Mark Meyer is the founder and managing partner of E&M Strategic Development, LLC. His focus is to bring hospitality development to tertiary or overlooked markets focused in the Midwest. To bring these projects to reality, Mark works with the communities to identify the business gap and create win-win strategies to find a potential solution. Often these strategies utilize Tax Increment Financing (TIF), Tax Credits, and/or different leverage through the capital markets. Mark’s upbringing in central Nebraska taught him to value hard work, honesty, and a good bottle of whiskey. He has carried these values throughout both his career and leisure time as a board member in the Illinois Small Business Advocacy Council (SBAC) and host of the monthly Whiskey Wednesday Chicago Loop networking event. Mark’s background as a Consumer Banker from 1988-1994 and owner of a mortgage company in Peoria, IL from 1994-2005 gives him unique insight to the balance of entrepreneurship and risk identification. After receiving a MBA in 2007 to from Bradley University, Mark began to embrace his knowledge over the next five years and invested in his first hotel/restaurant, engaged in private consulting, founded a medical oxygen distribution company and engine testing lab in Peoria. In 2012, Mark sold the majority of his positions and moved with his family to the Chicago area. In Chicago, Mark took time to find ways to focus on giving back to the community through teaching and assisting start-ups until 2016, when he bought ICI Staffing, a boutique staffing firm in the Chicago Loop. While managing the staffing company, Mark’s interest in the hospitality industry returned when he identified an undeveloped 40-acre parcel in Elkhorn, WI. Under E&M Strategic Development, Mark developed a Holiday Inn Express & Suites (opened 2019) and the first location of The Waddling Goose Smokehouse (opens 2021) as well as brought a Love's Travel Stop to the development. Currently, Mark is in the final stages of a mixed-use development anchored by a 143-room Homewood Suites in Skokie, IL and early stages of a couple new hotel and restaurant developments elsewhere in the Midwest.