Awesome Inc

With 30 years of restaurant experience, Rob Perez has seen first-hand how to build restaurant brands and how prevalent addiction is in the industry he loves. Along with his wife Diane, he founded Dv8 Kitchen as a social enterprise focused on giving second chance employment opportunities to people in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction through vocational, on-the-job training. 

Dv8 Kitchen focuses on providing top-quality food, service, and atmosphere for every guest, and by providing “a better-than-expected” dining experience, the hope is to build a new standard for the second chance employee to live by and to change the way the guests perceive people in addiction recovery.

Chris Sullivan is a co-founder of the Outback Steakhouse restaurant company and a member of the Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall of Fame. 

Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall of Fame profile | Founders Series video

Chris is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and while in college, he would work the busy seasons down in Fort Lauderdale to pay for school, which was his first entry into the restaurant industry. Chris' main restaurant ventures included Steak and Ale, Benningans, and Carrabba's before founding Outback.

The first Outback Steakhouse was opened in March 1988. From 1991 to 2005, he was CEO of OSI Restaurant (parent corporation of Outback), after serving as the first President of the organization. In 2007, OSI Restaurant was sold for $3.1B to Bain Capital Partners and Catterton Partners. Outback has 968 locations worldwide and also operates over 300 locations of Carrabba's Italian Grills, Fleming's Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar, Roy's, Cheeseburger in Paradise, Bonefish Grill, Paul Lee's Chinese Kitchen, and several other hospitality-related businesses.

Chase Fairchild with Manchester Coffee Co. and Manchester Studios is the prime example of the Enneagram's Type 7: The Busy, Fun-Loving Type: Spontaneous, Versatile, Distractible, and Scattered. 

Chase, focuses on building relationships first in life and work. He lets people know they come first. He is constantly exploring new opportunities for growth and looking to see where he can connect with people personally and professionally.

Allen Warford (formerly) with A Cup of Commonwealth, Chocolate Holler, and KRFT Goods is a design guru and entrepreneur with an architectural background and a decade of small business experience. Allen resides in Lexington, Kentucky, and highly values his people. His community and values are driving factors in his entrepreneurial and creative pursuits.

A Cup of Commonwealth's mission is: Embrace community. Serve others. Create culture. They are known for their culture and great coffee throughout the city of Lexington. 

Morgan Franklin of Atlas Trust Real Estate is one of the co-working tenants of Awesome Inc and is always keeping things interesting. During our 2018 Summer Retreat, he led a session on something he cares passionately about, sales. Morgan is a digital marketer who excels within the real estate industry and is in the top 1% of all agents nationwide.  

He has a background in corporate finance and private equity, as well as having started several businesses with some pretty awesome failures.  As a mentor and coach for many small startups, Morgan is currently leading an entrepreneurial workshop in Lexington to help people make their dreams an everyday reality.

We hear from the 40th company to be accepted into Awesome Inc's Fellowship program, OmniLife. 

Eric Pahl shares the why behind OmniLife - an unfortunate career-ending motor vehicle accident left his friend (and co-founder) Dalton Shaull, a former University of Iowa football player, with paralysis in his right arm, in addition to family members being waitlisted for organ transplantations. His passion for medical software in hopes to influence medical support led to what the company is now today. OmniLife (formerly HealthTech Solutions) was founded in 2016 based on the need to make the organ procurement process more efficient. OmniLife's SaaS offers the ability to transplant additional organs by reducing donated organ waste.

In part two, Keith identifies why you need to know your story as a startup. He notes that as people, we relate to stories well, and this is connection founders need to be able to use to their strengths when networking and working with customers. 

Additionally, we hear from Smart Rotation's founder, Madison Hartung, as she shares the "why" behind her company - Smart Rotation provides automatic rotational scheduling solutions for gymnastics to allow facility owners to focus on providing high-quality gymnastics instruction.

In this first episode, Keith McMunn shares about Awesome Inc’s flagship entrepreneurial program, The Fellowship. He goes in-depth about his role and what exactly the Fellowship program is. He points out how we serve startup companies across the state of Kentucky while making note of some insights he's observed within the entrepreneurial world. And, Keith talks about naming the newest addition to the McMunn family, his son "Wells."

APAX Software Senior Developer Dave Mitchell reflects on his involvement and gained experience after participating in the 2018 Startup Weekend Lexington event. 

Recorded live from Base 110 on Lexington Entrepreneurship Day (LED), Curt Jones the founder of Dippin' Dots discusses how he started his company and how Pearse Lyons, the founder of Alltech, both encouraged and influenced him to follow his passions.

LED is designed to celebrate, support, and learn from some of the greatest entrepreneurs. The events offered throughout LED promote the local Startup Ecosystem and the players who work hard to make sure Kentucky becomes an even better place to innovate.