Milwaukee resident Ross Younger and his company Advantage Point 360 were given the $10,000 Project Pitch It Award during this week’s episode. The company’s 360° Virtual Tours allow businesses to share their space in an immersive virtual environment. Customers can experience a virtual walk-through of a business from any device.
Advantage Point 360 has three primary products: updating a company’s appearance on Google Maps and Google Images, creating virtual tours of a business, and creating other social media content that can be seen in 3D places like Facebook’s metaverse.
“We’ve just gone through a virtual revolution,” Younger said. “What we are doing at Advantage Point 360 Productions is making the next generation of media. We believe content that is immersive and interactive is king.”
Racine entrepreneur Yolanda Coleman and her store Plush Clothing took home the Jendusa/UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Award. This includes access to workshops, programming and support services including investment guidance and mentoring from UW-Milwaukee’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, plus $5,000.
Plush Clothing caters to plus-size women, offering trendy but reasonably priced clothing pieces and accessories. Coleman, who has been in the retail industry for over 25 years, started her company in 2019. She wants to empower women by enabling them to look their best. She can cater to the specific needs of fuller-figured women by pulling from personal experience.
“I realized that a lot of stores don’t cater to the full-sized woman, which leaves us to shop online only,” Coleman said. “A lot of women, they want to come in (to the store) and touch it (the clothes) and they want to see the quality.”
Her vision for her business moving forward is to open additional locations in smaller communities.
Sheboygan residents Stephanie and Houston Hoskins and their company Debtle won the American Family/We Energies Award which includes $1,500 in cash and mentoring from a We Energies leader to support all aspects of the business, including marketing, IT, human resources, and finance.
Debtle has developed a cloud-based software that streamlines the negotiation, settlement and payment of overdue customer invoices. Debtle’s solution, which is currently being implemented at health care organizations, enables its clients to capture more in payments while paying less in fees.
“When I worked in health care finance, I was shocked at the number of patients that would call the health care system, desperately trying to negotiate their own overdue patient debt,” said Stephanie Hoskins.
The company is on a mission to tackle the consumer debt crisis that impacts over 85 million Americans each year. Hoskins said health care providers send bills out to debt collectors because they believe it is the easiest, most efficient thing to do, but debt collectors only bring back pennies per every dollar of debt. Debtle allows these health care providers to cut out the middleman and easily negotiate with customers themselves.
Debtle has also been selected by gener8tor as a past participant in the gBETA Milwaukee accelerator.
Project Pitch It airs Saturdays at 10:35 p.m. and Sundays at 11:30 a.m. in Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin on WISN-TV Channel 12. BizTimes Milwaukee is a media partner for Project Pitch It.
