3/6/2023: 5 minutes. $5k.
5 local businesses. 5 minutes. $5K.
After a five-year hiatus, Startup Zoo has re-launched with a $5,000 grand prize for its new monthly pitch competition, which Demargeo White of Huey D’s Goodies won last Friday.
The competition is one of a number of the initiatives by the organization that was first launched in 2007 to help start-ups and other entrepreneurs discover best practices, investment, and other support.
“We don’t have the limitations we had 10 years ago as far as investors,” says Carl Brown, co-founder and Interim Director of Startup Zoo. He says this 5×5 pitch competition (five entrepreneurs pitching for five minutes each) is the first ever held in the city.
White says this was the fourth local pitch competition he’s entered but the first he’s won. White founded Huey D’s Goodies LLC in 2019, a gourmet cheesecake business. He says his current focus is to hire a baker to alleviate the work he currently does all by himself, with only occasional help from his family when they’re available.
“A lot of people say there’s no opportunity in Kalamazoo but really they’re running in the wrong circles,” he says, reinvigorated, a $5,000 check in hand.
“If we’re building a business in Kalamazoo, we can’t look at Kalamazoo as the end of the market, so we have to look at investors that are not exclusively in Kalamazoo,” he says.
However, the current challenge is that “institutional investment and venture capitalists say they don’t know what’s happening in Kalamazoo,” he says.
That’s the barrier Startup Zoo aims to eliminate in its mission to fund the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Kzoo treasurer still under scrutiny
Kalamazoo County Treasurer Thomas Whitener will have to give a financial report while under oath for a second time this week. The first time was nearly two weeks ago. After failing to show up for a previous meeting, county officials required him to give a quarterly investment report while under oath. On Tuesday, he will give an updated report. The oath requirement is unusual, but comes after months of mistakes by the embattled treasurer. The county went as far as to hire an outside accounting firm to help clean up financial records. As of mid-January, the county had spent about $30,000 with the accounting firm.
Some Kalamazoo County leaders would like Whitener to resign. So far he has refused. Commissioner Jen Strebs said a voluntary resignation is about the only way to get him to leave his elected position. “It’s not simply a vote this board can take and remove the treasurer. It would take a recall vote or intercession by the governor,” she said. There have been recall attempts. Just last Friday, the state’s board of canvassers rejected two recall petitions. Strebs said there’s a high bar to recalling an elected official. “I don’t think that we’re seeing illegal activity occur in the treasurer’s office. What we’re seeing is incompetence,” she said. Whitener’s term runs through 2024.
