All Episodes

Chris Cox found relief from long-term back pain through use of CBD in 2016, and soon turned his growing knowledge of and passion for holistic medicine into a retail enterprise - Plenty Wellness in Loveland, Colorado. Plenty Wellness carries the highest-quality retail CBD products in the region, and has a very education-focused and consultative approach. Buzz Screens was founded in 2022, as an efficient way for local businesses to reach community marketplaces - their screens are located in dozen...

Valeria Ortiz, founder of Vortiz Insurance, offers education and insurance packages for the Medicare market, with its headquarters in Greeley, Colorado. I met Valeria at a local event and struck up a conversation which eventually led to Valeria joining LoCo Think Tank and sharing her story. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Valeria worked in marketing for a similar agency before moving to Colorado. After facing challenges as a single mother with limited English skills, she found stability ...

Phil Pelto is the Co-Founder of Firestorm B2B Networking and Certus B2C Networking - The Power of Network Effect & How to Build Authentic Connections, both with an increasing number of chapters and members across the Colorado Front Range. Phil Co-Founded Firestorm while he was working as a suit salesman in Minnesota nearly 15 years ago, scaled rapidly and expanded to Florida, and then hired a professional manager to operate the business while he moved to Germany to pursue a girl he met at Oktobe...

Sean Godbey founded Old Town Spice Shop in Fort Collins, Colorado with his brother and parents in 2010, with an original plan to expand to five retail locations within just a few years. They found some retail success, but the overhead and staffing complexities of retail soon shifted the plan into a more wholesale-focused operation, supplying bulk and custom spices for restaurants, food manufacturers, breweries, and more! As the lockdown response to Covid destroyed demand for retail and wholesale...

Seth Coonrod is the Founder and Owner/Operator of Timberline Audio Video in Loveland, Colorado, and also a LoCo Think Tank member. He worked as a key employee of a similar company in North Carolina in his earlier years, and founded the company immediately after moving to Colorado. In this episode, we get into the nerdy stuff of luxury home audio video systems, talking tech trends and smart homes and more, and also get a bit nerdy on business - creating quality estimates, sourcing sometimes many...

Shelley Polansky has been on the team at BBB of NoCo and Wyoming since 2008, serving in Dispute Resolution, Education, Communications, and Outreach before ascending to the leadership role in 2019. LoCo Think Tank has been a BBB member since 2021, and they’ve hosted many chapter meetings and trainings in their amazing conference rooms!` My conversation with Shelley spends a lot of time on exploring the what of ethical business practice, alongside an examination of her own foundations and motivat...

Nathan Wilbanks and Alex Swanson are the Founders of BizOp Media, a content and strategy-driven marketing agency headquartered in Fort Collins. In 2021, Nathan departed Bizop to develop new ideas, and eventually founded Jaq n Jill, a subscription-based AI-powered writing tool, focused on the collaborative power of an AI tool and a thoughtful content creator. We get deep in this one - deep into the utility and limitations and dangers of Chat GPT and Open AI and various iterations, and deep into ...

My guest this week was Franklin Taggart - a fellow consultant with the Larimer County Small Business Development Center and founder of Franklin Taggart Coaching. Franklin was the first podcaster to feature me on his show! My story of going from banker to food trucker to LoCo Think Tank guy was a great fit for his Reset Podcast, and I’ve been blessed by dashes of his wisdom throughout our time together with Larimer SBDC. Franklin was a career musician “back East” for many years, until health cha...

John Kefalas is currently a Larimer County Commissioner, elected to his second term in 2022, and previously served many years as a Colorado State Representative and later, State Senator. He previously worked in education, advocacy and outreach, with special emphasis on career development, housing, and serving the underserved and marginalized. John has a reputation for being one of the most progressive political figures in Northern Colorado, and we spend a lot of time in this episode pulling bac...

Drew Yancey is the President and COO of Incite Performance Group in Fort Collins, and the LoCo Facilitator for a pair of Next Level chapters. He’s also the author of a new book, his third, with co-author Larry Linne - “Leading Performance, Because It Can’t Be Managed.” In this episode, we unfold principles from this book with a theme of helping leaders guide their teams toward the work style and environment in which they can thrive. Drew has been on our podcast once before. This time, he went i...

Aaron Everitt, broker with The Group, joins us to give his quarterly update on the Northern Colorado real estate market, sharing market and interest rate updates, and examples of opportunity in any market. Aaron is also one of our newest LoCo Next Level members, a partner in a delivery service provider, and Founder of InMotion, our newest sponsor of The LoCo Experience Podcast. In this episode, we’ll focus in on the founding of InMotion, along with stories of successful scaling opportunities th...

My guests on today’s episode were AJ and JJ Fountain, bandmates with locally-famous campfire folk music band A Brothers Fountain, and co-founders and partners of Stoked Ember Productions. This was the brothers’ 2nd time on the podcast, because I think they’re a lot of fun to be around, and they always share great stories! The brothers and most of the band went on a 20-day, 18-show tour this fall, all across the midwest and southeast and points between. Followed shortly after that was a weeklong...

This week we somehow fit three of the Northern-Colorado famous Trainor Brothers into the podcast studio, with Brian, Adam, and Joe Trainor all sharing their stories and philosophies with me and with our listeners. The three brothers are a total of four years apart and were raised by their single father, an enterprising teacher that kept the family fed with side jobs and construction projects. Brian and Adam both went to CSU on athletic scholarships. Brian got into real estate - as a broker and ...

Becky Allsup is the owner of Becky’s Custom Interiors, which in turn holds Niche Design House and Rebecca Windsor & Associates. Niche is primarily an upscale commercial and residential design center, and Rebecca Windsor provides national-scope design, procurement, and installation services - especially for rapidly growing retail franchise operations. Her business journey was a joy to uncover: Young interior designer sees opportunities everywhere, attracts a team of smart, loyal, and dedicated pe...

Matt Shoup is a serial entrepreneur, author, inventor, real estate broker and investor. He’s the President of M & E Painting and Roofing, Inventor of The Pirate Patch, and a realtor with C3 Real Estate. Matt’s first book was “Become an Award-Winning Company” and his new book - just out - is “Painted Baby”. He’s also a Professor and Partner at Northern Colorado Jiu Jitsu, and there’s more but no time to mention it all! There’s a lot of ideas Matt shares in this one to make your business life eas...

Nick Armstrong is among Fort Collins’ most interesting people! He’s the Geek-in-Chief of WTF Marketing, the Pepper Pioneer of FTW Hot Sauce, and the Lead Organizer of both Founded in FoCo and Fort Collins Comic Con! He’s also a freelance community organizer in various ancillary capacities, and a recently BARELY unsuccessful candidate for Fort Collins City Council. In this episode, we zoom especially in on the Founded in FoCo event and highlight some of the amazing speakers, workshops, and event...

Dudley Brown is the Founder and President of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO), and the President of the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), both based in Loveland, Colorado. Ben Gates is a previous guest and longtime friend, President of NG Companies and CFO and Partner in Kinetic Research Group, a firearm manufacturing business based in Idaho that specializes in stocks for competitive long-distance shooting. After a short career in politics after college, Dudley launched RMGO in 1996. ...

Dr. Heidi Golding is the Founder and Practitioner at Living Well Chinese Medicine in Loveland, Colorado. She’s an acupuncturist, an herbalist, and one of the most interesting health professionals I’ve become acquainted with. Heidi likes to describe her practice as a fusion of traditional wisdom and modern technology. She is a student of both Japanese and Chinese herbs and acupuncture, with a strong background in tech. We did something new for this episode, in that Heidi and I both had a sturdy...

Annie and Mike Griffith are fellow members of the Rotary Club of Fort Collins Breakfast - or, more commonly known - Breakfast Rotary. We meet at 6:45 am at Ginger & Baker in Fort Collins, every Thursday morning - come and check it out sometime! Annie grew up in the travel industry, with her grandfather delivering sightseeing tours and her dad developing a healthy freight and people-moving bus service along the Front Range, later moving into airline travel and hotel bookings. After college at CS...

Dan Anderson is the President and CEO of Kingdom Way Ministries, and a Strategic & Leadership Coach with Five Capitals. Kingdom Way's mission is to help marketplace leaders thrive in business, life, and ministry. They do this through peer advisory groups, coaching, and community events that, in his words, connect Sunday’s inspiration to Monday’s perspiration. His business offers a membership model quite similar to LoCo Think Tank, but with a decidedly faith-oriented curricula. Dan shares his pe...

Kent Obermann is the Founder of Tooth Zone Network, a pediatric dentistry enterprise that grew to include locations in Fort Collins, Loveland, and Longmont and as many as 60 employees. Kent founded the practice in 1982, fresh out of dental school and intro practice, with a high-rate loan “from Vinny the Loan Shark” after banks turned him down. Kent sold the business in 2017 after 35 years of creating - and maintaining - children’s smiles across the Northern Front Range - and their mission contin...

In this episode you’ll get a glimpse behind-the-scenes of LoCo Headquarters in my conversation with LoCo Experience Producer Alma Ferrer and our new Marketing Manager Alisha Jeffers. We give focus especially to Alisha, her arts background and travels that eventually led her to LoCo. She talks a little about her introductory project with us to revamp our logo, and suggests reading her guest blog post for the complete narrative with pictures here. We also take some time to review and share highli...

Althea Hrdlichka is the Founder and Owner and Midwife at Tender Gifts Midwifery and Birth Center in Fort Collins. After years of supporting Northern Colorado moms through at-home births, Althea took a leap of faith and opened her birth center in the fall of 2020, navigating an abundance of regulations - covid and otherwise - and finding strong market demand for their services from the beginning. I first met Althea several years ago, when she sought support through the Larimer SBDC for a busines...

Hope Hartman is the Executive Director of the Larimer County Small Business Development Center, located on the Front Range Community College campus in Fort Collins. The Larimer SBDC provides education and connection to entrepreneurs across Larimer County. In this episode, we explore the role of the SBDC in the business ecosystem, Hope’s “why” in pursuing the role, and the meandering journey of an impactful career that positioned her for success in this role. Hope’s first love was theater, and w...