Laird Hedlund Nossuli, CEO, and Bernard Nossuli, COO will join Mike Colwell for the September edition of Square One DSM Startup Stories to share the tale of a vision conceived and brought to life by company founder and Laird’s late father Dennis Hedlund.

I have had the good fortune of working with this company and its executives. Their story is good one.

Here is an excerpt from the Square One DSM press release:

A fairly circuitous path led to the creation of iEmergent and its cloud based tool, Mortgage Market Smart. Dennis Hedlund, after many years as an executive in telecommunications and mortgage companies, saw an opportunity to apply the forecasting methods he had developed for large call centers to quantifying future market opportunities for mortgage lenders. Taking the entrepreneurial leap, he left Wells Fargo and began studying decades of data from a wide variety of public and private sources. He identified unique patterns that would ultimately lead to the development of the iEmergent forecasting model…

Diversifying over the years through product development and service offerings, they have penetrated not only the large national businesses and regional lenders but are now targeting the smaller community institutions with data, products and resources that are tailored to each institution’s size and complexity…

Laird, along with her sister and mother initially joined her father in his pursuit of growing the company. Although both sisters would step away for a while to continue their educations, circumstances called Laird to take the helm as CEO, with the illness and untimely passing of her father. “I had to take the reins in a way I was not at all prepared to do,” confesses this Swarthmore graduate in Religion, who also holds a Masters in Social Work. As she reflected on those challenging times, Laird states “you just keep moving forward, staying true to your goals and your visions,” foreshadowing some of the insights she can share with the Startup Stories audience…

Laird’s husband Bernard came on board as COO at the time of her father’s illness, taking his own entrepreneurial leap leaving a position at DuPont, to help the company continue. “While it is something of a double edged sword, being small and nimble has served us well,” he adds, anxious to share the value they have found in augmenting their in-house skills as needed through outsourcing, consulting and contracting.

Details on the event:

$15 admission fee (includes lunch) or free (if you don’t want lunch).

11: 30 a.m.
September 21st 2016
Greater Des Moines Partnership

700 Locust Street, Suite 100

Conference Center (street level)

Purchase your tickets/make reservations – http://members.desmoinesmetro.com/events/details/september-startup-stories-53786

Contact at info@squareonedsm.com for more information.