With a priority of leading the Investments Team whose priority is creating, implementing, and evolving various investment mechanisms, including BRC and other grant and loan programs, that are designed to help Wyoming’s communities and businesses thrive economically. This role also develops and strengthens relationships with various stakeholders for the purpose of creating tailored funding resources. The Investments Director oversees funding, policy, service delivery, management of investments, and technical assistance to build resilient Wyoming communities and optimal investments of public funds and resources through transparent processes that align with the state’s economic development strategy.

Help to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Wyoming by engaging in the community and understanding the assets and resources that are available throughout the State. I have found that the best way to engage in the ecosystem and help create momentum is to attend regional pitch challenges, collaborate with incubators like IMPACT 307, participate in the gBETA accelerator events, and work closely with other partners. One partner group that plays a critical role in the ecosystem is investors and understanding each investor's goals, capacity, and investment thesis have been very beneficial in making connections in the ecosystem. In this role, I also have the privilege of managing Wyoming’s Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR/STTR) matching grant program that supports start-ups in commercializing their innovations.

Bert offers more than 15 years of professional experience in the digital, UI/UX and the web marketing space, culminating with his role as Manager of Digital Experience for a for TJX Corp. Having a creative background with exceptional marketing, analytics and UI/UX experience. Bert’s passion is servant leadership and he shares his unique skill set in assembling and training outstanding teams with the ability to see projects from multiple perspectives while creating innovative and successful initiatives for small businesses to Fortune 100 companies.

Working with the team to acquire new client signups and helping clients drive increased sales through our unique eCommerce platform. Exceptional user experience, dialed in features and phenomenal customer support are the ingredients in this recipe to success.

Focused on leading the Mountain News content and development teams to create a great user experience that engages users and makes driving traffic more efficient. Including building strategies, road maps and managing large scale development projects.

Manage the web marketing team as well as the UI/UX team at Sierra Trading Post. Responsibilities include budget projections and tracking, dashboards review, project design and prioritization, project testing, user testing and analysis, as well as team growth and devolopement

Manage the web marketing team as well as the UI/UX team at Sierra Trading Post. Responsibilities include budget, dashboards, project design, project testing, and user testing.

This was a transitionary role for me. As the Web Marketing Manager, I began to enjoy helping my team grow and take on new responsibilities. I learned in order to be to be an effective manager, I had to delegate. I had to adjust to not attaining that instant sense of gratification at the end of a task or project. It meant I had to do more training and work toward accomplishing the larger, less specific tasks and projects like building dashboards for each channel, including mobile and a buyer’s dashboard. The transition to delegation and training was a difficult one, but I soon started seeing the fruits of investing in my team.

I spent the first few months of this position diving into the depths of SEO, specing out new projects and ensuring we were aligned with the most current best practices to gained a solid understanding. This new understanding gave me the insight necessary to hire an amazing SEO Specialist. Now, with both the SEO and SEM channels running smoothly, I focused on strategy. I set goals and started thinking like an entrepreneur to balancing performance, growth, coverage and understanding of how both paid and organic search work together. This is also where I started learning what being a manager really meant: giving the credit to the team, taking the flack when things didn’t go right, removing roadblocks for the team and helping them grow.

This position allowed me to improve my Excel skills while tracking, measuring and monitoring keyword performance for more than 250K keywords. Not only did I get to manage our paid search channel I also managed our comparison shopping engines (CSE’s) and the data feeds that powered them. At that time, we worked with 15 separate CSE partners and 4 search engines. I built some great industry relationships that resulted in improved bidding strategies and increased performance. From this opportunity, I began to understand the depth of digital marketing. This position also gave me a different perspective on spend, ROAS and new customer growth, all of which helped to shape my vision for a strong marketing strategy.

This was a big change and learning experience for me. Not only did I know almost nothing about digital marketing, affiliates, or KPI’s, I also had never worked for a company this size. After a few weeks of training, I quickly learned the KPI’s, Affiliates, Networks and Excel (which was the beginning of my passion for data analysis). I also learned the value of relationships while working closely with more than 15,000 affiliates I was responsible for maintaining. On a day-to-day basis, I was responsible for producing newsletters, building promotions, resolving issues and negotiating ad buys for our affiliate partners. After about 6 months in this role, I discovered through the data that we were overpaying affiliates. I worked with our internal development team to resolve the issue and saved the company money.

I was very blessed to have the opportunity to lead Derailed.com from ideation through strategy and to launch. Derailed was a multi-faceted test site for Sierra Trading Post. The intent was to engage and find a way to improve the conversion rate of a younger demographic of outdoor enthusiasts, and see how fast we could develop a feature-rich site from concept to processing the first customer’s order. Derailed allowed me to work with multi-functional teams across the company. From this, I learned how to effectively communicate with different personality types and tiers of management. I also got to experience the momentum and power of buy-in created when involving other dynamic teams. During the first two years the Derailed site saw amazing growth and and so did everyone involved.

Warehouse Twenty One was the next evolution of Local Creative. The new-and-improved business was born from a Local Creative and Corethree merger. I stayed on through the merger and continued to learn and embrace the small business environment. From the web perspective, I learned about ADA compliance, and continued to polish my CSS and DIV based designs. On the creative front, I learned more about types of paper than I ever thought existed, plus developed a heightened attention to detail in design and learned positive ways to vocalize critiques. I also learned a few new skills like AdWords and how to write contracts, proposals, work orders and even graphic standards manuals.

Leveraged my existing HTML knowledge base and my newly learned design skills to fulfill client needs. We produced all of the typical marketing assets (catalogs, books, vinyl stickers, banners, letterhead, envelopes, business cards, newsletters, postcards, and invitations) for small-to-medium-sized businesses. We also created top shelf web design that was W3C valid HTML and cross-browser tested before it was deployed. During this time, I dramatically improved my HTML and CSS skills and picked up a few new skills like InDesign, Illustrator and developed an eye for strong design.

This was my first job out of college where I helped a fellow graduate start a consulting business. While I was there we focused on website creation, diagnosing and resolving technology issues, as well as technology and network training for business. This was also my first exposure to software like Adobe Photoshop, ImageReady, Dreamweaver and the mac OS.

Supervised the second shift production and assembly crew. And was a certified forklift driver.