Press Room ::

FOR RELEASE:
March 4, 2008
For more information contact:

Tom Lacock
Senior Marketing and Public Relations Specialist
Wyoming Business Council
Office: 307.777.2834

Denny Curran
Editor
Wyoming Business Report
Office: 307.638.3200

Wyoming innovators received BRAVO! Awards

CHEYENNE – Wyoming business leaders recognized the achievements of 10 outstanding entrepreneurs in the state during the presentation of the 2008 BRAVO! Entrepreneurship Awards in Cheyenne, Tuesday.

The fifth annual Bravo! Entrepreneur Awards, which honor outstanding innovators in Wyoming, were presented at Little America in Cheyenne and were held in conjunction with the Wyoming Economic Development Association’s Winter Conference and the Wyoming Chamber of Commerce Executives Business Day at the Legislature.

The 2008 Bravo! Entrepreneur Awards are sponsored by the Wyoming Business Report, the Wyoming Business Council, the Wyoming Chamber of Commerce Executives and the Wyoming Economic Development Association.

Bravo! Entrepreneur Awards are given in four statewide categories -- Lifetime Achievement Award, Governor’s Award for Economic Development, IQ (Innovation Quotient) Award, and Emerging Entrepreneur Award. In addition, six Bravo! Entrepreneur Awards recognize entrepreneurs from each of the six Wyoming Business Council regions of the state. Criteria for the awards include demonstrating the best traits of entrepreneurship, including vision, drive, perseverance and willingness to take risks.

The following awards were given:

Governor’s Award for Economic Development – Tom Barritt and the Weston County Development Board were presented the Bravo! Entrepreneur Governor’s Award for Economic Development for their work in developing the Upton Regional Industrial Site. Gov. Dave Freudenthal made the presentation, saying their efforts helped transform a closed bentonite processing plant into the 600-acre Upton Regional Industrial Site, the largest industrial park in the Powder River Basin and one of the largest in all of Wyoming. Today, nearly 100 of the park’s 600 acres are either occupied or spoken for. It is already home to three companies, with others nearly ready to announce their intentions to locate there. This award recognizes businesses, organizations, communities and individuals who contribute to significant economic growth in Wyoming. The winner has been instrumental in creating new jobs and increasing tax revenues in Wyoming.

Lifetime Achievement Award - U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.: For his efforts at the local, state and national levels, Wyoming’s Sen. Mike Enzi is the winner of the 2008 Bravo! Entrepreneur Lifetime Achievement Award. As a former small business owner and member of the Senate Small Business Committee, Enzi has remained a strong advocate of small businesses by promoting legislation that would help small businesses, while opposing measures that could hurt them. Small businesses and individual entrepreneurs and inventors have benefited from special conferences organized by Enzi, such as his annual inventors’ conference and the annual GRO-Biz Conference. Winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award demonstrate a long career of commitment to Wyoming’s growth and well-being of its business community. Among the criteria is a minimum of 10 years as a Wyoming entrepreneur.

Emerging Entrepreneur - Shawn Mills and Green House Data Inc. (Cheyenne): Shawn Mills and his company Green House Data Inc. are the winners of the 2008 Bravo! Entrepreneur Emerging Entrepreneur Award. Winners of this award demonstrate the best traits of entrepreneurship, including vision, drive, perseverance and willingness to take risks. The award is for businesses started within the last three years. Green House Data is building its first data center in Cheyenne, providing clients throughout Wyoming and along the Colorado Front Range with managed server hosting and data storage services. It is Wyoming’s first enterprise-level data center. When fully operational, the 10,000-square-foot center will be one of the nation's largest wind-powered public data centers, operating twice as efficiently as traditional facilities of comparable size. If all goes according to plan, the Cheyenne operation could become the first public data center in the country with a zero-carbon footprint.

IQ Award: Scott Tafel, WindRider Technology Inc. (Laramie): Scott Tafel and his company WindRider Technology Inc. are winners of the 2008 Bravo! Entrepreneur IQ (Innovation Quotient) Award. This award honors the Innovation Quotient among Wyoming companies and seeks to honor those products or services that have demonstrated a high degree of innovation with a strong market potential. WindRider Technology Inc. is the leader in sales of powerful, multi-monitor computing systems for stock trading. There are a handful of companies in the U.S. building systems to meet the needs of traders, but WindRider is the best known. Its Web site, www.tradingcomputers.com, experiences twice as much traffic as the others. Today, the powerful computing systems built in Laramie are found throughout the world. WindRider boasts an impressive list of stock traders as clients, including E*Trade, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Oppenheimer & Co. and StockTrading.com.

Bravo! Entrepreneur Awards for six regions – Winners of these awards demonstrate the best traits of entrepreneurship, including vision, drive, perseverance and willingness to take risks. Six winners statewide were named from each of the Wyoming Business Council’s six regions of the state. Winners of the regional Entrepreneurship Awards included:

Southeast Wyoming – Tom and Merrie Elsberry, A Thru Z Document Destruction Inc. (Cheyenne): A Thru Z has found its niche as a security company, not a trash hauler. In an age of identify theft, A Thru Z safely protects a company’s confidential papers, shreds them and recycles them. When the business started five years ago, it had only one truck and one employee beyond the owners. Today they have expanded to two trucks, five full-time employees and two part-timers and they are looking for additional employees. They also have expanded their business to Laramie, Casper and Douglas as well as Cheyenne.

Southwest Wyoming – Howard D. Woody, Union Telephone Co. Inc. (Mountain View): Since being founded in 1914 in rural Uinta County, Union Telephone has converted into wireless provider and expanded its operations from the Bridger Valley across southern Wyoming to the southeast corner and up to northeastern Wyoming. It also provides service to parts of Colorado and Idaho. Its workforce has grown from 35 to approximately 270, and its towers now number 286, with plans to add another 108 this year and 100 per year for the next five years.

West Central Wyoming – Cory and Heidi Fabrizius, Precision Analysis (Riverton): Precision Analysis offers air and water quality measurements to show that energy companies are complying with state and federal environmental regulations and requirements. Since beginning in their garage, the business has more than doubled sales each year and is serving some of the giants in the energy industry. It has also introduced mobile analytical services.

Northwest Wyoming – Sheri DeCroo, WY-TEST (Worland: When Sheri DeCroo, a certified phlebotomist, returned to her hometown of Worland, she recognized a need for qualified drug testing throughout the Big Horn Basin and in 1997 she started her company, WY-TEST, working out of her home. Today she has two employees in her office in Worland and has trained a number of testers throughout Wyoming and Montana.
East-Central Wyoming – Mike Daly, First State Bank (Wheatland): Mike Daly returned to his hometown of Wheatland and bought, with other local investors, a bank several years later, creating First State Bank of Wheatland. Through Daly’s leadership and vision as chairman and CEO, the bank has continued to grow, opening a branch in Torrington in 1999. First State Bank was named one of the top 50 community banks in the nation by the American Bankers Association in 2000, and Daly is viewed as one of the leading community bankers in the state.

Northeast Wyoming – Bob Marron, Wyoming Biodiesel Corp. (Gillette: Energy Fuel Dynamics, dba Wyoming Biodiesel Corp., is contacting farmers and landowners in Wyoming and Montana about producing various plants for feedstock for a biodiesel plant in Gillette. The company’s business plan is based on the research of “Sonic Bloom” which indicates that crop yields can increase dramatically with use of his patented Sonic Bloom audio and organic nutrient plant-growing process. Bob Marron proposes using the process to raise such crops as camelina, canola and brown mustard for bio-diesel feedstock.

For more information on the BRAVO awards, contact Wyoming Business Report Editor Denny Curran at 307.638.3200 or dcurran@wyoming.com. Photos of the winners and the banquet are available. They can be obtained by contacting Tom Lacock of the Wyoming Business Council at 307.631.0958 or tom.lacock@wybusiness.org.

The mission of the Wyoming Business Council is to facilitate the economic growth of Wyoming. For more information, please visit the Web site at www.wyomingbusiness.org.
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