Excerpted from Janesville Gazette
By Jim Leute

An expansion that will more than double its production space is not yet complete, but a Janesville manufacturer has already surpassed employment benchmarks required by city and state incentive packages.

Construction on a 112,000-square-foot addition to United Alloy should be complete later this year and fully operational early in 2015.

The company on Kennedy Road makes fuel tanks, frames, trailers and complex fabrications for the power equipment and off-highway equipment markets.

Earlier this year, the company promoted Stephan Achs from vice president of sales and marketing to president and chief revenue officer.

With Achs came a change in strategy to transform what has been a regionally strong manufacturer to one that competes both nationally and internationally in the wider power equipment, construction and agriculture industries.

“We had been a high quality fabrication shop offering services,” Achs said Tuesday before Gov. Scott Walker arrived to tour the company. “Now we’re going to aggressively manufacture and sell products to Fortune 100 manufacturers, and we’re going to do it so it’s annuity, repeat business.

“We are poised to make the big step to a firm that can compete on a global stage. It is harder for multinational customers like ours to find suppliers they can trust to keep up with their pace and demands. Our commitment to—and investment in—growth is what gives them confidence.”

Achs said the company’s year-to-date sales have increased significantly over last year’s record pace, and the current quarter is the strongest in company history.

United Alloy considered an expansion outside Wisconsin to be closer to key customers.

“Ultimately, we came back to the fact that our employee base here in Rock County is exceptional, hardworking and fully trained,” Achs said. “We believe we have world-class manufacturing talent right here in our own hometown, and we decided that it was wisest to go with the people who helped us achieve our success in the first place.”

In order to keep United Alloy in Janesville, the city provided an incentive package worth $887,460, and the state kicked in a forgivable loan of $500,000 and tax credits worth up to $130,000.

In return, United Alloy agreed to retain its workforce of 100 and add 35 new workers.

Achs said Tuesday the company already has more than 150 employees, putting it beyond the benchmarks tied to the city and state incentive commitments.

“United Alloy’s expansion is another indication of the strong economic development we are experiencing in Rock County and throughout the state,” Walker said. “The company reviewed other options for this project and ultimately decided Wisconsin was the best place to continue to grow its business.”

Read the full article.

Excerpted from Wisconsin State Journal
By Judy Newman

It’s only logical that MobCraft Beer, a Madison craft brewery that makes its ales based on a majority vote by customers, would be the first company to sign up to use Wisconsin’s new crowdfunding law.

“The whole premise behind our company being a crowdsourced brewery is that we are very focused on interacting with our customers. How much more can we be connected with our customers than by having them be part-owners in our company?” MobCraft co-founder and president Henry Schwartz said.

The state’s crowdfunding rules took effect June 1, and as of last Friday, MobCraft is the only company, so far, to take advantage of the financing tool.

What the funding mechanism does for companies is to let them raise up to $1 million — or $2 million, if they submit an audit — through a Wisconsin-based crowdfunding portal.

That’s a lot more money than the typical project seeks using informal crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo. It’s also substantially less than a company might raise in a very structured and formalized initial public stock offering through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

For an investor, Wisconsin’s crowdfunding law is a chance for someone who is not super-rich to own a piece of a company with the possibility of getting back more than just, say, a T-shirt, if it succeeds — but, officials hope, without the risk of going broke if the business fails.

“We’re hopeful that Wisconsin entrepreneurs could find new opportunities to raise money and start new businesses,” creating jobs and boosting the economy, said Patricia Struck, administrator of the Department of Financial Institutions’ securities division.

“I think it’s going to be a game changer,” said Zach Brandon, Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce president. “It brings a whole new class of investors” and it also brings funding to businesses that “largely are not going to be technology-based.”

Read the full article.

Excerpted from Wisconsin State Journal
By Bailey Berg

A $25 million grant will allow the UW-Madison College of Engineering to hire 25 new faculty members with the goals of creating a more interdisciplinary teaching approach and focusing on manufacturing advances to boost the nation’s economic competitiveness.

Ian Robertson, dean of the College of Engineering, announced Monday that The Grainger Foundation will make the donation to create the Grainger Institute for Engineering.

“This will allow us to make many new discoveries and enhance the university’s reputation as a leader in advancements that solve some of the worlds biggest problems,” Robertson said.

Housed within the College of Engineering, the commitment — the largest in the college’s history — will allow the college to up their faculty count from approximately 225 people to 250.

“We’ll be seeking highly creative faculty who are the top people in their fields,” said Renee Meiller, a spokeswoman for the College of Engineering. “Top faculty think to the future and make research advances that have the power to change or impact their fields in dramatic ways. They might, for example, be implemented in new products, improve existing products, help solve a challenge important to society or lead to discoveries in other areas.”

The new faculty members will be hired in clusters of different backgrounds and will be appointed to two departments in the college. The college’s mission is to create a more transdisciplinary education for the nearly 5,600 undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled in the program, as well as future students.

“By bridging multiple disciplines, like computer engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, we can come together and focus on major problems,” Robertson said.

Robertson said the institute will start with tackling various manufacturing issues, such as consuming fewer materials and energy and producing less waste. This, he said, will allow companies to bring new products to the market more quickly and economically.

Robertson said this could further speed up the “renaissance” of American manufacturing.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis recently announced that in the fourth quarter of last year, manufacturing was one of the leading contributors to the increase in economic output. The economic impact of nondurable-goods manufacturing — goods that are rapidly consumed, such as food, gas and clothing — increased by almost 19 percent in that quarter.

“There is a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S.,” Robertson said. “Companies are coming back here. To maintain that, we need to keep them at the forefront by providing them with a skilled workforce.”

The Institute will also act as an incubator, which will allow the college to continuously launch and research new concepts. The goal is to create more self-sustaining research centers.

“The positive and transformative effects of this investment within the College of Engineering will resonate throughout the state and our nation far into the future,” UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank said in a statement. “The institute will accelerate the renaissance of the U.S. manufacturing industry and enhance the nation’s economy.”

Read the full article.

Excerpted from Forbes Magazine
By Joel Kotkin

In the town of Verona on the rural fringes of Madison, Wisc., there’s a Google-like campus that houses one of the country’s most rapidly growing tech companies, and one of the least well known. Founded in 1979, the medical software maker Epic has grown to employ 6,800 people, most of whom work at its 5.5 million-square-foot headquarters complex, which sprawls over 800 acres of what was farmland until the early 1990s.

Despite annual revenue estimated at $1.5 billion, the company is congenitally publicity shy, a characteristic associated with its founder and CEO, Judy Faulkner. Yet in its quiet, unassuming way, Epic is emblematic of the expansion of the information industry in the Madison area. Employment in the metropolitan area’s information sector is up 28% since 2008, among the fastest growth in the country over that period. This has occurred despite the city’s reputation for left-wing, often anti-business politics—a culture that its left-leaning mayor (and Epic booster), Paul Soglin, describes as “76 square miles surrounded by reality.”

To come up with our list of the cities with the fastest-growing information sectors, we zeroed in on the 55 metropolitan statistical areas that have at least 10,000 information jobs, which includes software, publishing, broadcasting and telecommunications services. We used the same methodology as for our overall ranking of the Best Cities for Jobs: we ranked the MSAs based on job growth in the sector over the long-term (2002-13), mid-term (2008-13) and the last two years, as well as recent momentum.

Our top 10 is dominated by large metro areas renowned as tech hubs – Madison, at No. 5,  is the smallest by far. In first place is Silicon Valley — San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara — followed by San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, which together employ over 110,000 information workers. Both have been primary winners in the latest high-tech bubble. Since 2008 information employment is up 23% in San Jose and 27% in San Francisco.

Read the full article.

 

 

We are pleased to share the Madison Region Economic Development Guide, a new publication showcasing the Madison Region’s many business and quality of life assets. We unveiled this inaugural issue at our Summit earlier this month as part of our ongoing commitment to telling the Madison Region’s story.

The articles within the publication paint a powerful picture of the region’s assets – from our industries, to workforce, to infrastructure, business climate, and quality of life. The piece is available in print and also lives online at businessclimate.com, a leading economic development website reaching visitors from more than 9,300 cities around the globe.

We thank the many businesses and municipalities who partnered with us to support the creation of this publication. MadREP and our partners will distribute this publication to thousands of business decision makers nationwide, and we invite you to make use of the magazine as well. Please contact us for copies of the magazine to take on your business travels or display in your workplace.