Sheboygan County is home to some of Wisconsin’s largest and most recognizable generational companies: Kohler, Johnsonville, Sargento, Vollrath, Bemis and Acuity, to name a few. It’s Brian Doudna’s (’90) job to make sure the business community in which they’re located is doing all it can to support them and help them — and every other interested business in the county — reinvest and grow.
Four years ago, Doudna, an economics alum, became the executive director of the Sheboygan County Economic Development Corporation (SCEDC). The organization is a nonprofit that offers business and workforce development services to both established companies and startups in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin’s 13th most populous county.
“We just have something in the water that helps people ideate and go to market here,” says Doudna, a self-described farm kid who grew up in Richland Center. “And we’re really focused on, how do we continue to build those generational companies? In Sheboygan County, when someone starts a company, they just keep growing it, and they don’t really sell off. They just keep what they have built over time.”
Doudna came to UW–Madison with an unclear career path but wanted to play baseball (back when the university still had a Division One program). A shoulder injury suffered during college brought a focus on finding a career for which he had passion.
Instead of spending his summer solely focused on throwing baseballs, Doudna took an internship with an economic development organization in Richland County, doing some economic development analysis on hotel development and a downtown redevelopment initiative.
“It really opened my eyes to the opportunities of the field where you can make an impact in the community, which quite honestly, I had never really heard about in great detail,” Doudna says. “When I went back for my fall semester, I started looking at different programs tied to economic development, and it just really deepened my interest.”
After graduation, Doudna went into downtown development, adding yet another dimension to his economic experience. As his career progressed, he relocated to different regions of Wisconsin, always with a focus on economic and community development work across the state — in Oneida, Portage and Eau Claire counties.
In 2010, Wisconsin didn’t have an incumbent governor running for re-election, therefore, the Wisconsin Economic Development Association (WEDA), a statewide trade association, implemented an Economic Development Competitiveness Study with a coalition of trade association partners. As incoming President of WEDA, Doudna served as the primary project and coalition manager for the study that was endorsed by both gubernatorial candidates and eventually transformed the state’s Department of Commerce into the current Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), an entity that is charged with implementing economic development policies across the state of Wisconsin. Several years after that transformation, Doudna became the executive director of WEDA.
In Sheboygan County, one of Doudna’s first actions as executive director was to work with his 38-member board to create a three-year strategic direction that incorporated themed cohorts on topics like talent recruitment, financial tools, innovation and housing that could meet with SCEDC staff and leadership to keep the SCEDC abreast of the business community’s needs. It’s an approach that has helped to successfully leverage the SCEDC’s resources and bring in new investment.
“We always have to hear the voice of the customer and understand what the pains are in the marketplace, and then we need to be more effective on addressing that as a community-wide initiative, rather than one individual company trying to deal with that issue,” he says.
One of the keenest shared issues among Doudna’s Sheboygan constituents is a shortage of entry-level homes in the area. After all, it’s difficult to grow a generational company like Kohler or Carbliss — a hot new startup that produces canned handcrafted cocktails — when the employees you’d like to hire and move to Sheboygan County can’t find an affordable place to live.
When Doudna arrived in Sheboygan in 2020, he and his staff identified that the county only had 10 days of inventory of homes under $250,000. Typically, experts suggest a healthy home market should have about six months’ worth of available home stock.
“We had jobs, we had corporate headquarters, but we didn’t have homes for people who we wanted to locate here,” Doudna explains.
To address the issue, Doudna and the SCEDC partnered with four of their private sector members — the Kohler Company, Johnsonville, Masters Gallery, Sargento Foods and Sheboygan County. In the short term, the SCEDC raised $10 million to begin building entry-level, affordable, individual single-family homes. Those homes are advertised and sold "at cost" on the SCEDC’s talent recruiting website, someplacebetter.org. The SCEDC has a goal of having at least four homes for sale each month for the next several years.
Doudna and his three siblings were first-generation college students. As an undergraduate, Doudna’s schedule limited his opportunity to fully enjoy campus life, but he has enjoyed his alma mater more after graduating. Today, he describes himself as a creator, not a maintainer.
“I’ve always been passionate about helping others, and this field has allowed me to have that passion and make sure that my work will have a long-term impact across the state,” he says. "And for that, I have been blessed to have found this career path while at UW–Madison."