For November’s Project 3810 profile, I spoke with Elevated Dynamic. Karis and Jack Long share their story of why they started their business, what services they offer, and what they love about Project 3810.
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Tyler Powell and Tom Robins discuss Keeping Politically Aware for your Business in this article I wrote for the Oklahoma Venture Forum.
Tom Robins is the president and founder of the Oklahoma Innovative Technology Alliance (OITA). Robins described OITA as the home and voice for Oklahoma Innovation and Technology, where their number one priority is creating a workforce talent pipeline for their members as they grow. Previously, Robins spent time in D.C. after graduating from college and went to Utah State, got his master’s in political management from the George Washington University, worked for the Senate judiciary and other projects in Washington D.C. on political campaigns. In Oklahoma, he was the Deputy Secretary of Energy for the previous governor, helping advise and handle energy policy and all of its forms for the governor.
Tyler Powell owns the firm CSS Partner, assisting in government affairs and political strategy, helping clients of all sizes, including OITA. Before starting CSS Partner in 2017, Powell was the Deputy Secretary of Environment, where he met Robins. As the Deputy Secretary, Tyler oversaw the implementation of the Oklahoma Comprehensive Water Plan, the Water for 2060 Act, and the Lesser Prairie Chicken Range Wide Conservation Plan.
“Policy and politics impact in the innovation technology industry, but it might not be something that people think about,” said Tom Robins.
For the Oklahoma Venture Forum, Powell and Robins will host a panel discussion along with Representative Nicole Miller and Senator Julia Kirt. Members will get an update on what happened in the elections, which will be the night before the Power Lunch Event. Topics will include the implications of the elections, both for D.C. and locally, and how that’ll impact over the next couple of years, innovation, and technology.
“I think obviously it’s going to be super topical given kind of it’s the day after the election,” said Tyler Powell. “What will the next two and four years look like? What are those issues that, if I’ve got a business, I need to be thinking about, or in the case of stuff that we’re going to be promoting, how is that going to go through and change based off the current dynamics of what the legislature looks like?”
Kirt, Miller, Powell, and Robins will speak to Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch members on Wednesday, November 9, 2022. The event will be open to members and guests both in-person and virtually via ZOOM.
“OVF brings together investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, innovation and technology leaders, and engaging and educating, engaging elected officials or policymakers is an important opportunity for that community,” said Robins. “We can learn from one another.”
Kris Murray talks about Growing Through Acquisition in this profile article I wrote for the Oklahoma Venture Forum.
Kris Murray’s entrepreneurial journey began in college when a friend suggested they should start a web development company. While in high school and college, Murray was interested in web development, video production, graphic design, and how to code, but throughout most of his college career, he was a biology major. Before making a significant life pivot, Murray had some terms.
“I was like, ‘Sure, we’ll start a company if you secure the first client,’” said Kris Murray. “And essentially, I threw some numbers at him, like, ‘If you can kind of guarantee that both of us will make X amount of money for the first year, I’ll jump in this crazy idea with you,’ and like two weeks later; he had all the stuff secured. He had sold to different people and secured a lump sum of money and a retainer covering our living expenses.”
As time progressed, Murray’s original business partner wanted to exit, so Murray bought him out and then merged with a friend’s video production company, where they were outsourcing all of their video work. They joined forces and created a new brand called Spark.
“At the time, people’s choices were to hire an ad agency, where typical ad agencies had not kind of caught up with the changes of digital media, so they were billing high hourly rates and didn’t really know how to engage new media, or hire a person internally and have to pay their salary, pay for their equipment, pay for their health insurance, and stuff like that,” said Murray. “We were the no-brainer choice because we were cheaper than both options available to them, and it was like, hey, if we hate these guys, we can fire them because they’re essentially a contractor, and we can move in a different direction. So again, we saw pretty quick success with that. I think our goal was to get like 20 clients, and we met that goal within two weeks.”
With Spark, Murray loved they were helping solve unique problems for people. He found companies would be great at providing their goods and services to people, but they didn’t know how to connect with potential customers, and that’s where Spark excelled.
“We had a client early on say essentially we were the best investment they had ever made in marketing, and that was like a big moment for me,” said Murray. “When I started realizing that people see us as an investment, this is a partnership, this isn’t a typical contract engagement, and this isn’t a service. They feel like we are jointly moving towards their shared success.”
Murray knew Spark’s next phase of growth would be through acquisitions. Their first acquisition was Scissortail Media. Murray admired the company’s high-end impactful work. Through circumstances, the owner of Scissortail Media had started a virtual reality software platform and was looking to pursue that avenue. The creative and storytelling aspect of video production was an area Spark needed to grow, so they acquired them to get the talent, equipment, and proprietary story craft process.
“We did an acqui-hire, where we hired all the staff,” said Murray. “Whatever Scissortail Media’s best year was, we doubled that in the first year of our acquisition. We gave all the staff a raise, we kept everybody on through the transition, and we carried that through with our future acquisitions, is we always tried to retain the entire team.”
For the following acquisitions, they used the Traction system, an entrepreneurial operating system, to help explore core values, systems, processes, and what is needed to get to the next phase. Murray identified Casey Cornett with Cornett Marketing and later Studio Flight.
“With all of our acquisitions, we always did cash deals, where we never got into debt because of acquisitions,” said Murray. “I wanted to have an agency that was working citywide, statewide, nationally, globally, and by the time we consolidated the brands and everything, we had great local clients, we had great statewide clients, we had great national clients, and we had great global clients. In all service areas that we were a part of, we were, in some ways top of that, working with top-tier clients. We were getting top-tier clients to work with us, so it was the completion of the original vision.”
Kris Murray will speak to Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch members on Wednesday, October 12, 2022. The event will be open to members and guests both in-person and virtually via ZOOM.
“My advice would be a lot of people think that they need seed capital to get started, and for some things, you do need seed capital, but I would encourage people to market test their idea and do as much as they can to bootstrap whatever product or service they’re doing, and then once they have marketed tested their service or product, and they have a good idea of what the demand will be, then if they need capital, do growth capital,” said Murray. “We never did any kind of investment, so we bootstrapped everything. Honestly, I’ve got friends that have done capital rounds, saying, ‘I wish we had bootstrapped things,’ because one thing that capital does is it accelerates all of your problems. Money accelerates everything, so if things are going good, it accelerates things, but if things are not figured out or going well, it can run you off a cliff pretty fast.”
Ryan Coe talks about Creating a Flow for Innovation in this article I wrote for the Oklahoma Venture Forum.
Ryan Coe has been in the oil and gas industry his entire life, the fifth generation in his family line. Where Coe is now in energy was not the path he expected for himself. Straight out of college, he went to work at Chesapeake.
“I got comfortable with mashing together data sets and applying them towards my specific discipline, which was land, and that not only gave a ton of support to our land team to be able to be more efficient, but it also really sparked a massive passion that I had no idea that I possessed until this opportunity came along,” said Ryan Coe. “It gave me the ability to provide creative problem-solving into my day-to-day routine, and it’s what’s been driving me since that moment. I’ve been incorporating technology into most of the things I do regularly here at Flogistix, and it’s been a wild ride, frustrating, but I love it.”
Coe is now the Corporate Product Manager at Flogistix. Primarily, Flogistix is a compression service company that’s incorporated innovative technology to optimize its fleet and the runtime and efficiency of its operators. His role includes reviewing Flogistix’s products and seeing, from an industry expert perspective, where’s the application, what should be changed, what shouldn’t be changed, and helping facilitate the best development and product fit they can achieve.
For companies looking to advance and innovate with technology, Coe said the best thing they can do is create an environment where their employees feel comfortable and are not afraid to ask questions.
“They’re not afraid to come up with those weird ideas that they may be concerned, “What is the person next to me going to think about it if I say, ‘Oh, this is a way to solve a problem,’ and it’s just off the wall crazy?” I have always encouraged people when they have an idea, talk about it, bring it up,” said Coe. “If you’re doing something monotonous or repetitive and you think there’s a better way to do something, there probably is a better way to do something.”
Coe also added that people should be confident in the value they add to your company because not letting people think and express their thoughts and creativity hampers the organization. See what you can solve using technology versus, “Let’s just continue to do it the same way because we’re afraid to learn something new.”
With the EPA’s concern about fugitive emissions, the next facet for Flogistix is trying to answer and solve some of those problems because it’s massive. Thousands of wells are outdated, so they’re some of the biggest emitters.
“It’s a much bigger problem than people realize, but we are incredibly confident that we know how to address it,” said Coe. “We’re always developing new solutions to make things more efficient on our end and the customer side. I have no idea where the next step is, but I know that it will be in the energy space, and I know that it will involve technology and creativity.”
Ryan Coe will speak to Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch members on Wednesday, September 22, 2022. Coe was introduced to OVF last year, and while he initially didn’t know what to think of the forum, he’s come to see OVF as a great way to build a network of companies looking out for each other. The event will be open to members and guests both in-person and virtually via ZOOM.
“It’s incredibly cool to bring some of these smaller organizations together that are all kind of fighting a common battle, trying to get established, trying to figure out what to do to give themselves an advantage and to be able to come together sort of as a consortium and collaborate amongst each other,” said Coe.
Josh Merrill, Cody Dupler, and Jennifer Hankins discuss Opening Doors Through Collaboration in this article I wrote for Oklahoma Venture Forum’s 35th anniversary.
In honor of Oklahoma Venture Forum’s 35th anniversary, OVF Director Cody Dupler will host a fireside chat with Jennifer Hankins of Tulsa Innovation Labs and Josh Merrill of Echo Investment Capital as part of the OVF Awards ceremony. Dupler, Hankins, and Merrill will discuss the importance of collaboration for innovation in Oklahoma.
“What I love about Oklahoma Venture Forum is because it’s not just a bunch of landfill gurus that are there, a bunch of business gurus, or digital marketing gurus, or IT gurus, there is an all-encompassing board of directors and all-encompassing base of members,” said Cody Dupler, Business Development Manager for Summit Utilities. “With Summit Utilities, the company I work for now, it’s one of our pillars, for what we build our business cases on is collaboration. Because what we have found out is, as everybody’s probably aware, when you start working in these silos and don’t collaborate with these other departments, it becomes a little more stressful, a little bit more difficult to get things done.”
Jennifer Hankins, Head of Partnerships at Tulsa Innovation Labs, described herself as an economic developer by trade. The Tulsa Innovation Labs is a tech-led economic development organization tasked with spurring Tulsa’s innovation economy by investing in academic innovation, startup support and workforce, and talent development, as it aligns to those areas. Before that position, Hankins was at the Tulsa Chamber. On the subject of collaboration, Hankins said, “it’s everything we do in economic development.”
“I think the beautiful thing and what I have loved most about being in the state–I’m not from Oklahoma, I’m not a native Oklahoman–is not to be afraid,” said Hankins. “This is something I worked with our startups at, at The Forge daily, not being afraid to ask for help. Whoever you know in your network who can help you make that next call, that next move, never being afraid to ask for that because our state is a big place, but it’s also a really small place.”
Hankins added that the entrepreneurial community is willing to make that next call for you. For entrepreneurs to be successful, they have to have the ability to create relationships, ask for help, and not be afraid of saying what they need to be successful.
“I think it’s incumbent on Oklahomans to be collaborative because we can’t have a business environment where everybody kind as sharp elbows, because truthfully, if we’re self-aware and we look in the mirror, there are not enough resources here for us to be fighting over and still be successful as a state,” said Josh Merrill, Co-Managing Partner at Echo Investment Capital.
For the past 35 years, Dupler said the OVF has pulled together many different industries and many different parts of the state to get a total reflection of what the state needs. The forum has hosted influential and key leaders–not only just for Oklahoma but the nation as a whole.
“To do anything for 35 years means that you’re doing something correct,” said Dupler. “Even though I’ve been on the board kind of a short time and a member, not much longer than that, they’re really reaching out. I’m from Lawton, Oklahoma. So this isn’t just a, hey Oklahoma City clip or a Tulsa clip. This is all-encompassing from the state, from the Northeast border to the Southwest border, and everything in between.”
Jennifer Hankins, Josh Merrill, and Cody Dupler will be part of a special fireside chat at the Oklahoma History Center on May 18, 2022, from 11 am to 1:30 pm. Special guest is Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt. Awards will be presented for Economic Impact, Venture of the Year, Most Promising New Venture, Entrepreneurial Champion, and Incubator Tenant of the Year.
“I cannot believe that [OVF] is already 35 years old,” said Hankins. “I was involved with OVF while I was in OKC, and I’ve seen it evolve consistently, and I think that’s great, and that’s healthy, and really exciting to see that an organization has a longevity of 35 years. That’s just incredible.”