Peregrine Financial's Economic, Personal Impact Runs Deep in the Cedar Valley

Dismay.

That's the word Greater Cedar Valley Alliance and Chamber CEO Steven Dust used to describe his reaction to the collapse of Peregrine Financial Group, PFGBEST, this week.

PFGBEST, an online brokerage firm, relocated its headquarters to Cedar Falls from Chicago in 2009. At the time, Dust said, analysts at the helped the chamber determine PFGBEST would have a $125 million yearly impact on the local economy.

"The Wasendorf family has been engaged, highly supportive volunteers in both the Alliance & Chamber and TechWorks Campus," Dust wrote in a statement on behalf of the chamber, released Wednesday. "The events of the week are tragic personally and to a community that had come to appreciate the economic and civic contributions of PFG and the Wasendorf family."

PFGBEST CEO and founder Russell Wasendorf Sr. reportedly tried to commit suicide Monday morning. A financial discrepancies at the company, which has customers around the world. Investigators from a U.S. Bank account.

Beyond the money, there was the personal impact of a man who charmed leaders in Cedar Falls and in his industry. He was, by all accounts, generous with time and money and had a broad reach.

Both Wasendorf Sr. and his son, Russell Wasendorf Jr., sat on the board of the Greater Cedar Valley Chamber and Alliance, and Wasendorf Sr. also served on the fundraising campaign committee.

The company built a multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art facility on 25 acres in rural Cedar Falls, next to the Beaver Hills Country Club. It had 125 employees, about 70 of whom followed Wasendorf to Iowa from Chicago. To help entice those workers, Wasendorf opened the popular restaurant in downtown Cedar Falls and hired about 75 people to work there. There were plans for another location of the restaurant on the TechWorks campus in Waterloo and for a related Cedar Falls business that would produce pastas, sauces and soups. Wasendorf also owned a small printing press, W&A Publishing, in Cedar Falls, and ran a digital magazine, SFO (Stocks, Futures and Options, The Official Journal for Personal Investing In Stocks, Futures And Options).

Then there was the philanthropy. Wasendorf started Peregrine Charities in 2004, which held annual triathlons to benefit pediatric care and research at area hospitals. Last November, the charity gave a combined $187,060 to the St. Luke's Foundation in Cedar Rapids and to the University of Iowa Foundation, according to its website.

Wasendorf was involved with UNI. The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported that in 2009, he pledged $2 million to UNI's athletic program, reportedly the largest unrestricted gift in the program's 100-year history. Wasendorf was on the UNI Foundation’s Imagine the Impact campaign board of trustees, and was a platinum member of the Panther Scholarship Club, which cost $13,000 a year. PFGBEST was also entering the fourth and final year of a contract with the university for a suite in the UNI-Dome and McLeod Center at a cost of $50,000 a year, the Courier reported.

He also sits on the President Committee of both the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa, according to the PFGBEST website.

Across Cedar Falls, other tributes to Wasendorf can be found. At the , a plaque honors Wasendorf and his ex-wife, Connie Wasendorf, as part of a short list of people who donated between $100,000 and $999,999 to the library. At the Beaver Hills Country Club, a sign designates Wasendorf’s personal parking spot.

This year's Peregrine Charities triathlon, which had been planned for August, has been canceled. UNI is considering pulling ads at athletic events for myVerona and PFGBEST. Local PFGBEST employees were reportedly cleaning out their desks Tuesday and Wednesday.

Dust, however, pleaded for a sense of scale.

“Economically, PFG’s demise dents the strength of the Cedar Valley regional economy,” he wrote. “What this is not is a situation where a firm faces demise a failing economy, such as when Rath Packing failed and left many relatively unskilled people unemployed some 30 years ago.”

He said the chamber is working to limit the fallout as much as possible. Tech and finance-based companies that can use the skills of the PFG staff are growing in the Cedar Valley, he said. He said the chamber is also working with the Iowa Economic Development Authority to keep PFG’s core operations in software, in whole or in part, located in the Cedar Valley. The intellectual property-based operations of PFGBest are a good match to the local economic base, he said.

“In the spirit of Midwesterners, this will be recognized as a setback overcome by very strong commitment to progress, the typical ethic of hard work applied to productive endeavor, and the willingness to take failure in stride as a next step toward greater success of our Cedar Valley economy,” Dust wrote. “In the face of this tragedy, we are pleased to say it is not an economic dilemma, as this area has faced in the past, but an opportunity to strengthen what we’ve started.”