April Jill Seggebruch

Success a slam-dunk for entrepreneur

NWA Democrat-Gazette/JASON IVESTER --04/22/2015--
April Seggebruch, co-founder of Movista; photographed on Wednesday, April 22, 2015, inside The Icehouse in downtown Bentonville for nwprofiles
NWA Democrat-Gazette/JASON IVESTER --04/22/2015-- April Seggebruch, co-founder of Movista; photographed on Wednesday, April 22, 2015, inside The Icehouse in downtown Bentonville for nwprofiles

April Seggebruch splashed out on the floor -- hands propping her chin up and feet kicking absent-mindedly behind her -- while watching the Dallas Cowboys play. Her sister Lindsey stood stoically behind the TV, wondering how she got talked into holding the "rabbit ears" for her.

Her brother passed by the living room and called out to some distant part of the house: "MOM, APRIL'S BEEN WATCHING TV FOR THREE HOURS!"

April Jill Seggebruch

Date and place of birth: May 22, 1983, Urbana, Illinois

What I always tell my team at Movista: If anyone could do it, it would have already been done. Together, we will make this happen.

The best business decision I ever made: taking the risk and starting our own company.

Guests at my fantasy dinner party: Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, Madeline Albright, Walt Disney and Jay Z.

A scent that makes me nostalgic: oatmeal cookies.

If I were stranded on a desert island, I’d have to have: a bikini

People who knew me in high school thought I was a tomboy.

At any given time, I’d rather be laying in the sun.

A fashion trend I never fell victim to: low rise, wide leg jeans….seriously?!?!

What’s always in my refrigerator: orange juice and beer from Core Brewery.

My biggest self indulgence: watching TV shows on my iPad. I’m completely obsessed with ABC and HBO Go.

One phrase that describe me: “Just keep swimming.”

From the beginning, everything in Seggebruch's life has been a friendly negotiation.

She escaped her mom's rule of one hour of TV daily by counting sports games as homework; dodged changing the channel with rounds of rock-paper-scissors; and kept in touch with old friends by living with them on college summers.

Now co-founder and vice president of operations for Movista, Seggebruch uses that approachable diplomacy on a daily basis and has seen a healthy return for her business.

The company provides work-flow management, payroll and job verification within the merchandising industry from a smartphone application. It serves Wal-Mart and a variety of its vendors, including Lindt & Sprungll and the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company.

Since its founding in 2010, the company has seen 300 percent annual sales growth, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. This June, Movista is growing its team and moving into the historic Ice House building that takes up about 15,000 square feet in downtown Bentonville along the Razorback Regional Greenway trail.

Friends and business colleagues, and most consider themselves both, agree that its success stems directly from Seggebruch's work ethic and No. 1 priority: to be a team player.

"She's done a lot already, and she's not old," says lifelong best friend Rachel Hurliman. "From the time she was young, she's just been academically smart, worked hard ... and is just a great person who loves life and helps others."

"Her accomplishments to age ratio are most compelling," says Movista co-founder Stan Zylowski. "At her age, most of us are buying our first house and hoping to land a management role at work. April was a D1 (Division 1) athlete, a real estate broker, worked for Nike in Chicago, earned her MBA and co-founded a company before she was 27 years old."

Seggebruch's ability to instantly make friends, to work a room and be quick to know who is best at what makes her the obvious choice for team captain.

"We have worn a lot of hats over time," Zylowski says. "April has some role in all aspects. Because she understands the legal, finance and technical aspects of the business better than anyone, she was the natural leader."

Before the formation of Movista, Seggebruch's leadership manifested itself through basketball, her first love.

A BORN LEADER

In rural Illinois, April Seggebruch picked up her penchant for a good solid day's work as a farm girl. She carried buckets of water to the animals during the winter and baled hay with the rest of them. But she longed for the bright lights of the big city.

Once she discovered basketball, she knew she had the skill that would carry her there. Like all things in her life since, she invested every bit of time and energy she had in it.

"I became somewhat enamored, but you could probably say addicted," Seggebruch says. "I played it every day from sun up to sun down and had dreams of leveraging basketball to get a college degree."

What she might do with one didn't concern her too much. She wanted higher education because no one else in her family had gone after it, and anyone from a small country town who wanted a career outside farming could use all the help they could get.

"I used to visualize myself coming home at summer and winter breaks with all my athletic gear for school and giving it to my sisters and family," she says. "It was one of those things that kept me inspired and motivated as a little kid."

The early years of athleticism were a series of placed bets on who'd win the race to the car and all non-school daylight hours logged playing basketball on the concrete slab her father poured in the backyard.

A star on her team at Cissna Park High School, Seggebruch was crucial in taking her teammates to the state competition.

"She's probably the best player I came up against in junior high and high school," says Hurliman, who was on April's team in junior high but on a rival team in high school. "She's very fierce and very good. Her defensive is tremendous, and she's a lot of fun to play.

"I didn't beat her often, but when I did, I had to tell her about it."

No one could deny Seggebruch's talent for the sport, but it took a lot more than that to put little Cissna Park on the map.

"Our audience always told us it was fun to watch [our team], with the way that we interacted and the way we worked together," says Lindsey Gerdes, her sister, who was also on the team. "April was a leader on the floor. She's very good at making things happen in the sport, a natural leader."

With a state tournament under her belt and dreams of attending the University of Illinois, Seggebruch's senior year was looking good. She was closer to her dream than ever when, mid-game, she tore her ACL. Her dad scooped her off the court and carried her to the coach's office, Seggebruch crying, "It's all over! It's all over!" in devastation of the loss of her almost-career.

Hopes of landing a Division 1 team were done, she thought.

But it didn't take long before she tried again. She enrolled at Wabash Valley Community College, where she recovered from her injury before hitting the court again.

In 2003, during her sophomore year of college, she was recruited to play as a Lady Razorback for the University of Arkansas.

"The injury was devastating to her, but it showed her determination to overcome and stick with it, to keep pressing on," Gerdes says. "It's an admirable thing to watch someone who's that dedicated to stick with something they love. April's an all-in kind of person. If she's going to do it, she's going to do it right."

Seggebruch was tempted by the UA's status as a team in the SEC and what that meant for women's basketball. On her first visit to Fayetteville, she decided that this was the place for her.

Since she wouldn't have an official press conference to sign her scholarship papers, April conducted her own. She sat at the kitchen table in a Razorback cap she picked up on her trip to Arkansas when the papers arrived in the mail a couple of weeks later and signed in front of her family and a single camera, manned by her mom.

PLENTY OF DENTISTS

It was around the same table that her family asked her the big questions.

"'Do they have shoes down there? Do they wear shoes? Do they have front teeth?' Do they pave their roads?'" Seggebruch says. "It wasn't that [different there] but I reassured them, 'Yes, there's plenty of shoes down there. There are dentists all over. They have paved roads.'"

At the University of Arkansas, Seggebruch enrolled in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, but much of her focus was on basketball. One professor, Thomas Jensen, recognized her lack of academic direction at the time and steered her into marketing, where she found SAKE (Students Acquiring Knowledge through Enterprise), a class that's a student-run business on campus under the guidance of Carol Reeves, vice provost for entrepreneurship. Things started to click.

"She was a basketball player who wanted to take the class, and I told her 'I don't think that will work. It's way too much work, you can't handle it,'" Reeves says. "But she took it and was the outstanding student in the class."

After her graduation in 2005, Seggebruch had a brief foray living big city life and having fun in Chicago, but it didn't take long for her to feel restless.

She called Jensen to talk about the UA master's program and before long, she was right back in Arkansas, networking for her next business opportunity and working on an MBA in two tracks: entrepreneurship and finance. The combination is a harrowing workload that other students tried to repeat because of her. So many failed at that particular double track that the college now bans the attempt.

"We had to tell students, 'Yes, April did it, but April's April," Reeves said. "She's a treasure for Northwest Arkansas. We need more Aprils here ... that describes her. She just breaks the mold."

This time around, it was Reeves who begged Seggebruch to be in her class. The class was centered on writing business plans to pitch at national entrepreneurship competitions with prizes ranging from $10,000 to $50,000. And through it, she was introduced to her co-founder and investors.

At first Seggebruch went with her own idea, which was to commercialize a medical product made by a UAMS team that helped decrease the infection rate and increase the pace of healing for abdominal surgeries. But when the technology couldn't be ready in time for the competition, Seggebruch petitioned Zylowski to be on his team, which hinged on the idea for Movista, then called Merchant Eyes.

"We were both interested in entrepreneurship and running our own business," Seggebruch says. "He had this idea of introducing technology to revolutionize the merchandising industry, and I told him he was crazy. I said, 'There's no way in an industry where that much money is spent that it could be that inefficient and that fraught with fraud. There's no way.'"

But it was.

When the pair went to the tri-state Donald W. Reynolds Governor's Cup competition and the Boise State Business Plan competition, they landed $50,000 for their idea -- the highest awarded amount available.

HIGH INTENSITY FOUNDER

Once she completed her MBA, Seggebruch went to work with Zylowski at Spectrum Brands, and the potential business got put on the shelf.

In working closely with Wal-Mart with some success, there was little motivation to enter a risky endeavor. But Movista stuck with them, and the investors they'd met at the competition wouldn't let them forget.

"From 2008 to when we started Movista, they were always there saying, 'Hey, have you guys thought about this [any more]? Do you want to get serious? Because if you guys are serious, we'll support you.'"

In 2010, Seggebruch and Zylowski quit their jobs at Spectrum Brands and set to work making Movista a reality.

Changing gears for someone as high intensity as April is drastic. She's an all-or-nothing kind of gal.

"She's the one who's going to jump in 115 percent when she gets her teeth into something," says friend Dave Alderson of Wal-Mart. "She's stubborn and has that drive. She and Stan play well off one another, they're both bulldogs ... but they know when it's time to turn it off and go have fun."

Movista was among the first recipients of the Arkansas Risk Matching Capital Fund headed by Gene Eagle and benefited from Accelerate Arkansas, Innovate Arkansas and the Economic Development Commission, the programs put in place statewide in the early 2000s to spur business development and growth.

Six months later, Seggebruch became a part of the original founders of Tusk & Trotter American Brasserie, a restaurant in downtown Bentonville. What started as a backup plan for Movista became an important landmark on the Northwest Arkansas culinary scene when the restaurant won the James Beard Foundation Award.

At Movista, colleagues say, Seggebruch detests sales calls and white board brainstorming sessions, but she's the one you turn to when you want to build and lead a top-notch team.

"We call her the 'stone flipper' because she has the ability to identify every potential resource in a situation," Zylowski says. "Need an investor? Call April. Need a great designer? Call April. It's amazing how many times she has been able to deliver the needed program or person to help us get past a hurdle."

Even with all Movista's success so far, Seggebruch would have built it differently from the ground up, knowing what she knows now. But she appreciates it having brought her to this place in her life, where Movista, Tusk and Trotter and beautiful walking trails intersect. For putting her in the center of Bentonville development. For bringing her home.

"This place is the Magic Kingdom for adults," Seggebruch says. "I've never considered living anywhere else since I came back and don't think I ever will.

"People come here kicking and screaming and then they don't want to leave. [We] gravitate to the welcoming aspect, the southern charm, and it's something we want to keep true. Northwest Arkansas makes you feel at home ... because we're all in this together."

April Robertson can be reached by email at arobertson@nwadg.com.

NAN Profiles on 05/03/2015

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