Brian Deurloo is the president and founder of Frog Creek Partners

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And here’s where the legend really begins ...

At exactly 2:38 a.m. on his daughter’s 8th birthday in 2016, Deurloo said he woke up with an idea: a stormwater filter that could be installed just about anywhere in the world, a filter that could be easily serviced and successful in stopping stormwater pollution - without causing any urban flooding.  Less than 10 minutes later, he was in his garage building a prototype - which is proudly displayed at Frog Creek Partners HQ.  By 4 a.m., he was at Walmart buying more supplies to tinker with his prototype. A few weeks later, he was one of the winners of the Wyoming Technology Business Center’s Startup Challenge, earning seed money, mentorship and office space in the business center for a year.  “I have a good talent for spatial orientation in my head, ‘’ Deurloo said. “I can throw things around in my head, move gears and see how things work. By like 5 a.m., I pretty much had a working prototype. Over the course of a month or two, I filed like three provisional patent applications - I was working 18, 20 hours a day, but I didn’t have a job - and I told my wife, ‘Honey, I need you to be 100 percent behind this - and she was.’  “Then I won the challenge, got some grant money, got an office and, well, here we are.”  Here we are, indeed. In 2021, Forbes chose Deurloo, and his business partner/Chief Financial Officer Christopher Tippie, as one of the “Next 1,000, a Forbes list of entrepreneurs from across America with less than $10 million in revenue or funding.”  “Brian is a little like a mad scientist,” Tippie said. “Ideas and innovations come to him constantly. While killing time on one long business trip, I was telling him about a documentary I saw about origami. He got ‘that look’ on his face and about two hours later he outlined how we could incorporate origami into our products by creating hand-foldable stainless steel components.

The original Gutter Bin in its final production design.

 “His steel origami idea resulted in significant reductions in manufacturing costs and created massive shipping efficiencies as our bulkiest products now ship flat.  “Brian is a creator at heart and is driven to solve problems,” Tipple added. “But not in a duct tape and baling wire way. He’s driven to find the best, more straightforward and lasting solution to any problem. He’s always thinking many years past the immediate fix.”

What Frog Creek Does

“The idea is really pretty simple,” Deurloo said of his original Gutter Bin concept. “We like to think of it as a coffee filter, but for storm drains.”  While not the only catch basin in production, Frog Creek Partners employs a patented Mundus Bag water filter (Latin for “clean world”). So the

Frog Creek Partners donated a filtration system to the city of Cheyenne and the state of Wyoming, complete with a Steamboat logo, that was installed in front of the historic Capitol Complex. Governor Mark Gordon, Secretary of State Ed Buchanan, and State Treasurer Curt Meier attended the dedication on July 14, 2021.

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contents can be easily measured, geocoded and imported into GIS software, letting the municipality see where pollution is coming from. The Mundus Bag also is designed to allow water to drain from the streets even if it becomes completely full. No flooding. There are even different kinds of Mundus Bags, for trash and vegetative waste to plastic, sediment, hydrocarbons and heavy metals, which means it’s customizable to location and season.

Customers can put their logos on it too, which helps build public awareness.   The Gutter Bin retails from around $500-900 per unit, but Deurloo does give volume discounts. Each unit has a rated life of 25 years.  The first Gutter Bin was installed in 2016 in Sheridan to protect the Goose Creek watershed, where they’re still in use. There also are installations in other parts of Wyoming, along with Colorado and California.

      Deurloo said the company is focused on expansion in three areas of the U.S.: the Intermountain West, Pacific Coast and

A few highlights about Frog Creek Partners:

 Founded in 2016, the company has raised about $1.7 million in investment. Chesapeake Bay area. Sales also have begun in the Southeast, as well as the Great Lakes region.  In Denver, a dozen Gutter Bins removed close to 2,500 pounds of pollution in a single year.  “To put this in even greater context, we

 The company’s valuation increased seven-fold in estimate there are about 40 million catch basins

our years.

 2020 was a record year for sales.

 The company set a sales record in the first half of 2021.

in the United States and the vast majority are unprotected,” Deurloo said. “That puts the approximate pollution capture potential for the U.S. at 41 million tons or 8.2 billion pounds per year.”  “The two missions of my company are quite  It has a 300% average year-over-year growth for the simple: To clean stormwater is number one; last three years. number two is make money so I can clean more  There are only 12 fully approved stormwater products stormwater,” Deurloo said. that have both Full Trash Capture and mosquito vector  “Two things make Brian successful: One is his

control certification within the state of California; passion for what he’s doing and why he’s doing it

Frog Creek Partners manufactures three of the approved devices.

- it is genuine, pure and infectious - and his drive is relentless,” Tippie said. “Two, he’s nimble and doesn’t fall in love with his ideas, meaning he’s not  Besides the Gutter Bin, Frog Creek Partners builds and afraid to abandon them if a better solution sells these other stormwater products: the Channel appears. It might sound silly, but falling in love

Filtration System; the Curb Inlet Filter; the Drop Inlet with your own idea is a massive blindspot that

Filter; as well as the original Mundas Bag. plagues many creators in business.”

Wyoming colleges and university continued from page 12

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Rooted in the traditions of the West and surrounded by the rugged Rocky Mountains, the University of Wyoming is nationally recognized for their expert facility, top-ranked academics, and world-class campus. UW offers hands-on training and opportunities for students to earn certifications and hone their craft in their industry.

The Final Word

 “The problem is absolutely enormous and I don’t think people get it,’ Deurloo said.  Let’s take cigarette butts, Deurloo’s biggest bugaboo. Read these facts, from the research paper, “Toxicity of cigarette butts, and their chemical components, to marine and freshwater fish” from San Diego State University:  “Cigarette butts are the most common form of litter in the world, as approximately 5.6 trillion cigarettes are smoked every year worldwide. Cigarette waste constitutes an estimated 30% of the total litter (by count) on US shorelines, waterways and on land (LitterFreePlanet, 2009). In fact, cigarette butts are the most common debris item collected along waterways during the Ocean Conservancy’s yearly International Coastal Cleanup.  “A study performed by Moriwaki et al found that arsenic, nicotine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals are released into the environment by littered ‘roadside waste’ cigarette butts. Moreover, previous studies have shown chemicals in cigarette butt leachate can be acutely toxic to aquatic organisms.”  “There’s only 3 trillion trees on this planet - and there’s over 4 trillion cigarette butts littered all over the world in a year,” Deurloo said. “According to the Centers for Disease Control, Casper had the highest number of smokers in the U.S. in 2014 -30.6 percent of Casper residents smoked. I estimate that 44 million cigarettes are littered in Casper every year - 44 million!”  To be sure, each time a Mundas Bag is removed, it is weighed, Deurloo said. On average - and just in Casper - every Gutter Bin/Mundas Bag bag stops some 200 pounds of debris from reaching the North Platte River.  “We’ve got 5,000 storm drains in Casper, that’s a million pounds of pollution hitting the North Platte River from just 55,000 people,” he said. “We’ve got to do something - it’s our fault, it’s human’s fault - and we can’t help it. But we have to make some changes.  “I have chosen to focus on stormwater pollution,” he added. “Others are focused on agriculture waste, carbon capture and air pollution. But for me, it’s water, because there’s no such thing as Democrat water or Republican water. It is everybody’s water. It should be clean. Because clean water is a good thing.”

 See Brian and a demonstration of   Frog Creek Partners products here. 

What Students Need to Know About Entrepreneurship and Life

Simply, Deurloo said, what you do matters. Make a choice to do good things.

 “Learn the soft skills in life,” he said. “Call people back.

Say please and thank you. Show up to work on time.

Be civil.

 “Whatever you do - whether you go to college, go into the military or go straight into the workforce, we need you to be involved,” he added. “Not everyone needs to go to college. We need people who know how to weld.

You thought that everything you needed to know you learned in high school - you’re dead wrong. You’ve got to keep on learning. Teach yourself a trade - but never stop learning. Read a lot.”

 “Find something that you’re passionate about and do it,” Tippie said “ I’ve been in the business world for more than 30 years, and I can tell you with certainty that passion is often the difference between success and failure.”