Excerpted from Janesville Gazette
By Elliot Hughes

The highest offices in a downtown Janesville building soon will be occupied by at least 80 employees of SHINE Medical Technologies after the city council approved a tax increment financing deal Monday.

City officials believe SHINE’s move will bring—if only temporarily—the spending power of dozens of new workers to the area at a time when downtown revitalization has become a top priority in Janesville.

“This is a great thing for downtown,” council member Carol Tidwell said. “It will be a great boost for the economy here.”

SHINE, a medical radioisotope producer, soon will begin construction on a $100 million production facility on Janesville’s south side.

But downtown might not be its long-term headquarters. The company eventually plans to build a corporate office building on the production facility’s campus.

The TIF deal, however, will keep SHINE’s headquarters at 101 Prospect for at least five years. And those within City Hall and outside of it said the deal is a worthy investment to bring more people downtown.

“Maybe in five years they do move out to their corporate offices, but in the meantime, I think we need to expose people to the downtown,” said Dave Marshick of the Downtown Development Alliance. “It will support the private investment being made.”

The city’s master plan for reviving downtown, known as ARISE, will begin in earnest this winter with the demolition of the downtown parking plaza that straddles the Rock River. Meanwhile, private investment in several aging downtown properties has begun as well.

Gale Price, the city’s economic development director, said having SHINE downtown also could spark homebuyer interest in the area.

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Excerpted from Wisconsin State Journal
By Judy Newman

Sixteen Madison-area companies have made the 2016 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing, privately owned companies in the U.S., including two that cracked the top 500.

Madison health information technology company Wellbe, whose Connected CarePaths guide patients’ recovery after surgery and help health care providers track their progress, scored highest among Madison-area companies, at No. 322 on the Inc. 5000 list.

Founded in 2009, Wellbe reported revenue of $2.1 million, a three-year, 1,201 percent increase, and has more than 30 employees.

“We are extremely pleased to be included among this exceptional group of high-growth businesses,” said Wellbe founder and CEO James Dias, in a written statement.

Evoke Brand Strategies, Madison, an advertising and marketing firm also founded in 2009, was No. 325, with $2 million in revenue, up 1,183 percent.

The other Madison area companies on the Inc. list are:

• 1,459: Nordic, Madison
• 1,470: Concero Search Partners, Madison
• 1,799: RevolutionEHR, Madison
• 1,892: Information Technology Professionals, Madison
• 2,416: Best Defense Security & Fire Protection, Waunakee
• 2,519: Chandra Technologies, Madison
• 3,016: Synergy Consortium Services, Verona
• 3,830: Singlewire Software, Madison
• 3,862: American Risk Management Resources Network, Middleton
• 3,886: Midwest Prototyping, Blue Mounds
• 4,091: bb7, Madison
• 4,105: New Glarus Brewing Co., New Glarus
• 4,512: TASC, Madison
• 4,835: InForm Product Development, Sun Prairie

The statistics are reported by the companies that choose to participate and are based on their increase in revenue from 2012 to 2015.

Statewide, 50 companies made the Inc. 5000 list this year compared with 62 companies last year.

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Excerpted from Wisconsin Public Radio
By Shamane Mills

Twice it made a list as one of the best places to live in a comparison of mid-sized cities. Its also been acknowledged for its abundance of information technology jobs. Now, it’s gotten another favorable assessment – the most socially responsible city.

The Community Progress Index analyzed 100 of the “most populous” cities in the United States. The city ranked well for percentage of residents with health insurance, those with college degrees and low unemployment.

The study’s author, said Madison fell a bit short in economic vitality, with one notable exception.

“You had the perfect score in municipal finance, bond rating which is a measure of fiscal responsibility and make sure you don’t mortgage future generations,” Angelou said.

Madison also does well on environmental responsibility: Only 63 percent of commuters drive to work alone and 16 percent bike or walk to work.

The city’s No. 1 ranking is a compilation of 52 measures in five different areas – health, environmental responsibility, education, economic vitality and sustainability.

Madison did well overall but didn’t top any single category.

The data gathered in 2013 shows 10 percent of residents live in so-called ‘food deserts’ without a nearby grocery store, high school graduation rates are low and there’s a high prevalence of hates crimes.

Angelou’s report released this year indicated Madison’s economy is somewhat stagnant because it lacks diversity, relying heavily on information technology and health care.

“So you are running on a two-cylinder economy while many other cities are perhaps running on a six- or eight-cylinder economy.”

Paul Jadin is president of Madison Region Economic Partnership, also called MadREP.

Jadin notes the data is three years old and said there’s been improvement in business and job creation since then.

“So you’re going to continue to see life sciences and IT flourish,” Jadin said. “But as the Mayor indicated, if we are going to have the appropriate economic diversity, we’ve got to continue to do everything we can to prop up the ag, beverage and food sector, and we’ve got to do more to prop up the precision manufacturing sector.”

Companies don’t have to be located in Madison for the city’s economy to benefit, Jadin said.

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Excerpted from UW-Madison News
By David Tenenbaum

After a three-year sojourn in the Boston area, a maker of weather station networks has moved its headquarters back to Madison.

Understory, spawned by two University of Wisconsin—Madison graduate students in 2012, designs and deploys flocks of miniature weather stations that create an unprecedented level of detail on such weather measures as wind, hail and temperature.

This summer, the company mounted two of its patent-pending stations atop its offices on West Washington Avenue.

“Any meteorologist can tell you that weather data is way too sparse,” says CEO and co-founder Alex Kubicek, a Mukwonago native. “Radar only looks at the top of the storm, and to know how weather affects people we need to know what is going on at ground level.”

True to its roots, Understory straddles the divide between academia and commerce. The firm offers data free to academic researchers, and its initial commercial success is intimately related to hail, which was Kubicek’s focus in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UW–Madison.

A 2011 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that weather could have a $485 billion impact on the U.S. gross domestic product.

Weather information can be useful to event planners, builders and farmers, but Understory has focused on insurance companies, which pay out billions every year for storm damage. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reports that in 2015, 155 people died in 10 weather disasters that each had a price tag of $1 billion or more.

Hailstones grow as ice particles rise and fall in a cloud. Big hailstones — say, golf ball size and larger — are heavy enough to damage buildings and vehicles.

Overall, Kubicek’s UW research on thunderstorms convinced him of the need to create more data. For example, the relationship between storm intensity and hailstone size is uncertain. And the best way to find hail damage is tried, true and laborious: You climb up on the roof and look for it.

As Kubicek and co-founder Bryan Dow, who has a master’s in mechanical engineering from UW–Madison, pondered the problem, they realized that the data gap might be big enough to drive a business through. They began to design a detector built around sensors that register the movement of a metal sphere due to rain, hail and wind, then added devices to measure temperature, pressure and humidity.

Their business was in the first class of the Gener8tor accelerator in Madison, but raising capital was easier on the coasts, so it moved to the Boston area in 2013.

Understory has now completed a $7.5 million round of investment, with the largest shares coming from 4490 Ventures of Madison and Monsanto Growth Ventures, part of the agrichemical giant. The money supported the return to Madison, where Understory has just moved into light, high-ceiling offices downtown.

“Five years ago, there wasn’t much startup buzz in Madison, but now we were able to return home and we are excited to come back,” says Kubicek. “And an awesome reason to move here is to pull talent from the university; that’s a big attractor for us.”

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Excerpted from Janesville Gazette
By Neil Johnson

The Ironworks facility, owned since 2012 through Diane Hendricks’ development company, Hendricks Commercial Properties, is now humming with new commercial operations and ongoing redevelopment.

Three of the newer companies in the Ironworks—Comply365, FatWallet.com and Acculynx—are fast-growing tech firms whose clients range from multinational airlines to major retailers.

Another company, Universal Acoustic and Emission Technologies, which moved into the Ironworks in 2012, now employs up to 150 workers. It uses about 100,000 square feet of space to build specialized sound-deadened emissions equipment for industrial facilities.

The Ironworks’ new life has begun to transform Beloit’s downtown from a center of manufacturing to a garden of venture capital dreams that have taken root and are now budding.

Rob Gerbitz, CEO of Hendricks Commercial Properties, calls the transformation of the old foundry space a “daily archeological find.” It’s an exhumation and revival that’s been ongoing since 2002, in the months after Hendricks and her late husband, Ken, teamed up with a group of investors and bought the 24-acre site.

“It’s not an overstatement to say Beloit and its downtown could have slipped into an abyss after the Beloit Corporation closed. The lights go out in 1999 on a Friday night and never come back on, and if nobody steps in, you’re probably really in trouble,” Gerbitz said. “Quite frankly, we believe the redevelopment of the Ironworks, and the employment that continues to bring, is the future of the city of Beloit.”

WROUGHT IRON

The Ironworks is a hive of employment that brings 600 to 700 workers a day into Beloit’s historic city center, Gerbitz estimated. The facility, parts of which date back to the brick-and-mortar 1860s, has become a network of urban-modern studio space, open-floor offices with heavy steel and wood lofts that weave contemporary architecture into the hard, industrial backbone of the building.

It looks more like commercial space in London or New York, except that it’s set in small-town Wisconsin: Beloit, population 37,000.

The whole complex sprawls out over more than three dozen buildings stitched together between Third Street and the white-stone riprapped Rock River. Inside and outside the buildings, even in spaces not yet occupied, contractors bustle on build-outs that signal more development to come.

In 2017, the Ironworks will house a new downtown YMCA, which is being built inside 80,000 square feet of former factory space donated by Hendricks. Other spaces alongside built-out office suites continue a forward march toward being refit and rehabbed for future commercial tenants.

Outside, a refitted shipping lane known as Spine Road has been renamed Irontek Drive, a tip of the cap to Irontek, which is a new co-working space and incubator-accelerator inside Ironworks. It’s designed as a launchpad for startup technology firms that could take off in Ironworks.

TECH TAKES OFF

Tech-based companies have become the backbone of Ironworks, and one company, former Roscoe, Illinois, software firm Comply365, has become a vital part of that spine.

Kerry Frank, CEO and co-founder of Comply365, was looking for space to grow her Illinois company after it graduated from a home basement startup and moved into a Roscoe industrial space. The Roscoe building’s owner decided not to renew the lease, Frank indicated.

In 2012, Comply365 was the first of several tech firms to move to the Ironworks. The move came after Gov. Scott Walker personally contacted Frank, asking her to consider Wisconsin as her company’s new home. Beloit and Rock County economic development leaders and the Hendricks group joined the governor as suitors for Frank’s company, she said.

“It took me off-guard, the experience of being sought out by a community,” Frank said. “When you’re building up a business, you’re not expecting that. To have a community and even a state say they want you, that you’re welcome, that trumps anything about incentives, tax credits or other things.”

The company has grown while in Beloit. It moved into Ironworks with just over a dozen employees, and since then has grown to more than 70 employees—most of whom work out of the company’s Ironworks space.

The dozens of clients for whom Comply365 develops checklist software includes 10 Fortune 500 companies.

Comply365’s digs are like a kid’s daydream of a workplace. It has a large, open floor that overlooks downtown and chill-out space aplenty. The company’s coders and marketing staffers have huge LEGO-style blocks, beanbag chairs and ping pong tables—one of which has a dry-erase surface that workers can scrawl on to hash out ideas while they play.

Online deal-hunting website FatWallet.com houses its Midwest operations in the Ironworks, along with operations for its online sister company, Ebates and Ebates Canada, and its parent company, the Japanese-owned tech firm Rakuten.

In 2011, FatWallet moved from its digs in Rockton, Ill. to Beloit after tax changes in Illinois threatened its online business model. Early this year, it moved into the Ironworks building.

“Part of the selling point is that as we’re trying to recruit top talent, we can tell people you can have a real prospect at a top job in a place where you can actually afford to live. We’ve had people move here from our California offices to get that,” said FatWallet media relations expert Brent Shelton, who works at the company’s Irontek location.

PATTERN FOR THE FUTURE

Jim Spelman operates Jim Spelman Visuals, a small photography design and art studio, in the Ironworks. He moved here from Rockford, Illinois, about a year ago.

Spelman had done image and design work for Hendricks’ firms in the past. Now, as a tenant in the Ironworks, he does commission work refitting and rehabbing thousands of wood patterns leftover inside the former foundry.

Spelman uses the patterns to assemble large murals that adorn Ironworks inside and out. Each mural can take months of work, he said.

Spelman’s company is small compared to some of the others in the Ironworks.

But Ironworks’ developers are now gearing redevelopment, in part through the Irontek incubator, to try to foster small companies through startup and into growth mode.

Irontek has launched a mentoring program, Irontek U, that matches students with local software and tech companies. That’s an attempt to cultivate and keep local talent, said Erin Clausen, Irontek’s community manager.

Hendricks Commercial Properties eventually hopes to house 25 or 30 businesses of different types, many of them smaller companies. Gerbitz said the idea is that there is space and potential for small companies to grow at the Ironworks.

“What’s more important maybe isn’t the size of the company, but the unknown. It’s about what might start small but we know can grow here. That’s what inspires the whole project. It’s what Beloit is now becoming, and what it can be.”

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