-(electricity crackling) -(hand thudding) I am Mike Tobias, we'll take you inside the new Tecumseh State Correctional Institution.

I'm Andrea Gallagher.

This week on "Statewide", we'll take you to Sidney, Nebraska where a small-time fly fishing operation turned into a multimillion dollar industry.

(upbeat music) [Mike] Cabela's and Sidney, the outdoor recreation retailer and its hometown have been connected since the sixties.

50 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.

There was always great comradery between employees.

It was just a really good place to work.

[Mike] At its peak, about 2,000 people living around here worked in good-paying jobs for the Cabela's Corporation.

The entire population of Sidney was a little more than 6,000.

We're able to market the community or sell the community just because of their presence.

[Mike] 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.

So when the sale happened, what happened?

That was a dark time for all of us.

[Cory] Hundreds going into the thousands of jobs that were lost over a two or three-year period.

It was a lot of our friends, a lot of our family that was moving away.

You saw homes come up for sale.

We didn't know necessarily what our future held.

It was a financially insecure time.

Businesses closed, things shut down, hours being limited.

And just general mood in Sidney?

Negative, it was almost a time of despair.

[Mike] Someone anonymously bought this half page ad in the Sidney newspaper.

-(light switch clicking) -(playful music) Hi, buddy.

[Mike] For many folks who lost those Cabela's jobs, Sidney was where they wanted to live, work, raise kids.

[Speaker] Hi, dude.

No one's gonna come and save us, right?

I was not leaving.

I moved my family out here.

This is where I wanna 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.

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.

So, specifically, we started a group called Sidney Connect.

We started by just holding like workshops or networking events to try to bring the bright minds together.

Eventually, over time, that morphed into what we call E3, Energizing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems.

And essentially, what I do is I help businesses.

I'm a free service.

Wherever you are in your business lifecycle, I help provide you the resources that you need in that stage when you need it.

You're a connector.

I am a connector.

I navigate, I point you in the right direction.

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, you know, take the first step, which is just a conversation.

A lot of this early on was very grassroots.

Absolutely.

Bottom line, the people of Sidney decided to save themselves with entrepreneurship.

(upbeat music) One of the first businesses started by former Cabela's employees was a place a lot like where they used to work.

(upbeat music) Nextgen is an outdoor retailer.

We sell hunt, camp, and shoot products.

We've got six of us in here that just absolutely love some corner of that, whatever it may be.

Depending on the product you're after, we got somebody that's an absolute expert in it.

I've spent a lot of my adult life in retail.

It's a hell of a lot funner when you're selling what you love to do.

So how early did you have the notion that you were gonna get together with some other former coworkers and start this?

Well, I think as soon as we walked out the door, all my partners here at Nextgen, we jumped in a garage and sat down and said, "Okay, what do we wanna be when we grow up?

Because we're gonna have to figure that out really quick right now."

[Mike] Now, with a name that's a nod to these former Cabela's employees starting a next generation of an outdoors retailer, the small company sells online and from a store.

All the Cabela's experience in an environment that encouraged innovation helped.

But... [Santero] We'd run a business, but not like this.

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.

And it was your skin in the game.

Absolutely.

Everybody's gotta pony up and everybody's gotta put something in and we've gotta just run with it, and that's scary.

That's a different animal.

(cat growling) [Mike] Nextgen actually started here at Western Nebraska Community College's Sidney Campus in a space that used to house a cosmetology program turned into an innovation and entrepreneurship center.

What that does is it helps start with new startups.

So, if you're an entrepreneur, you come in and we give you free space.

-Like there.

-We give you resources Like this classroom, right?

-Yep.

-Okay.

That's where Nextgen started.

-Okay.

-Yeah.

You have an office, you have free wifi, you have all the furniture for you to launch your business.

[Mike] Another idea sparked by discussion among community leaders.

It was like, you know, this is a perfect time to maybe start something for all these extremely educated people from Cabela's leaving.

That was a big deal, and I'll give them a ton of credit, because that really paved the way for our business.

Did they really sort of kickstart a lot of what's going on here?

Absolutely.

It took a lot of guts for them to kinda step out, especially under the umbrella of Cabela/Bass Pro.

But I think other people said, you know, "If those guys can do it, then we can do it."

(upbeat music) An abandoned gas station is home to another new business.

Pedalers Corner bike shop.

(playful upbeat music) (bell ringing) So, why a bike shop?

What's the personal connection to this for you?

I was always an avid bike rider, an avid sportsman.

So bicycles was just a natural fit for me, because of the mechanical aspect and helping people, which I've done most of my career.

Yeah, that would work.

[Mike] 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 stuff 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.

But...

I figured that there was a bigger purpose for me to open a business like this and give back to the community in some capacity.

(vinyl scratching) (upbeat music) (beer splashing) Our last stop is a hopping place, but before we learned about the Norgaards and their brewery, know that after Stan was one of the early layoffs, Melissa left on her own.

And you left to become the economic development director?

-Yes, I did.

-Of a city that was facing some massive challenges.

Call me crazy.

(Melissa chuckling) [Mike] Melissa was another driving force in those early discussions.

A common story, someone who grew up here 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.

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 wanna stay in Sidney.

[Mike] Home brewer Stan always wanted to open a brewery.

It measures the sugar content.

[Mike] When a local pizza restaurant went up for sale, they saw an opportunity.

So I went home that night.

I told Stan, "This might be the opportunity that we can step into craft brew industry by buying into this pizza franchise and seeing if it will work."

So yes, worst timing.

January 2020, we bought the business.

-(person screaming) -(buzzer buzzing) [Mike] They survived Covid and moved into this bigger building with more brewing capacity.

All right, Guinness has six official steps to pour the perfect pint, which is the for the fourth step?

-C!

-Yes!

(patrons cheering) In what century was the earliest known instance of using hops in beer?

-Hey.

-No, no, no.

You can't Google it!

You're cheating!

Mike has actually written three questions about "What If..." Which one of these is an actual story that has appeared in the "What If..." series at some point.

Okay, the correct answer is A, Grain Weevil.

(patrons cheering) [Mike] Boss City, like other businesses here, was built from long hours, ups and downs, and support.

A lot of the folks here tonight are former Cabela's employees like Alisha and Cory.

He also made these menu holders.

Look how full this place is.

Yeah.

We're excited to keep growing.

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.

Did you ever think a few years ago, Sidney could have a packed bar for a trivia night?

On a Wednesday.

-On a Wednesday?

-No.

-What's this tell you?

-This is awesome.

This makes me have faith in what we're doing is the right thing and we're gonna keep moving forward.

-Mine's a little sour.

-Just like you.

Yeah.

(cars swooshing) [Mike] 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 the streets were full of prospectors seeking gold in the Black Hills, and entrepreneurs were opening gaming halls and brothels.

The businesses are, well, a little different these days.

(playful upbeat music) Sarah Sinnett keeps a running list of the more than 100 businesses launched since 2017, and a decent number are Cabela's people.

Yes, or they've inspired other people to move here and start their own business, those same people, or they've inspired young people to do that, because they're an inspiration to them at that time.

Get on.

You ready?

Here you go.

Sarah says, there are other signs, Sidney, her words, is "building back better".

Like this new park built after the community raised $800,000 in a year.

That tells you a lot.

Yes, the community's here, we're strong and we're not leaving.

It's been this group of just incredible people that are like, we're not gonna die.

And you don't just see one person fighting for their business, they're fighting for the community.

Yeah, this has been wonderful.

We all knew each other really well, but it worked out to where we could go to each other depending on what we're after and say, "How'd you do this?

Have you run into this?

What are we gonna do when this happens?"

And that's a big deal.

[Mike] Is Sidney a healthier place now than it was before?

I think so.

If we didn't grow out of a hard place, none of this may have happened.

It feels good to know that the lights are still on.

You just don't think that something like that would happen and that something positive could come from something that was so negative.

The fact that like we filled the homes, maybe there's not a mega business up on the hill anymore, and that's okay.

The jobs on what they refer to in a slightly snide way as the hill are gone.

Replaced by something new.

A culture of entrepreneurship.

We are the innovators and entrepreneurs of Sidney, Nebraska.

(screen popping) (screen swooshing) (bell ringing)