Kudos for solid ideas

Dr. Jessica Serwe trained to be a chiropractor, not a business owner. When the opportunity arose for her to purchase the practice at which she was working in Fond du Lac, she was excited but concerned.

“I had no business background,” she says. “I didn’t even have the right terminology or understanding of the business terminology.”

With the help of the Fond du Lac Economic Development Corp., Serwe developed a business plan to help guide her ownership of the practice, Ideal Chiropractic. In January she submitted the plan to the Northeast Wisconsin Business Plan Contest, and in mid-March Serwe learned she had won. Her plan was selected from more than 30 entries. As first place winner, she will receive a $10,000 prize.

“I was thrilled and surprised,” she says. “Going through the process was rewarding in itself, because it was such a great learning experience.”

The Business Plan Contest was launched in 2004 to encourage the preparation of business plans for starting businesses, making significant changes to existing businesses, or launching new products in the 18-county New North region, says Cathy Huybers, business services manager at the Fox Valley Workforce Development Board, a co-sponsor of the contest.

“It’s a rigorous competition,” says Huybers. “Each entry is judged three times: first, based on its executive summary. Next, based on the plan in its entirety and finally, based on an oral presentation of the plan by its owner to the judging panel.”

In her plan, Serwe describes her approach to chiropractic care as focused on finding the root of patients’ problems instead of merely managing the symptoms. Ideal Chiropractic has specific spinal rehabilitation equipment that only a handful of clinics in Wisconsin have. She focuses on improving a patient’s posture and spinal structure to not only correct the root of the problems, but also to make patients look and feel better about themselves.

The $6,000 second place prize was awarded to Andy Reuland of Credit Coach Electronic Services in Kaukauna, for a software application designed to help financial institutions maximize the potential of their online banking. The automated system assists customers with budgeting, repairing credit reports and maximizing credit scores to assist in making these consumers viable to the bank as borrowers.

Rob Zwettler and Dustin Overbeck of Town Accounting in Sturgeon Bay took the $4,000 third place prize for their web-based accounting and bookkeeping solution for small towns and municipalities. Zwettler and Overbeck say their service goes beyond what traditional PC-based software packages provide by leveraging the many advantages of proven cloud computing technologies, including website design and hosting; automatic data backups and recovery and online document management.

The fourth place prize of $3,000 was awarded to Heather Whittaker of Pen-Tech Professional in Outagamie County. The independent publishing company provides copywriting, consulting, publishing and project management to authors and businesses throughout the Fox Valley. According to Whittaker, Pen-Tech Professional provides authors an alternative that maximizes profits by charging a flat fee for publishing, versus the industry standard of paying authors via royalties. Pen-Tech Professional retains no rights to the manuscript and 100 percent of profits are retained by the author.

C.J. Schmidt, Fiber MX, De Pere, won the fifth place prize of $2,000 for his company’s green building product that he says dramatically reduces micro-cracking in freshly placed concrete. The product is made from cellulose fiber recovered from paper mill sludge, recycled paper and nylon from post-consumer carpet. Schmidt says that expensive new petroleum-based synthetic fiber and steel typically used to address this problem can be replaced by Fiber MX’s low-cost, low carbon footprint fiber blend, and that the burden on Wisconsin landfills will be reduced, with LEED credits earned.

Other sponsors of the business plan competition include The Northeast Wisconsin regional economic Partnership (NEWREP); Alliant Energy; Dominion; Florida Power and Light; Fox Valley Technical College; Lakeshore Technical College; Moraine Park Technical College; New North, Inc.; Northeast Wisconsin Technical College; We Energies; Wisconsin Public Service; UW-Green Bay; and UW-Oshkosh College of Business.