WAUPUN — Ten Fond du Lac County area entrepreneurs participated in the Ignite Rural Business Pitch event held in the Waupun City Hall Auditorium on November 6, 2025.
The event saw each participant give a pitch for their business idea or expansion project, making their best case for why their business deserved the top spots for a piece of the collective $50,000 prize to be split 3-2 for the top two contestants, as decided by a panel of judges and a tiebreaking vote from the audience.
Ignite Rural is an entrepreneurial accelerator program organized by Envision Greater Fond du Lac—the business development organization for the Fond du Lac County region. It is a five week program preparing participants for the final pitch event in the final week, giving them skills both for business development and presentation.
Out of the 2025 Cohort’s ten total participants, four Waupun entrepreneurs were represented in the cohort: Christina Kartechner of Kartechner Girls and Flower Co., Tara Riteris of 151 Salon, Michael Strzelecki of Last Mile Parts, and Andrea Cisar of Founder’s Collective.
The other participants included Olivia Halbur (Halbur’s Heavenly Hill), Katie Fuhrmann (Salchert Meats), Kaitlyn Kenealy (Into the Woods Wellness), Andrew Rieder (Agile 3D Solutions), Nicole Sippel (Airy Point Farms), and Kurt Wismer (GRiTedu by Rewired Dynamics).
“It was an honor to lead the last 5 weeks of the cohort,” said Raina Lyman, Senior Director of Economic Development at Envision Greater Fond du Lac. “They all grew in the understanding of their business and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The room’s competitive and collaborative spirit brought an unexpected value to the program.”
Lyman organized the Ignite Rural Business Accelerator Program during the workshop groups and spoke during the event.
The event was attended by many members of the Fond du Lac County and Waupun business community, Mayor Rohn Bishop, and City Administrator Kathy Schlieve.
“This is an event we’ve been trying to start for ten years,” Schlieve said after the event. “I have invested enormous time in entrepreneurial ecosystem building through the Ignite network, so we have a lot of really good relationships, and fundamentally it started with that—the idea of how do you get a group of people working together to support small business growth.”
A huge part of Envision is the development of local business, which Schlieve credited Raina Lyman with a lot of good work being done for the program after she came into her role.
“It’s exciting because there’s so much entrepeurnurial spirit—it’s alive and well in our community, so we just need to learn how to tap into it and grow it. And we can have great growtrth opportunities that come from it. We really need to think about how to resource it. And that will be our next challenge, how to bring it back here next year.”
There were 26 applicants to this year’s event, and only ten selected to participate in the event. Two were selected as winners of a $50,000 total fund.
“The participants all had really great ideas and brought different strengths to the program, I think they’re all setting themselves up for success,” Schlieve said. “I’m glad I wasn’t a judge, I would have had a hard time choosing a winner.”
As for the number of Waupun-based participants, Schlieve said, “40% of the group is pretty good, so I think we just need to keep working at it. That’s why we spent time adding programs at the High School. The more we inspire the entrepreneurial spirit the more it will carry itself, we just have to get the right building blocks in place.”
First place winner Kurt Wismer received $30,000 to expand Rewired Dynamics’ GRiTedu program—an educational tool to develop resilience, self-leadership, and “relational intelligence” among students. The program was ready to ship to any number of schools by the next day, per the pitch.
Second place winner Kaitlyn Kenealy received $20,000 to expand Into the Woods Wellness, a “mobile food truck initiative aimed at addressing urgent health concerns in local rural communities.”
Envision Greater Fond du Lac published their own article about the program last week. The program’s workshop events were held in the Warrior Innovation Center at the Waupun Area High School.
