Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall Of Fame

Season 3 | Episode 28: In 2015, the city of Louisville, KY noticed a big problem: half of all fires involving two or more buildings involved an abandoned property. The city recognized the threat to families and challenged the community to make a solution – and they did. Meet CASPER! CASPER and its suite of sensors constantly monitor abandoned properties for events like smoke detector sirens, break-ins, and floods. When a potentially dangerous event occurs, CASPER alerts both neighbors and emergency services so situations don’t turn into catastrophes. Better yet, through the CASPER Portal, neighbors and city officials can better understand and address activities happening in vacant and abandoned properties by looking at historical activity data. Nathan Armentrout, CEO, and founder, with his team of civic hackers, developed CASPER and soon after piloted 10 devices across 15 homes for six months, culminating in over 100 successful tests, two real-life confirmed detections, and zero false positives. Following t

Season 3 | Episode 27:  Shane Slone founder of Nursing CE Central has one mission: deliver high-quality nursing CEUs in a convenient, stress-free online environment.  They provide the required continuing education nurses need in a fast & easy online platform. Every detail has been taken into account to make your experience fast, easy, and hassle-free. The platform never requires tests and your certificates are automatically at the completion of each course.  We also understand that the #1 reason nurses seek continuing education is to satisfy the board of nursing requirements. We ensure that all of our continuing education meets the board of nursing standards for our accepted states.  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/awesomeinc/message

Season 3 | Episode 26:  As we start focusing more on what's happening around Awesome Inc, our local community, and Kentucky startups, we go back to our roots and hear from Brian Raney as he shares what started his vision of creating a startup community...  In 2009, a few college friends came together to bring to life an idea. They believed in the potential for Lexington to be a creative, innovative, welcoming community that helped anyone and everyone pursue their definition of “awesome.” This has meant many things over the years (remind us to tell you sometime about Awesome Wedding Engagements and Awesome Airlines), but today it means building the tech and startup community in Central Kentucky. Awesome Inc was founded on the basis of the "give-first" mentality and has grown to be the epicenter for anything related to technology or startups. We strive to make Lexington a better place to live and work, one Oreo at a time. Our Mission: To help people pursue their definition of Awesome  Our Visi

Season 3 | Episode 25.5: Some things are changing in house and we want you to stay In the know!  Long story short, we've got some fun and new stuff in the works. We're excited to share more of what our awesome team, startups, and community are doing to make Kentucky the best place to live and work. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/awesomeinc/message

Season 2 | Episode 25: Ian Gerard, the CEO and product designer of Adder talks about his company making outdoor advertising engagement easy. Adder is a specialized real-time, real-world data analytics platform for out of home and word of mouth advertisers.  Their advertising and audience measurement tools bridge the gap between digital and physical ad spaces and help brands invest directly in their community. Ian Gerard is a lifelong entrepreneur with a passion for stories, space, place, and time. Before Adder, Ian surveyed and mapped construction sites as a geospatial data specialist with Multivista, a startup that became a subsidiary of Hexagon and Leica Geosystems during his time with the company. In 2015, Ian kickstarted his first venture, a community farm focused on providing fresh, local food to the economically disadvantaged. During that time, he learned a lot about building communities and providing value to them. Since then, he's been working to bring modern data science to age-old industries

Season 2 | Episode 24: Enable.Ai is a social media analytics solution making cutting edge machine learning and natural language approachable to business users. It provides better performance metrics by identifying real moments of engagement and delivers insights on how to build better content for your audience.  Brian comes from the Enterprise software world, having led efforts at recognized brands like Johnson & Johnson, Burton Snowboards, and Colgate-Palmolive. Eric has worked in startups for over 20 years including exits at Tech Republic and Telapoint. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kehof/message

Season 2 | Episode 23: Jake Miller is CEO of Toggle Health, a med-tech company that aims to dramatically improve surgical workflows by providing surgeons with a wireless, sterile controller to access their digital world without having to leave the sterile environment. Jake has 25 years of product development experience, 20 of which were focused on launching new businesses & startups in the healthcare space for companies such as Target, Walgreens, & Humana. He holds a B.A. in Chemistry from Bellarmine University and an MBA from Vanderbilt University. Jake is experienced in lean launch methodology as a mentor at both the LaunchIt & XLerate Health Accelerator programs. Jake is on the board of Louisville-based New Roots, working to create affordable access for farm-fresh food. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kehof/message

Season 2 | Episode 22 Mac Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Moolathon. Moolathon is a social fundraising platform and fitness tracker. It gives charities, teams, groups of all sorts the ability to raise money and awareness for a cause with the miles that a user may run or walk.  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kehof/message

Season 2 | Episode 21 This episode contains a recap of the experiences of three individuals who participated in Startup Weekend Lexington 2019.  Logan Jones is from Ashland, Kentucky and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky where he recently graduated from UK. He works at Awesome Inc and also works to expand the business he started in 2017, KY Elevated Drone Imaging. Logan is Producer & Co-host of the Middle Tech Podcast, and he is passionate about entrepreneurship, digital media, and building relationships. Isaac Mesiner is a Senior Application Developer at Zudy, building custom web application solutions for enterprise businesses. He is a proud ’17 graduate from Georgetown College where he studied Computer Science and Business. During college, he had the opportunity to intern at Awesome Inc which connected me to the Lexington tech and startup community. That experience sparked an interest in entrepreneurship and attending all the great events Awesome Inc puts on like 5 Across and Startup Weekend!

Season 2 | Episode 20: Destin George Bell is a senior at the University of Kentucky studying marketing. He shares his story about the company he founded LifeOffU in college. From a young age, when he started selling candy out of his backpack to walking around the neighborhood with a lawnmower in high school, he’s been fascinated with business & finding ways to make money for himself. Since coming to the UK, he started a college marketing platform helping connect students to discounts, events, jobs, etc to places like Lyft, Malibu Jacks, Breakout Games, and more, generating over $12,000 in revenue. He is also the president of the UK Entrepreneurship and has brought the club back from death to 62 members & raising over $12,000 in funding over the first two months of the semester. He also recently became the CEO of Synerjii, a startup seeking to improve the way we network. As he nears graduation, he looks forward to sticking around Lexington and fostering the entrepreneurial ecosystem both at UK & L

Season 2 | Episode 19: Mo Sloan of EZ-Chow sits down to share a little about his company and his personal life and he is onboarded and accepted into the Awesome Inc Fellowship Program. Mo Shares that in order for restaurants to be profitable and thrive in the digital age today, it's important for hospitality organizations to begin operating as e-commerce businesses. His solution is EZ-Chow. EZ-Chow provides an all-in-one digital customer engagement platform for restaurants and hospitality companies. Our platform consists of POS integrated ordering, loyalty application and capability, and digital marketing. By providing the digital customer engagement platform and focusing on increasing the number of times a customer engages digitally with a restaurant, our solution allows the restaurant to generate additional "off-premise" dining revenue with minimal costs.  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/awesomeinc/message

Season 2 | Episode 18: Since 1984, NetGain Technologies has delivered IT services to companies across the South Central U.S. NetGain Technologies managed services allow clients to focus on their business growth and Tim Burke, CEO NetGain Technologies' success, secure in the knowledge that their IT infrastructure is always operational and serves their needs. With a multi-state regional footprint and a three-decade pedigree, the company has helped thousands of clients grow their businesses by leveraging best-in-class IT services and solutions. Jason Jacobson was most recently CEO and an owner of NetGain Technologies before leading the sale of the company to a private equity group based in San Francisco. Jason graduated with dual degrees in Management and Finance from the University of Kentucky, where he also studied international business and finance in London. His focus when he started working at NetGain in 2007 was mergers and acquisitions. During Jason’s time at NetGain Technologies, he helped to spin off a

Season 2 | Episode 17: Zach Jenkins of Syndicate is an extremely talented designer based in Louisville, Kentucky. He enjoys building brands, developing products, and when he’s not working he enjoys Mountain Biking, Rock Climbing, and Ale8. A few years ago, he released a product for Pelican that launched about as successfully as one could hope! His Spartan Cases MDX Lid Organizer exploded on Kickstarter. Spartan is dedicated to the efficient organization and protection of film and photography equipment. Zach's product has a great post on Medium as well as varying photography and gear community forums.  Currently, Zach has some cool products in his pipeline, but his newest product is from Fifth Made. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kehof/message

Season 2 | Episode 15: Chase Minnifield is a former defensive back for the Washington Redskins and three-time entrepreneur who was recently inducted into the 2019 class of Forbes 30 under 30. He currently serves as CEO of EZ Turn, the only vendor management digital platform that enables property managers in the student housing business to more efficiently manage, invoice and communicate with contractors. In its first year, EZ Turn has acquired more than 30 clients and managed over $1M in invoices. With EZ Turn's EZ Scheduler, housing unit staff will be more efficient and give their property managers more free time to focus on different tasks. Chase began his entrepreneurial career at the age of 25, post-NFL career, with his first company Helping Hand, LLC, which provides moving, cleaning and apartment turnover services for college dormitories and student housing complexes. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kehof/message

Season 2 | Episode 14: Alex Reed co-founded cleaning startup Truman’s following more than a decade at fan and light manufacturer Big Ass Fans, where he led an expansive marketing division that helped the company grow from $30 million in annual sales to more than $250 million. Alex used innovative approaches to grow the company’s customer base nearly 40 percent annually. At the same time, customer loyalty became so strong that repeat business accounted for half of all orders. He oversaw its expansion beyond a business-to-business strategy to business-to-consumer with the 2012 debut of Haiku, the first Big Ass Fan for homes. After their exit sale in 2017 for $500 million, Alex co-founded Truman’s with Big Ass Fans Chief Operating Officer Jon Bostock. The pair aims to disrupt the cleaning industry with the belief that cleaning should be green, simple,  convenient and cost less. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kehof/message

Season 2 | Episode 13: Matt Miller is the founder of RAADZ, a digital advertising company that aims to revolutionize the way people interact with ads. He is the visionary behind the idea, and the coder who created the platform. In all parts of life he strives for improvement, thus how RAADZ was born. Outside of continuously improving the digital advertising world, he enjoys sports, games, and most outdoor activities. Awesome Inc article: Focus on the Hot Dog --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kehof/message

Season 2 | Episode 12 Logan Burchett and Steven Plappert are the founders of Forecastr, a SaaS model to help startups with their financial planning. They see their product becoming the "Quickbooks" for financial planning and analysis. Logan Burchett is the Outsourced CFO, head of FP&A at Venture First. He has constructed over 100 financial models for startups, CFO for various startups, and helped to raise millions in early stage funding. Steven Plappert is a Techstars alum & serial entrepreneur who Founded Fantasyhub and grew it to 40,000 users. Has been working in finance/marketing at Venture First for the past two years.  Both Logan and Steven have been well prepared because of their involvement with Venture First out of Louisville, KY, which exists to build an ecosystem for entrepreneurs, companies, and investors while providing support throughout their lifecycle.  Listen to how these two are helping eliminate the barrier for startups as they raise capital. --- Send in a voice message:

Season 2 | Episode 11: With 30 years of restaurant experience, Rob has seen first-hand how to build restaurant brands and how prevalent addiction is in the industry he loves. Along with his wife Diane, he founded Dv8 Kitchen as a social enterprise focused on giving second chance employment opportunities to people in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction through vocational, on-the-job training.  Dv8 Kitchen focuses on providing top-quality food, service, and atmosphere for every guest, and by providing “a better-than-expected” dining experience, the hope is to build a new standard for the second chance employee to live by and to change the way the guests perceive people in addiction recovery. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kehof/message

Season 1 | Episode 10: Chris Sullivan is a co-founder of the Outback Steakhouse restaurant company and a member of the Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall of Fame.  Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall of Fame profile | Founders Series video Chris is a graduate from the University of Kentucky and while in college, he would work the busy seasons down in Fort Lauderdale to pay for school, which was his first entry into the restaurant industry. Chris' main restaurant ventures included Steak and Ale, Benningans, Carrabba's before founding Outback. The first Outback Steakhouse was opened in March 1988. From 1991 to 2005, he was CEO of OSI Restaurant (parent corporation of Outback), after serving as the first President of the organization. In 2007, OSI Restaurant was sold for $3.1B to Bain Capital Partners and Catterton Partners. Outback has 968 locations worldwide and also operates over 300 locations of Carrabba's Italian Grills, Fleming's Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar, Roy's, Cheeseburger in Paradise, Bonefish Grill, Paul Lee'