Kent Kolstad is the Founder and President at Livewire. Their warehouse and offices are located at 18 13 1/2 St N, Fargo, ND,just west of Brew Bird and just east of Drekker. Kent attended Concordia College and graduated in 2010; obtaining a teacher license in Communication Studies and English Education. 
Livewire’s mission is “Dynamic, meaningful, and engaging live event and video production that better our clients, their audiences, our team, and our world. Experiences elevated.” Kent share’s that their why is “Far too often, technology detracts from the message — this can result in lost fundraising, lost sales, lost inspiration, lost impact, lost growth! We exist to change that for clients of all kinds: across sectors, across media, locally and across the country. Our company primarily serves corporate and nonprofit clients of all shapes and sizes — from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to the FMWF Chamber, Emerging Prairie, and the United Way of Cass-Clay. We have embraced our unique advantage in the Upper Midwest to service clients on a national scale. No other audiovisual company that we know of is as willing to travel as we are. For our national-level clients, we exist to help eliminate the staggering costs and poor-quality production associated with hosting a conference or event in a larger or different market space.”
“I’m grateful to be able to say that I come from a long line of small business owners. My family had a menswear store (Kolstad’s Clothing) in Alexandria, MN for four generations before it closed in 1996 due to an influx of new big-box stores. Growing up within that experience enabled me to embrace the highs and lows of entrepreneurship in a very personal way — big successes and big failures, some of which led to the demise of our family’s long-standing store (which was devastating as a nine year old, let’s be real).”
“Growing up around the daily need to creatively problem-solve, and to be okay with not knowing all the answers, was something I quickly found I missed as I embarked on my professional journey after college. I had the pleasure of working in a few positions in event production around town right after college, as well, and quickly found that while the status quo in event production in our region was certainly acceptable, it was ready for a refresh at every level across planning, design, and (if you can believe it) proving to the world that live events can be fun to produce, too.”
From a VERY early age, Kent was interested in all-things-audiovisual. He would rip out pages from Sears catalogs that featured boom boxes and TVs and hang them on his walls, and his parents would find very old computers that people were giving away for free so he could rip them apart and put them back together again. In elementary school, a friend’s birthday party resulted in Kent being dragged to a church youth group at a new, large church in Alexandria. When he saw the audio and video projection systems in the space, he was instantly hooked, and volunteered to learn more about the systems and ran them often for Sunday morning services and other church events throughout the week, much to some of the church elders’ chagrin: they weren’t keen on letting “some kid” run their AV, but the other adult volunteers at the church (and incredible mentors to him) insisted that they allow him to be taught. As he started to get calls for audiovisual help around the community in middle school and high school, Kent quickly realized that this could be a real career path.
One of Kent’s highest points is that Livewire is a North Dakota company anchored in Fargo-Moorhead. He didn’t anticipate landing here, “In fact, I TRIED to move to Saint Paul once upon a time after college, but a job opportunity lured me back and helped prove to me that this was where I need to be. It has been the best possible place to build an event production company, from our central geographic location to the quality of amazing people here across clients and our team.”
When sharing some of his lower points, Kent shares, “Aside from the pandemic, clearly a pain point for a live event company in the first six months of 2020…I’d say being taken as a legitimate business entity. I believe that we’ve done very well to establish ourselves as a legitimate and ongoing business concern in the eyes of many (did I mention we have 26 people on our team?!), but some in other sectors like banking, insurance, engineering, etc., view what we do as “that fun thing that we do on the weekends”, when really our team is working almost 24 hours a day in our busy seasons to ensure high-quality meetings, conferences, and events for each one of our clients. We’re not producing bar bands (usually); we’re producing high-stakes events that have one chance to go right to ensure our clients’ success and growth.”
The best way you can support Livewire at this time is through presence. “The pandemic nearly wiped us off the grid in a variety of different ways; prior to 2020, we were grateful to have a hand in many of Fargo-Moorhead’s events, large and small. These days, many events are still virtual, still limited in some way due to the pandemic, still on a very tight budget due to lower attendees, etc. We’ve started to do a little more advertising to make sure we’re still at the forefront of people’s minds when they realize they need a microphone for this, a projector for that, or a full event management and design consultation…but word-of-mouth is king, and we have been so grateful to be the beneficiaries of such amazing word-of-mouth across the region as we’ve grown since going full-time with Livewire in 2014. We’d appreciate the community’s continued networking and connections to upcoming events and event planners.”
You can learn more about Livewire through their website, and their social accounts, facebook.com/livewire.fargo / instagram.com/livewire_now
