Stout recognized for community impacts with Large Business of the Year
MENOMONIE — While being recognized as Large Business of the Year by the Menomonie Chamber of Commerce, the University of Wisconsin-Stout also celebrated its role in the community.
The recognition comes as the chamber annually recognizes several entities in the community, including small businesses, with this year's recipient as Markquart Menomonie; nonprofits, recognizing The Bridge to Hope; emerging leaders and others.
Seth Hudson, executive director of corporate relations and economic engagement, said the recognition is an honor.
'It really celebrates our partnerships with the community and our relationships with businesses and our collaborations that we put in place over a number of years,' he said. 'We sit in the heart of downtown Menomonie and we are a large economic impact to the community as well, but we see ourselves in a relationship where we are working collectively and I think that's what this award really calls out and shows.'
Amid this recognition, the university was also able to talk about community impact.
On average, Stout sees roughly 7,000 students enroll and attend classes annually. Furthermore, the college employs roughly 1,100 faculty and staff throughout their campus and off-campus facilities. In total, the university has an estimated annual economic impact of $306 million.
'Stout is a very large driver for our community,' said Ashley DeMuth, Menomonie Chamber CEO. 'When the Chancellor [Katherine Frank] was first hired, I had the opportunity to get to know her a little bit and it was fun getting to know her and watching her get to know the community through the eyes of the university. Because the university is not only our largest employer in the community, but it also brings in those large influx of temporary residents to the community as well.'
Hudson said as part of their role, there are strong relationships with industry within the community created through a variety of programming, alumni relationships and investments into the community.
For the region as a whole, Hudson said, 'we're very fortunate to have that educational ability and the ability to work with industry from that collective,' noting that Stout sits in a very unique place in the 10-county region alongside two other Universities of Wisconsin, UW-Eau Claire and UW-River Falls, and two technical schools, Chippewa Valley Technical College and Northwoods Technical College.
Hudson said there are 'lots of different ways to engage and we're always looking for new ways to do that and give back.'
'We have a great, deep and strong relationship with the university,' DeMuth said. 'They do a really great job participating in our programs and events. They also help us enhance our programming here at the chamber because they are such a large footprint in the community, so they really lend their expertise to us in a variety of ways as well.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Think you know the basics of retirement planning? Think again. ‘There's a lot of ignorance out there.'
For years, Jim Sexton has led financial-education classes at a local library. He's often struck by gaps in attendees' knowledge of retirement planning. 'Very few people understand what they need to know to help them prepare financially for the future,' said Sexton, a certified financial planner in Hudson, Ohio. 'There's a lot of ignorance out there about financial planning and retirement.' Israel-Iran clash delivers a fresh shock to investors. History suggests this is the move to make. 'I'm at my wit's end': My niece paid off her husband's credit card but fell behind on her taxes. How can I help her? 'I prepaid our mom's rent for a year': My sister is a millionaire and never helps our mother. How do I cut her out of her will? As Trump blasts Fed to lower rates, it's the bond market in need of convincing I'm 51, earn $129K and have $165K in my 401(k). Can I afford to retire when my husband, 59, draws Social Security at 62? He administers a five-question 'retirement fluency' test to help pre-retirees assess their knowledge. The results prove his point: many people lack a basic understanding of money issues. For example, in Sexton's test, only 30% of respondents know how much of one's healthcare expenses in retirement are, on average, covered by Medicare and other government programs. The answer: about two-thirds. When it comes to money matters, ignorance is costly. As you age, your margin for error tightens up: You no longer have another few decades to earn income from work to offset any misguided (or disastrous) financial decisions. Aside from lacking a long-term horizon to make up for your mistakes, you need to lean on your own resourcefulness and knowledge to navigate financial uncertainties that can upend retirement. Examples include managing your investments to withstand ever-volatile markets, rebalancing your portfolio so you don't outlive your money and exercising sound, informed judgment amid aggressive attempts to sell you everything from annuities to Medicare Advantage plans. Read: I'm 55 with a state pension in my future. Do I have to save as much as other people? Social Security is another frequently misunderstood topic, Sexton said. Pre-retirees may overlook the 8% increase in benefits they get each year by delaying Social Security past their full retirement age (until they reach 70). 'They know that Social Security benefits are taxable,' he said. 'But they may not know claiming strategies or how benefits are calculated.' As you near retirement, you should receive a Social Security statement in the mail. It explains in plain English how Social Security works. A bar graph shows how much money you might collect based on when you claim benefits. Even well before retirement, workers should make sure they have registered for a my Social Security account as the agency migrates more of its services online. 'People still struggle with what role Social Security plays and when they should start it,' said David Shotwell, a certified financial planner in Lansing, Mich. 'They might say, 'I'll retire at 66 and start Social Security at 66'' without weighing all their options. It's also easy to underestimate the medical costs you can incur in retirement. Medicare helps, but it doesn't cover everything. The average couple will spend $12,800 in their first year of retirement at age 65. To estimate your total healthcare expenses during retirement years, use Fidelity's free estimator (but brace yourself for the shock!). Read: Medicare may actually be in more trouble than Social Security There are many so-called rules of thumb that preretirees treat as gospel. Like many advisers, Sexton scorns these rules. He calls the popular 100-minus-your-age rule 'absurd.' (It involves subtracting your age from 100 to determine the percentage of equities you should have in your portfolio.) With people living longer, there's more risk in prematurely shifting too many assets into bonds and cash equivalents. Investing more conservatively makes sense as you age. But that doesn't mean you should necessarily own more bonds at 75 than 65. Another misguided rule: Retirees should withdraw 4% of their total nest egg in their first year of retirement. From there, you supposedly withdraw an inflation-adjusted amount tied to the prior year. In theory, that means you should not run out of money over a 30-year retirement. But not so fast. 'People still rely on the 4% rule and they shouldn't,' said Thomas Van Spankeren, a Chicago-based certified financial planner. 'Just last week, a new client who was laid off in his mid-50s says, 'I did the 4% rule and I'll be OK.'' Read: I'm 48 and want to retire next year. Do I have enough money to last me until I'm 98? Instead, Van Spankeren suggested they customize a financial plan. The 4% rule is built on assumptions that may prove faulty, he says, so it can derail retirees' plans. Speaking of assumptions, you might assume seasoned investors in their 50s and 60s would acquire the wisdom to buy and sell stocks with prudence and patience. Again, not so fast. As they approach retirement, otherwise smart, successful investors can get caught up in mass psychology. If they missed the surge in stocks over the last 15 years or so, they may feel compelled to overload on equities now. 'For many years, it was all about TINA [there is no alternative],' Van Spankeren said. 'It's tough to stay disciplined, especially with performance-chasing' if you keep buying stocks and expecting big gains. Savvy investors, by contrast, adopt a broader perspective. They think in terms of TARA [there are reasonable alternatives], not TINA. Retirement fluency means keeping an open mind about all types of investments. If risk-free cash yields hover near 4% and investment-grade corporate bonds pay over 5%, exploring these and other alternatives can produce decent returns for retirees content to hit singles, not home runs. 'They should focus on the returns they need [in retirement], not the returns they desire,' Van Spankeren said. Read: The guy behind retirement's 4% rule now thinks that's way too low. Here's how much more money you could spend. Perhaps the most vexing issue for preretirees is predicting how long they will live. Consider one of Sexton's questions in his 'retirement fluency' test: 'On average in the U.S., how long will a 65-year-old man/woman live?' Only 32% of test takers pick the right answer: 84 for men, 87 for women. 'The biggest issue in financially planning for your retirement is your longevity,' said Ben Loughery, an Atlanta-based certified financial planner. That's why he analyzes a client's family medical history to predict their life expectancy. That serves as a starting point for estimating the portfolio performance they'll need to enjoy their retirement years. Read: Opinion: Annuities are looking good right now. So why aren't people buying them? I'm 75 and have a reverse mortgage. Should I pay it off with my $200K savings — and live off Social Security instead? 'I'm 68 and my 401(k) has dwindled to $82,000': My husband committed financial infidelity and has $50,000 in credit-card debt. What now? Why the biggest-ever 'triple witching' options expiration could deliver a jolt to Friday's trading Israel-Iran conflict poses three challenges for stocks that could slam market by up to 20%, warns RBC Tech companies lead list of double-digit gains in June for stocks in the S&P 500 Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
The new math: why seed investors are selling their winners earlier
Charles Hudson had just closed his fifth fund several months ago – $66 million for Precursor Ventures – when one of his limited partners asked him to run an exercise. What would have happened, the LP wondered, if Hudson had sold all his portfolio companies at Series A? What about Series B? Or Series C? The question wasn't academic. After two decades in venture capital, Hudson has been watching the math of seed investing change, maybe permanently. LPs who've previously been patient with seven-to-eight-year hold periods are suddenly asking questions about interim liquidity. 'Seven or eight years feels like a really long time' to LPs right now, says Hudson, even though 'it's always been seven or eight years.' The reason: a steady stream of venture returns in recent years — returns that made long hold periods acceptable — has largely dried up. Coupled with the availability of other, more liquid investment options, many backers of very early-stage VC are demanding a new approach. The analysis his LP requested revealed an uncomfortable truth, says Hudson. Selling everything at the Series A stage didn't work; the compounding effect of staying in the best companies outweighed any benefits from cutting losses early. But Series B was different. 'You could have a north of 3x fund if you sold everything at the B,' Hudson discovered. 'And I'm like, 'Well, that's pretty good.'' Beyond pretty good, that realization is reshaping how Hudson thinks about portfolio management in 2025. Though now a veteran investor – Hudson has spent 22 years in VC between Precursor, an eight-year run at Uncork Capital and another four years at In-Q-Tel earlier in his career – he says investors in very young companies are being forced to think like private equity managers, optimizing for cash returns alongside the home runs that, if they're lucky, define their careers. It's not an easy mental change to make. 'The companies where there's the most secondary interest are also the set of companies where I have the greatest expectations for the future,' says Hudson. It's not just Hudson; his thinking about secondary sales reflects broader pressures reshaping the venture ecosystem. Hans Swildens is the founder of Industry Ventures, a San Francisco-based fund of funds and direct investment firm with stakes in 700 venture firms, and he told Techrunch in April that venture funds are 'starting to get savvier about what they need to do to generate liquidity.' In fact, Swildens is seeing venture funds hire full-time staff members specifically to pursue alternative liquidity options, with some seed managers dedicating months to 'manufacturing liquidity from their funds.' Though this reshuffling of priorities extends far beyond any single fund, the pressure is particularly acute for smaller funds like Precursor, a traditional seed-stage fund that prides itself on backing unconventional founders like Laura Modi of ByHeart baby formula (a solo founder in a regulated industry with no prior experience) and Doktor Gerson of Rad AI (whose previous startup had failed). While firms with mega-funds like Sequoia and General Catalyst can afford to wait for $25 billion outcomes, smaller funds need to be more tactical about when and how they harvest returns. Perhaps nowhere is the shift more visible than in Hudson's relationships with limited partners. University endowments, once the most coveted LPs in venture, are now grappling with unforeseen challenges from the Trump administration. Harvard, of course, is the poster child here, with federal investigations into its admissions practices, threats to research funding tied to compliance issues, and ongoing scrutiny of its substantial endowment amid calls for universities to increase their annual spending requirements or face taxation. Hudson says that based on his conversations with LPs inside these organizations, they've never believed more in the power of venture, yet they've also never felt more hesitant about making 10- to 15-year illiquid commitments. The result is a more complex LP base with competing needs. Some want 'as much money back as soon as possible, even if that's a suboptimal outcome in the long term,' says Hudson. Others prefer that Hudson 'hold everything to maturity, because that's what's going to maximize my returns.' Navigating these demands requires the kind of portfolio management sophistication that seed investors haven't traditionally needed, which Hudson views with some ambivalence. Venture, he says, is starting to feel a lot less like an art and something that 'feels a lot more like some of these other sub-asset classes in finance.' Hudson isn't without hope, he adds, but he is clear-eyed about what's changing on the ground, as well as the opportunities those changes create. As funds grow larger and deploy more capital, they're becoming necessarily more algorithmic, looking for 'companies in these categories, with founders from these schools with these academic backgrounds who worked at these companies,' he says. The approach works for deploying large amounts of capital efficiently, but it misses the 'weird and wonderful' companies that have defined Hudson's best returns and kept Precursor in the game. 'If you're going to hire people just off a resume screener tool,' he says, 'you're going to miss people who maybe have really relevant experiences that the algorithm doesn't catch.' You can hear our full interview with Hudson via TechCrunch's StrictlyVC Download podcast. New episodes come out every Tuesday.
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Yahoo
Nicolet Law Proudly Announces Russell Nicolet's Selection to Prestigious 2024 Super Lawyers
Madison, Wisconsin--(Newsfile Corp. - June 14, 2025) - Nicolet Law Accident & Injury Lawyers is delighted to report that the law firm's founder, Russell D. Nicolet-widely referred to as the Midwest's Lawyer-has been selected to Super Lawyers 2024 list as one of the top-rated personal injury attorneys in Hudson, Wisconsin. The highly sought-after listing only includes the highest 5% of lawyers in each state and is determined after a rigorous screening process involving peer nominations, independent research, and professional awards. Nicolet Law Proudly Announces Russell Nicolet's Selection to Prestigious 2024 Super LawyersTo view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: According to Super Lawyers' website, the organization is a trusted rating service of outstanding lawyers who have attained a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievement. Its patented attorney selection process is peer-influenced and research-driven, selecting the top 5% of attorneys to the Super Lawyers list each year. Russell D. Nicolet stated, "As a Midwest native and legal professional, I've built Nicolet Law on the values that define our region: hard work, integrity, and genuine care for others. At the heart of my work is a genuine connection with my clients-people I'm privileged enough to sit next to in a courtroom." Nicolet Law is a family-owned, Midwest-based personal injury and accident law firm with offices in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Iowa. According to the company, eight attorneys from the firm were honored in the 2024 Super Lawyers and Rising Stars lists, including founder Russell Nicolet and Managing Partner Adam Nicolet. These recognitions are based on peer nominations and professional achievements. Fueled by a mission of excellence and integrity, Nicolet Law Accident & Injury Lawyers, the top-rated lawyers for injury claims, take pride in providing top-tier services, further cementing its position as a leading law firm in the Midwest. Earning the esteemed title of 2024 Super Lawyers, Top-rated Personal Injury attorney in Hudson, Wisconsin, is a huge testament that reflects Mr. Russell Nicolet's exceptional expertise in the field of personal injury and accident law. Visit Russell D. Nicolet's profile on Super Lawyers to learn more about the 2024 Super Lawyers' Top 5%, personal injury attorney in Hudson, Wisconsin. For more information on Nicolet Law's award-winning personal injury lawyers, please see the contact details below. About Russell D. Nicolet Russell D. Nicolet, known as the Midwest's Lawyer, has always been focused on helping people through difficult situations. With over a decade of exceptional expertise in the field, Mr. Nicolet is the founder and an attorney at the award-winning Nicolet Law Accident & Injury Lawyers. His goal is simple: to provide his clients with the highest quality of successful representation. The Midwest lawyer focuses his practice on personal injury, serving throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota. Contact Info:Name: Jordan MillerEmail: jordan@ Nicolet Law Accident & Injury LawyersPhone: 234-567-8902Website: To view the source version of this press release, please visit
