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CONTESTS
• Nav, a Draper-based site and app for small-business owners to access their business credit scores and get matched to financing options, is hosting its third Small Business Grant. To apply, entrants must sign up for a free Nav account and share via social media details about their business and a challenge that it is facing, explaining how a grant would help elevate the small business to the next level. The grand prize winner will be awarded $10,000. Prizes for a runner-up and second runner-up will also be given $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. The entry deadline is Dec. 15. Winners will be selected and notified in early 2019. Details are at www.nav.com/business-grant-contest.
• Oct. 31 is the deadline for applications for Salt Lake City’s Arts, Culture and Events (ACE) Fund grants. The mayor’s office is giving $200,000 this year to promote and support neighborhood and community events. The ACE Fund awards can range between $100 and $10,000. The fund gave money to 79 organizations this year. Details are available at http://www.slcmayor.com/ace/.
• Registration for the 2018-19 High School Entrepreneur Challenge is open. Students in Utah who are ages 14-18 can compete for $30,000 in cash and prizes. The program is managed by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute at the University of Utah and sponsored by Zions Bank. Students can enter the competition by submitting their ideas online. Submissions are due by midnight Feb. 28. To participate, students form teams, develop an innovative idea and submit a presentation online to be judged for the first round. The top 20 teams will be announced March 12. Those teams will be invited to the final presentations and judging event alongside with the collegiate Utah Entrepreneurship Challenge. The final awards and showcase event will be held in the Lassonde Studios building on the UofU campus March 30. The grand prize is $7,500. Details are available at lassonde.utah.edu/hsuec.
ECONOMIC INDICATORS
• Uintah County leads all Utah counties for people holding the least credit card debt, according to rankings compiled by SmartAsset. The study analyzed counties across the country to determine where people held the least credit card debt relative to income and wealth. Following Uintah County are, in order, Weber, Carbon, Box Elder, Wasatch, Washington, Davis, Duchesne, Summit and Tooele counties. Details are available at https://smartasset.com/credit-cards/credit-card-calculator#Utah.
EDUCATION/TRAINING
• Several thousand students participated in last week’s two-day STEM Fest at Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy. The fourth annual event, hosted by the Utah STEM Action Center, included support from more than 100 STEM-related organizations and exhibiting sponsors. STEM Fest is a hands-on showcase of applied science and technology projects that spark children’s interests in STEM career opportunities available in Utah.
EXPANSIONS
• UTOPIA Fiber, an open-access fiber optic network, has announced an expansion in Woodland Hills later this year. Woodland Hills will become the first additional city to have UTOPIA Fiber since the original 11 member cities formed UTOPIA in 2004. UTOPIA — the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency — will build the community’s fiber network, connect the homes and manage the system, and Woodland Hills will own the network as part of its city infrastructure. Woodland Hills residents will be able to choose various services from 10 local competing ISPs that run on UTOPIA’s network.
INVESTMENT
• Lucidchart, a South Jordan-based visual productivity platform company, has closed a $72 million funding round from new investors Meritech Capital and ICONIQ Capital and existing partner Spectrum Equity. The company’s total funding to date to $114 million. Lucidchart said the funding will also be used to enhance Lucidpress, the sister product to Lucidchart, which provides a brand templating platform that gives its over 5 million users the power to quickly create and distribute on-brand marketing collateral.
MEDIA/MARKETING
• KSTU-TV Fox 13 has promoted Kelly Chapman from weekday morning anchor to weekday afternoon and evening anchor. Chapman will co-anchor Fox 13’s 4 p.m. newscast with Max Roth and co-anchor the 5 p.m., 5:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. newscasts with Bob Evans, who has been the station’s main evening anchor for 23 years. A former Miss Utah USA, Chapman joined Fox 13 in 2013 as weekend morning anchor after moving back to Utah from California, where she held on-air positions at KOVR-TV and KMAX TV in Sacramento. Her career also includes on-air positions at KUTV in Salt Lake City.
MILESTONES
• Cyprus Credit Union has reached its 90th anniversary, making it the first credit union in Utah to do so. In 1928, a group of 22 Kennecott Copper employees pooled their resources of less than $100 and formed the credit union. It now has 18 branches and serves more than 100,000 members. The credit union also has over $950 million in assets.
PHILANTHROPY
• ArbiterSports, a Sandy-based athletic management software company, has contributed $5,000 to the North Carolina High School Athletic Association and $2,500 to the South Carolina High School League for distribution among member sports officials and schools affected by Hurricane Florence. The association has more than 400 member schools and certifies the eligibility of more than 200,000 athletes annually. The league is composed of 216 high schools and 217 middle schools.
REAL ESTATE
• Unico Properties LLC, a real estate investment and operating firm, has acquired City Centre I, a 10-story office building and an adjoining 1.8-acre surface parking lot along State Street in Salt Lake City. With the acquisition of 229,600 square feet, Unico has more than 1 million square feet in downtown Salt Lake City. It plans to invest in several upgrades at its new properties, which include the Boston Building and an office tower (rebranded as Tower 250) acquired from CenturyLink in 2017. Along with the City Centre I acquisition, the company has opened its first property management office in Utah, staffed by Unico general manager Nicole Quirk and chief engineer Todd Taft. Unico vice president of real estate services Russ Davis oversees the office.
• Little City, a company owned by Tim Sullivan and Michael Yount, is offering shipping containers — repurposed and modified — as an affordable, compact place to do business. The containers will be part of a “pop-up” project called Fleet near the northwest corner of Fleet Block, the city block bounded by 800 and 900 South and 300 and 400 West in the Granary District. Each space offers 160 square feet. The concept will have a common that will serve as a meeting and gathering place for entertainment. The units are intentionally small, mobile and nimble so they can easily move to a new area as the surrounding land becomes developed. Fleet will open over the course of this fall.
• Century Communities, based in Colorado, has had a grand opening for Vistas at Eastgate at 1628 E. 3175 N., Layton. Multiple floor plans ranging from 1,405 to 4,789 square feet and from three to eight bedrooms are available. At full build-out, 61 lots will be available.
RECOGNITIONS
• Cindy Crane has been named winner of the 2018 Athena Award, to be presented Nov. 16 at the 42nd annual Salt Lake Chamber Women’s Business Center’s Women & Business Conference. Crane is CEO of Rocky Mountain Power. Winners of Pathfinder Awards also will be honored: Kristen Cox, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget; Katie Holland, CEO and founder of Illuminate; Dr. Donna Milavetz, CEO of OnSite Care; Hollie Pettersson, partner at Cicero Group/Ed Direction; Amanda Smith, of counsel at Holland & Hart LLP; and Emily Wright, founding executive of sales and marketing at doTerra. Details are at slchamber.com/athenaslc.
• Podium, a Lehi-based customer communication platform for local businesses, has been named to Forbes’ “Next Billion-Dollar Startups” list for 2018. The 25 companies were selected by members of Forbes’ editorial team and TrueBridge Capital Partners. To compile the annual list, Forbes teamed up with TrueBridge to ask nearly 200 venture capital firms to nominate the companies. Forbes narrowed down the field from over 100 businesses to 25 by looking at revenue, funding and their most recent valuation. Podium was founded in 2014 and works with more than 25,000 businesses to create over 4 million customer interactions a month.
• Impartner, a Salt Lake City-based partner relationship management solutions company, has been named Product of the Year for Technology Software (small company) in the 2018 BIG Awards for Business, presented by Business Intelligence Group.
• Milton L. Lee, co-founder and chief science officer at Axcend Corp., Provo, recently was presented with the 2018 Csaba Horváth Memorial Award, presented annually by the Connecticut Separation Science Council to a top separation scientist. The award was presented during ceremonies at the 18th annual Csaba Horváth Memorial Award Symposium at the Yale University campus in Orange, Connecticut. Lee has been a member of the faculty of Brigham Young University since 1976 and is currently the Emeritus H. Tracy Hall Professor of Chemistry. He is best known for his research in capillary separation techniques and mass spectrometry detection. He also is an entrepreneur and has been involved in inventing, commercializing and transferring technology from his research laboratory at BYU into the private sector. In addition to co-founding Axcend in 2018, he co-founded Lee Scientific in 1984, founded Sensar Corp. in 1991, and founded Torion Technologies in 2001.
• Time has announced that John Kendall Garff has been nominated for the 2019 Time Dealer of the Year award. Garff is dealer principal at Ken Garff Honda Downtown in Salt Lake City. He is one of 51 dealer nominees (from more than 16,000 nationwide) who will be honored at the 102nd annual National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Show in San Francisco in January. Award recipients are among the nation’s most successful auto dealers who also demonstrate a long-standing commitment to community service. Garff was chosen to represent the New Car Dealers of Utah in the national competition. A panel of faculty members from the Tauber Institute for Global Operations at the University of Michigan will select one finalist from each of the four NADA regions and one national Dealer of the Year. Three finalists will receive an additional $5,000 for their favorite charities and the winner will receive an additional $10,000 to give to charity. Garff was named CEO of Ken Garff Automotive in 2002 and president in 2012. He founded Vehix.com in 1996, a fleet-lease and credit company in 2016, and Arivo Acceptance in 2017. He was a partner in Garcadia, a dealership acquisition entity. Garff’s education includes a B.S. in accounting at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah.
• Six Utah companies are ranked in Entrepreneur’s “Top Company Cultures” list, a ranking of U.S.-based businesses exhibiting high-performance cultures created in partnership with employee engagement platform and service provider Energage. A total of 150 companies are ranked. Among medium companies, Zurixx, Cottonwood Heights, was ranked No. 1. Also in that group is No. 20 MX, Lehi; and No. 37 Midigator, American Fork. Among large companies are No. 9 Pluralsight, Farmington; No. 13 Instructure, Salt Lake City; and No. 14 O.C. Tanner Co., Salt Lake City. Honorees were determined and ranked based solely on their employee online survey feedback scores. Each company was measured in response to 24 questions.
• Six Utah companies are ranked in the list of 2018 Best Small & Medium Workplaces, compiled by Great Place to Work and Fortune. Among medium-sized companies are No. 9 Pluralsight, Farmington; No. 20 BambooHR, Lindon; No. 72 Health Catalyst, Salt Lake City; and No. 84 Lucid Software Inc., South Jordan. Among small companies are No. 2 You Need a Budget, Lehi; and No. 7 Zurixx, Cottonwood Heights. The award is presented to companies that excel in providing inclusive and innovative environments for their employees. The ranking considered more than 112,000 employee surveys from small and medium-sized companies.
• Bank of America Merrill Lynch recently honored HireVue, Salt Lake City, for innovation that modernizes talent acquisition at the 10th annual Bank of America Merrill Lynch Technology Innovation Summit. HireVue provides an AI-driven talent assessment suite and video interviewing solutions.
RESTAURANTS
• JMH Premium, Salt Lake City, has opened a new Culinary Design Center. The innovation and development site features a 2,200-square-foot development kitchen and pilot plant for JMH Premium’s research and development team. The Culinary Design Studio includes enhanced workstations, restaurant-grade cooktops, griddle and wok stations, large-capacity swept surface kettles, and increased dry and wet blending capabilities. They will allow the team of food scientists and chefs to take customer ideas from concept to benchtop to application to scale-up, all in one space, substantially reducing the time required for commercialization.
RETAIL
• Overstock.com Inc., Salt Lake City, has added three executives to its retail leadership team. Catherine Borda has been appointed to the newly created position of chief customer officer, Chris Donnelly is chief of staff to the president, and former Overstock.com co-president Dave Nielsen has returned to the company as chief sourcing and operations officer. Borda most recently spent six years at AT&T, ultimately becoming assistant vice president of audience strategy and planning. From 2008-12, she held various roles at Georgia-Pacific LLC. Borda began her marketing career at PepsiCo, where she led cross-functional and agency teams in portfolio alignment. Donnelly has over 25 years of experience, most recently building a portfolio of companies. From 2006- 2015, he was chief strategy officer and chief product officer for Oakley. He also was Nike’s director of mergers and acquisitions and a manager at Bain & Co., where he led teams in the private equity, technology and consumer goods sectors for eight years. Donnelly has also founded and sold three start-ups focusing on online consumer data management, innovation consulting and technology. Nielsen previously spent six years with Overstock, rising to the position of co-president and leading the company’s marketing, merchandising and supply chain operations. He left Overstock to assume the role of CEO at Global Access. He also held several leadership positions with Payless ShoeSource Inc., eventually rising to the role of vice president of merchandise allocation, and served as president and CEO of Old Town Imports LLC. Nielsen received his bachelor’s degree in business management from Brigham Young University.
TECHNOLOGY/LIFE SCIENCES
• PolarityTE Inc., a Salt Lake City-based biotechnology company, has appointed Sharon Whalen as vice president of market access. She will lead the company’s effort to bring its innovative products to market in a manner that improves both health and economic outcomes for the patient, provider and payer. Whalen has more than 25 years of experience in the life sciences and biomedical products, wound care, managed care and healthcare delivery industries. She led reimbursement and health policy for Acelity and also worked for LP, Edwards LifeSciences and PacifiCare.
• Domo, an American Fork-based cloud-based operating system for business, has formed the Domo Enterprise Advisory Board. The group consists of six former global chief information officers and will “help shape new solutions and go-to-market strategies that meet the dynamic needs of large organizations worldwide at all stages of their digital transformation journey,” Domo said. The members are Philip Fasano, former global chief information officer and executive vice president at AIG who formerly held CIO roles at Kaiser Permanente, Capital One, J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Financial Services; John Leggate, former group chief information officer at BP; Bob Ridout, former vice president and chief information officer at DuPont; Tony Scott, former federal chief information officer for the U.S. government and held CIO roles at VMware, Microsoft, Walt Disney Co. and CTO at General Motors Information Systems & Services; Esat Sezer, former senior vice president and chief information Officer at Coca-Cola Enterprises, as well as former Corporation Vice President and Global Chief Information officer at Whirlpool Corp.; and Mahvash Yazdi, former senior vice president and chief information officer at Edison International and Southern California Edison. The group was formed in partnership with Mumford Sole Advisors, a group co-founded by Peter Sole, former CEO of Gartner’s Research Board, who also chairs the group.