Dan Calabrese

After selling Gas Station TV in Detroit, Mark Alhermizi used his technical skills to transform how people share the news and memories of a deceased loved one.

The 2018 class of 30 in Their Thirties spans the business world, including employee staffing, finance, food production, health care, insurance, real estate development, and technology.

The film industry in metro Detroit, which is very much alive despite the end of sizeable state incentives that were designed to attract top-flight actors and directors, can draw big-budget production companies like Disney and Warner Bros. by building up a creative infrastructure.

Detroit’s three casinos, along with land-based operations outstate, are facing growing competition from the Michigan Lottery and its exclusive offering of online gaming options.

The region’s water economy, stretching from the southern end of Lake Huron to the northern tip of Lake Erie, is a major economic generator — but more marketing efforts could drive expenditures for fishing, boating, and charters even further.

Following a stint as manager of energy and sustainability at Eastern Michigan University, Steve Moore took over in 2013 as director of energy management for Bloomfield Hills-based Taubman Centers Inc. He says he was surprised by what he found when he started. “I’ve worked in this industry 13 years, and when I first came here, what I expected was to walk into a lot of the malls we own and find savings opportunities relatively quickly,” Moore recalls.

Adam Jahnke sat at his desk at Honigman Miller, a large law firm in downtown Detroit, and pondered his position in life. He’d already made partner in his early 30s. Things were going well. But something was missing. He didn’t feel passionate about coming to work every day. “I called up my wife and said I felt I needed to move on to something else,” Jahnke recalls.

Not every dilapidated property in Detroit needs to be demolished. Ask Sterling Howard. He looks for undervalued properties in otherwise viable neighborhoods — structures that can be livable and desirable if they receive the right kind of upgrades.

From the time Michael Gross joined Beringea in 2008, it didn’t take long to land one of the firm’s top jobs as managing director. The Farmington Hills-based venture capital firm pursued Gross after seeing his work — particularly with health care companies — during his time at Plante and Moran Corporate Finance in Southfield.

Is it possible to be in your early 30s and about to start your third decade in business? Ken Cauley is 31, but he laid the groundwork for his first business when he was only 14 years old. As a hobby, Cauley developed a source of original content about the video game industry, including “blogging about video games before blogging was a thing,” he says. Cauley had 30 to 40 regular contributors to his daily news, community forums, and game reviews when he realized his hobby was evolving into a serious business.