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Top suburban entrepreneurs honored at Business Ledger event

Last night was dedicated to risk taking and overcoming failure as 19 local entrepreneurs were honored during the 17th Annual Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards, hosted by the Business Ledger and its sponsoring partners. Mike Justice, founder, president, and CEO of Grid Connect was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Better with Age: Chicago’s Top Ten Startup Founders over 40

Successful startups are driven by experience, knowledge, and an overall understanding of respective industries. This type of wisdom enables older founders to be well-equipped to envision the ideal workplace, with its unique office perks that are often associated with startup cultures. While most people picture a youthful individual as the stereotypical startup found, this does not pertain to a lot of startup companies.

Employee Spotlight: Glenn Rodgers, VP of Production

About 12 years ago, Glenn Rodgers and Mike Justice sat in an empty building and Glenn made a little, paper sign that said "Grid Connect" and hung it on the door. Glenn and several other employees worked for the next four months without a salary until the Grid Connect business got going. It's clear that Glenn has been extremely dedicated to working for Grid Connect from day one.

Employee Spotlight: Jon Allured, Lead Developer

on Allured has been with Grid Connect for a little over a year now as the lead developer. Jon spends most of his day pair programming with Erik as they work on the new ConnectSense app and other client projects. Jon says there are a lot of interesting problems to solve in their various projects.

Employee Spotlight: Mike Justice, Founder and President

Mike Justice is the Founder and President of Grid Connect. Before the Grid Connect, Mike founded Synergetic Micro Systems, which was later acquired by Lantronix in 2001. After working on the Lantronix team for a couple of years, Mike decided it was time to form another company. Grid Connect was founded in 2003 and has been selling and creating great networking products and technologies since.

Employee Spotlight: Jonathan Witthoeft, Software Engineer

Jonathan Witthoeft has been working with the Grid Connect team for the past five years. After hearing about Grid Connect from a friend, he applied for a technical support position while finishing up his degree in electrical engineering. After spending three years leading tech support at Grid Connect, Jon has fully transitioned to a software engineering position where he spends much of his time working on various ZigBee and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) projects.

Smart bosses reveal their secrets to hiring

If you're a small-business owner in Chicago, your glass probably looks half-full compared with this time last year. The regional economy is slowly recovering from its stumble, more banks are showing enthusiasm for lending and consumer spending is up. Enough of you are confident that, in a survey earlier this year conducted by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, 71 percent of you plan to grow your small businesses over the next 12 months.

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