How Did You Do That?

Introducing Midwest Moxie, a new podcast about the successes, failures, insights and opportunities that shape some of the Midwest's most exciting entrepreneurs.

On the latest installment of our series on entrepreneurship, How Did You Do That?, host Kathleen Gallagher speaks with Chris Salm about how he went from working at several large food companies to commercializing research out of UW-Madison.

Rock Mackie is a medical physicist who invented a safer type of therapeutic radiation, called tomotherapy, that delivers less radiation with just as much effectiveness. It has saved many lives. During a 25-year tenure as a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, Mackie taught radiation physics and dosimetry, wrote 185 peer-reviewed publications, secured more than 50 patents and supervised 42 Ph.D. students. But he also successfully made the difficult transition from academia to business. Mackie has started six companies, including most recently Linectra, a Madison company he co-founded in 2019 that is developing a metal 3D printer for manufacturing uses. In all of his startup endeavors, he has mentored and nurtured other up-and-coming entrepreneurs. His most successful startup, TomoTherapy Inc., raised $185 million in a 2007 initial public offering and sold for $277 million to Accuray Inc. in 2011. Mackie says he's never been driven by the desire to make money; he's always been part

Glen Tullman has an undergraduate degree in economics and psychology, spent a year in Oxford, England studying social anthropology, lived for a year with the Amish, and is a highly successful software entrepreneur. He's founded, grown or invested in more than 20 businesses. "Really studying how cultures change is now about studying how we use different digital tools and electronic tools, and hopefully use them for good means as opposed to bad means," Tullman explains. During the 15 years he led Allscripts, the electronic health record company went public and grew annual revenue to $1.4 billion from about $30 million. Tullman lead Allscripts and two other companies through initial public offerings (IPOs). The most recent, Livongo, raised $355 million in July 2019 and was the most successful IPO in Illinois history and the largest consumer digital health IPO ever. "Livongo focused on chronic conditions. A third of the employees either had a chronic condition or had a family member who

Lori Cross dropped out of her all-girls’ high school in Michigan because there wasn’t enough physics and math to keep her challenged. Technical college was a little better, but Cross found her place at Northwestern University, where she got a degree in chemical engineering and became the first woman to play ice hockey on a men’s NCAA team. Cross received her master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Then, she was recruited to be a systems engineer at Baxter Edwards Laboratories, where she commercialized a series of catheter-based innovations from the research lab and completed her MBA along the way. That launched a career as a product intrapreneur at a number of well-known medical technology companies. "[My philosophy is] that you gotta find something, a problem that’s really worth solving that gets you excited about a solution," says Cross. "Think big, act small — that's sort of my motto." From creating one of the first video arthroscopy devices

John Splude began his career in public accounting, auditing some of the biggest companies in the area. But he stayed involved with his firm’s smaller clients along with the Fortune 50 companies. And he became more and more interested in the operations side of the businesses. "When you work with smaller companies you really become part of their management team, and they come to you with issues involving their operations, decisions they need to make. And I really got a lot of pleasure out of that, much more than I did just in the pure auditing work," says Splude. He moved in 1978 to Harnischfeger, the Milwaukee-based construction, industrial and mining equipment maker, and he was well-positioned to work his way up. Splude became a key player in the financial reorganization of the business, got involved in many important operational decisions and was eventually put in charge of Harnischfeger Engineers — a division that operated in the emerging area of automated handling systems. By 1993

Robert Jordan spent 20 years as a trucker, driving loads of cheese and other dairy products across the country. Over the miles he educated himself by listening to books on tape and spent hours thinking about how to solve some of the problems he encountered on the road. One of those problems was the enormous cost and environmental damage related to idling, when truckers run their engines all night at truck stops and rest areas to warm or cool their cab while they sleep. “I felt I had some good ideas. I started to share them, other people weren’t as excited as I was about it, and I thought, 'Well maybe I can make this happen.' So I started inventing things," says Jordan. He then invented a way to harness power from his refrigerated trailer and store it in batteries for later use. That technology was the foundation for Idle Free , a company Robert founded in 2003 and successfully sold in 2014 to Phillips and Temro Industries. Robert Jordan’s Tips for Other Entrepreneurs: The number one

Ralph Kauten is a true serial entrepreneur. He co-founded two life sciences companies that sold for a combined $200-plus million and was involved very early in three more. The biggest of those, Promega , has about $450 million of revenue and operations around the world. Kauten’s entrepreneurial experience was built on a series of decisions that took him out of the comfort zone into the unknown. His inclination was to take calculated risks and his guiding philosophy was to understand where the market was going and find the best way his companies could fit in. "If you're entrepreneurial you'll recognize the fact that, jee, maybe these people would buy those tools and they could spend their time focusing on research as opposed to making the tools they need to conduct the research," Kauten explains. Madison, Wis., has become known in the last few decades as a startup-friendly town, and Kauten is one of the big contributors to that reputation. Ralph's startup roster: Promega: Founded 1978;

Loren Peterson’s path to a successful startup company began on a Nebraska farm. It was a half-mile from the nearest neighbor, 1 mile from where his Swedish ancestors homesteaded, and several miles from the closest town of 600 people. He spent a lot of time hanging out with his two siblings, stacking hay and irrigating cornfields in 100-degree heat, and reading books from the school library and the Bookmobile. Loren graduated from the University of Nebraska with an accounting degree and found a job at a big accounting firm. He left to become the chief financial officer of a St. Louis pharmaceutical company — and found the industry in which he would make his mark. After leaving the big pharmaceutical company, he moved to increasingly smaller companies. First, he headed and sold a respiratory drug company. Then, he was hired by a venture capital firm to turn around a struggling startup that was developing enzyme therapies for lysosomal storage diseases . He raised much-needed funding in a

James Phelps thought about starting his own business for a long time. He turned the idea over and over in his mind while: learning about the trades at Milwaukee Tech, working in the Milwaukee Public School district's facilities department, rehabbing houses on the side, getting his undergraduate degree in finance and finishing a commercial real estate certificate program. One evening, sitting with his two brothers on the stoop of a property they were renovating, the plan for that business finally began to take shape. It was early 2008, the U.S. was deep into the Great Recession, and the workload was thinning out at the construction firm where two of them worked. James understood project management, Jalin understood construction and Clifton knew administration. By the end of that year JCP Construction was born. JCP Construction now has 35 employees and has either managed or worked on some of the city’s highest-profile projects, including the Bader Philanthropies headquarters,

Lori Hoch graduated first in her class from University of Southern California law school, worked at two of Milwaukee’s biggest law firms, then became in-house counsel for the trust department of Wisconsin’s largest bank. She was on track for a comfortable corporate legal career. Then four money managers who were starting their own firm asked if she'd be willing to give them some advice. At the first meeting they asked a whole lot of questions about setting up the new company. At the second meeting they had a few more. Then came the big one: Would she run the firm? Lori agreed in 2004 to lead Cortina Asset Management while her four partners focused on managing client investments. They grew the firm to 28 employees and $3 billion of assets under management. Fifteen years later, in the summer of 2019, Silvercrest Asset Management Group bought Cortina for $45 million, plus an additional $26 million if certain benchmarks are met over the next four years. Lori’s tips for other entrepreneurs:

Jerry Jendusa grew up working in the Waukesha pharmacy his dad operated for 33 years. It was there where he learned about being a business owner and having employees, customers, and a work ethic. So it was no surprise that Jendusa had the entrepreneurial itch. The surprise was the industry in which he chose to start his business. Jendusa dabbled in home remodeling, re-sealing floors, and painting during college. Then he spent a short time as a bank loan officer after graduating. He considered doing pharmaceutical sales, but a job at Franklin-based Electronic Cable Specialists introduced him to the industry in which he’d achieve entrepreneurial success: aviation. Jendusa founded EMTEQ in 1996 with a partner, Jim Harasha, who had worked at Hughes Aircraft. The company pioneered alternative lighting with LEDs on circuit boards at a time when aircraft cabins were still being lit with fluorescent and incandescent bulbs. “Back in 1996, LEDs were not in use at all. The only type of LED might

After graduating from the University of California, Davis with an economics degree, Laura King got a job in finance at General Electric (GE). She rose quickly through the ranks, and after a series of high-level jobs she was promoted to run GE Healthcare’s $1.2 billion interventional cardiology and surgery business. She also became an officer of the corporation. It was there at the top that King began to question whether there was a better way to satisfy her passion for clinical innovation. "I loved so much of what I learned at GE, there's no comparison," she says. "But I was very far away from what I would consider real revolutionary innovation versus incremental innovation." King started thinking she might prefer running a mid-sized, private equity-backed company, but the startup world intervened. Madison-based Venture Investors hired her to analyze a young company called NeuWave Medical, which King learned had great technology and no revenue. King decided to take a big risk and

When Google and Microsoft came calling with the type of jobs many young computer engineering graduates look for, Justin Beck turned them down. The 2009 graduate of UW-Madison wanted to stay in town and build the gaming studio PerBlue , which he started with his business partner, Andrew Hansen. Their first effort, a Pokeman Go-type video game was about 10 years too early. But Beck and his partner went on to create Parallel Kingdom, a successful mobile location-based, massively multi-player game that put players in a virtual world on top of the real world. In 2016, they sold another hit game, DragonSoul, to GREE Entertainment for $35 million. PerBlue today employs more than 50 developers in Madison. It publishes, among other titles, Disney Heroes: Battle Mode under a partnership with the mega entertainment company. Beck's tips for other entrepreneurs Focus When you run out of money, the whole show stops. Prudent management of cash is a critical attitude to have. Choose carefully who you

A native of Bombay, India, Jignesh Patel never touched a computer until he went to college. But he knew that computer science was an exciting area where a lot was happening, so he chose it as his major. Patel came to UW-Madison in 1991 to get his master's degree and Ph.D, then left for a professorship at University of Michigan. He returned to Madison in 2008 to join the faculty and has built a solid reputation as a computer science professor. He's also built a strong record of entrepreneurial success. "What does it mean to have a real impact for your research? It's when it actually makes it into the hands of people where they can actually use it in direct ways," says Patel. "And as a researcher, you hope for someone else to carry that torch to that final stage. And what was really empowering was seeing that you could do it, too." Patel has co-founded three tech startups, all of which have been acquired — one of them by Twitter. He’s currently founder and CEO of a fourth startup,

After years of working day and night in his family’s businesses, Craig Culver decided he wanted to get out of the restaurant industry. But a four-year stint at McDonald’s corporate headquarters — first as a management trainee, then store manager — got him interested again. With help from his mom and dad, Craig and his wife Lea ended up back in his hometown of Sauk City, Wis., running an old A&W his parents had owned 20 years before. They named it Culver’s and built a menu around ButterBurgers and frozen custard. It was the beginning of a company that would franchise 700+ restaurants in 25 states and generate more than $1 billion in annual system sales. In October 2017, Craig and his co-owners sold 30% of the company to Atlanta-based private equity group Roark Capital Group, one of five that was interested in partnering. Craig will remain chairman, his management team will stay intact, and his plans are to ensure that the company stays family-owned and continues to grow for the next

Pete Ullrich was a young spine surgeon in Neenah, Wis., who wasn’t satisfied with the available tools. So he came up with a new one: a titanium spacer to put between vertebrae during spinal fusion surgery. "We really thought we saw an opportunity for an unmet market need," notes Ullrich. "And another thing is I knew nobody else was going to do this, and the patients were doing significantly better." The invention took Ullrich, a self-described reluctant entrepreneur, on a very successful startup journey. He and Kevin Gemas, an experienced business person who happened to be his best friend from high school, built Mequon-based Titan Spine . The innovative company grew to obtain multiple patents, experienced rapid revenue growth and employs 134 people. Today, Titan Spine leads the category of surface-enhanced titanium interbody implants. It also has a world-leading nanosurface technology that encourages the body’s stem cells to mature into bone-healing cells. In June 2019, Titan Spine was

Milwaukee native Andy Nunemaker studied electrical engineering and business at some of our country’s top universities and held high-level jobs at two of its biggest companies. He got an undergraduate degree at Valparaiso and a master's degree at Georgia Tech, both in electrical engineering. After running major operations for GE Healthcare, first in Australia and New Zealand, then for all of Southeast Asia, Andy was deep into a career as a very successful corporate executive. But then came a moment when he was presented with a life-changing decision. How Did You Do That co-host Tim Keane, who had known Andy for more than a decade, approached him with an opportunity: Would he leave GE Healthcare to run a small startup called EMSystems that provided emergency medical services software and didn’t have any profits? Andy jumped at the chance and has never looked back. He ran EMSystems for seven years and engineered a sale to Florida-based Intermedix that got investors more than 10 times

After successfully growing and steering the $582 million sale of Madison-based Third Wave Technologies, Kevin Conroy went looking for another company to run. He found Exact Sciences — a struggling, publicly traded Massachusetts company with a DNA-based test for colon cancer that hadn’t been approved by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). When Kevin took over in April 2009, Exact Sciences had a handful of employees and a stock that was trading around $1 a share. Ten years later, the company has more than 2,000 employees, about 300 job openings, and a stock price that has reached into the high $90s. That colon cancer test, now called Cologuard , got FDA approval and has been used to screen more than 2 million people. Now, Exact Sciences is making progress on a non-invasive test for liver cancer and has others in the pipeline. Here are Kevin's three guiding principles that transformed Exact Sciences: 1. Defy convention "Exact Sciences wouldn’t be the company it is today if not for

Mike Harris was a middle-class kid from Racine with no family history of entrepreneurship. He played it safe at UW-Parkside by studying accounting, then got a job as an auditor with Ernst & Young and became a Certified Public Accountant. However Mike’s appetite for risk grew when he got a job at Wind Point Partners, the venture capital fund led by the Johnson Wax family at the time. At Wind Point, Mike took on the extra duty of part-time Chief Financial Officer for a built-from-scratch portfolio company called Alternative Resources. That job turned full-time, ARC grew like crazy and went public – and at 33-years-old Mike had caught the entrepreneurial bug. After experiencing the exhilaration of taking a portfolio company all the way to an initial public offering as its Chief Financial Officer, Mike founded Jefferson Wells, a professional staffing company that provided internal audit, accounting, technology risk and tax services on-demand. Jefferson Wells grew organically to $132

Bob Atwell’s critical career decisions can be summed up in one word: contrarian. Unlike most of his classmates at Yale School of Management, Bob came back to the Midwest to find work. Secure in a coveted commercial lending job at a big Milwaukee financial institution, Bob decided he would rather be in a smaller town at a smaller bank. At that smaller bank in a smaller town, Bob found a stable job with a great deal of responsibility. Then, despite having 10 kids and an 11th on the way, Bob quit. He and a colleague, Mike Daniels, raised $18 million and started Nicolet National Bank in 2000, at the time the biggest bank startup in state history. Nicolet now has $3 billion of assets, 38 branches and a lead position in many of its markets. It is the third-largest bank headquartered in Wisconsin. Atwell's tips for other entrepreneurs: People follow not because you are in charge; rather you have authority because they follow you. Money is not the purpose of our work. Service of our customers

A chemistry whiz who grew up in Poland, Michael Major left his job as a tenured professor when he was in his early 30s to immigrate to Milwaukee for a job as a chemist at Aldrich Chemical. Two years later, in 1992, he moved to Cambridge Chemical, where he rose to vice president of research and development. When Cambridge Chemical’s owner passed away, leaving his widow with all the equity in the company, it underlined for Michael what would eventually become a life-changing reality: he needed to start his own business. In 1998, Michael formed his own company, Major Laboratories, which merged with Cambridge a year later. Under Michael’s leadership, Cambridge Major grew exponentially, employing more than 100 people at its peak and becoming one of the largest suppliers of custom research and manufacturing services to the pharmaceutical industry. Cambridge Major was acquired in 2011 for $212 million by American Capital Ltd. Michael now leads MPP Group, a Mequon startup that formulates and

Craig Dickman got his first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80, in 1977. That purchase, a few coding classes and a lot of self-teaching (combined with two business degrees), sparked a career that landed Craig a job at Schneider National Inc., one of Wisconsin's biggest companies. For some, that might have been enough. But never afraid of taking a risk, Craig left his job as Vice President of Information Technology at Schneider after just a year, to run Paper Transport Inc., a then-$10 million trucking company. Three years later in 2004, after listening to a customer describe a specific problem, Dickman agreed to hire and train his own replacement so he could spin out a startup called Breakthrough Fuel to solve that problem. Under Craig's leadership, Breakthrough has grown to have nearly 100 employees, customers representing many of the world's best-known brands that transport goods in 46 countries, and the largest repository of real-time product movement data in the country. Paper

Todd Dunsirn grew up in an entrepreneurial family. His grandfather, father and brothers have all started and owned their own businesses. So, it was no surprise when, two years after graduating from UWM with a mechanical engineering degree, Dunsirn decided corporate jobs weren’t for him. The fourth startup he founded, called True Process, was the one that would lead to a big payday. Todd started True Process in 2004 and after 14 years running the business he sold it in two parts to two different global companies this year. Todd used a tried-and-true to grow True Process. He bootstrapped the company, accumulating revenue from the consulting side of the business to build an enterprise software platform that is used by hospitals to collect data from patient monitors, infusion pumps, ventilators and other medical devices. Revenue rose as high as $10 million and True Process’ employee count peaked at 50. The company sold its consulting arm to ICU Medical in 2018, then sold the rest of the

Editor's note: This interview with E d Ward first aired in Nov. of 2019. Ward died on Oct. 13, 2019 at the age of 74. Ed Ward has experience in the Peace Corps, the military, politics, law and investing, but it's in the not-for-profit world that he made his mark as a successful entrepreneur. In 1981, Ed turned his passion for Irish music into a venture that now requires 4,500 people to run and has 125,000 annual customers. It has been the guiding force in a global movement that he inspired, shepherded, and grew — and it will have a lasting influence on Milwaukee. The venture is called Irish Fest and it’s arguably the world’s most influential Celtic music festival. Ward, a musician himself, has been responsible for nurturing new musicians from all over the world, discovering new groups, and inspiring other cities to follow the Irish Fest lead. He and his colleagues host a breakfast each year during Irish Fest that attracts as many as 100 organizers and would-be organizers of other

Gary Reynolds started out as a musician, left for the West Coast to try songwriting, then followed his entrepreneurial instincts back to Wisconsin. His idea of connecting emerging bands with big company sponsors got him his first client, Miller Brewing. His idea of using his band support network of 300 representatives on campuses across the country to market tech products got him his second client, Apple Inc. Today, Gary is considered a pioneer in experiential marketing. He sold his company, New Berlin-based GMR , to Omnicom in 1997 but stayed on to build the global marketing communications firm's primary experiential and digital services and lead the acquisition of 23 agencies. Under Gary's watch, GMR has grown to have nearly 1,000 full-time employees and a field force that swells to as many as 20,000 when the firm is involved with big events like the World Cup and the Olympics. Here are some tips Gary has for other entrepreneurs: Put people first: You must know what’s happening with

From a very young age, Sue Marks has valued entrepreneurship and a strong work ethic. After her grandparents immigrated from Germany in 1919 with nothing, her grandfather built a life for them in Milwaukee as the owner of a small printing business. Sue married at 19 and finished college at night, earning a BS in Business Administration from Marquette University. Like her grandfather, she never stopped working. Sue is founder and CEO of Cielo , a fast-growing recruitment process outsourcing firm. Headquartered in Brookfield, Wisconsin, the company has 1,800 employees and $200 million of annual revenue. She previously founded and ran ProStaff and HRFirst, which she sold to Kelly Services Inc., a Fortune 500 staffing firm, in 2000. "There’s always been a war for the best talent," Sue says. "And actually right now, we’re back in a full-fledged war for talent in the United States, and globally." Sue has also invested in, or been on the boards of, a number of tech and tech-enabled service

Kyle Weatherly took over his mother’s compression garment business in 2006, grew it by 30 percent a year and sold it 10 years later — all without a relevant degree. In fact, he started out wanting to be a lawyer. Solaris had five employees when Kyle started and 120 employees when it was acquired by Lohmann & Rauscher International GmbH & Co., a European conglomerate of medical device and product companies. "My thinking at the time was, I’d go to work for my mom’s six-person company for two years and would round out my resume and I could, then, run a Habitat for Humanity somewhere in the world, yet to be determined," recalls Weatherly. "The thing that was really surprising in there is within six months, I fell in love with working in a small business." After selling Solaris in 2016, Weatherly and his new wife spent a year staying in Airbnb’s around the world, a trip that inspired the idea for Frontdesk , his current startup. Here are some tips from Kyle for other entrepreneurs: