Hartland, Michigan, is  a small community north of Ann Arbor where Jace Stokes ‘ 19 grew up hunting and fishing with his family on the rural side of town.

“I grew up in the outdoors,” Stokes said.

Stokes’ father, along with his group of friends, started an informal outdoors group called the Rod, Gun and Bow. The group would travel together to hunt on State of Michigan lands until they recently discovered an issue with recreation on public property.

“You can go on public land but it’s over-crowded and people are afraid of being out on public land,” Stokes said. “This is a bonafide problem.”

Stokes took this problem to heart and recently went back to the Hartland community to perform a market study and found that 78 percent of outdoorsmen who are interested in hunting do not have access to non-State lands. His personal experience combined with the market study resulted in Rod, Gun and Bow LLC, a land-sharing service for individuals interested in outdoor recreational activities.

“We are focusing on hunting and fishing,” Stokes said. “Right now most leases are found on Craigslist. Our service adds credentials to this process so it will be more useful and legitimate.”

It works similar to Airbnb and Uber. A landowner will have the option of putting their land up for lease on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Prospective hunters will then have the option of agreeing to a short-term lease.

“The key is that you don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable,” Stokes said. “Some people are skeptical of having strangers on their property.”

The target market for this service is a casual hunter - a non-landowner in the 18-26 age range who has the desire and free time to go hunting but doesn’t necessarily have the financial resources to engage in a long-term lease. With this service, prospective hunters could gain access to land for a single day. The rate depends on the amount of land a hunter chooses to lease. The benefit to the landowner is a new source of income with insignificant overheads.

“You cannot guarantee that the outdoorsman will be successful. It's all fair chase,” Stokes said. “You only guarantee exclusive access to the land.”

Stokes is currently going door-to-door in Livingston County in an attempt to build a database of properties available for leasing. Once agreements with property owners are secured, Stokes will work on constructing the online interface that allows for a seamless exchange of services.

“There’s a lot of people willing to travel to go hunt,” Stokes said.  

This year, Stokes was awarded a $2,500 seed grant from the Kettering Entrepreneur Society (KES) to further develop his start-up. The funding allowed him to attend the Northern Outdoors Expo in Gaylord, Michigan, this past summer where he networked with other outfitters and gadget-makers for outdoor recreational enthusiasts.

Along with being the newly-elected President of KES, Stokes, an Industrial Engineering major, is also completing the innovation-2-entrepreneurship (i2e) course of study. The i2e classes emphasize coaching over lecturing, mindsets over routine coursework and hands-on creative experience over theory. Students in the i2e course of study begin by being exposed to innovation activities (engineering design and applied science), followed by an exploration of the mindset and activities of successful and failed innovators and entrepreneurs.

“The great thing about KES is having like-minded people,” Stokes said. “Your peers are not there to shoot down your idea, they assist you by critiquing and building on your idea from different perspectives you may not have originally thought about. I like to think of it as a diverse stock portfolio. All these different fluctuating stocks combined together build the strongest portfolio.”