Pete Lukszys is a distinguished lecturer with the Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management and the Department of Operations & Information Management at the Wisconsin School of Business (WSB). Pete is also a double Badger having received his Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering and his MBA degree in supply chain management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has won several teaching and service awards.
In 2016, Pete was having coffee in the Capital Café with an old friend Dr. Nick Von Bergen, a physician at American Family Children’s Hospital. Nick was discussing a medical device that he and a team of UW biomedical engineering students were working on to help physicians better monitor arrhythmias in pediatric patients after cardiac surgery. Pete loved this idea and felt that there was huge potential for the product, the AtriAmp. Pete enthusiastically signed on as the founding CEO, and not long after, the business entity Atrility Medical was formed. Pete and Nick sought help from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and the Business and Entrepreneurship Clinic (B&E Clinic) to help license, develop, and commercialize their invention.
For those who are unfamiliar with the B&E Clinic, the Wisconsin School of Business and WARF partnered to provide a free resource for Wisconsin-based entrepreneurs to help nascent entrepreneurs navigate through the many business issues that arise when starting and growing a new business. The clinic assists growing business in developing a strategy, conducting a competitive analysis and making improvements in many other areas. The clinic is led by director Michael Williams and offers MBA, law, and senior-level undergraduate students the opportunity to gain experiential learning in the domain of entrepreneurship.
Atrility Medical was able to come to the B&E Clinic and find help developing its business plan, which was an important requirement in WARF licensing the rights for the AtriAmp to the company. They also received assistance in generating proforma financial statements and in creating financial modeling. Pete was also able to work through the possibility of introducing a second product for Atrility Medical. The B&E clinic supported this idea by providing market and competitive analysis that helped the stakeholders at Atrility decide not pursue the development of the product, a decision that Pete says he does not regret.
2021 was a big year for Atrility who won the Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest. In March the company recognized its first sale just as Pete was handing off his role to a dedicated CEO. Pete now serves as a Senior Advisor and Board observer for the company and credits the B&E Clinic as being instrumental in getting the company on the right path in its early stages.
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