This week, we are celebrating national Economic Development Week and are taking a moment to recognize the incredible resilience of our business community throughout this past year. Upstate’s dedication to helping primary employers was challenged in 2020 as we shifted gears to administer over $4.5M in grants to secondary employers who faced operational restrictions and increased financial hardship while continuing to administer programs such as the Weld County Enterprise Zone, the Weld/Larimer Revolving Loan Fund, continuing legislative support, responding to prospect leads, and growing our regional marketing efforts through the NoCo REDI partnership.
We are humbled and inspired by the Northern Colorado business community and workforce, as they have adapted and overcome the many challenges their operations faced throughout this past year. Through overcoming remote and hybrid schedules where opportunity allowed, to shifting work schedules to continue operations around the clock in order to maintain safe working conditions, the business leaders we talked to all came together and rallied their workforce to keep their staff working and their operations running as smoothly as possible.
This quote from Nick Doucette, COO of Ursa Major Technologies, sums up how many companies looked at the hardship.
“We’re going to look back on this moment and laugh, right? There’s a stoic saying that the obstacle is the way that many folks look for the end. Instead, what’s really enjoyable is the obstacle of getting to the end. You don’t tell the story about the summit, you tell a story about how you got there and the difficult parts of the climb. [The pandemic] is the obstacle. In three years, we’re going to talk about this time. So remember that and just keep going.” -Nick Doucette, COO, Ursa Major Technologies.
We invite you to hear stories from companies throughout the region by watching our video, Resiliency Through The Pandemic here: www.choosenortherncolorado.com.
