UMSL Accelerate accepting applications for inaugural Entrepreneur of
the Year Awards

Peter A. Racen is a strong proponent of entrepreneurship and the important role business owners
and founders play in the vitality of the St. Louis region. That is why he began working with UMSL
Accelerate – the entrepreneurial arm of the College of Business Administration at the University
of Missouri–St. Louis – to establish the Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.

The awards are meant to celebrate entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial spirit through
recognition of innovators who are entrepreneurs, corporate innovators or those who have been
advocates of entrepreneurship.

“St. Louis needs entrepreneurs to create business in our economy,” said Racen, the CEO
of Racen Wealth Management and a 1980 graduate of the UMSL College of Business
Administration. “If you look at not only St. Louis, but across the country, our economy is really
driven by small businesses.”

Awardees will be chosen by a committee of UMSL staff members and local entrepreneurs in five
categories: An UMSL student entrepreneur, an entrepreneur advocate, a social entrepreneur, an
UMSL entrepreneur with a lifetime of achievements and an entrepreneur with tremendous
successes during the past year.

UMSL Accelerate will begin accepting applications for the inaugural awards on March 1. All
applications must be received no later than 11:59 p.m. on April 8, and the recipients will be
honored at a ceremony on May 5.

“The Entrepreneur of The Year awards are important for UMSL as we work to build an awardwinning program,” said Dan Lauer, the founding executive director of UMSL Accelerate. “We want to recognize and celebrate the successes and collaborations of the many stakeholders who make
this possible.”

Lauer launched UMSL Accelerate in 2016 to foster entrepreneurism and help bring concepts from
mind to market. The program is built on three pillars: educate, innovate and collaborate. In
addition to providing advanced curriculum, expertise, mentorship and experiences to UMSL
students looking to start their own businesses, UMSL Accelerate has also partnered with regional
business leaders such as Ameren and Edward Jones to create the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Accelerator, which supports underrepresented entrepreneurs with a nondilutive $50,000 capital
injection, access to paid UMSL student interns and the chance to participate in an eight-week,
best-in-class business development program.

“One of the things that makes the UMSL Accelerate program unique is that we’re on a university
campus,” said Joan Phillips, dean of UMSL’s College of Business Administration. “So, we have
access to the tremendous plurality of expertise on campus. As the entrepreneurs come, and they
have areas of need, we have expertise in almost every area where we can draw on to help them.”
By creating the Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, Racen hopes to attract more of the UMSL
business community to lend their expertise to the program.

“One of my objectives was to inspire other UMSL alumni who are entrepreneurs and business
owners to get involved with the UMSL Accelerate and the DEI Accelerator,” Racen said.
“Collectively, they could help influence and promote entrepreneurship within our community.”
Applications for the awards can be found here.

The University of Missouri–St. Louis (UMSL) is the largest public research university in eastern
Missouri, and the third largest in the state, priding itself on creating greater access to higher
education and opportunity for its nearly 16,000 diverse students. UMSL confers more than 3,000
degrees annually and offers a wide range of baccalaureate and master’s degrees, two education
specialist degrees and 17 doctoral degrees, including the only professional doctor of optometry
program in Missouri. Established in 1963 as the fourth campus of the University of Missouri
System, UMSL boasts more than 108,000 alumni, 73 percent of whom live and work in the St.
Louis region.

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