Excerpted from Wisconsin State Journal
By Jack Cullen

One lick of the smooth, frosty vanilla ice cream made Danny and Donna Poggioli’s 15-hour drive from New York City temporarily disappear. Finally, they felt like they were in Wisconsin.

“This is what we came for. The back country roads and some awesome ice cream,” Donna Poggioli said outside the Sassy Cow Creamery’s store and bottling facility in Columbia County between Sun Prairie and Columbus.

Since opening in 2008, Sassy Cow’s grass-roots beginnings and organic focus have attracted swarms of tourists and local buyers, making its “milk with an attitude” one of the most popular dairy products in the state.

Reaching the milestone wasn’t easy for brothers and co-owners James and Robert Baerwolf, who have farmed the fields around Sassy Cow their whole lives. They placed a $1.5 million bet on themselves, adding a milk processing facility to their farm despite having little experience in processing or marketing.

Sassy Cow sold $4 million in products last year and continues to market its “milk with an attitude” brand and increase its variety of about 75 ice cream flavors.

“It has been quite the learning process,” Baerwolf said. “Milk is what keeps our doors open and keeps our business viable, but ice cream is what keeps us fun.”

Sassy Cow’s rapid rise has been pushed along by a wave of interest in local and organic products.

“They were good farmers to start with, and their business and marketing skills are what made for success,” said UW-Madison dairy economist Bob Cropp. “Sassy Cow is in a unique market, and they have been able to capitalize from it.”

Baerwolf also notes Sassy Cow was a good fit with Madisonians’ tastes.

“It’s the biggest blessing to be close to Madison. People are receptive and interested in local farms,” Baerwolf said. “When people take interest in what they’re eating, that’s good for farmers, good for the product, and allows businesses like us to succeed.”

Read the full article.

Excerpted from Janesville Gazette
By Marcia Nelesen

Several business people at Monday’s council meeting lauded the work Janesville city staff did to keep a Seneca Foods expansion here, and the president of Forward Janesville offered to partner with the city to market the new anaerobic wastewater pretreatment lagoon the city is building.

The city was able to lower Seneca’s wastewater costs by building the pretreatment facility outside the company’s front door on East Conde Street.

The $3.3 million cost will be paid for in about a dozen years with the additional revenues the city’s wastewater treatment plant will earn from the extra processing line and by the sale back to Seneca of methane produced by the lagoon.

In addition, the lagoon might draw other food processing plants here.

The council voted unanimously to enter into a TIF agreement for the project.

Seneca will build an 80,000-square-foot addition that can house up to five new packaging lines. The company agrees to employ an additional 25 people over 10 years.

Read the full article.

As appeared in The Cap Times
By Paul Jadin

Mike Ivey’s June 12 story, “Madison lagging behind peer cities in economic vitality,” is an interesting analysis of what afflicts the local economy. As the country slowly emerges from a deep recession, it’s a story that’s no doubt been read in countless other newspapers, even in those communities that, for now, rank higher than Madison on the latest list.

But what ails the Madison region’s economy begs a more important question: What are we going to do about it?

Last year, Thrive (now the Madison Region Economic Partnership or MadREP) launched a comprehensive, regional answer to that critical question: Advance Now. Advance Now is a strategy that makes economic development efforts more efficient and effective, fueling revitalization and driving growth in the eight-county region that includes Columbia, Dane, Dodge, Green, Iowa, Jefferson, Rock and Sauk counties.

MadREP’s strategy is based on solid research, incisive analysis and unprecedented feedback from more than 2,000 business owners, community leaders, public officials, economic development professionals and others committed to economic growth in the Madison Region. It’s focused on improving our economic competitiveness, entrepreneurial climate, workforce development, regional promotion, diversity and leadership.

Six months into our five-year plan, MadREP is charging full-steam ahead on execution of the Advance Now strategy. Our staff, board and partners across the Madison region are working harder than ever to tackle its economic challenges.

We’re actively partnering with businesses in the region to ensure they stay and expand in our eight counties. These efforts work in tandem with our international program, designed to increase exports coming out of this region. We believe there are at least 2,000 companies within these eight counties that have the potential to export, a necessity for economic growth when 96 percent of the world’s consumers live outside the United States.

We’re also fostering the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, working specifically on efforts to create more mentorship opportunities and to expand innovative spaces like Sector67, a community hackerspace for creating and perfecting next-generation technologies. We’re linking the region’s educators and business leaders to ensure that our education and workforce development initiatives more closely meet the needs of our employers. And our marketing and diversity activities are raising the profile of this region as they promote our competitive advantages and more fully engage our diverse constituencies.

As Ivey’s article demonstrates well, issues of economic cause and effect are remarkably complex. There never will be a simple, singular answer. That’s why MadREP continues to build its efforts on the foundation of the five Advance Now goals. But before those goals were set, our organization was founded on an even more fundamental principle: Any successful effort to fuel economic growth in the Madison area must be a regional one.

The economic diversity of our eight-county region and the range of outstanding assets across it are greater than those found in any one part of it. This is an incredible strength, one that MadREP’s work is both drawing from and promoting. Coupled with the region’s educational, cultural, natural, community and other assets, the Madison region is in a unique position to regroup and rebound, stronger than ever. As we do, MadREP looks forward to continuing to lead, collaborate and report on our progress.

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Excerpted from Biz Opinion
By Tom Still

Like it or not, health-care reform is here to stay. Even if the Affordable Healthcare Act was magically repealed tomorrow, the U.S. health-care system would continue to search for ways to control costs, eliminate waste and improve quality.

A major tool being applied to health care’s challenges is wider adoption of health information technologies, which collectively help patients, providers, insurers and medical practitioners as they come to grips with change.

That’s an opportunity for many businesses in Wisconsin, from the largest health-care providers to the smallest startups. Consider these developments in the last two weeks alone:

* GE Healthcare, which has about 6,000 employees in Wisconsin, announced plans to invest $2 billion worldwide over the next five years to accelerate the development of innovative software for healthcare systems and applications. Focus areas will include scheduling efficiencies, support for clinical decisions and diagnostics, elimination of waste and a variety of workflow issues.

* The Marshfield Clinic, which has about 50 clinics in Wisconsin, announced it will form Marshfield Clinic Information Services, a company that will build on nearly five decades of health information technology expertise. The clinic has used a homegrown computer-based electronic health record – called Cattails – for more than 20 years.

* At the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference and the Digital Healthcare Conference, both held in the Madison area, a dozen companies with ideas for improving health care quality, safety, access, compliance and accountability presented their business plans and met with investors and potential customers.

The anchor tenant in the state’s health IT shopping mall is Epic Systems in Verona, which continues to grow in revenues and employees. However, there are many smaller companies with bright ideas – and some of them have attracted former Epic workers. These include companies such as Nordic Consulting, Aver Informatics, BlueTree Network, Wellbe, HealthFinch, Moxe Health, KayO Technology and many more.

While the Affordable Healthcare Act has accelerated the pace of change, the movement toward smarter use of health information technologies began decades ago within organizations such as Epic, GE Healthcare and Marshfield – which means Wisconsin enjoys a strong head start.

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Excerpted from bizjournals.com
By Jeff Engel

When Deb and Dan Carey bid in a brewpub foreclosure sale on the equipment they would use to start New Glarus Brewing Co. in 1993, they only had $40,000 in the bank, hadn’t secured a loan yet and had an unfinished business plan.

“This is the part where if somebody else did this I would’ve taken them aside going, ‘This isn’t going to work,’” Deb said with a laugh, reminiscing in the offices of her New Glarus, Wis., brewery. “But I really believed in my heart that it was going to work. I think this is what makes me an entrepreneur, or possibly somebody who should be locked up.”

Turns out she was more entrepreneur than eccentric.

Twenty years later, the brewery the wife and husband started in a 10,000-square-foot, run-down warehouse in this village of 2,172 people has grown into a $31 million business making some of Wisconsin’s most popular craft beers in two New Glarus locations totaling 126,000 square feet.

Deb, the brewery’s founder and president, was the first woman to establish and operate a brewery in the U.S.

The U.S. Small Business Administration named her Wisconsin’s Small Business Person of the Year and the national Small Business Person of the Year runner-up in 2011. She is a member of the White House’s Small Business Council and has met with President Barack Obama — twice.

“Neither of us envisioned this kind of growth or success,” she said of her plans with her husband, the company’s brewmaster. “And it wasn’t really our goal. Our goal was always to make world-class beer and take care of the people that worked for us.”

New Glarus beer wouldn’t be flowing today without the SBA and local community banks.

“When you’re starting out you don’t have a proven track record, and without the support of the government, I don’t think we could’ve done it,” Dan said.

Read the full article.