March 1, 2021

Some entrepreneurs are born with business ownership in their blood.

Ben Reznicek is pretty sure he’s one of them.

“Since I’ve been a little kid, I’ve been an entrepreneur – whether it’s lemonade stands or sports cards of shoveling snow,” said Reznicek, who grew up in Sioux Falls.

While he started in business as a kid to earn extra money for video games, entrepreneurship kept calling and now represents his first job out of college.

Reznicek and his father, Dave, formed RezBats – a business based around his love of baseball and tendency to break his wooden bats.

“How do we make a better bat?” they asked back in 2010, when he was playing baseball for O’Gorman High School.

They kept asking that question and improving on the answer through his college years, which led him to play Division I ball at the University of North Dakota and Creighton University.

“Now, it’s how do we make it more durable and break less and better overall, and that process we figured out, and it’s now patent-pending as of June 2019,” Reznicek said.

Taylor Hoekstra thinks he’s one of those born business owners too.

“I’ve always had a big desire to run a business, form a team, create something,” said Hoekstra, whose day job is a senior manager at Farmers Business Network.

He has started businesses before – “some which fizzled out and some which didn’t take off” – and experienced the startup scene in Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas.

The job at Farmers Business Network, itself a successful startup, brought him back to Sioux Falls. By 2019, he and his wife, Jaclyn, had started their newest business venture: an e-commerce business called FlyKid.com.

It was a side business for both of them, selling nontoxic baby and kids’ merchandise.

“And it was doing OK, we were moving some inventory and getting a little bit rolling and doing some importing from overseas and looking at starting a diaper business,” Hoekstra said.

Then COVID-19 hit, and while some online retailers flourished, smaller ones like this “had just enough overlap with Target and Walmart and Amazon that no one checked a different lane,” he said. “We tried lower our prices and couldn’t compete.”

That led them to look at “what opportunities are arising because of the pandemic,” he continued.

These entrepreneurs have a growing number of counterparts in Sioux Falls. The city is experiencing increased interest from new and aspiring business owners – so many that the inaugural CO.STARTERS accelerator program had twice as many applicants as spots at the start of 2021.

This week, the community will mark Entrepreneurship Day on Wednesday.

“There’s surprising momentum,” said Brienne Maner, executive director of the Zeal Center for Entrepreneurship. “We had enough applicants to fill two cohorts right out of the gate, which was really exciting because we had no idea what the interest level would be in the community.”

Matt Paulson can gauge that as well as anyone. As the founder of Startup Sioux Falls, a website and Facebook group for the area entrepreneur community, he’s seeing “a new generation of people who haven’t been involved” at events such as the weekly 1 Million Cups entrepreneurial speaker series.

“Four years ago, you’d never seen them at 1 Million Cups. It’s a new cohort of people,” he said. “We’re seeing more young, fresh-out-of-college types. I see a lot of that.”

The three categories he’s seeing the most are direct-to-consumer businesses, local retail and restaurants, and software.

Many founders are “trying to get from zero to one, where they have enough to cover their income and figure out how to grow from there,” Paulson said.

“And I feel like there’s a lot more people working on their businesses heads down, maybe doing less community events but actually building their businesses. I think COVID has given people a lot of free time, and some people are using that free time to get businesses off the ground, maybe less publicly than before.”

Maner also is seeing COVID-related startup activity at Zeal.

“I just continue to reflect on the pandemic and what that has done to the ecosystem in our city,” she said. “And on the positive side, it’s created innovation. People are resilient, and they’re pivoting.”

In Hoekstra’s case, that meant launching another business, PopFly, and participating in the Zeal accelerator.

“We started talking to all different brands and businesses we sold on our website and what challenges they were running into with COVID, and they were way down on foot traffic, trying to get more people through the stores and had a hard time competing with Walmart to keep people local,” he said.

That led them to build popfly.com, an online marketplace to connect shoppers with merchandise available in local businesses. Think of a pop fly in baseball, which is a ball that’s meant to be caught, “and it depends who’s there and who is in the best position,” he explained.

“Call it the mall of Sioux Falls, where we showcase what is on the shelves of stores around Sioux Falls,” he said.

The plan is to launch a pilot version of the website with merchandise from up to 30 area businesses this month.

“The grander vision would be to buy or book anything online locally,” Hoekstra said. “So if you have a cooking class or cut hair or need an oil change, you can buy or book.”

And speaking of baseball ties, Reznicek also is growing RezBats with help from the Zeal program. His MLB-certified product already is being used by a half- dozen MLB teams and a growing number of minor league and professional players.

He was supposed to be at spring training now and at the College World Series as a vendor last year, but the pandemic derailed both.

“But we were able to adjust,” he said. “We made a jump this year during the pandemic, but I attribute that to all the contacts I’ve gained over the years of playing baseball and word of mouth.”

The uniqueness of the product is big too, he said. RezBats figured out how to finish a wood bat to make it more durable without the age-old technique of bone rubbing and steel hardening. The company now is launching a site for teams and individuals to customize bats with names and logos.

“We basically revolutionized the way wood bats should be finished,” Reznicek said. “The whole goal with this was to simply make a better wood bat. By doing just that we have disrupted an industry that has been using the same age-old process for years.”

They’re continuing to craft the bats from a Morton Building in Sioux Falls.

“Everything is done here,” he said. “We’re in the stage where we need funding. I’ve basically taken this as far as I can go. We’re getting so busy I need to be out selling. I’m working in my business a lot and not on it, so we are looking for people to make the bats for us and hire a couple people.”

Who’s starting businesses

Shane Boen also reflects the sort of entrepreneur increasingly emerging on the Sioux Falls scene. The Colton native, who is 28, and his business partner, Logan Koopman, 25, have full-time jobs in recruiting but started The Dryer Vent Cleaning Company in December 2020.

“We’re bringing a new method of cleaning to the market, which is cool,” Boen said. “Cleaning your dryer vent is not something everyone thinks about; however, it’s something that needs to be done contingent on how much it’s used. It’s a major cause of fires. It reduces energy costs.”

He got the idea after paying a technician $100 to service a dryer taking too long to dry his clothes.

“I paid him $100 to clean out my dryer vent,” he said. “It’s like that niche market no one is really getting into, and we just see opportunity for growth.”

They invested in a specialized air compressor system that allows them to clean dryer vents from outside the home or apartment, reducing the time needed and eliminating the need to enter a residence. That has led to business from property managers.

“We have submitted bids for over 600 individual apartment units with a couple different property managers. If we get those, I’ll have to hire another service tech to help,” Boen said, adding he’s also bidding jobs for pet kennels, vet clinics and dental clinics.

“I want to take over the world in dryer vent cleaning,” he said.

The business has an office downtown and one technician.

“By the end of the year, God-willing, we’ll have another location,” Boen said. “We’re looking at Brookings and Rapid (City) because it’s a cool job and people can do it as a side hustle.”

The diversity emerging in the Sioux Falls startup scene isn’t just reflected in the industries represented but in the founders themselves.

“I am pleasantly surprised to see the diversity coming to us,” Maner said.

“Our (accelerator) cohort is, I think, more women than men, but we’re also seeing a couple of black-owned businesses taking part, which is really great to see, and I hope that means our message is getting out there. At one point, our ecosystem served true tech startups, but we want to make sure (we’re reaching) anyone looking to introduce a new product or service into the marketplace.”

The market also is seeing some established entrepreneurs taking on or considering new business ventures, Paulson said.

He points to successful founders such as Michael Zuercher, who founded Prismatic after successfully exiting his public safety software business. Prismatic is a platform that helps business software integrate with other software.

Other veteran entrepreneurs also are gravitating toward software as a service business model, which “you can scale without a lot of people,” Paulson said. “It’s a lot less messy than being a physical products business or a web design agency.”

At Zeal, occupancy is steady at 94 percent, and tenants are “hanging steady or seeing an uptick in business,” Maner said. “And for us specifically, we are seeing an uptick in inquiries.”

There’s “a lot more interest in the physical space and business resources,” Maner said, prompting Zeal to establish a mentor network that already has grown to 30 people.

“There are so many people who need resources and support and don’t know where to go and so many business leaders who want badly to give back, so it’s been a great synergy to bring those parties together,” Maner said.

The organization also is considering its role as the workplace itself continues to evolve.

“I can see corporate entities wanting a co-working option,” she said. “I feel like Zeal is uniquely positioned to support working from home as an employee benefit. Some don’t want to work from home but want a change in atmosphere and our physical space can really fill those gaps.”

Paulson also sees momentum at the startup space.

“Zeal for the first time since I’ve been around is firing on all cylinders,” he said, pointing to plans for up to three cohorts of accelerators this year and multiple committees focused on the building, events and marketing.

Back at PopFly, Hoekstra, who has seen startups scenes elsewhere, is hopeful Sioux Falls can sustain its startup-friendly environment as small businesses scale into larger ones.

“What Sioux Falls has going for it is you have some lively communities talking about the right things. You have a few people raising capital, and I think you have some talent that’s sticking around,” he said.

“The hard part is how do we keep them around. A really talented person will find the money if they have a great story and a great idea, and my hope is Sioux Falls continues to grow to a place where it makes sense to continue to grow here because you can find the talent and you can find the team.”

Entrepreneurship Day events

Here’s how to connect to what’s happening Wednesday:

• 9 a.m. — Join the 1 Million Cups community for a special presentation featuring John Meyer and Natalie Eisenberg as they discuss the Click Rain acquisition of Lemonly.
• All day — Business and community leaders will conduct social takeovers on the Zeal Center for Entrepreneurship + Startup Sioux Falls Facebook page where a short documentary among other impactful announcements are slated for release throughout the day.
• 4 p.m. — Join the startup community and founders of Fernson Brewing Co. for the Startup Social and Fernson Brewery Tour. In addition to the free networking event and tour, each attendee receives a free beverage with registration through Eventbrite.
• Ongoing — To support the promotion of Entrepreneurship Day, Facebook users can select a profile picture frame by using this link to search for Sioux Falls Entrepreneurship Day.

For information and registration details, visit the Sioux Falls Entrepreneurship Day event page.