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Sun Devil 100 winner shares secrets for vaulting into entrepreneurship
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of ASU alumni who own or lead businesses around the globe. We caught up with Holmquist recently and asked him to share his keys to business success. How did the desire to own your own business manifest itself when you were younger, and how did you channel it? I grew up in an entrepreneurial household since my parents owned a family business. Their entrepreneurial influence intrigued me, and the process of designing systems came naturally to me and I enjoyed it. For example, during elementary school, riding BMX bikes on dirt tracks in the desert was very popular. Most kids would 52
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Making the leap love to spend hours riding the tracks and jumping their bikes. However, I always preferred to build and perfect the jumps and trails rather than actually ride the tracks. What was your first entrepreneurial venture? What did you learn from it? My first outlet was a business in which I served cold drinks to the construction workers who were building new homes in my subdivision. Next, I talked my parents into fronting me money to buy snacks and drinks in bulk to enhance my small business. Instead of limiting our audience to those who happened to drive by, we converted the drink stand into a mobile business, using
a wagon to haul cold drinks and snacks to each of the construction sites. Like many young kids, my attention span was short and I couldn’t resist eating the inventory, so the venture never took off.
variety of invaluable business processes and logistics operations. The knowledge gained from that experience gave me the confidence to make the leap to full-time entrepreneur.
How did ASU and your participation in an entrepreneurial internship program help prepare you for launching a business as an adult? The entrepreneurship internship put me on the path that ultimately led to founding Stream Logistics. ASU handmatched me with a young logistics company with an impressive growth trajectory. There, I was exposed to a
You’ve said in news stories that “The hardest thing was making the jump — making that initial commitment to leave a stable job with a promising career path to be an entrepreneur.” Why was that a hard decision for you? It was a tough decision because of the security I had to give up in order to chase my dream. I was married and
DEANNA DENT/ASU
arson Holmquist spent his childhood dreaming of owning his own business. A 2008 graduate of the W. P. Carey School of Business, he put that vision on the fast track to becoming reality in 2012, when he launched Stream Logistics with a partner. The business was ranked No. 1 in the 2017 class of the Sun Devil 100, a university event celebrating the achievements
