to be part of a movement that helps people live healthier lives, where they feel like they’re not totally deprived,” Meradith says.

As a mom of five who is careful about the treats she buys her kids, Meradith wants to let the world know a nutritious, allergen-free and gluten-free option does exist.

While Tolley’s goals are tied to those within the company, he continues to find new ways to create.

“I’m an inventor,” Tolley says. “My dream is to have a company where I can sit in my lab, invent new products and funnel them to those who can run with it.”

So far, he’s able to do just that with Blue Unicorn. As the company’s founders uncover additional ways to make nutrition taste good, the idea of a unicorn protein bar — or even an alpacacorn protein bar — becomes far less mythical.

Manly Bands is rethinking men’s rings

How Crystal Maggelet went from hotelier to chief adventure guide

Duck your head inside the property with an all-caps MANLY BANDS pronouncement on its outside, and it almost looks like a jewelry store, with glass display cases all in a row, each containing rings. There’s a chandelier pieced together with deer antlers hanging from the ceiling. The walls are painted black. There’s a cowhide throw rug. And when an associate offers to take you on a tour of the space — offering that over 80 percent of Manly Bands’ rings are made right here — it takes only a few minutes to uncover the truth: this spot is the antithesis of a stuffy jewelry store. It’s practically an updated take on a bachelor’s pad. It’s a man cave with rings.

“This is our Fender collection, which has rings with acoustic guitar strings," says my tour guide, Manly Bands Administrative Assistant Sadie Post. The ring is made entirely out of ebony wood and, in addition to its bronze guitar string inlay, it has authentic Fender tweed fabric inside. The tiny box it comes in resembles the world’s smallest guitar case.

Post showcases more unique rings, including one that’s made of Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrels. Rings with actual meteorites embedded. Rings with bits of archaeologist-provided dinosaur fossils and/or shards of Sherman tanks blended in. There’s an entire “Lord of the Rings” collection approved of, signed off on and celebrated by the family of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Since 2016, Manly Bands has provided men’s rings that rarely fit a standard mold. The company was formed to provide a wider range of sizes and styles to men about to get married, creating bands that are unique to their customers’ hobbies and passions. This hardly seemed a radical idea at first, but it evolved into one. Manly Bands founders Michelle Luchese and John Ruggiero have since become disruptors in the industry.

“That was the exciting part. We’re not jewelers; we’re marketers and entrepreneurs,” Ruggiero says. “We wanted to design rings all along, but it was a process to discover how we could help other guys like me who either had big fingers or wanted options that went beyond a traditional gold or silver band. That resonated then and resonates now.”

Ruggiero’s nuptials were the starting point for the business he shares with his wife. Finding rings that fit him was no easy task, and he ultimately felt like there might be others like him who shared his plight. Nearly a decade into their journey, he’s more than proven that inclination right.

One size fits some

But disrupting an industry isn’t what Ruggiero and Luchese had in mind when they were trying to get married; they just wanted a little variety. Options. Something that would go past his first knuckle.

“Not only did the stores not have my size, they couldn’t size me, period,” Ruggiero says. He wears a size 17 — far larger than most stores carry, as ring sizes for men average between 9 and 13. Instead, he was handed a catalog with a few simple choices and then told he’d receive it from overseas in four weeks. He wasn’t ready to stop looking, but after striking out at several stores in a row, John’s final recourse was to order from Amazon.

While what they ordered wasn’t anything flashy, at least it fit. After getting married and moving from Los Angeles to Florida, Ruggiero and Luchese thought more about their experience with securing a wedding ring. They’d done their share of research, and it sparked ideas.

Ruggieroe ran a marketing agency, Luchese was an actor, and both their parents were entrepreneurs. By combining their creativity, they felt they could be a solution to the problem nobody had solved.

“You’ll only buy a wedding ring once,” Luchese said in a 2023 Utah Business article. “Maybe twice, if you’re part of the national average — the point is, it’s a special thing, and it’s something we assume you’ll be wearing for years and years. It should be personal.”

Within their first year in business, the couple knew they had something to offer, and customers agreed. Sales grew. Ruggiero handled marketing and Luchese tackled customer service as they shipped products out of their garage for their first year and a half. The company grew from five people who wore a few hats each to a staff that’s now 45 employees strong, creating up to 180 rings onsite and shipping between 300 and 500 packages daily.

A ring with a story

While many customers choose rings that align with their interests, sometimes a ring connects someone to their family. For example, Phil Marascalco of West Virginia bought one that tied him to his late grandfather. The ring — called The Patton, after the famed Sherman Tank commander George S. Patton — is made of tungsten and includes a genuine World War II Sherman Tank metal inlay. More than 50,000 Sherman tanks were produced between 1942 and 1945, making them one of the most commonly used American tanks throughout the war. Now, Marascalco wears a piece of one on his finger.

Marascalco’s grandfather, who fought in World War II, passed away a few decades ago. He was a tank driver in Patton’s army, and Marascalco recalls the stories his grandfather shared when he was still a teenager. His ring is a constant reminder.

“There is that connection to my grandfather with the ring, including all the people his age who chose to put their lives on hold — men and women, both fighting and working in factories to win the war,” Marascalco says. “They were truly the greatest generation.”

When a business owner finds that emotional connection between them and their customer, Ruggiero says, “it’s everything.”

“We’re lucky because a lot of happy customers have told us their stories,” he continues. “It’s often a special moment, especially if they’re getting married. There’s a lot of happiness.”

Not just another jewelry store

Because Ruggiero and Luchese didn’t have a background in jewelry, their take on rings differed from the norm. By licensing with brands like Jack Daniel’s, Fender, Jeep and the DC Universe, they’ve tapped into pockets of enthusiasts excited to see their interests reflected in ways they hadn’t before. “We started approaching what personalities would accompany our collections as a way of helping people find their place [in them],” Luchese says.

Licensing makes Manly Bands stand out from its competitors and elevates the brand with credibility. Other companies and competitors may have generalized whiskey barrel rings, but only Manly Bands hail from the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Tennessee. Barrels are sent and chopped into pieces before being smoothed on a lathe. The ring even comes with a certificate of authenticity.

“That resonates with people who like whiskey,” Ruggiero says. “Some don’t [enjoy whiskey] … but they still like Americana, and it becomes a conversation piece.”

Licensing the universe

Many of Manly Bands’ licensing deals result from leadership seeking out the brands that most interest them and their customers. The three rings in their most recent launch — a collaboration with NASA — represent the moon, deep space, and satellites in orbit by using materials like titanium, crushed opal, black zirconium and gold, respectively.

Securing a NASA license is another dream realized for the Utah company, one Ruggiero never expected at its onset. He believes others will want to share his vision of being connected to space in a unique way. It’s the company’s latest way to offer customers a chance to be connected to history — and, more than that, a chance to display a connection that extends far beyond the everyday.

“What do guys get excited about? The outdoors, history, the military, space, things made of wood, deer antlers,” Ruggiero says. “Why not wear something that matches your personality? The idea of a ring is a symbol of your commitment. Why can’t the ring be a little different?”

This Utah ring company has collaborated with Lord of the Rings, Major League Baseball, Fender and more

Growing up in Brigham City, Utah, Crystal Maggelet was often picked last in team sports. She describes her younger self as impossibly shy and largely uncoordinated. She also says she consistently had the highest grades.

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“I was going to do well in school. If I did that, every opportunity would be available, whether I wanted to do more with my education or secure a good job,” Maggelet says. “Early on, I felt that doing my best helped keep doors open. That’s played out in all aspects of my life.”

Since earning degrees from Harvard Business School and Pepperdine University, the opportunities Maggelet has acquired have been frequent. In addition to being CEO and chairwoman of FJ Management Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the country, she manages a diverse portfolio that comprises petroleum refining, convenience stores and hotels, including the Crystal Inn Hotel & Suites chain, TAB Bank and, as of 2023, the Des Moines, Iowa-based convenience store company Kum & Go.

Not bad for a formerly “impossibly shy” girl.

As the daughter of the late Flying J founder O. Jay Call, Maggelet never expected to become the company’s CEO in 2009. At the time, she had four children at home, all under 13, so signing on for 60-hour workweeks wasn’t attractive.

However, Maggelet was serving as a Flying J board member and saw the opportunity to have more influence in an industry she was already committed to. At 44, she accepted the challenge, then guided Flying J away from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and paid back the $1.4 billion the company owed to its creditors.

She never quit working to get out of bankruptcy, a subject she writes about at length in her 2019 book “Building Value to Last.”

“I was ready and willing to do whatever it took to get out of this mess,” she writes. “No longer would I sit on the sidelines watching as the company unraveled.”

Maggelet remains proud of the company her father started and has kept his reputation strong by keeping his businesses strong.

Foundational values

Though neither of Maggelet’s parents had degrees, both urged her to attend college, a decision she’s happy to have made. The daughter of entrepreneurial parents, Maggelet learned a lot about business around the dinner table, long before deciding on her career.

“I learned through their actions what values I wanted and wanted to pass on to my children, like honesty, integrity, humility and transparency,” Maggelet says. “Hard work. Confidence over ego. Understanding that it’s OK to make a mistake, and to remove the fear of failure.”

These values have given her the strength to tackle the unknown, regardless of experience. They have helped her make smart decisions and execute big decisions under pressure.

She demonstrated these characteristics when she saved her father’s legacy from financial ruin. Today, Maggelet’s focus is on FJ Management’s future and shining a light on all her organization is accomplishing now.

Inn-ovation

When Maggelet’s dad approached her with the idea of building and running a chain of independent hotels throughout the region, she trusted his judgment. She opened her first Crystal Inns & Suites in 1994.

“I truly believe that if you are given an opportunity that interests you, you figure it out,” Maggelet writes in “Building Value to Last.” “You might not do everything right, and you might mess up along the way, but you figure it out.”

Sometimes figuring it out meant organizing her to-do tasks on 100+ color-coded index cards organized by category (construction, marketing, operations and so on) to stay on task. Other times, it meant offering a free hotel stay to her newlywed friends if they would help move furniture into her first location, ensuring an on-time grand opening in Salt Lake City.

“The biggest lesson I learned during that whirlwind of a year was to believe in myself, to make decisions on the fly,” she writes. “There was no other choice.”

That outside-the-box thinking served her well. Today, Crystal Inn & Suites has locations in Brigham City, Murray, Salt Lake City, West Valley City and Great Falls, Montana.

Maverik: Maggelet’s next stop

After founding and running Crystal Inn for over a decade — a venture that shares her name, thanks to her father — along with her role at Flying J, Maggelet was interested in further diversifying the company portfolio.

As luck would have it, she never had to look further than her extended family.

In 2012, her cousin Mike Call shared that he wanted to sell Maverik, his gas station and convenience store chain.

“And I said, ‘Are you going to sell to me?’” Maggelet says.

Within months, Call did just that. Maggelet effectively doubled the number of Maverik stores, growing organically from 240 locations to over 400 in 10 years. Acquiring Kum & Go in 2023 was another feather in Maggelet’s cap. Now, FJ Management has over 800 locations across 20 states.

Maggelet says Maverik matches FJ Management’s culture and reminds her of the important lessons her father taught her.

“One of the most important ones was that, when you make a deal with anyone, both parties feel good about it afterward. You’re never taking advantage of anyone,” Maggelet says. “I have always tried the best I could to make sure people feel that way, and I’m proud of that.”

Building solutions

Service is where Maggelet’s heart is. Through her Call to Action Philanthropies — which include the Call to Action Foundation and also Call Foundation, its grantmaking arm — she’s able to invest in early childhood education, early childhood and family mental health, food security, scholarships and affordable housing.

“When we came out of bankruptcy, we only had 1,000 employees. Today, we have 16,000, far more than Flying J ever had. The fun part is we built ourselves back to become far better and much more profitable than we once were.”

Crystal Maggelet

“Forty years from now, when someone looks back on how I chose to live my life, will they see that I balanced … family, career, community?” Maggelet says. “That I left a legacy by making an impact in those ways? That I left a mark?”

One of the issues she is currently most focused on is addressing the affordable housing problem in Utah, partnering on an ambitious plan to build 850 affordable housing units — a combination of townhomes, condos and apartments — over three years.

“There’s an acute need for affordable housing in Utah right now, and too many Utah families can’t afford an average home,” Gov. Spencer Cox said of the partnership in 2023. “Together, we can change this narrative and build a brighter future for all Utahns.”

Maggelet’s Call to Action Foundation has been operating since 2007. In 2024, the foundation donated $38 million toward securing and preserving affordable housing for working families throughout the state. The same year, its first leasing project — Innovation Park at Holbrook Farms, a 240-unit affordable townhome community — opened in Lehi.

While there’s still plenty to do, they’ve made great progress, says Drew Maggelet, Crystal’s son and director of housing at Call to Action Philanthropies.

“When you’re left to wonder how you will ever be able to afford a home or if you’re going to remain living where you are, if you’re deciding between feeding your family or paying rent every month, you’re just trying to hold it together,” he continues. “At Call to Action, we’re trying to alleviate that in our way.”

Crystal’s brightest vision for the future is to continue helping businesses, communities and FJ Management thrive. FJ Management’s CFO, Sheri Widerburg, shares this vision.

“We talk about building value to last as the mission of FJM — a desire toward longevity,” Widerburg says. “We want to invest in businesses for a long time. We’re looking toward the long term in our multifamily program for generational assets. We can provide value long into the future at the same time. We can be agile and make adjustments to go the distance and stay around for a long time.”

Navigating change

Building a successful business can come with unexpected ramifications.

When Crystal’s ex-husband Chuck retired from their business, she assumed control over Maverik, becoming its CEO and chief adventure guide. For some, it was an unexpected change in leadership, but it was tied to a larger change for Chuck and Crystal. In 2024, they announced they were divorcing after 30 years of marriage.

In a business often fraught with challenges, the dissolution of Crystal’s marriage remains top of mind. She says she didn’t expect this ending and is still trying to process it. She wonders if she could have saved it. Maybe she needed to sacrifice her career, losing one part of her livelihood to hold on to another. In her opinion, though, she says her dad’s business became their family business. Losing the business partner she was so used to having by her side has taken getting used to, and it may take longer.

“Maybe in five years, when you ask me about it, it won’t even come to mind, because that’s who I am. I move on and try to get over [problems]. This one will be harder, but I’m here,” Crystal says. “I have a business to run, and we have made tremendous progress. But [getting divorced], to me … was a large hit.”

She says she still has four exceptional children, and that fact alone is akin to having it all.

A lasting legacy

Years ago, when Crystal approached her father about what his initial business goals were, he offered advice she still adheres to. He said, “Every morning I would look in the mirror and ask myself if I was going to work because I loved it. Since the answer was always ‘yes,’ I didn’t have to think about an alternative to the foreseeable future.”

What Crystal wants most is for her story to continue. Under her direction, her father’s small family business is larger than ever. She considers the people who have joined the company since she took over to be an extension of her own, and it continues to grow.

“When we came out of bankruptcy, we only had 1,000 employees,” Crystal says. “Today, we have 16,000, far more than Flying J ever had. The fun part is we built ourselves back to become far better and much more profitable than we once were.”

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An unsatisfying scavenger hunt around the Salt Lake Valley ensued. Hendry found many fleece blankets. She saw a lot of decorative throws and quilts. All were either too scratchy or useless for burrowing in. She needed something soft, cozy and classy.

When she couldn’t find what she wanted, she called on Jenna Houston to help her custom-make the perfect blanket. In particular, Hendry enjoyed a new microfiber fabric called minky, which was as soft as it was stretchy.

The 100 percent polyester fabric was still new to the market, and Hendry often used it to make gifted baby blankets. However, her daughter’s blanket needed to be much larger. She picked a baby pink fabric for one side and a paisley floral pattern for the other, bound together with silk.

For Miller, the gift gave comfort in an uncomfortable situation, but more than that, it was a way for her mom to always be with her.

“When you’re in a crisis, the first person you want with you is your mom,” Miller says. “Because she couldn’t be with me, having her blanket near meant the world. It gave me the love and support I needed.”

Everyone needs a blanket

A curious phenomenon took place almost immediately. When Hendry visited her daughter again, she noticed others wrapped in the blanket she and Houston had designed and sewn together. It was as popular as it was well-used. She learned that Miller often lent it out to other patients needing comfort.

“I thought to myself, ‘I need to go home and have several more sewn and provide blankets for everybody,’” Hendry says, and again she tapped Houston to assist, an early partnership that continues today.

Starting with 250 yards of minky fabric and her trusted PFAFF sewing machine, Houston made another 50 blankets for hospital patients. Hendry gave the blankets away to doctors, nurses, staff and patients. The blankets endeared recipients and word spread.

“People started calling me on the phone, asking me, ‘Are you the Blanket Lady?’” Hendry says, which would inevitably lead to a placed order.

Again, more blankets were sewn, only she upped the total to 200 this time. Again, Houston provided assistance but called in recruits, and a handful more seamstresses were hired for the project.

Quickly, Hendry became more than a mother responding to a daughter’s request. She was fielding the requests of many more in need of comfort. Seeing firsthand how much her blankets benefited others propelled her forward.

“From the beginning, my goal was to blanket the world with love, coziness, comfort and healing,” Hendry says. “A blanket can be the beginning of that.”

Hendry kept ordering fabric and taking orders, even delivering the minky fabric blankets — often nicknamed Minkys — by herself. She folded and piled them into the back of her car and met people in parking lots for delivery. Despite all the precautions she took, meeting with people she didn’t otherwise know was deemed too dangerous, and a new path was taken.

“My husband’s client saw me getting into my trunk and handing over a package, and called my husband asking, ‘What’s your wife doing transferring goods in parking lots?’” Hendry recalls. “What I was doing was too dangerous. I needed to have a store.”

In October 2010, the first Minky Couture store opened in Layton.

A blanket balance

With Christmas not far off, the company made a healthy guess of how much product would sell, and the several hundred Minky Couture blankets lining their shelves when business began seemed like more than enough. But by the end of the first week, only a single blanket remained.

Hendry quickly threw out a new number and goal: Could Houston and her crew of five seamstresses manage to create another 200 over the weekend? It was like that a lot, often coming down to selling more than they could make, an ongoing tug-of-war between supply and demand.

“In those days, I was cautious about how much we would need to make. I didn’t want to overextend or assume I would be bigger than I could keep up with,” Hendry says. “Instead, I thought, ‘I don’t want to jinx this. It’s going so well.’”

“Do I feel like I’m done growing? No. Do I feel like I’m happy with where it is? Yes. I’m delighted. But I’ve got to keep going. I’ve got to blanket the world.”

Sandi Hendry

The team managed to complete the request and continued to take on orders for additional blankets as they came, even if it meant they had a hard time keeping up at first. As the company has grown, it’s transcended that one-time problem: today, Minky Couture sells an average of 80,000 blankets every month.

Success in a second career

Prior to starting Minky Couture, Hendry built a career working as a fifth and sixth grade teacher. For 30 years, she impressed upon students universal lessons like always being on time and always doing your own work. She learned to read body language and got a feel for what battles to fight and when to do so. These lessons and experiences uniquely prepared Hendry to survive her early years of business.

“I’ve been blessed to teach and loved it. But when I [started this company], I felt something change,” Hendry says. “What I’m doing now is what I created. From the very first blanket, it was mine, as well as every step along the way. There’s something about ownership that makes you want it to succeed. I thought, ‘If I take baby steps, it will.’”

Nearly all of Minky Couture’s blankets are sewn remotely by local women. Seamstresses show up two or three times a week at the company’s Ogden headquarters, grab new bins of material and return home to make what’s been ordered.

Houston, the company’s first seamstress, is now the production manager, overseeing a crew of 50 employees who are key to blanket creation. She grew the production team early on in the company’s history when an order for 500 blankets came in. The blankets had to be made in a month.

“It was crazy and super stressful. I was a stay-at-home mom. I’d do little jobs here and there, but [making that many blankets] was like jumping into the deep end of the pool,” Houston says. “People love that we still have that aspect about our company, that we give moms jobs. They can stay home, raise their kids and still earn an income.”

Always giving back

Minky Couture got its start by giving blankets away. After 15 years of business, that essence remains through The Heart of Minky program and other charitable pursuits. The Heart of Minky program donates over 60,000 mini blankets to NICUs across the country, ensuring some small sense of comfort in the first few weeks and months of those babies’ lives.

When Hurricane Helene landed in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2024 — causing an estimated $53 billion in damages and accounting for 108 deaths in the state — the company heard from one woman who worked in the local post office. She called a week after the storm hit, needing to cancel her blanket order. She’d lost her home in the hurricane.

Hendry had a different idea.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I sent her and others in the town 500 blankets, and they were thrilled [by the gesture] as they were displaced and staying in churches nearby. When a disaster like that happens, opportunities to give increase. New doors open.”

5 business lessons from Sandi Hendry, founder of Minky Couture

And Hendry is doing what she can to keep them propped open. As national exposure grows for the brand, she’s back to how she felt when the company first started, hoping she doesn’t run out of blankets.

“Do I feel like I’m done growing? No. Do I feel like I’m happy with where it is? Yes. I’m delighted,” Hendry says. “But I’ve got to keep going. I’ve got to blanket the world.”

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Stewart’s company started because she wanted to give her son clothes she couldn’t find anywhere else. Taking a screen printing workshop led to creating custom-made clothing; as her hobby developed, so did her business. Requests for product piled in, and she speedily complied.

Her store opened three-and-a-half years ago, but success began with her online Etsy shop. This year marks Stewart’s tenth in business, and she’s seen it blossom in various ways.

“I feel lucky to get to do something that I love. I never thought I would have that,” Stewart says. “I used to assume everyone hated their jobs, and now I know that’s not true.”

‘I never thought this would become a business’

Mochi Kids sells carefully curated and mindfully designed “super soft, comfy, unisex clothing.” But Stewart didn’t start down this path because she necessarily wanted to be a tour de force in the crowded industry. The venture began because her son wanted shirts reflecting his interests.

In 2015, Stewart began designing and screen-printing shirts featuring snails, outer space, slugs, earthworms and leaf-cutting bees. She got to work using fairly rudimentary materials, and soon, her son was a satisfied customer.

“He would draw what he was interested in, so I got a lot of ideas from him,” Stewart says. “It was a collaborative process, so he didn’t have a big reaction [to what I made]. He knew what I was doing because I was screen printing in a corner of the playroom.”

“[The shirts] gave him confidence to wear clothes he loved that he could relate to,” Stewart says. And if that’s as far as the creative venture went, it would have been a perfectly adequate stopping point. Yet, Stewart kept designing and making shirts. When she posted her creations on Instagram, family and friends reached out in interest.

Stewart responded by creating even more items. Sales started to surface.

“When people wanted to buy what I made — people I wasn’t related to — that’s when I decided, ‘Oh, maybe I can make this into something more,’” Stewart says.

But if she was going to scale her budding operation appropriately, first, she needed to buy more screen printing equipment. To afford it, she taught paid workshops to anyone who wanted to learn.

“At that time, my purpose was ‘I’m going to teach you how to screen print,’ and not ‘I’m going to start a company,’” Stewart says. Though she had started screen printing two years prior, Stewart could do and provide much more when she opened her online Etsy shop in 2015.

“It was something I loved doing. I never thought it would become a business,” Stewart says.

In 2020, Mochi Kids added toys and stationery, including puzzles, books, washi tape and stickers. Her customers liked the additions so much that it was hard to keep them in stock. Stewart added even more items and brands to help compensate. Stewart’s business outgrew her basement when the added inventory outsized the clothing she was selling.

“Men who have built up businesses have a lot of resources available to them. It’s important that women feel equally empowered as they grow their businesses.”

Ashley Collet

Instead of connecting with a fulfillment center to accommodate that growth, she chose to open her store instead.

“I felt like people were eager to get outside and socialize after the pandemic,” Stewart says. “Salt Lake City had a gap in the market for a modern kids’ store for modern families. I wanted it to be an inclusive space for all families to visit, with no girls’ or boys’ aisle, for example. That was the goal from the start, and it’s been fun.”

Curating causes

Mochi Kids provides unique children’s clothing, but soon after the business began, Stewart also began using it as a channel to support causes she believed in.

The company’s online verbiage backs up that mindset: “Since our founding, we’ve used our platform to raise money and awareness for causes that are important to us, from racial equity to voting rights to women’s health. We believe actions as simple as what we wear and how we spend our dollars can change the world we live in for the better.”

To that end, shirts created by Mochi Kids have helped raise funds for presidential campaigns, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and the Los Angeles fire tragedies.

Making shirts for these larger purposes allows Stewart and her brand to partner with artists for fundraiser designs, promoting causes she cares deeply about. It’s a way of sharing how she perceives the world and what is most important to her. She acknowledges that her policy for strong stances isn’t typical of more established brands.

“People are scared,” Stewart says. “From day one, fundraisers have been part of our brand. Supporting causes is not hard for me. It’s more natural.”

For another example, Mochi Kids showcases designs that celebrate Asian food and culture. Stewart herself is half Singaporean and half American. Her mother is ethnically Chinese, but her family has been in Singapore for many generations. She believes being biracial is a fact to be proud of, and she hopes to help others feel that way.

“I want to use our Asian-American designs to teach the next generation to love their food and culture. We didn’t have that kind of representation when I was a kid. No cute kids stores were selling Asian-influenced products,” Stewart says. “We have loyal customers who have been with us since our first day because we are outspoken about our values. It makes them want to support us.”

As a person of color, Stewart says she knows how important representation is, and she hopes her store allows for a shift in thinking, a change from all she experienced in her youth.

“I grew up in Utah as one of only a few Asian people in my school. … It was rare to find any products outside of Asian grocery stores that provided representation and celebrated our culture,” Stewart says. “I feel lucky: I get to change that for the next generation through my store. Hopefully, our customers can see their cultures in a new way through our products, teaching them to love who they are by loving their heritage.”

A little help from friends

You needn’t look hard in Stewart’s store before finding a sticker on the front counter identifying Mochi Kids as a woman-owned business. Stewart is in good company, with many female-led businesses in the area that she can learn from and brainstorm with.

“I would not have opened my brick-and-mortar store if it weren’t for the other woman-owned businesses in the neighborhood who paved the way for me. Seeing mothers like myself open stores gave me the courage and confidence to do it,” Stewart says.

Initially, Stewart’s biggest hurdle was her lack of business knowledge. Leaning on female predecessors, like Ashley Collett of nearby Salt & Honey Market, helped immensely.

“Men who have built up businesses have a lot of resources available to them. It’s important that women feel equally empowered as they grow their businesses,” Collett says. “When Amanda was getting started nearby, I immediately asked, ‘Do you want to look at my books? Do you want to see how I structure things?’”

Additional assistance came from Helen Wade, who has owned The Stockist since 2009. She’s seen Stewart drive business to the area by constantly thinking outside the box, connecting with local artists to decorate her windows and offering regular storytimes for families.

“You can’t just open a door and assume people are going to walk in,” Wade says.

By bringing in an established online brand and curating it to include toys and goods, Stewart has provided multiple reasons to visit her store. It’s brought new clients to the neighborhood, which is exactly the kind of new energy and drive shops and shop owners hope for: new customers they may have never crossed paths with otherwise.

Helping further build the community is the very reason Stewart brought Mochi Kids to Salt Lake City in the first place. Stewart hosts free events during the holidays and seasons; partners with brands, allowing them an area to showcase their products and creations; and highlights fundraisers, including the 9th & 9th giving trees, which allow customers to help the store donate books and gifts to local lower-income schools.

That outlook allows Stewart and the customers her store attracts to tap into a larger picture of what is essential, which extends much further than selling toys and clothes. It allows her to feel greater fulfillment in all she does.

“I want to have enough money to live comfortably, but it’s not a huge motivator,” Stewart says. “Enjoying what I do is. Showing my kids that they can start their own business is. I want to show them they can do what they love to do and still have values as they do so.”

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“Many think sweaters can only be part of a fall or winter brand, but our buyers and customer base want our clothes in June,” she says. “[Knitwear] is our bread and butter. It’s what we’re known for. Having those styles available year-round is where we’re headed.”

While today Reese has a clear vision for her company, she started out her career in fashion by piecing together statement outfits for high school in Logan, Utah.

“Because I’m from Logan, [fashion] didn’t seem like a real job. I didn’t know anybody who made money at it. I knew nobody who went to school for fashion or chose it as their career,” Reese says.

Bridgerland Technology College, located in Logan, offers classes in fashion merchandising and development. Reese enrolled and got her toes wet before attending Utah State University and earning a bachelor’s in interior design. She then made the leap to attend FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising) in Los Angeles, where she became captivated by knitwear fashion design, developing her skills and earning an associate degree in that area.

“As a very tactile person, I gravitate to knits,” Reese says. “I like how sweaters are designed far more than how traditional cut clothing is created. With knitwear, you’re designing based on a shape. There’s a little more manipulation and forgiveness involved. You can graph it on paper and consider how the stretchy material will fall and drape. You design it, cut it into whatever shape you wish, sew it and put it on a mannequin. It was ultimately better for me with how I tend to learn.”

Creating her style

After graduating from FIDM, Reese interned for Uniqlo and Brochu Walker in LA. When she and her husband moved back to Utah for his job, Reese knew it was time to start something on her own.

“In many ways, I knew at a young age what I wanted to do,” Reese says. “It became a matter of, OK, ‘How do I get there? How can I support myself this way?’”

After securing a few ’80s-style refurbished sewing machines and installing them in her home, Reese began knitting made-to-order sweaters, the start of the career she’d only dreamed of up to that point. The more sweaters she sewed, the more word traveled and orders came in. Over time, she specialized her products to create an “androgynous, elevated tomboy brand,” focusing on oversized knitwear and denim.

“James Street Co reflects me, my evolution,” Reese says. “I dress very androgynously and am not the most feminine girl. What we create has resulted from all I have sought out and what I believe the next thing will be.”

She knew she was on the right track when she never had to seek out orders. As a one-woman operation, however, she could only do so much.

Reese was knitting, washing and assembling every day of the week. After about a year of struggling to keep up, she was finally able to expand into a full-functioning factory in LA, one of three she still uses to create clothing for James Street Co today.

“We don’t produce many styles, but if one isn’t selling and we have leftover quantities, we will always donate them to a local women’s shelter. We send our clothes to where they can get used. I have no interest in keeping a warehouse full of clothing.”

Jess Reese

Sustainability from the start

Reese made a choice early on to run an actively sustainable company.

After working in Los Angeles, Reese decided to promote sustainability in all she created. There, she saw how much excess a large brand could make and how quickly waste could accumulate due to a business shift or choice. It took her aback.

Styles of a single brand would get created and canceled, often leading to a lot of discarded excess. One saving grace of being a small, niche company is that Reese didn’t have the financial backing to make those kinds of costly mistakes. Still, she wanted to proceed differently, shifting toward better practices that were kinder to the environment, like choosing traceable yarn vendors.

While many industries can fail in these practices, the fashion and apparel industries are especially troubling. The trend toward fast fashion, for example, has regularly merited disastrous results, including unchecked worker exploitation in factories located in lower-income countries. Workers are often young women working under hazardous conditions.

To promote change in her field, Reese has chosen to create her clothing in small batches, using traceable fabrics and vetted factories that promote ethical practices.

“Because I made that choice in the beginning when the company was small and it was easy to do, I didn’t give myself any other option,” Reese says. “These are issues I care about and serve as moral choices for the brand.”

For Matt Disney, president of Wuru Wool, the longer his company existed, the more it made sense to be sustainability-driven. For example, building a factory in the United States allowed Disney to “control the controllables.” Now, the American-made Merino wool clothing company can produce pieces faster than if it outsourced manufacturing overseas. Recently, the company’s stateside manufacturing enabled it to take a product from concept to completion in under two weeks.

“That’s just not possible to do globally. For us, [sustainability] was a byproduct of what we do and doing business as we felt it should be done,” Disney says.

While James Street Co pursues sustainable manufacturing, the company has also created an archive site where customers can resell used pieces, an inexpensive way for buyers to upgrade and upcycle. If a customer wants to discard an item they’ve worn for a few years or find new pieces at a lower price point, they can go through the James Street Co site. Often, resellers use original photoshoot images on their listings.

As she actively pursues sustainability in all areas, one thing is for certain: Reese doesn’t produce more than is needed. Whatever gets created will get used.

“We don’t produce many styles, but if one isn’t selling and we have leftover quantities, we will always donate them to a local women’s shelter,” Reese says. “We send our clothes to where they can get used. I have no interest in keeping a warehouse full of clothing.”

It takes a village

While much of her sales and success can be traced back to her own experience, Reese has found many mentors along the way who have helped to grow her company. After being accepted into the Master of Business Creation (MBC) program at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, where business owners share ideas designed to catapult revenue, Reese learned how to budget and market more effectively.

The mentors she gained via the program were rarely involved in the fashion industry, but that was often more of a pro than a con. The industry didn’t matter as much as learning how others actively grew their companies.

“I got the best feedback from people who couldn’t have been more different from me. One was a scientist, for example, and another was a guy who owned a knife shop,” Reese says. “Being in what was essentially an incubator helped me understand what I wasn’t skilled at yet so I could organize my company better to grow.”

By seeing what other businesses were doing, Reese was able to fine-tune her strengths. It was important to determine what made her company unique — what made her customers gravitate toward James Street Co over another brand. Building on that without piggybacking and following the lead of others is hard to do sometimes, Reese says, but it helped her strengthen the uniqueness of her company and its customers.

“James Street Co has established who it is and has a clear voice. The MBC helped me to be OK with who we are and to shut out the rest as noise,” Reese says. “It’s what allows us to survive. We must ride that and keep that focus without caring what others are doing or how.”

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The students start playing an enthusiastic take on Huey Lewis & The News’ 1985 hit, “The Power of Love,” and then make their way through a few runs of Billie Eilish’s “No Time To Die,” the 2021 James Bond theme song. The singer behind the microphone wears a tee from Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour,” wearable proof she’s a fan.

It’s just a practice session, but it feels like a concert. That’s by design.

Grammy-nominated Caleb Chapman is 27 years deep into the business of teaching music at Caleb Chapman’s Soundhouse, turning players like this group of students into performers. He’s taught kids aged 10-18 since 1998 in a unique way: choosing to practice and perform as an ensemble. Every child and teenager learns how to get reactions from a crowd, to play alongside peers and to overcome any hint of stage fright.

“[The art of teaching music] seems to have gotten lost as we’ve moved music into academia, but the biggest difference is that most music schools do what they tell you they’re going to do, which is teach music,” Chapman says. “The power of what we do here is that we combine teaching music with teaching performance, coupling those parts together — there is the secret sauce.”

What Chapman does is far more ambitious than a school music program with paint-by-number recitals and lessons. His students perform annually at the Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, among other accomplishments (like being regularly recognized and awarded by DownBeat).

“I love what music did for me, helping me develop creativity, confidence and life skills in the same way playing sports did. You can learn discipline and teamwork playing basketball or football, and music allows for all of that too,” Chapman says. In fact, according to a 2023 University of Southern California study, music education can contribute to overall well-being and improve cognitive function, creativity, mental health and emotional stability.

“Music is a connection to the soul,” Chapman says. “It’s an expression, a communication, a manifestation of emotion, everything inside an individual.”

That link also serves as a springboard to what Chapman wants to accomplish and provide with his school.

“Music education has real power to it. If I tried to accomplish what I wanted in the traditional music education setting, my hands would always be tied,” Chapman says. “What I wanted to do was so against the grain that nobody would have let me attempt it in a structured organization. It needed to be birthed independently, outside the system.”

Imagining a dragon

For Chapman, music took hold in the fourth grade when he learned to play the saxophone. Over time, he began to enjoy it more and more, lasting into college when he received a full scholarship to study music at Brigham Young University. The more he learned, the more he wanted to pursue music beyond his school years, but options were limited.

Being a performer was out of the question, as he didn’t care for the lifestyle that usually came with it. Teaching music using traditional methods didn’t resonate as a career either, as he felt he would lack the freedom to do so the way he wanted to. Getting a master’s in business would have to do, and he began preparing to go that route.

“And right before I graduated, I had this crazy idea of trying to start a music school,” Chapman says.

Before graduating, Chapman drove around American Fork, Utah, finding a small red brick building available for lease. He decided it looked as good a spot as any for a music school. To his surprise, the person leasing it turned out to be a doctor he’d seen a year previously and who now allowed him to rent the building for $500 a month instead of its initially listed $3000. That price agreed better with his student income at the time.

“This was one day after I had the idea. I didn’t even know if I wanted to do it yet, and now I had a building,” Chapman says. One month later, Caleb Chapman’s Soundhouse opened.

The idea for this company was to start a music training program different from what existed, but that didn’t happen right away. When the school opened, it was not unlike other schools that already existed, offering private music lessons for kids playing various instruments. A few months in, a group of kids asked Chapman if they could put together an after-school jazz band and perform at the Soundhouse. He hesitated.

“I didn’t have my degree yet. As a pop and classical musician, I didn’t feel capable of running a jazz ensemble. Most of my training was as a conductor,” Chapman says. “So I called every expert jazz musician I knew in the state, and either nobody was interested, or they were unavailable.” Still, he was determined not to let the kids down.

“Being a broke, new business owner, I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity. I returned to those kids and said yes to the band with no idea what that would look like,” Chapman says. “Rehearsals started, and I realized I could compensate for my lack of experience by bringing energy to it. Doing so allowed the kids to respond with enthusiasm in their playing, which translated instantly.”

It was performing as a group that changed the entire direction of his business. After putting the first group together, Chapman could see more clearly what he wanted music education to do. Having his students perform together was the vehicle he needed to accomplish the results he felt were possible. The first group formed in 1999.

A drummer from that first group, a seventh grader named Andrew Tolman, also asked if he could put a band together. The junior high student went on to be a founding member of Imagine Dragons. Tolman recalls Chapman visiting the band room and performing saxophone for them when he was still in school. Chapman recruited students to take private music lessons at his Soundhouse, and Tolman signed up for drum lessons on the spot to study under Chapman’s tutelage for several years.

“Caleb brought so much energy into the room and helped us all have fun learning and performing,” Tolman says. “Performing in the ensemble bands created during that time — a salsa band, a jazz band and a funk band — gave me invaluable experience in diverse settings that significantly shaped my music career. I carry those experiences with me as a touring musician today.”

In 2008, the school’s program got an overhaul. Private instruction stopped and everything became ensemble-based, including bands of all genres: rock, pop, ska, Motown, reggae, New Orleans brass, Latin and even Modern Big Band.

“I’m so grateful to those kids who originally came to me to do this group. I knew I wanted to do things differently, but I wasn’t even sure where to start,” Chapman says. “It became the catalyst for what the entire business has become.”

Stephanie Paul of Saratoga Springs is a mother who has benefitted from Chapman’s efforts. After attending a Christmas concert by Chapman and his students in 2023, all three of her children chose to become students at his school. Her two daughters sing regularly as part of his groups while her son plays the trumpet.

“Caleb came out the first time we ever saw him and said, ‘This is a noisy concert not a sit and listen concert. We’re going to have some fun,’” Paul says. “Once they performed, my daughter — who’s been doing theater since she was eight — turned around, grabbed my shoulder and said, ‘I want to do this. Forget tennis. I want to do this.’”

The heart of rock and roll

The Soundhouse earned a famous fan when Chapman invited Huey Lewis to see his students perform hits from Lewis’ catalog. As part of a collaboration, Chapman and Adam Reader (known as the Professor of Rock on YouTube) recently established the People’s Hall of Fame annual awards ceremony to honor great artists who have not received the appropriate recognition. The event also allows students to learn the discography of these unnoticed greats and pay tribute to them, ideally with the person or persons being honored in attendance. Chapman and Reader, moved by the impact of Huey Lewis & The News, chose Lewis as the first musician they honored.

When Lewis learned of the idea of being honored by 200 Soundhouse kids playing music from his band’s catalog, he was touched. Not only would the event give recognition to Lewis, but it would also act as a fundraiser for music scholarships through the Sound Support Foundation. Lewis liked what he heard and committed to attending.

“[Lewis] shared with us that he was unprepared for what he saw. He was very excited, very grateful,” Chapman says. “It was one thing to be able to honor him, but to see an artist of his stature see these young people crushing his band’s music and being so passionate about it, that has to be a powerful thing for him — to feel that his music has a legacy, a timeless quality.”

Lewis’ ongoing health problems prevent him from being able to play or often hear music, but he made up for that by doing a Q&A with the kids for over an hour, answering any questions they had. The time spent together was a life changer for those kids, Chapman says, which is the whole point of doing it.

Matching ability with confidence

After nearly three decades in the business, Chapman says he can never walk away from it. He’s doing what he’s supposed to do by helping musicians discover how to share their talents in the best possible ways.

“I’m convinced we’ll never hear some of the greatest jazz musicians ever because they were in a practice room for 10 hours a day. They’re developing amazing music skills but might lack the social skills to connect with an audience, market themselves and build a fan base, basic knowledge you would need to survive if you wanted to make music your career,” Chapman says. “At Soundhouse, we focus on equally developing accomplished musicians with technique ability and performance skills. … Countless kids can get on a stage and play music as well as [the Soundhouse students] did that night. But there are very few kids on the planet who have the kind of confidence they did to perform the way they did.”

How Scott Wiley founded June Audio Recording Studios

From ATMs to everything: The evolution of OptConnect

The town earned its name when coal was discovered nearby many years ago. Today, it’s where husband-and-wife entrepreneur duo Chris and Jen Hudak manufacture teardrop campers.

Building their first teardrop trailer preceded the company, and it solved a personal problem. When the Hudaks initially met, both were mountain biking in Moab. Soon after, they traveled together to compete in races and stayed at campsites. Races were the highlight; camping was a constant headache. They moved what amounted to a small village every time they traveled, filling up all available pockets of space in their 2012 Mercedes-Benz GLK with a couple bikes, a couple dogs, a tent and cooking equipment.

“Looking at what was out there, I just wasn’t happy with what was on the market that we could actually afford,” Chris says. “And so I said, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just build something.’”

When that something turned out to be a teardrop trailer, it came as a shock to Jen.

“I knew Chris as a guy who managed restaurants and raced mountain bikes, not someone who built campers,” Jen says.

Though Chris hadn’t built a teardrop trailer before, he grew up a builder, using his hands and ingenuity to restore his first car at 16 — a 1968 Austin-Healey Sprite. Multiple motorcycles followed, then a 1948 Cadillac and even a beautiful 1954 Cadillac Eldorado. He liked the process of instilling life where there was little to none, of bringing whole vehicles back from the dead.

“That’s where I learned to use the part of my brain that traditional education doesn’t teach,” Chris says. “How does an engine work? The only [way to find the] right answer is to take it apart.”

Chris spent six months building the trailer using a one-car garage in Salt Lake City as his makeshift workshop, eventually relocating to a friend’s larger garage to cross the finish line, wrapping up in 2015. Sedona, Arizona, was its maiden voyage.

Trailers are fast, but word of mouth is faster

As Chris and Jen continued to travel, camp and race, their light and convenient trailer never went unnoticed among the mountain biking community. The easy-to-transport trailer acted as a ready-made base camp, eliminating the need to set up a tent and battle the elements.

An idea grew. Over the next year and a half, Chris simmered on a larger possibility: creating a company that built and sold trailers. In the summer of 2016, just a month before he married his bride, Chris told Jen he wanted to turn his newly acquired hobby into a business.

“I could see the sparkle in his eyes,” Jen says. Together, they immediately brainstormed a name for the venture, landing on Escapod (pronounced “ESS-kuh-pod”), combining the “pod” that a person sleeps in with “escapade.”

“Chris and I lived — and still do live — for adventure,” Jen says, and they wanted to share that opportunity with other like-minded individuals. One of their first calls was to a longtime friend and current Head of Product Design Chris Eckel. The couple shared drawings on a napkin, and Eckel drafted a logo that landed on the side of their trailers.

Six miles down the road from Coalville, in Wanship, they built a new trailer — what would be the company’s first — and once again in less-than-optimal conditions. Every time it rained, so many leaks in the garage roof revealed themselves that Chris had to move parts around to save his project from getting soaked. His efforts were hardly in vain: Three months later (just half the time it took during his first go-round), the first Escapod trailer was completed.

“At that point, it was a pretty rudimentary trailer,” Eckel says, “Kind of a ‘Harbor Freight built’ frame, with simple plywood and aluminum construction.”

After borrowing Chris’s trailer and heading to the Pacific Northwest for seven weeks, Eckel shared a list of suggested improvements. Both he and Joshie Fishbein joined as partners in 2018, the same year Escapod hired its first employee.

“I was up for a change,” Eckel says. “I said, ‘If you want to go into business together, let’s do it. I’m willing to get my hands dirty. I’ll help you build this thing from the ground up.’”

In 2019, the company grew largely by word of mouth — but the Escapod team could only build three trailers a month, and a bigger facility was very much needed. Their trailers belonged in the mountains, so they decided they’d go there too. Chris and Jen bought and renovated the building they are now housed in, which was formerly Crandall Ford until the 1940s. When Escapod took it over, it’d been unoccupied for a quarter of a century.

“People are often surprised with what we’re doing here in Coalville, a small town with a small workforce,” Chris says. “But we’ve been able to revitalize the town, taking a dilapidated building, setting up our company and becoming part of this community. It’s why we chose to be here. … When you have 16-year-old boys and girls who have raised lambs and they invite you to bid on them at the 4-H auction, that’s special.”

Then vs. now

In March 2020, Chris and Jen’s first baby was born. Two weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic essentially shut the world down. This made for imperfect timing, as they’d secured their new space and committed to paying their biggest monthly rent yet.

The last thing they expected was a significant spike in trailer sales.

“We want to bring people together to fully experience what these trailers are designed for ... That’s making connections and memories outdoors.”

Chris Hudak

“It was a crazy time. We figured that, in this space, success would be an increased ability to produce six trailers a month,” Chris says, as they were hoping to double their production with the move. The following month, they took pre-orders on an unexpected 63 trailers. The company responded in two ways: by quickly scaling how many trailers they could build and investing in a more refined model that would immediately follow their first.

Since then, it’s been a largely steady journey of gradual growth. In the beginning, Eckel recalls coming home to his wife covered in metal grease and smelling even worse than he looked. He also recalls a mutual decision among the Escapod partners not to pay themselves for six months in a row, finding the wherewithal to work 80 hours a week to build trailers and only taking breaks when home-cooked meals from other halves arrived.

“I look back to those first couple of years, and it was delightfully scrappy, almost laughable,” Eckel says. “We have problems now, and we had problems then … but it’s no longer about covering trailers with tarps before leaving for the weekend because the roof might leak and ruin work in progress. We did whatever it took to make it work. God bless our customers, who have been understanding and supportive as we’ve learned those lessons and still are.”

Part of that learning process includes reminding themselves that their product encourages their customers to get outdoors regularly, usually with loved ones in tow.

“We take great pride in bringing families closer together — getting them outside and away from their screens and going places where they can be together, creating memories that will last a long time,” Jen says.

“And that’s where we excel. We are not pitching the idea to go camping, stay in your fifth wheel, and watch a movie,” Chris says. “It’s, ‘Hey, get to remote locations. Enjoy some solitude. Enjoy being and cooking outside. Enjoy one another’s company near a campfire and then a warm, dry place to sleep.’”

The majority of Escapod’s customers are weekend warriors, be they mountaineers, ice climbers or mountain bikers. Some older customers aren’t exactly mountaineers anymore but want to return to the outdoors. Some aren’t comfortable camping in a tent anymore, but they can enjoy the Escapod’s built-in queen-sized mattress. And some are like Andrew Muse, who traveled to Baja California for six weeks with his trailer, surfing up and down the coast.

“They’re the same kinds of people, really, just a couple of generations apart sometimes,” Chris says.

Making outdoors memories

As an entrepreneur who’s learned along the way, Chris says it’s the constant evolution of what a company journey is allowed to look like that has been his biggest lesson thus far.

“I used to think, ‘Once we get this figured out, we’ll cruise right along,’ but we get thrown curveballs and unforeseen problems constantly. Part of being an entrepreneur is the enjoyment of attacking those curveballs,” he continues. “This is not a clocking in and clocking out kind of business. We go to work quite sure somebody may ask us to do something today that they didn’t ask us to do yesterday. We have an increased ability to attack problems head-on. … Because I’m systems-focused, I enjoy finding out what the system is: what half production looks like, what 4x production looks like, what a new product will look like, what pulling back on a product looks like. Being flexible and willing to explore and learn — those are the enjoyable parts.”

In the future, Chris envisions a way to build a community that extends beyond selling more trailers. For years, he’s dreamt of hosting an event for Escapod customers that includes speakers, towing clinics and even timed flat tire changes.

“We want to bring people together to fully experience what these trailers are designed for,” Chris says. “That’s making connections and memories outdoors.”

Diffusing an elitist mentality and increasing access: A roundtable on Utah’s outdoor industry

In 2014, three years before Chris Baird took over as CEO of OptConnect, an OpenSSL security vulnerability called Heartbleed was discovered. This bug allowed attackers to read portions of a server’s memory that could contain sensitive data like encryption keys, passwords and other personal information. Affected companies included Tumblr, Google, Yahoo, Intuit, Dropbox, Netflix and Facebook.

Skiing, sunglasses, ‘send it’

OptConnect’s internet gateway devices were not vulnerable. However, the bug still presented a consequence the team hadn’t expected: thousands of inbound pings were received worldwide as curious state-sponsored hackers and others scoured the internet including their network, and their devices locked up in response. While no passwords, credit card numbers or other data was compromised, the ability to communicate — to connect to the internet, the company’s sole purpose — went away completely.

“In two hours, OptConnect went from receiving two customer service phone calls an hour to hundreds, and that number kept going up,” Baird says. “We were completely caught unaware.”

The company had to create a solution fast. Baird huddled with a few others in a room and set up a whiteboard in a corner. At this moment, a Donald Rumsfeld quote rang familiar to Baird: “There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

They’d landed in the latter part of those truths: The OptConnect team didn’t yet know what they didn’t know. Still, they were fully committed to discovering what needed to be discovered and solved, a problem in need of a fast resolution.

“We’d jeopardized our customers’ businesses, as they could no longer connect to the internet. They couldn’t dispense cash or sell products,” Baird says. “When millions of locations suddenly stop working, revenue also stops. There was a lot of shouting. It was chaos; a digital version of a pandemic.”

Baird and his crew placed a technical support call that included partners and hardware manufacturer engineers. The call ended up lasting 96 hours from start to finish — four straight days.

“At one point, I needed to lie down, and an employee brought in a giant roll of packing bubbles from the shipping department. I stretched out on it and slept for an hour,” Baird says. He only left his desk during that long stretch for bathroom breaks and didn’t go home until the problem was solved.

Later, the OptConnect team realized that taking 96 hours to create a resolution in their industry was infinitely faster than what their competitors were managing. Calls at OptConnect switched from customers demanding answers and connectivity to brand-new customers wanting to move whole portfolios to OptConnect’s fixed and functional network.

“That was our DNA-altering experience,” Baird says, as it allowed the company to realize it needed to go even deeper into areas like security, functionality and reporting. “We couldn’t wait around for customers to tell us about the problems they were having. We needed to know already and tell them we had resolved them. That differentiated us in the marketplace.”

It’s that kind of quick thinking and resolve that initially led brothers and self-described serial entrepreneurs Burt and Tim Matthews, co-founders of Grant Victor, OptConnect’s parent company, to ask Baird to defer going to college and work under their tutelage starting in 2006. In 2011, as the Matthews brothers brought in strategic private equity partners and stepped away from daily operations, Baird took over leadership of the OptConnect business unit. When OptConnect was carved out from Grant Victor and acquired by Graham Partners in 2017, Baird was formally named CEO and president.

“Our focus was utilizing the opportunity within the ATM industry in our early days, but that’s a small part of the customer base of OptConnect today ... The company has diversified in so many ways and mushroomed into so many sectors.”

Tim Matthews

“He was a natural leader — energetic and happy, with a can-do attitude — and quickly rose as a young leader of the organization,” Burt says. “We have learned you can’t train kindness or happiness. You can train employees in all other ways but not to be naturally good with customers. Chris was honest to the core, and customers loved that about him.”

Fourteen years later, both Matthews brothers agree that hiring Baird when he was just 21 was one of the most solid choices they ever made. Even though Baird didn’t have a defined role at first, he easily filled in where he was needed. Sometimes, that meant taking a customer service or sales call, while other times, it meant helping out with shipping.

“If the garbage needed to be emptied, Chris would stay after business had ended and empty the garbage. If shipments needed to be taken to the airport because we had missed the FedEx cut-off, he would be the one to hop in his car and drive to the airport,” Burt says. “He wasn’t above any of that. Nothing was too little for him to do.”

The road to connectivity

Through its routers, modems, antennas, SIM cards and other products, OptConnect enables its customers to access the internet in remote locales without telephone lines. The road to connectivity has been long — and it started with ATMs.

In the mid-1990s, Burt and Tim owned high-end convenience stores with ATMs inside each. By the time they asked Baird to join them, they’d sold their stores and switched to operating and servicing ATMs, which proved infinitely more profitable.

The Matthews brothers were determined to discover a way to connect their ATMs without using phone lines. Staying connected was important for verifying that sufficient funds were available, but connecting via a telephone line was costly and cumbersome. Both were quite confident a better way existed, but it took a lot of brainstorming to figure out what it was.

“On a very late night, exhausted with all we’d done already, the light finally went on,” Tim says. If they could provide a permanent wireless solution to ATM merchants, they could eliminate the need for phone lines. Considering that there were over 425,000 ATMs in the United States in 2009, it was a huge opportunity. They offered a shortcut by providing a box with a cellular module and a monthly wireless plan.

“We created marketing material that said, ‘Cut the phone lines, no upfront cost, $25 a month for wireless connectivity,’ and the response we received in return was almost too much for us to handle,” Burt says. “It required an incredible amount of capital too. It was $150 for each box, and we were shipping 1,000 a month, a $150,000 monthly investment.”

Just like that, the concept of OptConnect was created. News of the solution traveled rapidly.

“Over time, 20 locations became 100, and 100 quickly turned into 1,000,” Baird says. “Before we knew it, we connected thousands of new locations monthly.”

Assembling the plane while flying it

For a time, much of Baird’s job centered on ATMs. He worked with the Matthews brothers in sales and operations at ATMequipment.com (renamed NextATM) and eGlobal ATM Services. If the machine didn’t function correctly or broke, he was onsite with an armored car, down on hands and knees to work on it.

“There was a little anxiety there, having my back to the general public and being inside of a safe, working on a cash dispensing unit that might have an error,” Baird says. “From a security perspective alone, doing that always made my parents nervous.”

At the time, ATM servicing was hardly an established industry and there were no playbooks to follow. Because the industry was regulated by federal and state agencies, banks primarily owned and operated ATMs until 1997. Deregulation that same year created a slow roll of interest from independent contractors and like-minded merchants who were able to own and operate their own ATMs not owned by banks or financial institutions.

“The whole idea of an operator on an ATM was novel then,” Baird says. “We were building the plane as we were flying it, and the industry was evolving at the same time.”

By maintaining the machines, Baird learned to empathize with customers. It gave him an inkling of the stresses they were up against, of the necessity of keeping entire fleets of machines connected and dispensing. By the time connectivity inquiries began surfacing, he was already familiar with the complexities of keeping ATMs online and understood his customers’ pain points.

After a few years of operating almost exclusively in the ATM industry, OptConnect grew because the customers it attracted asked more of it. Because many of the contractors they serviced ran other businesses and routes, connectivity requests for additional services began pouring in.

“We started receiving calls asking us questions like, ‘Could you also connect my digital sign?’” Baird says. “Or, ‘Could you also connect my carpet cleaning rental unit?’ or, ‘Could you connect my coin counting machine, key cutting machine and dog collar engraving machine?’”

The OptConnect team listened to their customers, and the company expanded significantly. Now, OptConnect operates across over 50 end markets, expanding into new sectors each year and connecting millions of endpoints across the U.S. and beyond.

Skyscraper success requires a strong foundation

“Our focus was utilizing the opportunity within the ATM industry in our early days, but that’s a small part of the customer base of OptConnect today,” Tim says. “The company has diversified in so many ways and mushroomed into so many sectors.”

In 2024 alone, OptConnect acquired Chile-based M2M DataGlobal, significantly expanding the number of customers the company supports globally to over 10,000, and Netherlands-based Capestone, a provider of 4G and 5G IoT solutions active in over 60 countries. These achievements allowed the privately owned company to land on the Inc. 5000 list in 2024, its seventh year in a row, further recognizing its sustained growth and extraordinary performance.

Baird believes OptConnect has the right products in place and has built the best possible solution for its customers. He foresees it growing to connect many millions more devices, continuing to attract large financial sponsors that want to underwrite the story they’re telling, and continuing to attract top talent across the state and beyond.

“What we do at OptConnect will far outlive my ability to deliver on that vision,” Baird says. “I think of it as a skyscraper rising. When we broke ground, we didn’t go straight up. We went down to bedrock and ensured we had a solid foundation first, then built on that. It took a few years to get back to ground level, but we knew what we had once we were there, and we could build more than a story or two. Now, we’re building a high-rise.”

In the business of building heroes with Ben Hodson