On Monday, Apr. 3, Colorado Mesa University (CMU) hosted their annual Entrepreneurship Day (E-day). Throughout the morning local business-people gave guest presentations to students within Dominguez Hall.

E-day also had a community luncheon in the ballroom with students and local business people. The first 100 students to sign up were able to attend the luncheon, normally $50, for free.

This event was open to the business community as well. The luncheon began at 12 p.m. Each table was sponsored by a local business and seated not only students, but business professionals as well. This gave an excellent chance for students to mingle and network with them.

Once everyone was seated, President Tim Foster gave an update on CMU. He said that CMU is now the fifth largest growing university.

Aaron Frick won the elevator pitch contest. His pitch was for a product called FrickIn Tune. He stated that this device could retail for about $35. It is a device to keep your instrument in tune.

Brandon VandenBosch, Rikki Cook and Sam Speirs pitched their product, Catio, next. This product is for cat owners who want to have something for their cat to help keep the litter off floors and furniture. They even built a protype of their product. They came in second place.

Lastly, Danielle Fleig and Austin Rickstrew presented an app called ‘Help’. Their idea was to have this app for people to use to assist in the daily care needs of elderly and disabled family members. With their app, all those who are doing the contract work would be thoroughly checked to assure for the safety and well-being of those in need. They placed third.

In between the elevator pitches and the reveal of the winner, we heard from the keynote speaker, Matt Rissell. Rissell is a Colorado native and an alumni of CMU. He graduated from CMU in 1999, and went on to start his first franchise called “Cartridge World” in 2004.

From what he explained, Cartridge World was a store in which you could take your printer ink cartridges to be refilled. While at one of the stores, he stated that an employee had written down her time and left and then he got the urge to see what time she had written down. She had stated she worked fifteen more minutes than she did.

That is when the idea struck him. He went searching at stores looking for a time management program that would allow him to see all of his employees times from one location. He could not find anything that fit what he wanted. He then contacted a friend and asked him if he could create a program that would track the time worked by all employees and their locations.

His friend said he could, and in 2006, they created TSheets. In 2018, Intuit acquired TSheets for $340 million, and Rissell and his team joined the QuickBooks family at that time as well.

Rissell had one important thing to say to everyone, “Don’t let anyone tell you when it is time to give up.” He also talked about fighting. Not physical fighting, but if someone disagrees with someone else, they should tell them that they disagree and why.  This will foster trust between those who do this.

Later that day students, faculty and business people gathered in The Point from 4 – 6 p.m. for a networking happy hour.