Earlier this month, Dolores natives Tyler Cutrone and Jordan Elder were named the winners at Fort Lewis College’s Hawk Tank competition for their business idea Odyssey Adventure Elopement.
Cutrone and Elder, who are getting married in 2025, were awarded $10,000 to put toward their business, which they will start after Cutrone graduates from Fort Lewis with a degree in adventure education in 2025. With the win, Cutrone became the first adventure education student to win Hawk Tank.
Elder will graduate with her bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship and small business at the end of this semester.
Hawk Tank, which takes inspiration from the television show “Shark Tank,” allows Fort Lewis students to submit a business plan to be analyzed by a panel of judges made up of CEOs and other business leaders in the Durango area.
The judges choose a portion of the businesses to move to the next round, where they will be presented to the panel.
“They thought our idea was the best out of the 16 or so groups that participated, which was exciting,” Cutrone said.
Cutrone and Elder’s business, Odyssey Adventure Elopement, combines two of the things the couple love most, photography and adventuring in Southwest Colorado’s backcountry.
“Jordan has been an elopement photographer for three years now, and I’m an outdoor guide, so we thought it made sense to combine the two,” Cutrone said. “What if we took couples on extravagant adventures? They could do anything from canyoneering, climbing, river rafting, cross-country skiing. … They get to choose and we personalize the adventure for them. Then we just get to spend the entire day out with them having a ton of fun in the backcountry, and Jordan captures the whole thing on our camera.”
“It’s a pretty unique idea,” Cutrone said. “We tried looking into it to see if anybody had done something exactly like it on the market, and we couldn’t find it. We somehow had an original idea.”
Elder, who took up photography in high school, said this hobby turned into a passion that she wanted to cultivate into a full-time career during her sophomore year of college at Northern Arizona University when she shot her first wedding.
“I didn’t really know if I wanted photography to be more of a hobby or more my career, but once I did my first wedding I decided I wanted it to be my career. From there, I upgraded my gear and started going full into weddings and elopements. Now, that is my full-time job,” Elder said.
Cutrone became an adventure guide a little over a year ago after transferring to Fort Lewis from NAU and becoming an adventure education major.
“As I got more invested in it, I just realized this is superfun. I’m really good at this. It plays to my strengths, and I knew I wanted to do this for a career. I didn’t think you could make money in an outdoor service-based job, so that’s why we created our own,” Cutrone said. “It’s going to be fun and an opportunity to work with my wife.”
Both Cutrone and Elder said the business model they created for the competition took hundreds of hours and ended up being 26 pages.
“It was everything from our business model, how we’re going to deliver to clients, our marketing strategy, our target market, competition, financial projections, projections and income statement balance sheet,” Elder said. “Basically, everything we would need to know if we were pitching to investors to get funding.”
After seeing their competitors’ presentations before the final decision, they said they just hoped to rank in the top three.
“There was some really, really steep competition, and we were like, ‘Hey, if we get top three we’re going to be really happy,’” Cutrone said.
Though judges “had a hard time” deliberating between Odyssey Adventure Elopements and another business model, Cutrone and Elder’s business won out in the end.
“We were so stressed, but then we got a call two minutes later saying, ‘Congratulations,’” Cutrone said. “We were quite surprised.”
While it will be another year or so before Odyssey Adventure Elopements is officially up and running, Elder is still offering her photography skills in the area.
She can be booked for sessions through the website www.ponderosaportraits.com or through her Instagram @ponderosaportraits.
