Cabela’s and Sidney. The outdoor recreation retailer and its hometown have been connected since the 1960s. Fifty years later, Sidney was home to the company headquarters, a nearby distribution center and the first of several massive retail stores nationwide.
“I wanted to work there because it was the place to work when you moved to Sidney,” said Cory Keen.
“There was always great camaraderie between employees,” added Melissa Norgard. “It was just a really good place to work.”
At its peak, about 2,000 people living in the Sidney and Cheyenne County area worked in well-paying jobs for the Cabela’s corporation. The entire population of Sidney was a little more than 6,000.
It’s easy to understand how important Cabela’s was to the local economy, and the devastating impact when Bass Pro bought Cabela’s in 2017 and eventually eliminated almost all of those jobs.
“A time of despair”
“That was a dark time for all of us,” said Alisha Juelfs, who worked in inventory and human resources at Cabela’s. “It was toxic. No one knew what was going on.”
“Hundreds going into the thousands of jobs that were lost over a two or three year period,” said Keen, who was a retail solutions delivery manager. “You saw homes come up for sale. Businesses close, things shut down, hours being limited.”
“It was a lot of our friends, a lot of our family that were moving away,” added Sarah Sinnett, who worked in strategy and project management at Cabela’s. “We didn’t know necessarily what our future held. It was a financially insecure time.”
Sinnett said the general mood in Sidney was negative. “It was almost a time of despair.”
Someone anonymously bought a half page ad in the Sidney newspaper that pictured lightbulbs with this text: “Will the Last One to Leave Sidney, Please Shut Off the Lights.”
“Grow our own”
For many who lost those Cabela’s jobs, Sidney was where they wanted to live, work and raise kids.
“No one’s going to come and save us, right?” Juelfs said. “I was not leaving. I moved my family out here. This is where I want to be. There were enough passionate individuals that also had their reasons for staying.”
“Our city and our county in some ways started to think differently,” Sinnett remembers. “The thought behind it was to grow our own. Grow our own business owners, encourage our kids to get into entrepreneurship, support one another.”
“Using the strengths of the community to help build each other up,” Keen added. “Once you start seeing other people be successful and starting to do their own thing, that’s when other people become more brave, and they decide to take the first step, which is just a conversation.”
Sinnett and Keen were among the leaders of this grassroots effort that started with workshops and networking events. People came to share ideas through a group called Sidney Connect, which led to Sidney and Cheyenne County being involved in the Nebraska Community Foundation’s Energizing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems initiative, also called E3.
“Essentially what I do is I help businesses. I’m a free service,” said Juelfs, who serves as the E3 Entrepreneurial Navigator. “Wherever you are in your business lifecycle, I help provide the resources that you need in that stage when you need it. I am a connector. I navigate, I point you in the right direction.”
The bottom line: the people of Sidney decided to turn the lights back on with entrepreneurship.
“What do we want to be”
One of the first businesses started by former Cabela’s employees is a place a lot like where they used to work, an outdoor retailer called NexGen.
“We sell hunt, camp, and shoot products,” said Nexgen co-founder Trent Santero. “We’ve got six of us in here who just absolutely love some corner of that, whatever it may be. Depending on the product you’re after, we’ve got somebody (who’s) an absolute expert in it.”
Santero worked in business development for corporate Cabela’s.
“I think as soon as we walked out the door, all my partners here at Nexgen, we jumped in a garage and sat down and said, ‘Okay, what do we want to be when we grow up?,” Santero said. “Because we’re going to have to figure that out really quick right now.’”
All the Cabela’s experience, in an environment that encouraged innovation, helped.
But Santero said this was different.
“We’d run a business but not like this,” Santero said. “Not your own business, not where you had to touch every piece of it and somebody had to own every bit of it. That was different.”
Nexgen got started at Western Nebraska Community College’s Sidney campus, in a space that used to house a cosmetology program. The college turned into an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center to help new start-ups.
“If you’re an entrepreneur, give you free space. We give you resources,” said Paula Abbott, director of WNCC’s Sidney campus. “You have an office. You have free Wi-Fi. You have all the furniture for you to launch your business.”
This was another idea sparked by discussion among community leaders.
“It was like, ‘this is a perfect time to maybe start something for all of these extremely educated people from Cabela’s,’” Abbott remembers.
“That was a big deal,” Santero said. “I’ll give them a ton of credit, because that really paved the way for our business.”
Now Nexgen sells from it’s own building on the edge of Sidney, complete with mounted animals that are also a Cabela’s trademark.
Abbott says launching NexGen kickstarted a lot of the new entrepreneurship in Sidney.
“It took a lot of guts for them to step out, especially under the umbrella of Cabela’s-Bass Pro,” Abbott said. “But I think other people said, if those guys can do it, then we can do it.”
“A bigger purpose for me”
Another new business, Pedalers Corner Bike Shop, is in an abandoned gas station.
“I was always an avid bike rider, an avid sportsman,” said owner Doug Loghry, who had been an electrician at Cabela’s. “Bicycles was just a natural fit for me because of the mechanical aspect and helping people, which I’ve done most of my career.”
It’s something Sidney didn’t have, a full service shop fixing and selling all kinds of bikes. The trained electrician who went back to school to learn bicycle mechanics was also well-suited to get into the growing e-bike market.
Loghry was one of the last to leave corporate Cabela’s. He could have taken severance pay and retired.
“I figured there was a bigger purpose for me to open a business like this and give back to the community in some capacity,” he said.
“What we’re doing is the right thing”
Never doubt that that Melissa Norgard likes a challenge. Her husband Stan, who did video production for corporate Cabela’s, was one of the early layoffs after the sale to Bass Pro. But Melissa left on her own. To become Sidney’s economic development director.
“Call me crazy,” joked Melissa, who worked in brand marketing at Cabela’s.
Melissa was another driving force in those early discussions. A common story, someone who grew up when Cabela’s was a little downtown store, moved away, and came back when it was a big deal.
“I think the number one thing that attracted me to a company like Cabela’s is the entrepreneurship spirit that it was built around,” she said. “I knew that there were a lot of great people who worked at Cabela’s and probably some of them would be forced to leave or choose to leave, but I also knew that there was that group of entrepreneurial-spirited people that would want to stay in Sidney.”
When a local pizza restaurant went up for sale, home-brewer Stan and Melissa saw an opportunity. “I told Stan, ‘This might be the opportunity that we can step into the craft brew industry by buying into this pizza franchise and seeing if it will work.’” She remembered. “So yes, worst timing. January 2020 we bought the business.”
They survived COVID and have since moved Boss City Brewing into a bigger building with more brewing capacity.
Boss City, like other new businesses in Sidney and Cheyenne County, was built from long hours, ups and downs, and support. On a Wednesday it’s packed for a first-ever trivia night.
“This is awesome. This makes me have faith in what we’re doing is the right thing,” she said, noting that former Cabela’s employees are a big part of the crowd.
“We’re excited to keep growing,” Melissa Norgard said. “We’re excited to grow our distribution footprint across the state of Nebraska. We are just teetering on the edge of growing into something great.”
“If we didn’t grow out of a hard place, none of this may have happened”
Sidney’s been through a lot over time. Some of its nicknames, like “boss city” and “toughest town on the tracks,” came from the 1880s, when streets were full prospectors seeking gold in the Black Hills, and entrepreneurs were opening gaming halls and brothels.
The new businesses are a little different these days, like a boutique, cheese shop and tech companies.
Sarah Sinnett keeps a running list of the more than 100 businesses launched since 2017, noting former Cabela’s employees are responsible for a lot of these.
“Or they’ve inspired other people to move here and start their own business, or they’ve inspired young people to do that,” said Sinnett, who has been a community lead for E3 and also works for local insurance company.
Sinnett said there are other signs that Sidney, with a population close to what it was before the Cabela’s headquarters closure, is “building back better.” Like a new large park and playground, built after the community raised $800,000 in a year.
“The community’s here, we’re strong and we’re not leaving,” she said.
“It’s been just this group of just incredible people that are like, we’re not going to die,” Abbott said. “You don’t just see one person fighting for their business, they’re fighting for the community. It’s just been wonderful.”
“We all knew each other really well,” Santero said, “but it worked out to where we could go to each other, depending on what we’re after, and say, ‘how do you do this? Have you run into this? What are we going to do when this happens?’ And that’s a big deal.”
Juelfs, who has been an entrepreneur in addition to her E3 role, said Sidney a healthier place now than it was before.
“If we didn’t grow out of a hard place, none of this may have happened,” she said.
“You just don’t think that something like that would happen and that something positive could come from something that was so negative,” Norgard said.
“It feels good to know that the lights are still on,” added Keen, who is also a tech entrepreneur and development manager for a new Nelnet office. “The fact that we filled the homes, businesses. Maybe there’s not a mega business up on the hill anymore, and that’s okay.”
The Cabela’s corporate jobs on what they refer to in a slightly snide way as “the hill” are gone. Replaced by something new. A culture of entrepreneurship.
Watch our “What If…” series story about Sidney about how a spirit of entrepreneurship saved Sidney after the Cabela’s headquarters left town.
