Innovation & Job News

Comerica grants $100,000 to non-profit for small business loans

Kathleen A. Pitton, Comerica Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Lansing-area entrepreneurs will soon have a new tool for getting their startups off the ground. Comerica Bank announced last week it will give the Entrepreneur Institute of Mid-Michigan (EIMM) a $100,000 grant for its JumpStart Microloan Program for small business owners.

“Comerica's Community Reinvestment Staff has worked with EIMM for a number of years,” says Kathleen A. Pitton, vice president of corporate communications for Comerica. “Our bank was looking for ways in which to support the community through microloan programs and was impressed with the grant proposal received from EIMM for support of their microloan program.”

Comerica Bank is the first company to fund the EIMMs microloan program, which has loaned about $250,000 since 1997.

“Michigan is an important market for Comerica,” Pitton says. “EIMM's microloan program benefits the community through its support of microbusinesses and as well as the low- and moderate-income residents of the Lansing area who will benefit through the program's creation of new jobs.”

Proceeds from the grant will help EIMM to provide resources to small businesses in the City of Lansing and Ingham and Eaton Counties in Michigan. Former loan recipients include Chad Jordan, owner of Cravings Gourmet Popcorn. Loans range from $500 to $15,000.

Chuniq PR opens in Lansing with big plans for growth

Zaneta Chuniq Inpower, Chuniqu PR Wednesday, May 16, 2012

There’s a new public relations firm in Lansing, Chuniq PR. The new business is the brainchild of MSU Alum and Flint native, Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. After working at a Detroit-based firm, Inpower decided it was time to break out on her own.

“It’s an industry you can earn a lot though experience, but it also takes a lot of gusto,” she says. “I’m very ambitious, and I saw the best thing for me was to open my own business.”

Even though she got her start in Detroit and already has clients around the country in cities such as Dallas and Houston, she had no doubts about where Chuniq PR would be located.

“The Lansing area has so much vibrancy,” she says. “It has not only students, but also a lot of really experienced PR professionals. It is a strong area for those who are practicing PR.”

Inpower says the goal of Chuniq PR is to help businesses increase their brand awareness and value. She has also made a commitment to supporting youth-focused non-profits with the business’ proceeds.

Inpower hopes to set up a downtown office in the next three to four years. She currently works with interns and plans to hire two permanent staff members before the end of 2012.

Phenometics to expand, receives start-up award, adds seven jobs

Mimi C. Hall, Phenometrics, Inc. Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Phenometrics CEO Mimi C. Hall was surprised when she learned that her company had been named the Michigan Business Incubator Association's Incubator Client of the Year last month. Considering all that Phenometrics has accomplished since moving into the Technology Innovation Center six months ago, perhaps she shouldn’t have been.

“We’ve gone from nothing – just a business plan - to shipping product,” says Hall.

And not just any old product, but a pretty amazing one. The Phenometrics Photo Bioreactor allows researchers who are working to develop biofuels from algae to bring that work into a controlled setting.

“It’s a great technology and we’ve grown very quickly in the beginning,” Hall says. “The staff at TIC and having the opportunity to be here has played a pivotal role in our development and growth. We’re taking the next step right now.”

That next step will officially begin in June when Phenometrics moves out of the TIC and into a 2,300 square foot facility in East Lansing’s Alliance Building. The extra space will allow Phenometrics to manufacture certain parts of their product and assemble it on site. Since opening last fall, Hall has added seven staff members to the company.

Hall’s future plans for Phenometrics are to begin developing new product lines, as well as expanding within the company’s current market.

Pruess Pets celebrates 30 years, grows staff by 10 percent

Rick Preuss, Preuss Pets Wednesday, May 02, 2012

The Preuss family has been in the pet business since the 1960s when Rick Preuss’ mother opened a small fish store in the family’s home. Half a century later, Old Town’s Preuss Pets is celebrating its 30-year anniversary as the premier pet store in the region.

The 25,000 square foot location on Grand River began in 1982 as a 2,000 square foot shop in Haslett.

“For the first year and a half it was pretty much a family-run store,” says Preuss. “I thought it was the greatest profession ever. Soon enough, we started growing, from our understanding of what it is that people really need, to what it takes to run a successful family business.”

Preuss Pets now has 70 employees and is continuing to grow. The staff has increased by 10 percent over the last two years, and two to three new part-time staffers will be hired when construction on the store’s new pond, water garden and waterfall area is completed in May.

Preuss credits his business’ continued growth to his family’s commitment to not only their customers, but also their pets.

“It’s helping pets help people,” he says. “The pets are the stars of the show. Our job is to understand what the animals needs and to understand how to relate that to people so they can see those needs.”

Preuss Pets celebrated their anniversary with special events and activities in April.

“Celebrating the anniversary will go throughout the year,” Preuss says. “I hope we can continue to have this gift to share with the community for another 30 years.”

Zeppelin's Music Hall brings new music options to Michigan Ave

Michael Malott, Zeppelin's Music Hall Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Lansing native Michael Malott has had a full and successful music career already, but now he’s bringing his time and talents back to his hometown with his new venue, Zeppelin’s Music Hall.

The intimate space with a 60-person capacity is located on East Michigan Avenue in Lansing, across from The Green Door and next door to Emil’s Restaurant. Currently featuring live music Thursday through Sundays, Malott feels his music hall concept fills a need in the Lansing music scene.

“I spent a lot of time in New York City, and I like the warmth of the smaller clubs,” he says. “I didn’t see anything like that here. There are a lot of young, emerging artist out there who are under the age of 21 or 18 are excluded from playing a lot of places.”

Zeppelin’s does not serve alcohol and is therefore an all ages club. Marlott explains that this is important not only to give young musicians a place to play, but also to give young music enthusiasts a place to hang out.

“I would rather have them sitting in my club listening the music and not drinking and driving around, doing stupid stuff.”

Zeppelin’s will feature a wide range of music, including acoustic nights on Sundays, jazz nights, and even a taping of a variety show similar to The Gong Show that will air on public television.

“We have a reggae artist coming in from Kingston, we have a rock band from New York coming next month,” says Marlott. “It’s rock, industrial, punk, reggae, jazz and bluegrass. It’s everything.”

Injured MSU wrestler launches LynX Action Sports Apparel while in recovery

Collin Dozier, with LynX Action Sports Apparel Wednesday, April 25, 2012

It’s impressive enough that Michigan State University student Collin Dozier, who attends the school on a wresting scholarship can already look back on herniating a disc in his neck so badly that it broke in 2011 and say, “Everything happens for a reason.”

More impressive still is that Dozier has good reason to believe it. After being in a neck brace and unable to attend class for months following the injury, he was able to keep up in school, rehabilitate himself back to 100 percent, and is now launching his own line of clothing with LynX Shreds, also called LynX Action Sports Apparel.

“If I didn’t hurt myself I would have been wakeboarding in last summer,” says Dozier. “It’s almost been a blessing in disguise.”

Instead, the MSU student was busy building a business. He began with a concept developed by himself and some of his friends from his hometown of Virginia Beach who nicknamed their favorite wakeboarding area The Lynx. They made shirts, hats and stickers with a Lynx logo and sold them locally.

“Everybody wanted to know who we were,” says Dozier. “The name just stuck. When I came to MSU, I was still wearing my Lynx stuff and people liked it.”

Dozier has now designed and developed an entire line of sports apparel, including t-shirts, hats, dryfit workout shirts, as well as MMA gloves and shorts available online. Developing the business over the past year has given him the opportunity to partner with his father, a long-time businessman himself.

Dozier has also received promotional help from his fellow student athletes, such as Draymond Green, Greg Jones, Kirk Cousins and Keith Nichol who help to promote the clothing line.

MSU Foundation launches Spartan Innovations, to add seven jobs

Charles Hasemann, MSU Innovation Center Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Michigan State University has placed a strong emphasis on turning the school’s intellectual capacity into viable businesses with such programs as MSU Technologies, The Hatch and MSU Business-CONNECT. Now, the MSU Foundation will add a new component, Spartan Innovations, to make the process even stronger.

“What typically comes from a university is an invention or discovery,” says Charles Hasemann, executive director of the MSU Innovation Center, “and that becomes a patent, but a patent isn’t a company. You have to have to put together the business plan and the technology plan to move it far enough forward to succeed.

Spartan Innovations will help make that happen as a part of the MSU Innovation Center, together with MSU Technologies and and Business-CONNECT on the third floor of the Downtown East Lansing building where the Technology Innovation Center is located. The combination of entrepreneurial entities was assembled after a great deal of studying other such entities.

“I don’t know that we’ve invented anything here,” says Hasemann, “but we’ve assembled the best pieces from across the county and put them in the same place, like nowhere else I’ve seen.”

Spartan Innovations is now searching for it’s executive director, and will soon hire two other full time staffers and four to five part time business mentors. The MSU Foundation will fund the entity with a budget of $2 million per year. Additionally, when a private investor decides to invest in one of the Spartan Innovations businesses, the Foundation will match the investment.

MBI brings BioAcrylic closer to $10 billion market, grows staff by 20 percent

Bobby Bringi, Michigan Biotechnology Institute Wednesday, April 04, 2012

The Michigan Biotechnology Institute (MBI) recently announced a successful pilot campaign for the BioAcrylic process. This process was created by OPX Biotechnologies, and the successful scale-up of the fermentation process was achieved at the 3,000 liter scale. This brings the renewable alternative to petroleum-based acrylic acid closer to being used in products such as diapers, detergents, paints and adhesives. A $10 billion market exists for the new biotechnology.

“The scale-up from bench-scale to 3000 liter scale can be fraught with technical risks,” says MBI President and CEO Bobby Bringi. “The fact that these risks have been addressed successfully provides confidence to OPXBIO and its partners and other investors to accelerate their efforts to drive BioAcrylic to commercialization.”

MBI helps companies advance their technologies from early stage toward commercialization. OPXBIO is partnering with Dow Chemical Company to bring BioAcrylic to the market. According to Bringi, MBI’s success validates the local company as a go-to place to access world class expertise and facilities for bioprocess derisking and scale-up.

“We are delighted that a cutting edge innovative company like OPX chose to collaborate with us,” he says, “and we are equally satisfied with the outcome.”

The next step for OPXBIO is to continue working on other aspects of commercialization, such as demonstrating that BioAcrylic is equivalent in quality to petro-based acrylic.

MBI has recently increased its workforce by approximately 20 percent, with 37 people now employed at the firm. According to Bringi, many other projects are currently in the derisking pipeline at MBI.

While more work needs to be done, today’s milestone gives OPXBIO and its partners the momentum to continue to drive toward progress.

Neogen adds jobs, reports record third quarter revenues

Terry Maynard, Neogen Corporation Wednesday, April 04, 2012

The Neogen Corporation recently announced its revenues for the third quarter of FY 2012 increased 6.3% from the previous year's third quarter to $44,912,000. The growth represents a record third quarter for the 30-year-old company.

“Basically this was a turnaround from a couple of disappointing quarters,” says Terry Maynard, Investor Relations Manager for Neogen. “We’ve now returned to our traditional growth patters. We hope we’ll soon be back to our normal double-digit growth.”

According to Maynard, the recovering economy has played the largest role in the firm’s return to growth.

“We do see the economy getting slightly better for our customers,” he says.

Neogen has also recently released new products, which Maynard hopes will contribute to even more continued growth in the future. The Lansing-based food and animal safety company operates in several locations throughout the U.S. and has an international presence.

Neogen added 40 new positions in their Lansing location in the last year. Worldwide, Neogen currently has 730 employees after recently adding 90 new positions.

Okemos Sip n' Snack reopens under new ownership

Josie Bordayo, Sip N' Snack Restaurant Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The Okemos community, as well as the friends and family of Val Korrey were saddened when the Sip N’ Snack closed its doors when owner Korrey passed away earlier this year. It was therefore an exciting day last week when the restaurant, an Okemos staple for 57 years, reopened. Perhaps no one was as excited as the owner herself, Josie Bordayo.

“I’m here to serve the community,” says Bordayo. “I’m very pleased and happy, because this is my dream.”

Bordayo worked as a cook at Michigan State University for years, as well as took culinary classes there to complement the cooking skills she developed growing up cooking for 15 siblings. Once she gets the Sip N’ Snack back up and running, she will pass ownership on to her son, Nick Turrubiates, and his wife Olivia.

Under the new ownership, Sip N’ Snack will feature new menu items such as chef salads and her family recipes for enchiladas and fajitas. Eventually, she says, the family may change the name of the restaurant.

Sip N’ Snack now employs three workers in addition to Bordayo and her family members who help out. Throughout the renovation, Bordayo says several members of the community stopped by frequently to find out when the restaurant would reopen. When it did on Monday of last week, a large crowd came to welcome them.

“It was wonderful,” Bordayo says. “Everyone was waiting patiently for the doors to the open. Some had breakfast, and came back for lunch and then dinner.”

MSU MBA students compete in new business plan competition

Zsuzsanna Fluck, MSU Eli Broad Graduate School of Business Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business is making sure their students are armed with the power to be entrepreneurs upon graduation. The new Broad MBA Business Plan Competition challenges students to come up with an original business idea, submit a plan and then provides support and training to help the best of the plans come to life.

“The goal of the competition is to induce the students to come up with original business ideas and learn how to prepare business plans that can raise venture capital financing,” says Zsuzsanna Fluck, MSU finance professor and director of the Center for Venture Capital, Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance. “The ultimate goal of the competition is to create and fund successful new companies.”

The final competition was held on March 24 by a panel of MSU alumni entrepreneurs and venture capital investors from around the nation after finalists were announced on March 18. In its first round, 74 MSU students in 19 teams entered the competition. The winning team will receive $3,000 and travel support to next-level competition on a state, regional or national level.

“The race was very tight,” Fluck says of the first round of the competition. “We intended to choose six finalists but we ended up selecting seven.”

Many of the ideas developed by the teams of students were highly innovative. Finalists included MeTrak, a social media company focused on giving control to individuals over their data on the internet; Spartan Green Technologies, a concept around a new green adhesive bonding technology; and Zoom Cash, a concept to introduce a new electronic payment technology to rural India.

Grand Rapids venture fund launches MSU spin-off, nanoRETE

Dale Grogan, Michigan Accelerator Fund I Wednesday, March 21, 2012

In most cases, an entrepreneur with a great idea will approach a venture capital fund and ask for an investment to help get their plan off the ground. In the case of the Michigan Accelerator Fund I (MAF-I) and nanoRETE in East Lansing, the process went in reverse. The new Grand Rapids-based fund, which was awarded $6 million by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, actually launched nanoRETE themselves, at the request of one of their investors, the MSU Foundation.

“They said to us, ‘would you please help identify some of the assets that are being developed at the university so that we can commercialize them?” says Dale Grogan, Managing Director of the MAF-I and chairman of nanoRETE. “There is a ton of intellectual capital that comes out of [MSU research].”

Working with MSU Technologies, MAF-1 identified the work of Dr. Evangelyn Alocilja as the right fit for the fund. Dr. Alocilja develops nanoparticle-based biosensors for rapid, point-of-care identification and diagnosis of infectious agents, that is, she has created tests that identify agents such as salmonella and E. coli far more quickly than available tests.

“The novelty and the market opportunity of what she is doing is unparalleled,” says Grogan. “She has a method that shaves three days off of food testing. The market for this is enormous.”

NanoRETE just set up in a 1,100 square foot office in MSU’s MBI Complex and currently employs five workers. MAF-I has invested under $500,000 in the company since it began in 2011.

East Lansing pizza place unveils new identity as Goombas

Gail Sutton, Goombas Pizza Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Passersby to a familiar pizza place on Grand River in East Lansing may have noticed that something has changed. After 19 years, Gumby’s Pizza is now Goombas Pizza, due to the business savvy of owner Gail Sutton, who found that paying the royalty fees on a name that wasn’t paying out in and of itself.

“The dialog about the name change began over the declining name recognition of the cartoon character himself,” says Sutton. “After …19 years I know that most of our customers are college students who are increasingly more familiar with Gumby because of the pizza place and not vice versa.”

With that being the case, Sutton created her own fun character to represent the business with “Goombas.”

“A goomba is slang for a friend, a buddy or an associate,” Sutton says. “Not in the mob, but perhaps connected to it! Hence, the fedora. It's all about a friendly, fun, family atmosphere.”

Fans of the restaurant will be glad to know that the name and mascot are the only things changing about the business, which will serve the same food and retain the same employees – which means a lot to Sutton.

“I'm a diehard Spartans fan and love working with and around the students,” she says. “I care about the unemployment situation in Michigan and the name change means keeping more Michigan workers employed. I support local businesses and my primary food suppliers are all based in Michigan.”

Peak Physical Therapy opens in 2,600 sq ft Delta Township location

Jill Marlan, Peak Physical Therapy Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Peak Performance Physical Therapy on West St. Joe Highway near Waverly Rd. isn’t your run of the mill physical therapy clinic. Owner and physical therapist Jill Marlan has 13 years of physical therapy training, as well as experience as a resident instructor for Oakland University’s Orthopedic Manual Physical Therapy Program (OMPT) and MSU’s Kinesiology Program, as well as being a guest lecturer in Oakland U’s OMPT program. In short, she really knows her stuff.

“We would like to be the premier place to go if you’re looking for manual physical therapy,” says Marlan. “A lot of physicians don’t know the difference between physical therapists, and they just recommend patients go to the place closest to their home. We’re educating clients that driving an extra ten minutes is worth it.”

Marlan has the same standards for her physical therapy team. The new, 2,600 square foot office employs two office workers and two physical therapists, both with the same high-level qualifications as Marlan. She opened Peak Physical Therapy with the goal of offering a higher standard of OMPT services to area patients.

“Our staff is very highly skilled,” says Marlan. “There is one other clinic in the state that has the skill level of our clinic. Oakland’s OMPT program is the only one in the country recognized by the American Medical Association.”

A one-time Detroit resident, Marlan chose to open Peak Performance in Delta Township to be a near Grand Ledge, where she grew up. She intends to further her ties to the community with prevention clinics for local student athletes.

Lansing Regional Chamber to host trade trip to China

Brent Case, Lansing Regional Chamber Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The Lansing Regional Chamber of Commerce (LRCC) has announced it will host a trip to China for local business leaders to gain cultural exposure and connect with business opportunities in global markets.

“There have been some recent studies that show China and Mexico are the best countries for Michigan to be exporting to,” says Brent Case, LRCC vice president of international services. “The Chinese love U.S. products. They hold American-made products in high regard because of the quality.”

The trip will take place from Oct. 16 through 25 and will include meetings with Chinese business leaders, factory tours, as well as opportunities to travel to some of China’s most well known tourist destinations, such as the Great Wall of China, The Forbidden City, Temple of the Heavens and Tiananmen Square.

“The goal is to get business leaders exposed to China,” says Case. “There’s nothing like seeing it firsthand to see the opportunities, experience the culture and get excited about doing business internationally.”

LRCC intends to assemble a group of 30 individuals for the trip, and already has about half of the spots filled. The cost of the trip, including airfare, hotel accommodations, tours and 17 meals is $2,288 for Chamber members. The Chamber is partnering with 7C Lingo to provide cultural tutoring sessions for registrants.

Entrepreneurship : Innovation & Job News