George Pfenenger Entrepreneur of the Year

Six innovators win Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards

Young Entrepreneur of the Year – Adam Guy
Next Year’s Entrepreneur – Kevin Keegan
Serial Entrepreneur of the Year – Brock and Brant Bukowski
Best Marketer of the Year – Paul Sturtz & David Wilson
Career Achievement in Entrepreneurship – Nick Peckham

Entrepreneur of the Year
George Pfenenger
Businesses: Socket, real estate

Details: Pfenenger grew up understanding that starting an innovative business from scratch requires an enormous commitment of time.
John Pfenenger, his father, was a firefighter in Jefferson City who ran several businesses on the side, including a sporting goods company and an ice company, and the Pfenenger children spent their summers pitching in.
“It was a real drag at the time, but it was good basic training,” Pfenenger, the founder and president of Socket, said. “My father was always an entrepreneur. He told me, ‘You build your wealth after working 40 hours. ’”
Pfenenger said that advice and the work ethic instilled by his father was critical when he was routinely working 80 to 90 hours a week in 1994 leading the development of an Internet service provider that later branched into telecommunications.
Socket has been named one of the top 500 fastest growing private companies in the United States for the past three years and now has about 90 employees. In 2007, the company moved its headquarters to a new building on Clark Lane and opened a local office in the St. Louis area while it continues to expand across the state. Socket has more than 20,000 customers in more than 500 Missouri cities and has about 4,500 business telephone lines in service across the state.
Pfenenger, like is father, wasn’t satisfied with working one job. He and his wife, Joni, run several real estate companies and he is involved with his father’s latest venture, a fish hook distribution company in Windsor.

Young Entrepreneur of the Year
Adam Guy
Age: 24
Businesses: Magic of Adam Guy, Direct Wristbands, The Upper Crust and Elm Street Ballroom, Coldstone Creamery and Encore Wine & Dessert Bar.
Details: Guy earned his first paycheck at age 7 from a client who saw him performing his magic act. His mother, Lori Guy, owns Girl Boutique in the Elm Street complex.
Guy bought the café and adjacent ice cream franchise with profits from the custom made silicon wrist band manufacturing and distribution company. He’s now selling about 10,000 wristbands a day in the international market. Guy’s latest act is Encore, which opened last year and was featured on CBS Sunday Morning News, which described it as one of five wine and dessert bars of its type in the country.
“If you stay in the mold, you’re never going to create anything great,” Guy said in CBT profile last July. During his recent photo session, Guy said the restaurant business is incredibly time consuming and called the past 12 months “probably the longest year of my entrepreneurial lifetime. The main struggle is getting people in the door the first time. We’re confident they’ll come back and bring more people.”
Guy also said his greatest feeling of accomplishment is “to take a struggling business and turn it into something the community can be proud of.”

Next Year’s Entrepreneur
Kevin Keegan
Business: Equinosis LLC
Details: Keegan, an associate professor of equine surgery at the University of Missouri, developed computer software that analyzes the gait patterns of horses to identify lameness. Keegan did the research behind the technology while working at the university, but found he needed private funding to develop it into a product and take it to market.
Officials at the Missouri Innovation Center, a non-profit incubator for high-tech businesses, helped Keegan develop his business model. Equinosis sold about a third of its equity to Centennial Investors, the Chamber of Commerce’s angel investor group, to raise $327,000 in start-up capital. Angel investors are individuals with more than $1 million in net worth or $200,000 in annual income who provide early-stage capital and may give advice to start-up companies. Centennial Investors has more than 40 members, who work together to analyze companies and decide individually whether to invest.
Keegan graduated from the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine in 1983 and has worked as a veterinarian specializing in equine surgery and lameness. He has taught at the University of Missouri since 1991.

Serial Entrepreneur of the Year
Brock and Brant Bukowski
Businesses: Mortgage Research Center, Show-Me Tickets, LakeRentals.com and CoastRentals.com
Details: The Bukowsky brothers founded Mortgage Research Center in 2002, and last year it was No. 96 on Inc. magazine’s list of top-500 fastest-growing private companies in the nation. MRC’s ranking was based on its three-year sales growth of 1,555.3 percent and annual revenue of $10.2 million. MRC specializes in government home loans.
The duo launched a ticketing agency in 1997 while studying at the University of Missouri. Show-Me-Tickets grew to a volume of $22 million in 2004 and won the.Inc. 500 award that year, ranking No. 308 out of 500. Then the brothers sold Show-Me-Tickets in 2005 to TicketsNow.
Brock said, “During our time in college, my brother and I began experimenting with a few companies, including a company that created PalmOS software. We also started the ticket company. …
We had a blast building this company, and I became less committed to taking classes.” Because the business grew rapidly, he had to give up his job as a calculus instructor at Columbia College. “After selling the ticket company, we used our great team of people to start a few companies, including a variety of vacation rental sites. We are also involved in real estate investing and Angel investing” as part of the Columbia Chamber of Commerce’s Centennial Investors program.

Best Marketer of the Year
Paul Sturtz & David Wilson
Business: True/False Film Festival, Ragtag Cinemacafé
Details: The pair helped draw 18,000 ticket-buyers and more than 500 volunteers to the most successful True/False Film Festival yet. They also moved Ragtag Cinemacafé into a new building with one more screen and about 130 more seats than the old venue. Sturtz and Wilson have used a combination of public relations, networking and guerrilla marketing to achieve national reach.
Then the pair sent out a thank-you note on the True/False Web site. “It’s a proud thing to do something big with hundreds of people, and, as anyone knows who was here, True/False 2008 was an amazing weekend. Together we defied the odds, blasting past inconvenient truths like our biggest venue being closed for renovation and our headquarter’s opening still in doubt until days before the fest. Just like the storyline in the closing night film, Man.on.Wire, our crackerjack staff plotted for months and months, and then pulled off an amazing heist. In this case, we stole the heart of Columbia and made it fuel our fantastic dreams.”

Career Achievement in Entrepreneurship
Nick Peckham
Business: Peckham & Wright Architects, The Alpaca Company, RioGen Details: Peckham co-founded the architecture company in 1978 with Brad Wright, but actually started his first business several years earlier called Peckham & Sun. Peckham was an early advocate of solar energy.
Today, PWA is a national leader in sustainable architecture and has received many awards for their innovative designs. Among them is the U.S. Department of Energy Passive Solar Award for their design of the Trombe Wall Townhouses in Columbia. Nick founded both the Missouri Heartland Chapter of the US Green Building Council and the Greening the Heartland Conference.
In 1991, Nick and his wife, Diane, started The Alpaca Company, breeding alpacas, selling wool, and assisting new alpaca breeders. In 1993 they hosted a meeting of five other alpaca breeders to form MOPACA (the Missouri Alpaca Breeders Association). MOPACA now includes all the states Missouri touches and has over 600 farm members. In recent weeks, Nick has received a patent for the RioGen system, which increases the energy output that can be derived from rivers. Peckham said the best advice he received came from Buckminster Fuller, an architect, futurist and inventor who was Peckham’s dissertation advisor at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. Peckham said he asked Fuller’s advice on what to do with his life. “He told me, ‘Find a problem no one else is solving and you’ll solve it and never have to ask that question again.”’