How Did You Do That?

Mike Harris was a middle-class kid from Racine with no family history of entrepreneurship. He played it safe at UW-Parkside by studying accounting, then got a job as an auditor with Ernst & Young and became a Certified Public Accountant. However Mike’s appetite for risk grew when he got a job at Wind Point Partners, the venture capital fund led by the Johnson Wax family at the time. At Wind Point, Mike took on the extra duty of part-time Chief Financial Officer for a built-from-scratch portfolio company called Alternative Resources. That job turned full-time, ARC grew like crazy and went public – and at 33-years-old Mike had caught the entrepreneurial bug. After experiencing the exhilaration of taking a portfolio company all the way to an initial public offering as its Chief Financial Officer, Mike founded Jefferson Wells, a professional staffing company that provided internal audit, accounting, technology risk and tax services on-demand. Jefferson Wells grew organically to $132