Chase Stockon first discovered his passion for entrepreneurship in high school, when he started a company helping homeowners reduce wildfire risk to their properties in his home state of California.

As a high school student in the Bay Area, Stockon learned of a local problem: The hills outside of San Francisco are covered in tall grass, which dries out in the summer and becomes a fire hazard.

“When that grass dries out, the fire marshal comes to your house and says, ‘You have a fire hazard. You’ve got to cut that down,’” Stockon said. “And you’re looking at this steep hill in your backyard, and you don’t know how to do that.”

Inspired, Stockon came up with a business that would offer a solution: He brought a team of fellow high schoolers with weed eaters to the neighborhoods that had just been visited by the fire marshal. He called the company Dirty Jobs Unlimited.

“The next day, we would show up and say, ‘Hey, here’s what we do,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing! The fire marshal was just here, and I didn’t know how I was going to do this,’” he recalled.

That’s when Stockon knew he’d caught “the entrepreneurship bug.”

A few years later, he worked as a bartender to support himself while he studied at Colorado State University’s College of Business and had another business idea: sell glassware to local bars. He started Panther International Associates, through which he imported glassware, packaged it up and sold it.

While running Panther International Associates, he graduated with his bachelor’s degree from the College of Business in 1987 before going on to earn an MBA from San Francisco State University.

Now, nearly four decades into a successful career defined by entrepreneurship, Stockon has funded a program at CSU designed to get students from outside of the College of Business involved in entrepreneurship-focused programming.

Through the Institute for Entrepreneurship’s Affiliate Faculty Program, faculty at each college across the University serve as ambassadors for its programs, encouraging students pursuing majors as varied as history or equine science to develop a business mindset.

“The Affiliate Faculty Program has allowed us to establish entrepreneurship and innovation ambassadors at each of the colleges across the university,” said Kipp Krukowski, a clinical professor of entrepreneurship in the College of Business and an academic director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship. “These faculty members are on the front lines working with students, faculty and staff within their areas helping to establish relationships and navigate the nuances between departments and colleges to bring awareness to Institute for Entrepreneurship programming and opportunities.”

Stockon’s aspirations for the program hit close to home: He has often spoken with his wife, a lawyer who runs her own practice, about how developing business and entrepreneurship skills early on could have better equipped her for her career.

“When you go to law school, they teach you law, but what they don’t teach you is how to run a business, and that’s really what everybody ends up doing,” Stockon said. “In any field, if you’re good at what you do, pretty soon you’re in charge of the department or you’re in charge of any entity of some kind or you go out on your own. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an organization or you’re an entrepreneur. You need those skills.”

‘Time to go chase that entrepreneurial bug’

Although Stockon knew from an early age that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, he also recognized the importance of gaining industry experience first, so he didn’t strike out on his own right after graduation. Instead, he took a job with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a regional planning council in the Bay Area.

Stockon returned to Colorado around the time that Denver International Airport in the early ’90s was being built to work as the Denver Regional Council of Governments’ aviation program manager, then he took a job in Washington, D.C., running the Center for Aviation Research and Education, a think tank for state government agencies. But he soon grew tired of D.C. and government bureaucracy and decided it was finally time to start his own business.

“I made the decision that it was time to go chase that entrepreneurial bug, and knowing what I knew, it was obviously going be in the aviation and transportation world,” Stockon said.

He moved to Florida and founded Panther International, resurrecting the name of the company he started as a College of Business student. He ran the company, which provided grant management services to state and federal transportation agencies, for about 25 years, serving 23 states and moving $40 billion in projects through its software.

The company’s service became essential after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Many states, including California, ran their CARES Act money through its software.

Stockon sold Panther International in 2021, and now he’s pursuing other entrepreneurial ventures, including an investment company, Atti2de Ventures, that he named after a quote his mom often cited: “Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.”

For Stockon, the most satisfying part about his career as an entrepreneur is knowing he turned a concept into a successful business that has made an impact across the country.

“Panther International was an idea; Panther International was a product, software,” Stockon said. “Panther International is affecting $40 billion, at last count, in funding dollars across the country.”

Tips for young entrepreneurs

Although there’s no exact formula to determine when it’s time to leave industry and become an entrepreneur, Stockon does have advice for budding entrepreneurs.

“I always say, ‘Don’t quit your day job until you have your first client,’ and the reason the reason behind that is that I’ve seen a lot of great ideas not survive the cash flow of a startup,” Stockon said.

That’s especially true of government work, because the process of selling to a government client is measured in years, not months, he says. When he left his career to start Panther International, he was already in talks with the State of Florida, which became his first client.

When speaking with students, Stockon also emphasizes the importance of hard work.

“My generation knew that you went to college and then you worked hard, nose to the grindstone for 10 or 15 or 20 years, and then you began to achieve, and when you look at my career, that’s kind of what happened – I busted my tail to get to this level,” he said. “My kids and my kids’ generation are trying to shorten that down to, ‘Hey, I went to college and now I want success.’ And it’s like, ‘Hey, you missed a step.’ A career is a marathon, not a sprint.”