I don’t know about you, but 2025 was a year where I felt like I couldn’t keep up. Most days felt like they got away from me and the pile of work to do just increased each week. Thinking back over everything that’s happened this year, it’s actually been incredibly productive. I’ve been all over the Midwest and increased the membership at the EntrePartners Innovation Center significantly. However, this is the first year in a long time where I haven’t stepped onto a plane – I’ve taken the train a couple of times, and I’ve put thousands of miles on my truck. I’ve had to say no to attending several events because my responsibilities have kept me close to home. Even after getting the Innovation Center assembled late last year, managing the place has ended up being more work than I originally thought it would.
The only non-EntrePartners-related activity this past year was my few days in Chicago for CiderCon 2025 and the Cider Summit. Most of my cider friends attended this year’s convention, so I wanted to make sure I was there for the majority of the week. I had a blast attending tastings and special invite-only events during that week back in February, as I always do. I got to spend time with folks from all over the country and the world, in the convention hall, in the lobby of the hotel, around the neighborhood at different tasting events, over at Navy Pier for Cider Summit, and in the penthouse of the Chicago Hilton for an invite-only convention closing party. If I’d had the time, I would have gone in a day earlier for a couple of the Chicago Cider Week activities run by local friends in the industry, and I would have had the chance to visit a cidery or two in the city. I heard rumblings that the event may not return to Chicago in 2027 – I really hope this rumor is wrong, because it’s really nice to have the event just a few hours away every other year.
I thought I’d have more time to travel to cider events across the country this year – between the heavy lift building EntrePartners and the painfully slow process of getting Cider Finder to market, I decided my time was better spent at the office, slowing plugging away at everything myself. As I build out the EntrePartners Innovation Center, I’ve had an amazing chance to add significant amounts of programming and onboard about a dozen members over the course of the year.
We were pretty light on programming in 2024 and the first part of this year. After Startup Weekend Iowa City in July, I decided to hit the gas pedal and start running evening programming in the space. I already had some stuff ready to go – the partnership to run Kauffman FastTrac® was in place and the business basics curriculum that I designed before my stint at the university was sitting there waiting to be deployed. Participation was lighter than I wanted this fall, so I’m going to try these sessions again in the spring combined with a greater emphasis on promotion. Follow-Up Weekend also finally launched back in November, with a handful of people wanting to buckle down and get things done in the cozy confines of the Innovation Center.
I launched the “We Exist” tour this year as well – it’s hard to get your message out there when the big players in the neighborhood don’t want to help. I expected a fair amount of resistance from the university, as I show that educating entrepreneurs doesn’t require tens of thousands of dollars in overhead costs. The real surprise was the resistance I found in working with Greater Iowa City, starting with their refusal to host Startup Weekend Iowa City at MERGE in July. We’ve held that program there with no issues since 2018, but this is the first year where none of the MERGE staff has been willing or interested in helping organize the event.
In previous posts, I’ve discussed how chambers of commerce tend to be stuck in the era of shopping malls and Wal-Mart versus Main Street – a completely brick-and-mortar worldview that dates from the late 1970s or early 1980s. Greater Iowa City is just the latest branding for the local chamber of commerce, their second rebrand in the last five years. Since their merger with ICAD, they really haven’t figured out what to do with the early-stage entrepreneurial programs they inherited from the merger, including the MERGE coworking space and 1 Million Cups. The Innovation Center has actually benefited from this chaos, as we offer a more coherent front door to entrepreneurship, especially for those who are building fast-growing and scaling startups and want a community of like-minded builders.
Even with the resistance locally, I have had some success in spreading the word about our programs throughout the state. As part of the “We Exist” tour, I’ve had discussions with folks in Des Moines, Dubuque, Waterloo, Cedar Falls, and Clinton about hosting or sponsoring programs in those locations. EntrePartners mostly focuses on eastern Iowa – Iowa City in particular since we’re based here – but I want it to become more of a statewide coalition in the coming year. The Kauffman FastTrac® partnership with Curated Growth spread us into the Des Moines market this year, and I have a bit of new programming planned for the new year that will take us elsewhere in eastern Iowa. We were also added to IASourceLink this fall, thanks to my connections at the JPEC at UNI. Local businesses and entrepreneurs have also pitched in to help as volunteers and donors, both of which are much appreciated.
I did get to travel a bit to represent EntrePartners across the Midwest. The Global Entrepreneurship Network hosted their big event in Indianapolis this past June, the Global Entrepreneurship Congress. The week-long event was an amazing celebration of all things community building, and I was so happy to be part of the first GEC in the United States in over a decade. I reconnected with a bunch of my entrepreneurship friends, some of whom I hadn’t talked with since the Startup Champions Network conference in Des Moines a few years back and others who I hadn’t seen since the months of Zoom in 2020.
Toward the end of the summer, I traveled to Kansas City to the Kauffman Foundation headquarters for the joint 1MC/FastTrac Summit. At the time I had registered, I had a foot in both the 1MC and FastTrac pond – by the time the summit rolled around, I was officially retired from 1MC organizing. Due to my unique situation, I was interviewed by the communications team at the foundation. They’re trying to better integrate the two programs in the coming year, and I look forward to seeing how that goes. Before I was approached by Curated Growth, I had no idea that FastTrac existed, even though I’d been organizing 1MC for 6 years and had attended multiple different 1MC locations over the past decade. FastTrac pre-dates 1MC by more than a decade and really is a hidden gem at the Kauffman Foundation.
I’m glad that I attended both the Global Entrepreneurship Congress and the 1MC/FastTrac Summit, even though there was a bit of overlap in programming between the two. There were only a couple of people who were at both events, including a couple of the speakers. I was more excited about attending GEC just because I was still wrapping my head around everything that the Global Entrepreneurship Network does and that there were going to be people attending the event in Indianapolis from all over the world. I jumped at the opportunity to attend the Kansas City event because I’d been waiting for one more 1MC Organizer Summit in person after so many years of lackluster online events from 2020 onward. The best part of the 1MC Organizer Summits I attended in 2018 and 2019 was the ability to connect with organizers across the country, to compare notes and share experiences. You just don’t get that opportunity in an online format without taking conversations off of the conference platform. Getting one more opportunity to attend, even just after retirement, was a nice way to end my run at lead organizer in Iowa City.
Much of the rest of my time this past year was spent working with Main Street West Branch. I was named Vice President at the end of last year after only 3 months on the board and added the Economic Vitality committee chair to my list of titles this summer. It made complete sense for me to slide over from the Promotions committee to leading and rebuilding the Economic Vitality committee, especially as a bunch of our local businesses are changing. The work that Economic Vitality does matches well with the work I do at EntrePartners – serving as a resource for entrepreneurs and growing businesses in the community.
I’ve put in quite a few hours volunteering this year as well. From driving a golf cart around West Branch in the August heat, shuttling people to and from their cars during Hoover’s Hometown Days, to managing silent auction merchandise at our fundraisers, and helping people in and out of horse-drawn carriages in the snow during A Christmas Past. I drove down to Muscatine to attend one day of the Downtown Conference (which I will attend representing EntrePartners next year) and drove up to Waterloo to attend the Main Street Iowa Fall Training. Every Main Street organization has to attend certain events, and I don’t mind getting out of the office occasionally, as these trainings and conferences usually have some use for what I do at EntrePartners in addition to the benefits they provide Main Street West Branch.
There is one bit of sad news from this year – the Start Up Vehicle finally gave up the ghost after about 202,000 miles. The brakes, tires, and suspension all needed work, the coil packs needed to be replaced, and there was a traveling electrical gremlin that I’d noticed for the past few years. I wasn’t planning to put $3000 into an $800 truck, so I ended up selling the thing to an auto salvage place. It was an amazing run for a 28-year-old daily driver and finally gives me the opportunity to get something a bit more modern and less gas-guzzling.
I talk a lot about the Messy Middle in this blog, and how startups must go through several years of struggle between the celebration and joy at the beginning of the process, when founders start the business, and the exit at the end of the process. This year truly felt like my own Messy Middle. There were some serious high points, and then a bunch of times over the course of the year when I wanted to throw in the towel.
Even though EntrePartners is a non-profit, it still functions much like a true startup – we’re launching new things, trying to get new members (customers), and promoting the heck out of what we’re doing. We face headwinds from other organizations (even though we’re not actually competing with them, we’re just trying to make the size of the pie larger.) We have costs that have to be met with revenue, and we’re always on the lookout for new partnerships that help advance our mission. The non-profit world isn’t nearly as “rainbows and sunshine” as it looks from the outside, and it’s much harder to raise money for our mission than it is to raise money to feed children or stop diseases.
I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. There were a lot of growing pains in the last year, but I have some hope left for what we’re building in the coming year. However, I don’t feel as optimistic as I have in previous years. Continue to the second part of this post to see my predictions for the coming year, as well as what I have planned for EntrePartners and Cider Finder in 2026.