JACKSON, WY – CWC’s Start-Up Intensive is a place for budding entrepreneurs to take their dreams and turn them into a reality. For ten weeks, participants dedicate time to developing business plans, hashing out budgets, and working on marketing plans to get their businesses rolling.
Ed Brenegar is one such student who used the Start-Up course to launch his leadership business. Brenegar moved to Jackson from Asheville, North Carolina in March 2015. A series of events led him to meet Liza Millett, a workforce coordinator/entrepreneur for the Start-Up Intensive.
“She told me about the Start-Up Intensive program and suggested that it would be a good way to begin my life in Jackson,” he said. After Millett told him the class started at nine in the morning the next day, it was a quick decision for Brenegar to make.
“That’s how it happened,” he said.
After a short two weeks in Jackson, Brenegar was enrolled in the Start-Up Intensive and ready to start a new career goal, a leadership business. Throughout his life, Brenegar has had many leadership roles, starting as a minister he later worked in higher education before becoming a consultant in the 90s. One thing resonated with him, to help leaders build a better community.
“The Start-Up Intensive is a place for people to make something significant happen,” Brenegar said. “It was a disciplined place to hone your skills, a platform for you to be prepared to accelerate your business and make it happen.”
Writing a book was the first step in creating a new leadership business based on speaking, coaching and organizational consulting. The Start-Up Intensive gave him the tools he needed to write his first book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative to Ignite Change.
The Start-up Intensive gave him a foundation to ask the hard questions that led to the kind of changes that he needed to make the book the best it could be. Brenegar said most of his obstacles were in his own perception of what he was creating.
“The program focuses on the whole person, and it affirmed that I was ready,” Brenegar said. “The peer relationships tested my readiness. It really shot me out like a rocket. I would not be where I am today without the relationships and network it plugged me into.”
In his work, he developed a leadership model that was ultimately successful in assisting people with solving problems.
“One of the principles of the Circle of Impact is that the greatest change we go through is in our self-perception,” he said. “This is certainly true for the process of writing my book. I learned so much.”
It took two years and three versions to complete his book and it hit Amazon in September 2018. The book largely focuses on encouraging individuals to realize they can make an impact from any place they are in life.
“This isn’t about us becoming something else, this is about us being the person we already are,” Brenegar said. “We all have the capability of having an impact, starting small from where we are. There’s probably someone in your neighborhood who has no friends, [that] you could have an impact on. Spend time with them, be neighborly. From that, you will learn to make an impact, from that experience, you will learn.”
Brenegar’s ultimate goal is to involve one percent of the world’s population in the movement. That’s 75 million people. And, he wants to have a conversation with them. His website provides a platform for individuals to post questions, log comments, and build community with like-minded individuals. He now has a program called Impact Day where he works with individuals, groups, organizations, and communities to address ideas, questions, or an opportunity by bringing clarity to the situation and through establishing a plan of action. This ultimately leads them to the impact that they desire. And Brenegar is already working on his next book.
“I am already doing research for the next book. It will probably be five years before I’m ready to publish it. Right now the focus is on marketing my book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative to Ignite Change.”
CWC’s Start-Up Intensive has launched 114 graduates into the Wyoming economy and beyond and recently celebrated its five year anniversary in Jackson.
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