SHERIDAN — What a difference a year makes.
Just a year ago, Scott Van Dorsten’s detachable spare magazine — which can be inserted in the butt stock of any rifle — was just a prototype and a pitch: one that he presented successfully to judges at the Sheridan Start-Up Challenge Pitch Night. Now he’s about ready to go into production on the product and already has buyers lining up for his innovation.
“I’ve been getting calls saying ‘When will you have this ready because I need it in my gun,” Van Dorsten said.
In the year since he was named one of the three winners of the pitch night — earning some of the $100,000 in seed money allocated to the event — things haven’t always been easy for Van Dorsten. A slow in spending among firearms industry customers over the last year has meant the demand for the products he pitched at the event — including the spare magazine and a mount to attach a Scout rifle scope to any gun — hasn’t been as high as he expected, he said.
But nearly a year after winning the prize, Van Dorsten looks back on Pitch Night and the preparation that preceded it as a largely positive experience that helped him grow as a businessman.
“Some of the growth came from actually sitting down and formulating a plan,” Van Dorsten said. “I knew what I wanted to do, but had never outlined the steps of how to get there. That whole experience really helped me learn how to structure this business.”
Van Dorsten is just one Sheridan County resident who has benefited from the programming of IMPACT 307, the start-up business development program of the University of Wyoming.
The Start-Up Challenge was one of IMPACT’s flagship events in Sheridan County, but the organization also offered other services including business counseling and business incubator space. But as of July 2024, the organization has ceased all operations in Sheridan County, and it is expected to end operations in all other Wyoming locations outside of UW’s home base of Laramie by the end of the year, said Scot Rendall, the former Sheridan director of IMPACT 307.
The departure of the program has left a vacuum that other programs are quickly filling, said Jodi Hartley, marketing and communications director for the Sheridan County Chamber of Commerce. But that has often led to a delocalization of services that community members used to have convenient access to right in Sheridan.
For example, Energy Capital Economic Development will be holding their own start-up challenge event in Gillette based on the IMPACT 307 model in December and are inviting Sheridan and Johnson County residents to join, but there will be no event in Sheridan this year, or in the foreseeable future, Rendall said. And the state’s Small Business Development Center will continue to provide business counseling for start-ups, Hartley said, but only visits Sheridan County about once a week or so.
“Anybody looking for start-up information, we would send to IMPACT 307 or the Small Business Development Center, and the nice thing about IMPACT is that you wouldn’t have to wait for the one day when somebody’s in Sheridan,” Hartley said. “So losing an organization like IMPACT certainly affects the availability of some of those kinds of resources, even though those services are still being provided in some shape or form.”
Gaining IMPACT
IMPACT 307 started life as the Wyoming Technology Business Center, which was founded in 2005, as a “resource to facilitate companies starting up and growing here in Wyoming,” according to the IMPACT 307 website. On June 1, 2020, the organization was rebranded as IMPACT 307.
Statewide, IMPACT 307 has assisted in the creation and successful launch of over 309 companies across its three business incubator facilities in Laramie, Casper and Sheridan since 2018. In 2022 alone, 121 companies were launched, according to IMPACT’s website. The 5,000-square-foot Sheridan incubator was launched in 2015, and it offered office space, three conference rooms and various other amenities to support local start-ups. The Sheridan Start-Up Challenge launched in 2017, and was held annually through 2023. Last year alone, there were 35 applicants for the Sheridan Start-Up Challenge, according to previous Sheridan Press reporting. Participants in IMPACT 307’s Sheridan programming were largely from Sheridan and Johnson counties, although Campbell County residents also participated before IMPACT launched programming in Gillette, Rendall said.
Losing IMPACT
The beginning of the end for IMPACT 307 came late last year.
The Wyoming Business Council board — which had partnered with IMPACT 307 for several years and paid it $575,000 over the last biennium, according to previous The Sheridan Press reporting — voted in December 2023 to stop funding the organization, and WBC funding for the programming ran out in June 2024.
Josh Dorrell, CEO of the Wyoming Business Council, told The Sheridan Press in January 2024 that IMPACT’s “particular scope of work” — which included the Start-Up Challenge Pitch Night contests around the state, the development of an operations playbook and a mechanism to work closely with the University of Wyoming’s technology transfer office — was not being executed.
In February, representatives of the University of Wyoming visited the Sheridan County commissioners and requested additional funding to sustain the organization’s work, following the business council’s withdrawal of funding. The county had been funding IMPACT 307 at a level of $80,000 a year, said Cameron Duff, administrative director for Sheridan County.
While the county never received a set cost from the University of Wyoming for sustaining the program, commissioners were told the required funding would more than double what they were previously paying, Duff said.
Another factor that weighed heavily into the commissioners’ decision making was how that doubled payment would be spent, Duff said.
“The real problem was we were paying for staffing down in Laramie, and they would provide some services back here, but we wouldn’t have anybody on the ground in Sheridan anymore,” Duff said.
During the February meeting, multiple commissioners spoke to the significant role IMPACT Sheridan director Rendall had on the local program, and questioned whether the program would be as beneficial without someone working on the ground in Sheridan County.
Commissioner Nick Siddle reiterated this to The Sheridan Press in an interview earlier this month.
“We certainly thought it was a valuable program,” Siddle said. “He (Rendall) was very good to work with and really the driving force behind it. With him no longer being employed by the University, the program just didn’t make financial sense for us anymore.”
Future IMPACT
Looking to the long-term future, the Wyoming Business Council could find itself filling the role of statewide start-up business services. Earlier this month, the Business Council announced the launch of StartUp Wyoming, a collaborative initiative between the Wyoming Business Council and Jackson Hole’s Silicon Couloir, which is designed to enhance entrepreneurial services and support for communities statewide.
StartUp Wyoming’s first act will be conducting a comprehensive assessment of Wyoming’s entrepreneurial landscape through a state-wide listening tour. The goal is to evaluate opportunities for strengthening start-up programs and identify the resources necessary to foster innovation, drive start-up growth and support economic development throughout Wyoming, according to the business council.
“StartUp Wyoming represents a critical investment in our state’s entrepreneurial future,” Rob Kellogg, Silicon Couloir executive director, said in a press release earlier this month. “By assessing our current landscape and engaging with stakeholders from across the state, we aim to build a stronger foundation for start-up success, which can lead to long-term job creation and economic growth.”
Rendall said his understanding was Silicon Couloir was “at least a year away” from completing the state-wide tour and completing a report on the results, meaning StartUp Wyoming likely won’t be launching programs in Sheridan or elsewhere in the state for at least a year.
In the meantime, other organizations are stepping in to fill the void. The Small Business Development Center is continuing to provide business counseling for start-ups, Hartley said, and the recently opened Innovation Center at Sheridan College houses some business incubator space, particularly for manufacturers.
And Rendall continues to be involved in local economic development work, currently as a contractor for the Energy Capital Start-Up Challenge in Gillette. The event, scheduled for early December and currently accepting applicants, is largely inspired by the challenge held by IMPACT 307 last year, but is unaffiliated with the organization, Rendall said.
Due to the departure of IMPACT 307, Energy Capital Start-Up Challenge organizers decided to expand entries for this year’s challenge to five northern Wyoming counties: Campbell, Sheridan, Johnson, Crook and Weston, Rendall said.
Rendall said he doesn’t expect the same kind of participation he received from Sheridan residents for the local Sheridan County event, but said he is hopeful local citizens avail themselves of the opportunity to participate.
“It won’t be anything close to the response we got for the Sheridan Start-Up Challenge, of course,” Rendall said. “But we’re hoping for maybe 10 to 15 Sheridan residents, and hopefully a few from Johnson County. Since there’s not a Sheridan challenge this year, I hope Sheridan residents will consider being part of the Energy Capital Challenge if they have an idea they’d like to pursue. There’s the chance of seed money, of course, but even more important than that is the chance for objective views and feedback on their idea. Hopefully, that is worth traveling for.”
Applications for the Energy Capital Start-Up Challenge will be accepted through Oct. 7. The application can be found online at energycapitalstartup.my.canva.site/ .
Local News
Comments / 0