After coaching Division I football at colleges such as the University of Colorado Boulder, Northwestern University in Illinois and UCLA in California, John Wristen returned to the school that gave him his start — Colorado State University-Pueblo.

Pueblo’s historic Eastside was the city’s first neighborhood. Today, it’s a hub for small, family-owned businesses that have been in the area for decades — some have been open in the same location for 50 years. But in recent years, the Eastside has shown its age, and many business owners blame an apathetic city government combined with ongoing road construction and closure of a major grocery store for the area’s business woes.

t’s a southern Colorado business story that began more than 50 years ago in Rocky Ford. That’s where Sylvia Gobin purchased an office supply store (which has since closed) that eventually expanded to seven locations in the region, employing four generations of her family.

Entrepreneurship has been ingrained in Timothy Zercher’s psyche from a young age. While watching multiple people in his family build their own businesses — including his father and two sisters — Zercher always knew he would one day do the same.

Mountain States Employers Council, the regional employment law advocate, resource and training entity, announced it will be rebranding and changing its name to ‘Employers Council’ effective immediately.

A childhood computer programming hobby gradually became the backbone of a business for Jeff Kronlage. Kronlage worked for a decade to grow his computer repair company before selling it. All the while he was working toward earning his Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert recognition — a certification considered by many as the most prestigious networking certification in the industry.

When he’s not working as a broker at Cameron Butcher Co. to help local businesses find commercial space, Caleb David is helping his wife, Rebecca, run The Table Initiative, a nonprofit that aims to humanize social justice issues worldwide. Some might not see the connection between commercial real estate and founding a nonprofit, but David has discovered a way to tie those two diverse skill sets together.

In 2016, the locally headquartered Chefs Catalog, a retailer of high-performance kitchen tools, equipment and supplies, closed after 36 years in operation. The Denver Post reported a total of 180 jobs lost in Colorado and California combined. A little more than a year after initial reports that the Target-owned company would be shut down, two former Chefs Catalog employees opened their own shop: The Cooks Marketplace.

Having lived in Mexico City, South Korea, Alaska, Missouri, Texas and Colorado Springs, a life filled with travel led to a career in storytelling for Andrea Sinclair. When she moved to Colorado Springs in 2012, she began writing for the Gazette. Two years ago, Sinclair moved from journalism to telling the story of one of the city’s largest health systems, working as a communications specialist for Penrose-St. Francis Health Services.