MSU Research Foundation Podcast

Empowering Michigan's Entrepreneurs with Jeff Wesley

• MSU Research Foundation • Season 1 • Episode 1

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In this episode, David Washburn introduces Jeff Wesley, Executive Director of Ventures at the MSU Research Foundation. Jeff shares his journey from growing up in Chesney, Michigan, to leading transformative ventures at the Foundation. With a rich background in accounting, leadership, and entrepreneurial innovation, Jeff discusses his roles at Deloitte, a dental distribution company, and Two Men and a Truck before joining the MSU Research Foundation. Together, they delve into the creation of the Foundation's venture ecosystem, including its venture creation and investments subsidiaries—Spartan Innovations, Red Cedar Ventures, and Michigan Rise. Jeff offers insights into fostering entrepreneurship, building high-impact teams, and driving innovation across Michigan. This is the first of many conversations with Jeff, setting the stage for exploring the exciting work happening within the MSU ecosystem.

Host: David Washburn
Guest: Jeff Wesley, Executive Director of Ventures, MSU Research Foundation
Producers: Jenna McNamara and Doug Snitgen
Music: "Devil on Your Shoulder" by Will Harrison, licensed via Epidemic Sound

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David Washburn:

In this episode we talk to my friend and colleague, Jeff Wesley. We cover his background, growing up in Michigan and his time in the real world before he moved to Michigan State University Research Foundation about eight years ago. We cover the venture creation platform and direct venture investing companies that he has built for us here at the Foundation and I think you'll like the episode. Jeff will be a frequent contributor to this podcast going forward, so I hope you enjoy getting to know Jeff. You're a true Michigander. You grew up here and I wondered if you could tell us where you're from and then talk to me about your path out of undergraduate.

Jeff Wesley:

Okay, we have to go back a few years. I grew up in a small town of Chesney, Michigan. For those that don't know, it's up by Owasso, Michigan. Great parents, three brothers, all four of us left Chesney to go out and build our careers, which is pretty amazing for a small town. But I attribute that to our parents that we were blessed to have and just gave us good values on working hard and treating people right and getting ahead.

Jeff Wesley:

I left Chesney, went to Central Michigan University. I always wanted to go into business. I thought that was my path forward. I looked at different majors and I thought about going into law or accounting or something that could put me in a position to run businesses. So I chose accounting. I got my BA from Central Michigan University, blessed to work for Deloitte, or Touche Ross at the time, after leaving Central and had opportunities to go to different places across the Midwest. And I was just a Michigan guy. I wanted to stay close to home. I wanted to stay close to family, so I chose Lansing, Michigan of all places, to go to Touche Ross. They merged with Deloitte when I was there, probably one of my best educations. I spent seven years, saw industries of all types, saw leadership styles of all types, and it was just a great way to learn how to operate businesses, grow businesses, see opportunities, and I thought that really prepared me for my next step, to go out and start to get into the private sector.

Jeff Wesley:

So I left Deloitte, went to a small dental company at the time, going way back when it was a catalog company of all things, so it was relying on about a 10 page catalog of products. Our founder, dr William J Costello, was one of the original founders of the impression tray and that's what launched the company and from there we started adding a variety of different products in the dental space. Fast forward, I stayed there for 15 years. I was the chief financial officer that helped grow them we grow about 20% a year and eventually I was president of that company. By the time we got done, we had multiple warehouses across the country. We competed with $2 billion companies in the dental space. We had 68,000 SKUs of products. We went from a catalog company to a combination telesales company with three locations, service business with trucks on the road, so a full service dental distributor, and we chose at the time, for a variety of reasons, to sell the company. So we sold the company to Patterson's Companies in Minnesota, which is a publicly traded company From there.

Jeff Wesley:

That was kind of my dream. It was kind of a good thing, bad thing, blessed, to work with a lot of great people to grow that company A lot of fun. They parked me on the bench for three years. I wanted to stay in Michigan. I didn't want to move to Minnesota. So for three years I kind of worked on the transition with them.

Jeff Wesley:

After that three years coming up my contract, I had a couple opportunities. I actually got a call from PNC that said Two Minute Truck was in need of some support with the economy in 08. So I joined Two Minute Truck, became CFO there, helped working with the family to re-engineer that company and get it back on a growth track. So within a couple of years we had that company growing about 20 some percent. So we grew that 20 percent. For about nine years grew it from about 150 million to 500 million.

Jeff Wesley:

Really blessed to work with a lot of great people, a lot of great franchises, and it was a great run there. After that I didn't want to know what I wanted to do next. I looked at a variety of opportunities, had a chance to come here and talk with you, dave. My passion's always been entrepreneurs. I wanted to give back at this stage of my life. I wanted to see if I could come here, partner with you, grow the ecosystem around here at MSU, and we've just had a great run for now, almost seven years of working here and building something special that supports MSU, supports the state and just has a huge impact on great entrepreneurs throughout the state of Michigan.

David Washburn:

Wow, well, that's a thank you for the long answer, and I've heard it a lot of times's still. It's still just a great story because I love, I love the history of kind of going into the trenches of accounting and and finance through to Shross and then Deloitte, Just just, you know, dissecting lots of different companies, seeing lots of different sectors and and really understanding how businesses operate from the financial side and then and then sort of transitioning into to literally being a, you know, a manager, sort of um operator of of several really um high profile organizations that, uh, that you came in like the dental supply company how many people were there when you showed up? And then sort of, how did it end up?

Jeff Wesley:

Yeah, if you go back to dental, we were one location with probably 15 people. We were actually on Northwind on Grand River before we built our facility in Williamston. By the time I got done we were well over 200 people. Wow, um by time I got done.

Jeff Wesley:

We were well over 200 people, so so it was uh it was a great run, and just uh taught me a lot. Uh, when you compete with billion dollar companies and you're in distribution, you have to learn to manage fast and be able to be agile and really know where your key strategies are to grow, and uh really learned a lot in that opportunity man.

David Washburn:

Just such a great breadth of everything from you know, the sales and marketing and distribution and everything personnel and HR and working with banks and everything.

Jeff Wesley:

Yeah, it was. I love working with people. I love to build great teams. I actually attribute it in one of my leadership decks to going back and coaching my kids and learning how to coach them effectively in sports at a young age. I always pride myself on it's what the team's feedback gives you. If you're in a good place as a good coach, you really just need to dialogue into that. Um so just great people at all the organizations have been and everybody has always been committed to the vision and we've been able to have an impact wherever I've stopped.

David Washburn:

So it's been great yeah well, it's great and you, you parlayed all that two men in a truck and that that's such a great story for the Lansing region and that that that company has just done done so well and you see those trucks all over the country. I mean the story when I think when I met Jeff was I think we called on Jeff to see if they wanted to set up an innovation center or a corporate innovation center and get involved in recruiting students into helping working on systems.

David Washburn:

And we just got to him too late he had already built an innovation center on their campus. But it was a great meeting. We got to see all the great work that that Jeff and his team had done there and, um, it was great to connect after that experience and, uh, frankly, was one of the huge, huge reasons that, uh, I was so excited to join forces with you was your, your financial background as a um, as an operator, uh, and an accountant, um and um with the startup companies that we were, we were building. They were all really really early stage companies and I thought it'd be wonderful to have someone with your, with your background and, uh, you know uh skills in doing this a couple of times to help coach. You talked about coaching earlier, but literally you're coaching many of our startup founders and so when you walked into the foundation, what's your first memory of the first thing that sort of crossed your desk that needed some coaching?

Jeff Wesley:

Well. So when I first came just like anything new to me, it was like a white paper. I wanted to look and see what was in place, what strategies could I leverage to grow it, and, obviously, the ability to work with the foundation and MSU you knew you had something special here. There's got to be opportunity. So how could you redirect your work to start on the baby steps that would move that vision forward? So that's kind of where I started.

Jeff Wesley:

One of the loves for it that I had when I was looking at the decision point of what I wanted to do is I'd been an angel investor for a number of years, so I was always busy running companies and I always said when I got older which it happened how, if I had more time, I wanted to do more of that.

Jeff Wesley:

So to me that was a unique opportunity too when I came here was how could I have a bigger impact by working with the foundation and doing it not by myself but with other people and building the team and having a great organization behind me? Could we do even more to help those early technologies to get in a great place for success? But it's been a fun ride. It's just been remarkable what we built in seven years in the time we've been here, and just the great companies and technologies and entrepreneurs we get to see every day. I always think all of us are about learning in life, and every day I get to come in and get challenged by a technology that I've never seen before and learn about it, and to me that's so rewarding, as well as just working with the people, um, to make them successful.

David Washburn:

So well, I mentioned earlier when we started this conversation that Jeff is going to be a um a to this dialogue that we have here at the foundation, because it's not possible to unpack everything that we've been working on here in a 10 or 15 minute conversation. But as we, as we wrap this particular conversation up today, there's sort of three, three main entities that um are under under your uh, leadership. Um, and I wondered if you could um briefly walk through the venture creation entity and then our captive venture funds, just to set this up, and then maybe, maybe at the end, talk about sort of the current metrics of where we are, sort of a snapshot of where we are today, and then I promise you that in in the future there's so many great companies that we're going to have to talk about in the future. But talk about the practice today, if you would.

Jeff Wesley:

Yeah, let me set it up a little bit. I've been blessed to have an opportunity to look across the country and look a lot at different ecosystems, and the MSU Research Foundation has today something really unique and special in terms of the breadth and the talent and the number of tools we can bring to bear for an entrepreneur. So the first part of that is one of the subsidiaries under the foundation is Spartan Innovations, a venture studio that we've grown over the years that now supports close to seven different types of accelerators under our brand name of Conquer, seven different types of accelerators. Under our brand name of Conquer, we have also directors on the side of physical science and life sciences that bring unique expertise to help with tech transfer and moving things out of the university in a very successful way. And we also have locations in different places in the state of Michigan, from Grand Rapids to East Lansing and Detroit. So when you look at that venture studio and we have entrepreneurs in residence close to 25 to 30 today that we can put under contracts to support new technologies, to work with the university on assessing new technologies and bring the full complement of services, tools and resources with good mentorship, to really give all these unique technologies and entrepreneurs a chance for success. So that's a wealth of capabilities that many people don't have Under our Grand Rapids. We're right on the medical mile, working with MSU, working with the community. We have partnerships in both Lansing and Grand Rapids and in many ways in Detroit at New Lab and even Henry Ford we work with in hospitals across the state. So we've really worked to find the sweet spot of partnerships, collaborations, tools and resources and bring those to bear for the startups, for MSU and really get new technologies off the ground and into startups.

Jeff Wesley:

So with that, you know, very important to early stage companies is funding. We have Red Cedar Ventures that has a variety of captive venture funds. We have a pre-seed fund. That's a very early stage fund that helps us to milestone invest as we mentor those early stage companies. We have two opportunity funds we've built successfully over the number of years, which is some really exciting technologies and companies that we're just looking forward to their impact around the world.

Jeff Wesley:

And we have Michigan Rise, a partnership between MSU and the MEDC put in place four years ago. Just a great partnership where came together in a very unique way. We're very blessed to have that and it has provided us the opportunity to work across state, kind of in the philosophy of MSU's land grant philosophy, and have an impact with entrepreneurs everywhere in the state of Michigan. So you put all that together and you put all the capabilities of foundation, as well as the real estate group we have here that provides space to all these great startups and support from events to different aspects that we can bring to bear. That is just a platform of capabilities, technologies and great people really driving these entrepreneurs and new technologies into the marketplace Something very unique.

Jeff Wesley:

And we're probably one of the most active groups in the Great Lakes region, which is really neat to see what we've built here in a short span of time and just really excited about where we go from here in terms of our collaborations with the university, the state, the hospitals and all those great people we get a chance to work with every day that's great, uh, so a venture creation platform, uh, known as spartan innovations, captive venture fund, red cedar ventures is it was with that brand.

David Washburn:

And then the third is the partnership between the foundation and the state for the Michigan Rise Pre-Seed 3 Fund. So just great, great, great partnerships and apparatus so we've been at this for a while. An apparatus, so we've been at this for a while, and can you talk about?

Jeff Wesley:

the sort of current state of the portfolio.

David Washburn:

Yeah, and the portfolio from the sort of venture side.

Jeff Wesley:

Yeah, when you look at the venture side and you fast forward, we have about 180 active companies today that we're working with the investments we made in those companies, they've gone on to leverage our investments for over a billion dollars in co-investment. I think we have close to 600 co-investors we work with. We've created thousands of jobs, we've had a number of exits and we've really done it in the right way to support MSU, to support entrepreneurs across the state, to give every type of leader in the state an opportunity to find investment and support. So we're just really happy about that. So it's not only the investments we weighed but how we're doing it that's really important to us. When you look at our Michigan Rise Fund, that's kind of a subset of that. I think we just came across the 100 investment mark with the number of active companies we have. So we're really proud of that.

Jeff Wesley:

If I look at early stage we work with MSU, today we probably have 150 active projects we're looking at between disclosures and new technologies. New technologies Our CONCOR program every year with our accelerators is probably affecting 35 to 40 companies a year that we're making investments in and supporting. And on top of that we're supporting our CADE program that provides entrepreneurs with diverse backgrounds to support our companies. And then our regional partnerships we have in Grand Rapids and East Lansing. We're just making huge impacts on those communities and with those entrepreneurs and really driving innovation. So we have a lot of great metrics across the board, one of the things we really pride ourselves as impact. So as we work with all these partnerships, we're really trying to drive our results for the best of everybody.

David Washburn:

This is Jeff Wesley. He's the executive director of ventures at the MSU Research Foundation. He oversees Spartan Innovations, red Cedar Ventures and Michigan Rise. That includes our partnerships throughout the state and we're very glad to have you. This is the first of many conversations that I guarantee we'll have, because there's so much to unpack. It's always great to visit with you. We do it all the time, but to put this on the show, I think this is going to be a great setup for getting our story out there, so people across the state, people across the country, can learn about what we're doing here at Michigan State University and the Michigan State University Research Foundation. Thank you, jeff.

Jeff Wesley:

I appreciate being here and, as always, if you want to learn more about us, go to the MSU Research Foundation webpage and you'll find more about all the great things we're doing here.

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