By All Means: Recent Episodes
Twin Cities Business
Innovation. Drive. Purpose. Conversations with the enterprising entrepreneurs and leaders behind beloved and up and coming brands.
What goes better together than cereal and milk? Christina Dorr Drake is the co-founder and CEO of Willa’s Oat Milk, a brand that is carving out space of its own in the increasingly crowded plant based milk case at select Target locations and grocery stores. Hannah Barnstable is the founder and CEO of Seven Sundays, a natural cereal brand now sold in more than 20,000 stores including Costco, Walmart, and Target. The parallels are uncanny: women founders who had worked in business before feeling the call to start purpose-driven brands that prioritize a healthy diet and planet. Both work with their husbands, and siblings. Both triumphed over a cancer scare. Both based in Minnesota. And both speak to the importance of having a network to lean on while building consumer brands in categories dominated by multinationals.In Office Hours with the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, chief operating officer Kara Kolomitz talks about the essential role of marketing—whether building a packaged food product, or a university.
Huck Sorock was a hockey player who worked as a referee during high school to make some money. But it didn’t take long for the entrepreneurial juices to get get going when he saw the inefficiencies of the system hockey leagues used to assign referees to games—no way to swap games online; a lot of the organizing done on paper—and this was just a few years ago, Sorock is only 24.His experience led to the idea for insight led to Refr Sports, a management tool used by leagues around the country for assigning officials, payments, invoicing, team websites and more. Refr raised a $535,000 pre-seed round in 2024, led by Groove Capital. Sorock and his co-founder Wyatt Gustafson also participated in a Techstars accelerator sponsored by the Minnesota Twins; they also won the student division of the MN Cup statewide startup competition in 2022.Like many entrepreneurs in the sports tech space, Sorock and Gustafson held up SportsEngine as their inspiration. Also started by college athletes turned founders back in 2008, SportsEngine grew into a major player for youth sports with 35 million monthly subscribers and eventually sold to NBC Sports. (You can hear the sports engine story with Justin Kaufenberg on episode 75 of By All Means.)A serial entrepreneur, Kipfer latest startup is Monoline, a personal umbrella quoting platform for insurance professionals that he launched with co-founders in 2022. He's also a mentor and investor in Refr sports and shares the advice he imparts to other first-time founders. In Office Hours, we talk about the similar mindset of athletes and entrepreneurs with Kelly Anderson Diercks, director of athletics for College of Saint Benedict.
Think about the loss in productivity that happens when a valued employee leaves the company. The loss of institutional knowledge. Or the complete knowledge transfer required when a company changes hands. xBlock is a software tool that uses AI to capture and organize a company’s data—without any extra effort on the employees' part. Co-founder Dena Neek is an AI engineer with an MBA and a background in organizational psychology. She started out developing tech for the hospitality industry and realized her tool was a fit for mergers and acquisitions. Janet Johanson didn’t have anything like xBlock when she brought private equity partners into her company, Bev Source—now one of the larger beverage packing and ingredient distributors in North America—nor when she decided to step down as CEO. She offers Neek advice on scaling, marketing, leading, and exiting. In Office Hours, College of Saint Benedict and St. John’s University tech specialist Adam Konczewski dispels some fears around AI and offers advice for integrating technology without sacrificing human thinking and interaction.
Social media for good. That’s how Luke Wendlandt describes Cadre, an app that’s being marketed primarily to businesses as a stigma-free community for employees to address mental health concerns. More than 140 vetted professionals and peer experts hvae created content on Cadre, on any number of issues from anxiety to grief. Currently the app has about 5,000 users. Wendlandt has a big vision for Cadre to become an employee service as common as a 401k. He’s got a ways to go, but he does expect 2025 to be the year when mission meets margin, and Cadre reaches profitability.We introduce Wendlandt to an entrepreneur who believes the key to a building a successful business is surrounding yourself with people willing to take a critical look at your big idea. It’s Charlie Kratsch, the founder of Infinite Campus, an ed-tech platform used by 10 million K-12 students and their parents around the country for everything from seeing a student's grades to paying athletic fees. You can hear the full story of Infinite Campus on Episode 98 of By All Means. In this episode, Kratsch shares some personal experiences with mental health, and challenges Wendlandt with questions that could be the difference between Cadre being a passion project, and becoming a household name.In Office Hours with the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, associate professor Corrie Gross talks about the mental health challenges students today. An environmental studies professor, she talks about the toll climate issues can take on young people today and how the classroom can be a safe space to discuss different viewpoints without judgement.
DeLonn Crosby is using technology to get kids off screens. His startup, SayKid, is a voice technology company that has developed a screenless, play-based learning platform in the form of a plush robot called the ToyBot. Equipped with Amazon Alexa voice technology, the ToyBot can play games, do magic tricks, and promote active learning by getting kids to think and move. A former corporate social responsibility officer for Target, Crosby’s career has straddled tech, marketing, and education. He founded SayKid in 2019 and in 2024, launched the current version of ToyBot direct to consumer. Now Crosby is thinking about scaling up and was eager to connect with another Minnesota entrepreneur who has built a business around engaging kids: Maia Haag, the founder and president of I See Me!, personalized books and gifts. Haag started her company before the iPad existed, and her first book, “My Very Own Name,” which uses animals to spell a child’s name in rhyme, quickly became a popular baby gift—and still is. Today, I See Me! Publishes more than 100 titles and sells books and gifts through major retailers and direct to consumers around the world.Haag offers Crosby advice on selling through Amazon, creating a simple marketing message, and the pros and cons of raising investment funds for his bootstrapped company. In Office Hours with College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, assistant professor of history Brittany Merritt Nash takes us to the Bahamas, and reveals the Caribbean island’s surprising relationship with the Minnesota school.
Bruna Valente was a corporate marketer working in industrial manufacturing when a health scare sent her on a personal wellness journey, which led her to the rainforests of her native Brazil. There, she discovered natural botanicals that inspired her to create her own skincare products—face oils and lotion bars. She quickly realized they were good enough to sell. Minnesota-made Terrain Brazilian Botanicals is a small, but growing beauty brand now sold in luxury spas, hotels, boutiques, and online. Valente faces many decisions ahead: Does she set her sights on Sephora? How does she grow the audience, and the team? Does she raise money for the brand, which has been bootstrapped thus far? When beauty founders are mulling such questions, the person who is often on their wish list to meet is Sue Remes, a beauty consultant who worked with many of the biggest brands around the globe in her 30-plus year career, including Kiehl’s and Kevin Murphy. (You can hear her career story on Episode 22 of By All Means.)Remes shares the questions she asks of every founder before engaging in mentorship, perspective on how an indie brand can compete in a crowded field of multinationals, and how to succeed at retirement. In Office Hours with College of Saint Benedict and Saint Johns University, accounting and finance professor Boz Bostrom offers advice for early stage founders on creating a business plan, and not letting passion cloud the math on potential for profitability.
Angie’s Boomchickapop–one of the most legendary homegrown Minnesota brands in recent history and the benchmark for just about every new packaged food startup hoping to make it big. As the story goes: Angie Bastian was a nurse; her husband Dan Bastian a teacher. They bought a kettle corn machine off the internet in 2002, and started selling at festivals, in hopes of making some extra money. Soon they were selling to grocery stores, building their own manufacturing center, and becoming the first truly national ready-to-eat popcorn brand. In 2017, the company was acquired by Conagra for an estimated $250 million. Today, another Minnesota-made popped snack is slowly gaining shelf space at stores around the country: Yoga Pops, made of popped water lily seeds—a snack as popular in India as popcorn is in America. Currently sold in 350 stores across the country, co-founders Nalini Mehta and Anita Balakrishnan want to make Yoga Pops a household name. They get advice from the Bastians on manufacturing, marketing, culture building, and what it really takes to build a lasting packaged food brand.. As Dan Bastian says, “Leaders work for their people, and then they in turn will work for you.”Stick around for Office Hours with Kingshuk Mukherjee, chair of global business leadership at College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University. He talks about the school's entrepreneurial alums, the Bastians, and tariff volatility.
In our first Mentor Series pairing, Chuck Runyon, co-founder of Anytime Fitness, the world's largest fitness franchise chain, and its parent company Purpose Brands (formerly Self Esteem Brands), which includes Orangetheory Fitness, Waxing the City, and several other franchise businesses in beauty and fitness talks about transitioning out the CEO role to board chair. He offers advice to Melanie Richards, founder and CEO of goGLOW. Richards started her spray tan business in 2011 and with seven corporate stores open, she started franchising in 2024. Now with 78 units sold across the country, Richards is navigating the change from scrappy founder to leader of a national brand.Plus: Office Hours wtih the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University. Economics professor Louis Johnston offers advice to founders on knowing what you're best at, what to hire out, and the importance of telling the story of your business.
A chemical engineer turned community development organizer, Anthony Taylor shares the career journey that led him to founding Melanin in Motion, a Community Wellness Center program that connects children of color—and their families – with active pursuits like skiing, cycling, kayaking. Melanin in Motion was a Twin Cities Business 2024 Community Impact Award winner. “I noticed my white friends, when they think about preparing their kids for law school, they’re putting them in the woods. That’s the secret for making more lawyers,” Taylor says. “I want all communities to realize the benefits of municipal, state, federal investment in natural places that can show up in children being resilient, confident, and collaborative.” Taylor talks about how working for successful Minnesota wellness companies, Life Time and Aveda, helped him become a well rounded leader, and what he learned from his own startups, Spa One and Simply Organic Beauty, that led him to shift course and work for the Loppet Foundation and as president of equity outdoors for the YMCA of the North. “Melanin in Motion really is the culmination of that idea, where we see culture as an asset,” Taylor says.He also gives us a preview of his next venture: RiverNorth Development Partners, a social impact development group that is working to create a business district in North Minneapolis that prioritizes “equity driven employers” that agree to create skilled jobs for area residents who have been marginalized. Ion Aerospace is first to sign on, with plans to open on West Broadway in 2025.Following our conversation with Taylor, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where associate professor Alex Johnson teaches entrepreneurship. He talks about the pros and cons of starting a venture on your own versus within a larger organization, and explains the difference between an inventor and an innovator. “Inventors create things. Innovators identify the problem, the value, and build a solution.”
Peter Mogck and Matt Frakes turned their love of Minnesota lake life, and their desire to start something of their own into Paddle North, a water gear manufacturer best known for its inflatable paddle boards. The company marks its 10th anniversary this year, now with a team of 25 employees, and a line of products that has expanded to include kayaks, utility docks, and apparelThe founders share keys to their successful partnership—Frakes is a mechanical engineer; Mogck runs marketing and branding, and both say they have “short memories” when disagreements occur, keeping in mind that they always know they both want the same thing: to continue scaling this company.They each put in $15,000 to start it, and have grown without outside investors, utilizing pre-orders to pay for manufacturing, outsourcing some production to keep their overhead low, and through grassroots marketing, from popup shops to social media. Even on the most challenging, demanding days, Frakes says the two never lose site of how lucky they are: “Our day to day business is making toys for the water.” Following the conversation, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Seth Ketron is an assistant marketing professor. He talks about the importance of crafting a brand story. “How do you come up with a message that resonates with people, that they’re willing to spread, and how do you make it easy for them to spread, and make sure it’s something that really matters to people.”
Pet Evolution is a fast-growing pet supply chain that started with one locally owned store in Woodbury, Minn. back in 2012 and has really picked up steam in the last couple of years since it started franchising. There are now seven stores in the Twin Cities and St. Cloud, and 15 nationally. By the end of the year, 24 are expected to be open, from New York to Oregon.In the $147 billion dollar pet industry, Rian Thiele saw a space between big box stores and mom and pop shops to create a chain focused on premium food and services. What’s perhaps most interesting about Thiele as an entrepreneur, is that he didn’t grow up thinking about business. He always dreamed of being a police officer, and worked for the Carver County sheriff’s department. He talks about the decision to leave his dream job to pursue a passion project and why he believes Pet Evolution can scale to 500 locations. Following our conversation with Thiele we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Erica Diehn is an associate professor of management and faculty director for the undergraduate program. She talks about the growing frequency of career transitions, especially among younger professionals, and offers advice for managers whose employees are more likely than ever before to leave for a passion project. “Understand what motivates that employee, what kinds of opportunities for learning and growth and challenges at work could keep them really excited.”
Dr. Aho is a surgeon and scientist with an insatiable appetite for invention and more than 20 patents to his name. He was still in his surgical residency at Mayo Clinic when he spotted an opportunity that led him to develop a medical device now in use around the world.Tension pneumothorax is a life-threatening emergency that occurs when air builds up between the lungs and chest wall. It’s not especially common, but it’s one of those medical situations that TV medical dramas often act out because the way to treat it is to jam a large needle into the chest and wait to hear a gush of air. It occurred to Aho: there had to be a better way. He developed the Capnospot, a device that provides visual confirmation that treatment of tension pneumothorax has been successful. The Capnospot is now standard equipment on ambulances and in emergency rooms everywhere, from Minnesota to Poland. It's the first product to be released by Aho’s parent company, Pneumeric. But it took five years to get here, and challenges persist, from manufacturing to marketing. Aho walks us through the long, expensive process of earning FDA approval for a medical device. “I would have raised more money, earlier,” he says. “Everything takes twice as long, and costs twice as much as you expect.” He’s raised $2.2 million to date.Aho says venture capital for medical devices tends to go to the really big ideas, rather than “little innovations,” like the Capnospot, that improve on everyday treatments. We discuss the opportunities, and the challenges, of being both practicing surgeon and entrepreneur.“Being a doctor, you get to help people,” Aho says. “Doing a medical device, I get to help people on a system wide, national and international scale.”Following our conversation with Aho, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Dan McLaughlin is a senior executive fellow who teaches health care management. He explains why Aho's path to successful medtech developer is unique; most medtech innovation comes out of big companies that employ teams of scientists. He points out the value of basic business training in helping entrepreneurial thinkers turn their ideas into business.
It started as a fun project with his kids: creating the “best hot cocoa in the world.” After countless tries, Dean Packingham thought he had succeeded, and everyone who tried his instant cocoa mix agreed. Named for his kids, Mike & Jen’s Hot Cocoa debuted at specialty shops in their hometown of Duluth. Today, it’s sold in more than 1,300 stores nationwide including Costco, Target, and Meijer. Packingham has grown his home project to a national brand with just one partner and no outside investors. “It’s a little bit of a sleeper category, hot cocoa—there wasn’t much in the premium part of the category to compete with,” Packingham says.It may have started as a hobby, but Packingham went all in: selling his house, living in a trailer, leaving a 27-year career in meteorology, and even buying a fitness franchise to fund the hot cocoa business. He talks about scaling, from finding a co-packer to planning for a seasonal product to being disciplined about not adding other products too quickly. Mike & Jen’s has already attracted some interest from larger companies, but Packingham says he’s in no rush to be acquired.“As long as we’re having fun, we’re happy to keep doing this.” Following our conversation with Packingham, we go back to the classroom with Jay Ebben, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Ebben talks about the challenges of scaling a consumer products goods business without raising money. “It forces you to figure out what the selling equation is and how to get it done,” Ebben says. “Raising money… might take away some of the financial stress, but at the same time, right now, they’ve got the freedom to grow as they like, operate as they like, and not feel some of the pressure that comes along with having investors on board.”
“People think, oh, it’s just a catchy slogan. No. If marketing does it’s job, it’s what does your brand stand for and how do you buy things. If we do that really well, we’re the number one growth driver of a business.” Margaret Murphy is the founder and CEO of Bold Orange, a Minneapolis-based marketing agency focused on customer experience, growth, acquisition, engagement, and retention. Her company frequently shows up on “best workplaces” lists and she herself has won numerous accolades for leadership. She learned the ropes at Carlson Marketing Group, and co-founded Denali Marketing, which was acquired by Olson. At Olson, she served as president and chief operating officer. Following an “adult gap year,” Murphy started Bold Orange in 2018. Today, she leads a team of more than 120 serving clients such as Target, eBay, and CitiBank.Murphy offers advice on mentorship, marketing, leadership and work culture.“Action changes everything,” Murphy says. “If you have good ideas or a good thing the market needs, don’t keep talking about it. Make something happen. That’s entrepreneurial.”Following our conversation with Murphy, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Gino Giovanelli is a marketing professor. “I think grit is so undervalued,” he says. “That’s the biggest differentiator between people being successful and not.” Grit is tough to teach, but Giovanelli shares lessons in successful leadership approaches, which leads to quality work in marketing, or any other field. “It’s investing in the relationships.”
“I thought, you know what I could do? I could make games.” Julien Sharp is a game inventor and industry executive who moved to Minnesota in 2022 to head up the U.S. division of Paris-based Asmodee Group, a global game company with a portfolio that includes Catan, Spot it!, Ticket to Ride, and Star Wars X-Wing. An avid game player, who can solve a Rubik Cube in 45 seconds (which she says is amateur stuff), Sharp started out in the industry as the inventor of several games including Disruptus and Juxtabo. She sold her company, Funnybone Toys, to FoxMind Toys & Games, and went on to work for popular brands including What Do You Meme? And Spin Master toys. Sharp takes us inside the fast-growing $13 billion global industry, from the challenge of creating a game that endures to the power of play—for both kids and adults. Sharp says games are played every day in the Asmodee office in Lino Lakes, Minn. But her work is not all fun and games. “Budgets, logistics, sell-throughs—there’s all the aspects of business,” she says. “But if you’re going to do all that, why not do it in games?” Following our conversation with Sharp, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, where Tera Galloway is an associate professor in the Department of Management—and an avid game player who is working to incorporate games into her business classes. “The idea of gamification in learning is huge. There’s the collaborative component, which is good for mental health and it increases [feelings of] belonging.” Galloway is currently working on teaching methods that use board games to teach leadership, cultural change and strategic thinking. and toy industry executive who has worked on some of the biggest brands
Lisa Lavin is on a mission to change the way the world cares for the people we care about.“We don’t have enough resources to take care of the number of people that are aging. So how do we do that? We leverage technology.” Lavin the founder and CEO of Ōmcare, a digital health company that pioneered the Home Health Hub, am interactive telehealth solution which monitors patients taking medication. It makes remote care possible and more efficient for health care professionals and those caring for an aging relative. Ōmcare is now available direct to consumer and through some health care systems. But it’s taken Lavin more than a decade to get here. She charts the course, from the patent that inspired the idea to a testing phase with pets to raising more than $8 million in venture funding and releasing the product this year. “We have big visions on how we can actually change the way the world cares,” Lavin says. “And it is beyond what we’re doing today.” Following our conversation with Lavin, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Mike Porter is a senior clinical faculty member in the marketing department. He calls out a few of Lavin’s smart moves: -Thinking ahead—working on patents while still trying to get the first product off the ground-Conducting a low-stakes test drive of the product with pets-Making telehealth easy and approachable
If you spend any amount of time in or around the startup community in the Twin Cities, you will no doubt hear the name Daren Cotter. Today, most people know him as an investor and advisor—his personal portfolio includes more than 100 startups—primarily software as a service and tech. But before Cotter could focus full time on investing, he had to have an exit of his own. That was InBox Dollars, the rewards-based digital advertising platform he built in his college dorm room, scaled to a peak of $25 million in annual revenue, and sold, some 15 years later in May 2019, to a leading market research and insights firm, Prodege. Cotter shares his entrepreneurial journey, from concept to acquisition, as well as his investment philosophy and advice for founders—including not raising funds prematurely."My personal viewpoint is a founder is often much better served by building the product, finding a few customers, proving that they're solving a real problem that the customer is willing to pay for, and then they think about raising capital."TakeawaysFollowing our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Professor John McVea who talks about the entrepreneurial mindset."It's a stance you take towards problem solving and getting things done that is distinctly different."Key traits, McVea says, include, "A comfort, a joy in ambiguity, in dealing with problems, being drawn to messy situations that are hard to solve...and the relentless ability to pivot from those learnings and to take a different direction."
Laura Roos started Minny & Paul as a way to take the hunt out of discovering high-quality, locally made goods. She launched in 2016 with a selection of themed gift boxes that she thought would be popular with bridal parties or for housewarmings. But very quickly, businesses started requesting large orders of boxes for clients or staff. Today, 80% of Minny & Paul’s business is B2B and the company has gone beyond Minnesota to spotlight makers nationwide and offer curated gift boxes as well as ready-to-order options. The creative side drew her in, but Roos talks about the logistics and leadership that have made Minny & Paul a success. A request for a customized Minny & Paul box filled with CBD products inspired Roos’ next startup, the new Mary & Jane, which sells microdose cannabis products. “I love a challenge,” Roos says. “I think the most important thing to keep in mind as you're building any business is problems are going to come up all the time and it's really just about how you react to them and your creative problem solving that's going to fix them.”Following the conversation with Roos, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Seth Ketron is an assistant professor of marketing and has studied the subscription box market. His advice to those thinking of starting one is ask yourself: “What's your product? What are you trying to do?" If you're working with something that people…know they're going to use every month, a subscription could be functional. But if it’s just for the sake of a gimmick, you probably want to think that through.”
Ashley Hawks was a successful working model, in print and on runways around the world. But when she thought about her goal of making a magazine cover, she realized, “I’ll still be promoting somebody else's brand, somebody else's lipstick, somebody else's clothing line. And it was this light switch of, I want to be on the cover because of something I did, because of something I built. I want my name next to my picture.”For her first startup, Hawks built on what she knew. Style & Grace offered training for models and pageant queens. She made money, but realized the business wasn’t scalable—all of the students wanted to work with her directly.Her next venture took her back to her childhood, working in her mom’s bridal boutique. Hawks launched Forever Bride in 2012 as a tool to support the local wedding industry online. She created a network of small businesses and built a national following for her online platform and boutique market experiences. Halted by the pandemic, she took a shot and reached out to the CEO of David’s Bridal, who not only responded, he became a trusted ally and eventually acquired Forever Bride in 2022. (They renamed it Pearl.) Hawks went to work for the national wedding retailer, but after a year, realized her entrepreneurial spirit didn’t mesh well with a corporate setting. Her latest venture is Soar Leadership Groups, creating forums, events, and adventures for business leaders. Following our conversation with Hawks, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Erica Diehn is an associate professor of management. She wasn’t surprised that Hawks didn't stay long at David’s Bridal. “It’s really tough to find entrepreneurial experiences in larger organizations.” “We call that person-organization fit,” Diehn says. “Not only does the job fit your skills and abilities, but the broader context of the way work is done, the culture of that organization, their mission and purpose. If that’s not a strong fit with you as an individual, that’s a hard one to overcome.”
“We’re going to be helping hundreds of thousands of patients with our device and that’s probably more than a lifetime of patients I could see as a physician.” By the time Allisa Song started medical school at Mayo Clinic in 2018, she was already the founder of an active medical device startup company called Nanodropper. The idea came to her in 2017, when she happened to read an article titled: "Drug Companies Make Eyedrops Too Big, and You Pay for the Waste.”“It really felt like we were letting people down,” Song says. “We have these great medications that are vision saving, and we’re dangling it in front of people, saying that you have to pay this amount if you want to keep your vision.”The cost, the structure of benefits—it all felt “unfair,” Song says. But rather than go for the big industry-wide fix, she approached the wasted eye medicine problem with a harm reductionist mentality. “I was just trying to think about how can we develop a solution that we could put directly into the hands of patients.” That, for Song, was an eye drop bottle adapter with a smaller opening for less waste. The product, which sells for $19.99, is now available direct to consumer online and through thousands of medical clinics nationwide. Song talks about leveraging student startup competitions to fund the business, and juggling entrepreneurship with medical school. “Taking that first step in bringing your idea to life is a really powerful feeling.” Following our conversation with Song we go Back to the Classroom with Dan McLaughlin, senior executive fellow at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, with a focus on health innovation. “One of the things I teach in my operations management class is how do you improve processes?” Often the best way to make a big impact is by addressing something small or seemingly mundane. Look for the opportunities, McLaughlin advises, in your daily routine.
Sean Higgins knew he was spending too much time on his phone—going down a YouTube rabbit hole when he meant to go for a run, or call his mom. But rather than fighting the ever-present phone, he imagined a new way to utilize the technology that sits in the palm of our hands—a better way, if you will. BetterYou is a digital coach that uses artificial intelligence to map how we spend our time and make suggestions to fulfill the goals we set for ourselves, like more exercise, more sleep, or calling mom every week. Higgins started BetterYou with partners in 2018, using seed money from his first start up, ilos, a video platform that was acquired by Paylocity and became VidGrid. He quickly realized the real opportunity for an app designed to “harmonize technology with wellbeing” was B2B. The first organizations to sign on were schools, which offered BetterYou as a service for students. BetterYou ended 2023 with a $6 million Series A funding raise. It’s still early days, but this app is showing traction with users and Higgins is hopeful the company could hit profitability by the end of 2024. Higgins offers advice on going all in, knowing when to pivot, and vetting an idea without falling for false enthusiasm from those around you. He also talks about digital wellness in the age of AI.“We should be optimizing our lives around the things that matter most—not watching random ads.” After our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where Jay Ebben is a professor. He offers perspective on how AI is creating new startup opportunities, but cautions founders to make sure they're not just using technology for technology’s sake, rather “doing something beneficial that can help our daily lives.”
What happens after a founder appears on Shark Tank, and walks away from a $250,000 offer? For Beth Fynbo, her Busy Baby activity mat saw six weeks worth of online sales in in three days. “And two weeks later,” she says, “no one had heard of us.”“I thought Shark Tank was going to be life changing, and it was—just not in the way that I thought.” Fynbo, an Army veteran and former health care account manager, was a new mom when inspiration struck. Kids were constantly dropping toys off their high chairs. Her Busy Baby silicone suction placemat keeps toys, teethers, and utensils secured in place. In 2023, two years after her Shark Tank appearance, Busy Baby logged $5 million in sales and introduced new add ons to its core product.Now with two years of growth and perspective since her national television debut, Fynbo talks about what it’s really like to go on Shark Tank and what it’s really like to build a business from the ground up, including raising money, creating an advisory board, navigating the waves of social media marketing, and charting a path to profitability.“You’re never too old, and it’s never too late to chase a new dream,” Fynbo says. “I was in the army for 10 years. I had this corporate career for 10 years. I had given up on being a mom, but became a mom and a business owner after 40. And I know that probably 50 or so, I’m going to start the next thing. I just want anyone who is stuck in something they don’t love to know: you can change.” Following our conversation with Fynbo, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where Alec Johnson is a professor. Johnson talks about overcoming the limitations of a “dysfunctional belief system”—that’s the idea, he says, that you have to be creative or you have to be an expert to be an entrepreneur. “You can grow into it. You just have to be a good problem solver.”
“Where passion meets frustration creates motivation.” Erin Pash is the co-founder and CEO of Ellie Mental Health—one of the fastest growing franchise chains you’ve probably never heard of—yet. The Mendota Heights-based company opened its first franchise clinic in July 2022. Now there are more than 200 Ellie Mental Health clinics open around the country with another 450 sold and under development. Pash is driven by the desire to destigmatize mental health care by building a national mental health care brand that makes care accessible and fun while also creating a flexible work environment for therapists.Pash is a licensed therapist who saw a bigger opportunity. “We wanted to create a hybrid employment model where we could give therapists safety, security and support while providing them with the culture, creativity and compensation they could get in their own private practice.” Pash talks about barrier to mental health care, the rising demand for services and how that’s driving more therapists not to accept insurance, which creates barriers to entry for those who need it. She talks about building her business, one practice at a time, and coming to identify herself as an entrepreneur more than a therapist. “There are two paths to successful business. One is you’re an entrepreneur and you try 20 things and one sticks. You’re passionate about entrepreneurship. The other is you’re passionate about one thing and because you’re so passionate, people can’t help but want to join you. That’s me.”Following our conversation with Pash, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Mike Porter is a marketing professor. He talks about the importance of a passionate founder and the marketing conundrum in the mental health field. “Not everybody wants to talk about mental health or say, oh, I went to this amazing clinic.” Porter talks about why franchising makes sense. “She’s starting with community."
When your arteries are blocked, you see a cardiologist. For cancer, there’s the oncologist. But for the 13.5 million Americans dealing with a serious wound—from surgery, an injury or disease, an ostomy bag, or old age—there’s often no one coordinating care until the problem becomes a crisis. Nima Ahmadi saw the white space, and co-founded The Wound Company in 2022 with the intention of creating a coordinated, cost effective solution that supports health care providers and improves healing for patients. The Wound Company partners with medical practices and benefits companies to provide focused patient care through a combination of telehealth, AI diagnostics and in person care. Already the data shows that Wound Co. patients heal 60% faster for a 15 to 20% reduction in cost. Ahmadi, who studied bioengineering and worked on other software-focused health startups, walks us through the process of recognizing the problem, devising a solution, and actually bringing it to market. He talks about the challenges of scaling a health care startup and why he believes the big health care companies need to think smaller. Following the conversation with Ahmadi, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Mike Porter is a professor of marketing. He talks about the problems caused by a diffusion of responsibility. “What this business is really doing is owning accountability and expertise and aggregating those things in one place…for this very specific outcome.” Porter, who teaches reputation management, also talks about the public’s growing confidence in telemedicine and how that can benefit new innovations like The Wound Co.
Kristen Denzer is the founder and CEO of Tierra Encantada, a Spanish immersion daycare that is on its way to becoming a national brand. Currently there are 11 locations in four states—two of them are franchise centers, and an additional 20 franchise units have been sold. It’s already a $22 million business, and Denzer is just getting started. Tierra Encantada is actually her third startup; Denzer started her career in nonprofits, but saw business opportunity everywhere. When she got engaged and realized how expensive it would be to plan a wedding, she started her own event rental business. As an animal lover, she co-founded a doggy daycare. So when she went looking for a daycare center for her own children and coulnd’t find one that met her criteria: Spanish immersion, inclusive, healthy meals, quality programing, she started her own. Tierra Encantada started in Eagan in 2013 and within a year, Denzer was working on expansion. She shares what went right, the mistakes she learned from, and why she made the decision to franchise. Denzer’s advice on entrepreneurship “Just do it. So many people think about doing something for so long…you’re not going to get everything right and it’s ok because you’ll learn from your mistakes.”Following our conversation with Denzer, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Associate Dean Danielle Campeau talks about the “entrepreneurial mindset—an individual who able to see opportunity in a space and take it.” Here are some key indicators, and ways to make the most of it.-Curiosity. “A willingness to develop expertise. It’s especially important when you’re launching a business in an area that’s new to you.”-Product-market fit. “You can understand an opportunity based on your own experience, but then you’ve got to do your homework and make sure there’s really a need for what you want to do.” -Diverse viewpoints. “Collaboration with partners is key to success. IT’s another way that individuals can fill in their own knowledge gaps.”-Perseverance. “A no today is not necessarily a no tomorrow. Those that are entrepreneurial thinkers recognize that and they’re going to persevere through the ups and downs.”
Behind many popular drink brands—Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Celsius Energy Drinks, Pabst Blue Ribbon—is BevSource, a St. Paul based company that provides beverage development, sourcing, and production—everything from supplying the can that holds your beer to helping develop and test an entirely new drink idea. Today BevSource is one of the largest packing and ingredient distributors in North America, with $250 million in annual revenue. Janet Johanson started the company in 2002 when she was just 24 years old, with three years of experience in the industry. “I just said yes,” she says.Johanson talks timing: from knowing when to take on private equity and start a board to knowing when it was time to step away from the day-to-day operations. “As CEO, I got stuck in detail,” she says. “By cutting my hands off, it made me think differently about who we partner with…and how I can make an impact.” Following our conversation with Johanson, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Tera Galloway is an associate professor in the Department of Management who studies the craft brewing industry. She explains the idea of “coopetition,” where companies realize is better for their industry to work together than to compete. She talks about the importance of building a network and the critical moment for entrepreneurs, when they realize their out of their depth. “It doesn’t mean you have to leave; you need to get more help.”
"We call it the health care system, but really, it's the illness-burden-treatment system. There are so many things we can do to improve in health care."Tony Miller and Dave Dickey are serial health benefits entrepreneurs who've built and sold multiple companies, leading the way toward consumer-driven insurance programs. The most recent is Bind Benefits, an on-demand, zero-deductible program that was acquired by UnitedHealth Group in 2021. Recently renamed Surest, the benefits plan is UHG's fastest growing product with a net promoter score nearly three times higher than its competitors.Miller and Dickey, who no longer work for Surest, talk about how to change health care coverage in America, starting with Miller's first startup, Definity Health, which he sold to UnitedHealth Group in 2004 for $305 million (not $300 million as widely reported, and he tells the story behind that). Miller is managing partner of Lemhi Ventures, a healthcare investment firm, which put the first $12 million into Bind. Between Definity and Bind, he build Carol Corp., which he also sold to UHG. Dickey an early Definity Health employee and co-founder of Bind, was also a co-founder of RedBrick Health. An employee benefits expert and seasoned sales pro, he consults and advises sales teams and entrepreneurs.Packed with insights on business of health care, Miller and Dickey also dole out advice on entrepreneurship and disruption.Following the conversation, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Kjrk Ryerson teaches healthcare innovation. He frames up some of the key benefits advances Miller led, and frames up questions any entrepreneur should ask him or herself before diving in: 1. Do you have a great idea?2. Do you keep evolving that idea?3. What is the driving difference?4. Is there a personal motivation that's driving you forward?5. Do you have the power to make something better?
Nora and Jay Schaper are serial entrepreneurs with a big idea: rid the world of single use plastic bottles—starting in the bathroom. Experts told them salon-quality shampoo couldn’t be produced in solid form, but that only made them more determined to come up with a winning formula. They did, and HiBar launched in 2018. The line, which has grown to include face wash and deodorant as well as solid shampoo and conditioner, is now sold in more than 10,000 stores. To date, HiBar says it has eliminated nearly 5 million plastic bottles and conserved over 800,000 gallons of water. To turn their product into a successful business, the Schapers partnered with an entrepreneur experienced in consumer brands: Ward Johnson, who built and sold the pet food brand, Sojos. A fourth founder is no longer involved. We talk to the three partners about the challenges of building a mission driven business, from engineering to marketing.“People who are committed to sustainability are willing to make sacrifices…but don’t mess with my face and hair,” Johnson says. “We realized quickly: the product needs to not just be sustainable, it needs to perform as good or better than salon quality, professional grade products.” Following the conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Jason M. Pattit is a professor of management. He talks about the added challenge for mission-based businesses. “There’s a dual tension that happens in the growth phase where you’re trying to scale quickly, which may mean sacrificing mission.”
Feeling homesick drove Argentinian native Belén Rodríguez into entrepreneurship. But grit and tenacity have helped this first-generation immigrant take her grandmother’s empanadas recipe from backyard parties to farmers markets to the frozen foods case of major grocery stores in just five years.
By the end of 2022, St. Paul-based Quebracho Empanadas expects to be in 250 stores throughout the Midwest, with plans to reach 3,000 stores nationwide within five years.
The Spanish pastry filled with savory ingredients captures the flavors of Rodríguez’s childhood in the Argentine Pampas, adapted for modern convenience. Healthy frozen foods used to be an oxymoron, but Rodríguez says Quebracho Empanadas is part of a movement to bring better-for-you ingredients to the freezer case.
On the precipice of launching this fall with Cub Foods, Rodríguez talks about her unlikely path from medical interpreter to founder and CEO of a fast growing consumer product goods, and how the pandemic completely changed Quebracho’s business model. She walks us through her measured approach to growth, and explains why Quebracho, which she and her husband own 100%, is just now starting to pursue investors.
Some keys to Rodríguez’s success so far: - Leveraging advice from mentors and local organizations with a mission to assist entrepreneurs - Turning “no” into an opportunity to make a change; she convinced the state to amend a food licensing law to simplify the startup process for new brands - Balancing the heart of the brand with the realities of scaling—figuring out what can be outsourced, and what is fundamental
“For us, there’s such an emotional component to our brand and founder story,” Rodríguez says. “We bring this authenticity. And the innovation. I want my grandma’s empanadas to be the go-to handheld food in the U.S. It’s very close to home.”
Following our conversation with Rodríguez, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Professor of entrepreneurship Jay Ebben talks about the challenges of scaling a CPG brand. “It’s one thing to sell at farmers markets; very different to be on the shelves at grocery stores.” He says listening to customers, leaning on mentors and taking a measured approach are all fundamental to Quebracho’s forward momentum.
Adam Turman is one of Minnesota’s most prolific working artists today, known for capturing state icons like Paul Bunyon and the Stone Arch Bridge in vibrant illustrations. He’s also unapologetically commercial, selling his drawings on giftware, apparel, prints, and murals seen around town from Surly Brewing to his latest, and largest, yet: a 220 foot by 40 foot scene on the side of a parking ramp for the new Corsa Apartments in St. Louis Park.
He’s managed to do what most artists only dream of: pursue the creative projects that fuel him, and turn it into a successful business that includes licensing deals, custom projects, brand work, and art prints.
“I’ve always really liked having a reason to make the art I make,” says Turman, who started his career as a graphic designer for creative agencies. “I’m just trying to make things people really enjoy.”
Turman offers a peek behind the canvas and into his company, from licensing deals to corporate collaborations, and how he’s embracing AI.
For broader perspective, we go Back to the Classroom with Shinwon Noh, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. "Often, we believe arts and commerce are conflicting concepts, that you're bound to sacrifice one to achieve success in the other. That's not true," Noh says. "Find a sweet spot between what you want to do and what your audience wants to see. Art is a passion-driven career. Self-awareness is a must."
The Surly Brewing story is the stuff of entrepreneurial legend in Minnesota, but in recent years, founder Omar Ansari has had to contend with an industry wide decline of beer sales, diversification of the adult beverage market, pandemic shutdowns, and changing employee expectations.
“Things have changed and we’re having to change with it,” Ansari says.
Over the summer, Ansari got back to his roots: visiting neighborhood bars that sell Surly, connecting with fans, and telling the story.
In this wide ranging conversation, we go back to how it all started, and then talk about how Ansari had had to come around to doing contract brewing and introducing new beverages like hop water and a THC seltzer to stay competitive. “If that’s where we’re at, that’s what will do.”
Then we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Assistant professor Casey Frid has conducted research on the craft beer industry and talks about how the market saturation can chip away at a brand’s character. “Previously, craft brewing was about independence,” Frid says. “Now you do what have to to survive.”
Zoë Levin saw opportunity in the toilet paper aisle to create a high design brand committed to sustainability. Armed with a $10,000 Kickstarter fund and a whole lot of moxie, she believed she could compete against the likes of Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark.
Bim Bam Boo, made of fast-growing bamboo fiber and packaged in colorful paper wraps, launched in 2018 at a direct-to-consumer brand. Levin quickly learned that even the savviest online shoppers rarely order toilet paper online—it’s one of those staples people tend to run to the store to pick up. She was limping forward, trying to elevate an everyday product by promoting the benefits bamboo and cautioning consumers that 27,000 trees are flushed down the toilet every day in the U.S. And then the Covid-19 pandemic drove people into lockdown/stock up mode, setting off the great toilet paper shortage of 2020. “Suddenly I knew: I had the most wanted product in the entire world.”
With very little inventory on hand, but a manufacturing process in place utilizing a highly regenerative material, Levin was able to step up production and get on the shelves at Whole Foods. Today, Bim Bam Boo is sold in 1,800 stores nationwide including select Target and Fresh Thyme stores. Levin says she’s just getting started. She recently added bamboo wet wipes, paper towel and facial tissue to the collection and is in the midst of raising her first $1 million seed round.
“The future of the supply chain—the future of the paper industry—is at a crossroads,” Levin says. “I truly believe that we will be one of the major players solving the climate crisis through paper.”
Back to the Classroom Innovating on basic products is becoming commonplace, driven by consumer demand, says Danielle Campeau, incoming associate dean of the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas. “Students tend to think about big, flashy tech ventures, but we always encourage them to think about innovation in unique, underestimated areas.” Consumers crave socially minded brands, giving Bim Bam Boo an opportunity to disrupt a category that is owned by large companies. “Sustainability is the new standard,” Campeau says.
From farmers market novelty to grocery store mainstay: Minnesota-made Maazah, a line of Afghan-style chutney sauces, is poised to break through through the global foods aisle to become a mainstream condiment, much like Sriracha.
Founder Yasameen Sajady takes us from her mom’s kitchen, where she got the idea to bottle up the flavors of her family dinners that weren’t readily available at Western stores, to inflection point: Maazah is now sold in more than 150 stores nationwide and expects to double that by the end of the year.
“The industry is ripe for this shakeup—a woman-run, global product on the shelf," Sajady says. "It represents so much that we do: the way customers are shopping, and eating.
Sajady talks about the benefits of accelerator programs, raising her first venture round, the challenge of relying on co-packers, spending on a publicist, and scaling up for a national opportunity with Kroger stores.
“Every three or four months, everything gets so much bigger,” Sajady says. “And it takes capital and knowledge.”
Following our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship.
"We’ve reached a point where people in society have become impatient with inauthentic brands,” says entrepreneurship professor John McVea. “We have this hunger for authenticity. People have reached the point where they’re saying to big companies: we want access to real brands.”
And Minnesota, with its depth of large companies in the agriculture and food manufacturing space, is an ideal place to build startup food brands, McVea says. “We should be the Silicon Valley of the food business. There’s so much expertise here.”
Appearing on a TV remodeling show may be the quickest path to notoriety in the interior design space today, but Bria Hammel is more interested in building an enduring business. She’s leveraged social media to cultivate a following of more than 200,000, which helped to build St. Paul, Minn.-based Bria Hammel Interiors into a national design firm. In 2018, she parlayed her expertise into a retail business, Brooke & Lou, specializing in “life friendly furniture.” And that success has led to licensing deals with other brands.“I am a risk taker, but I’m a cautious risk taker,” Hammel says. She talks about running two distinct but overlapping businesses and how EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) helps in running an efficient team. She talks about the online design service that was born out of Covid, and learnings from her first brick and mortar retail pop-up. Plus, design advice including the trick to successfully styling a bookcase and why she’s glad to see the Midcentury modern trend fade in popularity.After our conversation with Hammel, we go back to the classroom with marketing professor Mike Porter at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. He talks about the challenge of scaling a service business, and what Hammel is doing well. “She emulates best practices in saying, what do I do, and what can I hire someone else to do.”
Amin Aaser was an entrepreneur in search of a problem, and then he realized the problem that had been with him his whole life: feeling different. Embracing his faith as a Muslim while also living his best life as an American. Aaser, along with his brother, launched Noor Kids with the goal of “raising Muslims who build a better world.” Initially, that took the shape of a magazine. Then came books, and more recently, video programming, which is drawing a global audience and setting the stage for a new chapter of growth for the Minneapolis-based social enterprise startup. To date, Noor Kids has published 140 titles and reached more than a quarter of million people with its content, which is available under a “freemium” model—some is free; subscriptions can be purchased for full access. The latest product is “Noor Kids Muslim Treehouse”—think of it as Mr. Rogers for a multicultural, international audience that interacts over Zoom. You can watch it now on YouTube, and don’t be surprised if you see it soon on a streaming service, or maybe even a network. Aaser talks about turning his passion project into a full-time job, how he applied his corporate and business school experiences to his entrepreneurial mission, and how to know when it’s time to raise money. Following our conversation with Aaser, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where professor AnnMarie Thomas teaches entrepreneurship. She talks about the value of following your heart in entrepreneurship. “In this day and age, we know that kids are really struggling in a lot of ways, trying to find meaning,” Thomas says. “With social and emotional learning, they are tapping into something families are really looking for.”
Years before chatbots burst into the mainstream, a trio of Minneapolis-based fishing enthusiasts launched a data-driven e-commerce shopping platform for anglers that gets smarter the more people use it. Omnia Fishing is disrupting the $5 billion dollar U.S. and Canadian tackle industry by offering a shop-by-lake e-commerce experience that connects customers to the gear they need based on where they’re fishing, what they’re fishing for, and even the time of year. Co-founders Matt Johnson (CEO), Chris Morgal (COO), and Dan Wick (CTO) each bring a unique skill set and prior startup experience to Omnia. They walk us through how they’re setting up the company, which is not yet profitable, for big success, from raising $1 million to get started to figuring out how to set up a warehouse and deliver merchandise to leaning on user-generated content. “There’s so much being bandied about with AI,” Wick says. “It’s great in a vacuum, but unless you apply that to a business case, it doesn’t really matter.”Omnia fishing is poised to hit eight figures in sales this year. The company employs 25 and features more than 25,000 products and information on at least 20,000 lakes on its site. ”We truly believe we are building a better experience,” Johnson says.Following our conversation with the founders, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus School of Business where Gino Giovanelli is a marketing professor and thinks the growing awareness of AI is making consumers more trusting of information provided by a site like Omnia Fishing. “The smartest thing they did: they had a lane, stuck to it with three different personalities and skill sets,” Giovanelli says, For startups, that can be tricky. Set out with big goals in mind and said it’s going to be hard, but that’s the only way to make it.
"If I had listened to people around me, I wouldn't have proceeded after three months. This is a risky business and maybe it isn't going to work and I'm going to look back and say I spent $300,000 and four years of my life, but I do believe the end is in sight."David Swan is the founder of PUR Golf—that stands for Producing Unmatched Results. PUR golf is a training aid designed to help golfers improve their swing. The PGA declared the PUR Golf system one of three items golfers need in 2023. But this isn’t a story about golf, so much as determination and ingenuity. David started his career as a basketball coach, first college, then for a professional team in Norway. His career has been a winding road since he retired from coaching in 2002. Real estate, software sales, motivational speaker, founder of Bright Day Energy, a Minneapolis-based company that specializes in LED and solar lighting. Only in the last few years did David add product inventor to that list, when his golf game started to tank. David is an entrepreneurial thinker, and in improving his own game, he came up with a product that would help others as well. When it didn’t work, he tried again, and again. On the 300th, he says Pur Golf finally ready for consumers. His friends think he’s nuts, but then, isn’t that the story with most successful founders? The doubters don’t get him down. David says this is just the way he’s wired. Following our conversation with Swan, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Professor Alec Johnson differentiates inventors from innovators. "Inventors have a solution and go out seeking a problem to solve. Innovators listen to the voice of the customer and adapt their solution to fit the market. That's what David did by going to golf pros to make his product better." Johnson will teach a class next year on making the transition from inventor to innovator.
Isaac Lien was a college student in California who wanted to stay in touch with his grandma in Iowa. When popular video conferencing programs proved too complicated for her, Isaac decided to develop his own simplified software tool. It worked. Issac’s father Scott Lien immediately recognized the potential. Scott was a career corporate technologist who had worked for Target, Best Buy, and Bank of America before taking the leap to become a startup co-founder with his son. Together, they launched GrandPad as a platform that makes it easier for seniors to connect with families, friends and caregivers. Grandpad has reached 1.6 million in 120 countries so far. The company, based in Hopkins, Minn., employs 165 and has raised $31 million to scale its technology—both hardware and software, with human-centered around-the-clock customer service to back it up.The Liens talk about working with family, moving from mission to profitable company and why they believe helping people over 75—super seniors as they call them—with technology isn't a market soon to evaporate.Following our conversation with the Liens, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Kjrk Reyerson teaches Health Innovation and says the GrandPad story is a testament to the importance of knowing your customer."There are tons of great ideas, but do you have the right opportunity, the right focus and mindset. This story is about passion. Knowing you have to solve this obstacle for grandma, realizing no one has done this. Tech is the enabler to create that connection."
Frustrated that pills weren’t making her heart patients feel better, Minneapolis-based cardiologist Dr. Elizabeth Klodas went looking for other answers. She started with a simple question for her patients: “What are you eating?” and was shocked to find more than a decade ago ago that she was often the first medical professional to ask her patients that question. “All of a sudden it dawned on me: we talk about food as medicine, what if we took that concept and interpreted it literally? A dose of food.”She started experimenting with foods naturally high in fiber, antioxidants, plant sterols, omega-3 fatty acids and created a cereal that she shared with patients. They started feeling better. That led to the creation of Step One Foods, an e-commerce snack food brand based in Eden Prairie, Minn. that has seen 40-fold revenue growth since 2017. Of course, Dr. Klodas wanted scientific proof that her food products could improve heart health, so she sponsored a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic, where she had trained. The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, 2022, proved that Step One Foods could lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of cardiovascular events in patients who ate it consistently.Today, Dr. Klodas continues to see patients while also running her fast-growing food brand. It’s definitely not the journey she expected when she went to medical school. “I did it because no one was solving the problem I was seeing,” she says. “There’s a huge gap in care that needs to be filled. I’m one small company. If you think of the breadth of health conditions that could benefit from targeted nutrition interventions—that field between drugs on the one end and food on the other is vast.” Following our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where marketing professor Mike Porter says many an accidental entrepreneur like Klodas is made by being open to discovery. Starting a food business was not her goal, rather a means to help patients.“Purpose was the accident, but everything she did after that was purposeful. If, then. The purpose drives her.”
"If you're someone who can express yourself, be an expert, gain the trust and be an authentic with an audience, there are unlimited outlets. Media in some ways is more interesting than ever. In other ways, it's harder than ever." Straight out of journalism school, Stephen Regenold turned his passion for outdoor adventure into a newspaper column called GearJunkie. A few years later, in 2006, he launched gearjunkie.com, which built up a large and devoted audience for its expert product reviews, and became an authority on all things travel and adventure for both experts and novices. In 2020, he sold the brand to Lola Digital Media, now AllGear Digital, and became vice president of strategy. Now he identifies other niche websites to acquire and grow.Regenold talks about what audiences and advertisers are looking for, and how to build an engaging content hub today.Following our conversation, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Alec Johnson teaches entrepreneurship. He says Regenold's story speaks to the importance of being focused, disciplined, and networking. "Always focus on content and audience, and work really really hard to understand who that audience is."
Twin brothers Rob and Ryan Weber famously started their first company, Freeze.com, out of a St. Cloud State dorm room. They had their first exit before graduating, and a decade later, sold tech startup NativeX to mobile ad platform mobVista for $25 million. All told, the Webers have been involved in more than 50 startups. Today, they're focused on funding them through their venture capital firm, Great North Ventures. They are fierce champions of entrepreneurship—particularly in greater Minnesota, and small towns that don't have all the resources. They share advice on being scrappy and determined; not raising too much and not selling too early; and the billion dollar idea they're still searching for.After our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Professor Jay Ebben teaches entrepreneurship from the investor side. "We teach students to think like investors," he says. "What stands out most about Rob and Ryan is the authenticity with which they operate. That's under appreciated in the VC world, and it's a big part of their story."
It took nearly a decade for Tim Murphy and his father Dennis to build Softies into a modestly profitable women’s loungewear brand, and just one mention by Oprah to catapult it into a whole new stratosphere. A career manufacturer’s rep specializing in women’s apparel, Dennis Murphy decided to start his own company in 2006. Inspired by his wife Peggy who was battling leukemia, Dennis Murphy created a line of super soft, moisture wicking sleepwear. His son Tim Murphy joined the business, based out of their Edina garage, in 2008 and together, they built a decent following. "It was enough to live on, but we were at the point where it was stagnant," Tim Murphy says. Six years ago, at a Dallas trade show, the Softies Snuggle Lounger caught the eye of Oprah’s longtime creative director Adam Glassman. Softies debuted on Oprah’s Favorite Things list is 2017 and has managed to stay on the list every year since. How does a small company prepare for an Oprah-sized spotlight and not buckle under the pressure? Tim Murphy, who has served as president since his father retired, talks about how Softies has leveraged the attention to keep growing—from hiring a CEO to expanding the product assortment. He shares advice on leadership, perseverance, and product development."You have to make a quality product, you have to sell a product you believe in. If you don’t believe what you’re selling, no one else is going to believe you.” Following our conversation with Murphy, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Marketing professor Mike Porter points out that Softies didn’t just get lucky in making the Oprah list; the company positioned itself to get recognized and was ready to make the most of the opportunity. “That’s just good business,” Porter says.
She may be the only beauty industry executive who is also a veterinarian with a Ph.D. in molecular biology. In 2009, Dr. Simone Xavier founded Sigma Beauty with her husband Renee Filho, while working as an assistant clinical professor within the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine. By day, she led a lab that developed vaccines and diagnostic tests. By night, she studied beauty influencers on YouTube to learn what products they liked and where holes in the market existed. Sigma Beauty started with makeup brushes, which Xavier sent to beauty YouTubers for feedback. They responded by sharing the discovery of the new indie line making high quality brushes at prices lower than the leading brands of the day, and Sigma Beauty caught fire. Today, the company brand based in Mendota Heights, Minn. produces around 300 products including makeup, brushes and cleaning items. Sigma is sold in 70 countries around the world and in major department stores across the U.S.Xavier and her husband bootstrapped the company and have no interest in selling. “We have a vision, a plan, a lot of growth coming up,” Xavier says. That includes a partnership with Disney, a new skincare line, and a move toward clean cosmetics.Xavier talks about the evolution of influencer marketing, product development, and building a consumer brand. “The biggest misconception is that you need millions,” she says. “Stop. Just relax. Come up with your product, fine tune it the way you feel is best, show your passion online, and you will connect with the audience.”As for her nontraditional background in veterinary medicine and science? Xavier says she wouldn’t change a thing. “My training was critical. You learn so much of critical thinking, trend analysis, research. All of that, I use today on this business and could have used on any business.” Following our conversation with Xavier we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business marketing professor Gino Giovanelli who offers advice on how businesses can leverage social media. Don’t go for the influencer with the biggest audience, he says; you’re better off partnering with someone authentic who has smaller numbers. And beyond amplifying your brand, leverage social media for brand feedback that can inform product development.
“Art is about exploration, process, potential.” A glassblower by training, Jackson Schwartz is an entrepreneur by instinct. A graduate of the Australian National University, renowned for its glass program, Schwartz returned to the Midwest to teach, and co-founded the Hennepin Made glass lighting studio in 2012 with the goal of creating jobs for his students, and himself. Today, Hennepin Made manufactures lighting for Room & Board and sells direct to consumer while also growing its business clients in commercial architecture and luxury residential design.You’d think that would be enough to keep the artist-turned-business owner occupied, but Schwartz set his sights on broader goals. He purchased a 30,000-square-foot industrial building on the edge of downtown Minneapolis to give the business plenty of room to scale, and also, to transform an underutilized pocket of the urban core, which he helped to name the Root District. “I want to see artistic production in the city,” Schwartz says. “We have the opportunity to weave it into the fabric of the neighborhood and what happens to downtown. We can show the business community what art does.” With passion comes a tendency to “go both feet in really fast.” Schwartz talks about opening a café and event space at Hennepin Made’s headquarters, and realizing he was in over his head. “I’ve learned that there’s only so much you can provide for altruistic reasons; you’ve got to really understand the implications for the existing business.” The café closed and the events business has been recalibrated so that Schwartz can find balance—professionally, and personally. That means getting back to the thing that inspired it all: a love of blowing glass.To further examine the relationship of art and business, we go Back to the Classroom with John McVea, a professor at the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. “The separation we tend to make between art and business is not very healthy and will be even less important in the future,” McVea says. “Businesses that are closer to the arts are probably the future for employment in an economy like ours. Arts are the things that mean the most to us and are hardest to replicate by machines.”
The decision Lisa Hannum made back in 1998 to leave the world of large communications agencies and start her own, to find balance as both a mother and professional, proved prescient as she scaled through the years. It made her agency especially adaptable when the pandemic hit. Beehive Strategic Communication had always been a hybrid workplace, where employees knew they could get a haircut in the middle of the day without being judged. But flexible and responsive does not mean fully remote. Beehive opened a new office in late 2022 that prioritizes gathering space, wellness, and technology. Hannum expected employees to come in one or two times per week, but they’re showing up even more than that, and clients want to meet at “The Hive” as well. Hannum walks us through the process of designing the office of the future, and creating a culture that makes employees feel trusted. “If you talk to your employees about flexibility and then don’t deliver, they will leave,” Hannum says. “Our team is so invested in the space because they designed it. When we trust in our people, it is repaid in immeasurable ways.” There’s no going back to the way work used to be, Hannum says. “We’re wired for change. What we need to understand as leaders, regardless of if your company is micro sized or global, it’s always about the people.”Following our conversation with Hannum, we go Back to the Classroom with Mike Porter, marketing professor at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, who discusses the importance of culture. “To the degree you have an established culture, you can take forward what’s working,” Porter says. “If you don’t have an established culture, be intentional about it.” Culture is your magnet, Porter says, and don’t get hung up on catering to everyone. “You don’t want everybody. You want the ones who want to play with the kinds of clients, work, environment you have. It’s just a new variable in the way we do that.
"There was no one better positioned to build a solution than the three of us," says Jazz Hampton, co-founder and CEO of TurnSignl, a tech platform that provides on demand legal advice to drivers with the goal of deescalating police interactions and ensuring that everyone "gets home safe."The app launched in 2021, a year after the murder of George Floyd at the hand of a Minneapolis Police officer. At that time in Minneapolis, Hampton was working as a corporate attorney. His partners were also in rising stars in their careers, both with MBAs: Mychal Frelix worked in sales for Sony Electronics; Andre Creighton worked for major accounting firms and Cargill. Three Black professionals."I spoke on so many panels," says Hampton," But it wasn't enough. I felt guilt as a Black lawyer in [Minneapolis] representing large companies. There were so many more opportunities to use this degree in a way that could help people."TurnSignl is now live in 25 states and expects to be in all 50 this year. In addition to selling annual subscriptions to consumers, the bigger opportunity is selling to businesses that are starting to offer TurnSignl as an employee benefit. Built as a dual-sided marketplace, TurnSignl charges its on-call lawyers. Some join for altruistic reasons, the partners say, others use it to find new clients. The next frontier: partnerships with car makers that want to build TurnSignl into vehicles. "In the same way people say 'I Ubered home,' we want people to say, I was pulled over, but I used TurnSignl," Hampton says. Adds Creighton, "it's the want that everyone has: to get home safe."TakeawaysFollowing our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with Sheneeta White, associate dean of the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship for a conversation about social enterprise."They're using business as a vehicle for social change," she says. "It's everything we teach about social entrepreneurship." The keys to making it work: spotting a need in the community, having a vision for improvement, and then creating a sustainable business to meet that need."
"A white haired gentleman came in the door and said I heard about this deal at the Minneapolis Club and I want to invest. And I'm sitting there going, I don't see and women—white haired or otherwise—knocking on the door saying I heard about this deal and I want to invest." In 1998, Cathy Connett co-founded one of the nation’s first angel investment funds. Sofia Fund invests in high-growth, women-led businesses. Connett stepped away from a successful corporate manufacturing career with giants like Proctor & Gamble and 3M to buy a company of her own and in the process realized that women were being left out of dealmaking—an inequity she hoped to rectify. “We hope we’re making progress,” she says.Connett offers advice for would-be investors and founders, who, these days, she says, are often too quick to try to raise money. Following our conversation with Connett, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business finance professor Mary Schmid Daugherty.“Women are still underrepresented in deal making,” she says. Even though there are now more women entrepreneurs than men, fewer women are entering investment-related careers. “We need to speak to these women earlier. When they come up through finance, they almost all go into corporate work. We just have to fight the tide."
Dan Mallin and Scott Litman have become synonymous with entrepreneurship in Minnesota. Together, they’ve co-founders several successful technology startups starting with Imaginet in the 1990s and moving on to Magnet 360, a marketing tech firm they sold to Mindtree in 2016 for a reported $50 million. In all, they’ve had four exits of their own, and advised countless others. Beyond their own companies, Litman and Mallin may be even better known as the founders of the Minnesota Cup, the state’s largest startup competition. Launched in 2005, it’s become the gold standard for startup contents—a rite of passage for many Minnesota companies that have gone on to great success and exits of their own. For the last six years, Litman and Mallin have been building another tech company: Lucy. Unlike their previous service-based businesses, this one is a product: an AI-powered management platform designed to help businesses keep track of internal files and documents and find answers quickly.But beyond innovation, this is a story of relationships—the enduring partnership of two independently minded founders, their encouragement of thousands of other aspiring entrepreneurs, and their commitment to building both businesses and an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Minnesota.“This is the best place to build companies,” LItman says. “Everything we’ve ever touched is really around entrepreneurism. People working hard to achieve a mission. Not letting hurdles or pitfalls get in their way. Hopefully that rubs off on others.” Adds Mallin, “The best ideas are not because of a great idea alone. It’s a great idea executed by a great team with the passion to do it.”Following our conversation, we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship Professor John McVea who picks up on the idea of being “born entrepreneurs,” to point out that we all are. “Innovation is a natural trait. Human beings are naturally inventive.”But successful entrepreneurs don’t just make something cool—they do it to add value. “It’s an inherently social process and we do that uniquely well in Minnesota.”
“I didn’t start The Stable for it to be big. But it probably had to be big because we had a big idea.” Chad Hetherington is the co-founder and CEO of The Stable, a “next generation” retail rep group that was acquired by Accenture in the summer of 2022, after just seven years in business. The Stable takes an omnichannel approach to launching products and has help digitally native brands such as The Ring and Quip go to market both online and in stores. Hetherington shares his path from Adaliade, Australia to sales rep for Quirky, a platform that crowd sourced product ideas and developed them. That experience opened his eyes to the need for a new approach to retail rep groups that would take multiple channels into a account. The Stable launched in Minneapolis in 2015 and within two years expanded to Seattle and raised venture capital—a rarity for a service agency. By the time Accenture made an offer, The Stable had grown to more than 500 employees with offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Bentonville, Arkansas, six acquisitions under its belt, and expertise in Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, and social media. Now running the company under Accenture, Hetherington says “I’m on the phone with people all over the world, trying to solve issues and problems their clients are facing around commerce.” He talks about what’s next in retail.Following our conversation with Hetherington, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Gino Giovanelli teaches digital marketing. He talks about “the power of scale” and advises businesses and founders to change their thinking if they want to achieve the sort of growth The Stable has enjoyed. “Don’t think tactically about marketing,” Giovanelli says. “Think strategically.”
For 8 million K-12 students and their parents, Infinite Campus is as essential to schooling as pencil and paper. The software platform serves as an administrative support tool for more than 2,000 school districts across the country—managing class schedules, tracking grades, collecting lunch money, scheduling conferences—all to minimize paperwork so that teachers can focus on teaching, and parents can get a real-time glimpse at how their students are doing.Charlie Kratsch started Infinite Campus in 1993—long before kids had their own iPads in the classroom. As his vision evolved, the company grew, and grew. Today, Infinite Campus, based in Blaine, Minn. employs 500 people and continues to perform at the forefront of ed tech—a category that has been growing by leaps and bounds since the onset of the pandemic. “Prior to the pandemic, it was tough to convince school districts they needed a learning management system,” Kratsch says. “Suddenly, a reluctant marketplace showed up at our door.” Kratsch talks about what its like to operate as a mission-driven for-profit company, succession planning, the accelerating pace of ed tech innovation, and about how technology has the potential to make good teachers great. He offers this advice to other entrepreneurs: -If you’re starting something from scratch, find a job in that world to learn everything about it first. -Find something you're interested in. Because it’s going to be aggravating and you're going to lose money. But passion will pull you through all that.-Most entrepreneurs are jacks of all trades, not specialists. You don’t have to be great at anything; you need to be good at lots of things. Form the vision, and find people who can specialize in different aspects of the work.-If you’re not willing to risk your own money on the business, don’t expect other people to put money in.Following our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Lisa Abendroth, the academic director of business in a digital world, discusses how technology can be used to enhance learning. She says technology is most useful when we think of it as a problem solving tool rather than the focus. “We can use technology to personalize and democratize learning,” Abendroth says. “To make interactions with teachers more human. To take a whole student approach to learning. There’s so much potential.”
Just a little over a decade ago, Emily Pritchard’s job didn’t exist. As an undergraduate entrepreneurship student, she noticed that her friends were communicating over social media, but businesses weren’t meeting them there. In 2011, straight out of the University of St. Thomas, she and a partner launched The Social Lights, a social media agency that helps brands with strategy, content, and optimization. Today, the Social Lights works with big brands including General Mills, Pentair, Cargill, and Polaris. In just the past year, the agency has grown its revenue by 87% and its staff by 70%, now up to 43 employees. Keep in mind, Pritchard has never had a boss. She’s never worked for an advertising agency. The role of social community manager—now commonplace at many companies—did not yet have a name when the The Social Lights launched. Today, the agency offers a training program for corporate social media managers.“What we’re doing is actually having implications on traditional agencies that have been doing things the same way for a really long time, and now we’re disrupting that,” Pritchard recalls realizing early on in the formation of her own company. “We really wanted to double down on exploring what we could build rather than what we could do for an [ad] agency.”Pritchard talks about learning to lead on the job, the evolution of social media, and the role it can play in building and supporting businesses today. After our conversation with Pritchard, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where Professor John McVea teaches entrepreneurship. “Emily’s story shows how entrepreneurship… can be molded and directed if people have the skills, talents, and interest. Entrepreneurship is not only a viable career, it’s also a noble one – you do make an impact on people and make things better," McVea says. "Entrepreneurship creates opportunity for outsiders.”
On Indigenous People’s Day 2021, Minnetonka –the 76 year-old non-Native owned company known for its moccasins, publicly apologized for appropriating native culture and promised to make reparations. Guiding that work was Adrienne Benjamin, an artist, community builder, and member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. Benjamin was suddenly thrust into the spotlight as news of Minnetonka’s apology and reconciliation work made national headlines. Since then, Minnetonka has released two hat collaborations with Benjamin and beaded moccasins designed by a native artist. The company has also donated money to Native organizations, hired Native workers and continues its journey to own and repair generations of hurt. You can read more about that at tcbmag.com. In this episode, we discuss what it means to be a reconciliation advisor, including Benjamin’s unexpected path from her childhood on a reservation to channeling her own struggles into art and unexpectedly finding her way into business. We talk about whether or not it’s possible for a brand built on appropriating Native American culture to make reparations, and what that ongoing work entails.“It takes guts to stand alone in that,” Benjamin says of a company like Minnetonka owning mistakes of the past. “We’re opening that door and that bridge for other organizations to feel safe, to feel like it’s possible. These companies can do the right thing and have an impact where at least some families will feel the economic impact. It’s changing the landscape of what it looks like in business.” After the conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Christopher Michaelson is a professor and the Academic Director of the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership. He talks about the challenge in separating art from commerce. Building on past art and culture can be an artist process, Michaelson says. But, "when it’s done in a way that exploits someone else’s culture, or misrepresents them, that’s when it becomes a problem. "I don’t think it’s possible strictly to make reparations to those harmed, in many cases, those harms are permanent and the people harmed are no longer here," Michaelson says. "But that doesn’t mean we can’t find a way to move forward together in a just and collaborative way.”
What happens when that corporate leadership path leaves you a bit unfulfilled? Amanda LaGrange got involved in the creation of a social enterprise designed to reduce waste and create jobs. Two years later, she exited the Fortune 500 career she thought she wanted to run that new social enterprise. LaGrange is the CEO of Repowered, formerly Tech Dump. Established in 2011, Repowered is now one of the largest collectors of e-waste in Minnesota and has processed more than 35 million pounds of electronic waste while also providing jobs and training for people facing barriers to employment, and building a marketplace for affordable refurbished electronics. That’s what the nonprofit calls a “triple bottom line.”“Impact work has to be financially stable,” LaGrange says. “Where there’s no margin, there’s no mission.” LaGrange talks about the role of founder vs scaler. She offers insight on the pros and cons of being a non-profit vs a social enterprise business. She talks about the "pile of denial" lurking in our closets and junk drawers, and the importance of giving those discarded electronics a second life. And she discusses the challenge of serving multiple needs.A recent rebranding, led by Minneapolis-based Knock Inc., helped Tech Dump become Repowered, and clarify its pillars of people, planet and technology. “When they presented the phrase ‘powering forward,’ I literally couldn’t speak on the Zoom call," LaGrange recounts. "I felt so seen of the work that we do.” Following our conversation with LaGrange, we go back to the classroom with Jason Pattit, associate professor of management at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. He lays out the value and challenge of being a missionary driven leader.
Scott Olson is the founder of one of the most iconic lifestyle products to come out of Minnesota in the 20th Century: the Rollerblade. He didn’t invent the inline skate, but he improved on a design that had virtually no market traction and made it an international fitness phenomenon and a product that endures still today.
Launched in 1980, Rollerblade steadily grew into a hot commodity. But by 1986, Olson was out of the company. Just 19 when he started working on the product, he had the vision and drive, but lacked the business know-how to scale the brand. Money problems forced him to sell to Robert Sturgis and Robert Naegele, who soon took over the company and eventually sold it to Nordica, which is now a division of Technica Group and still the parent company to Rollerblade.
"I was bummed out for a day or two," Olson recalls. But I had to regroup. I still had the goal of being successful with this product." And despite the disappointment, he considers his Rollerblade run a success. It's the product that defined his entire career and allowed him to pursue other dream products, including his latest focus, the human powered Skyride, another invention at the intersection of fitness and thrills.
"The entrepreneur and inventor seldom see anything—they can never hold on long enough to see the rewards. I held on to a little piece," Olson says. "I've been lucky enough to keep doing what I love to do: innovating and inventing."
After our conversation with Olson we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where Alec Johnson chairs the entrepreneurship department and makes sense of Olson's business journey.
"The transition from idea to running and growing a business is something a lot of founders don't make easily," Johnson says. "It's a bit of the Field of Dreams approach here—if I build it, they will come. My advice to founders: be prepared for the fact that they don't always come. What are you going to do to bring them in?"
“Know what your mission is and what your values are. You can’t engage in everything. If there’s an issue that affects your mission and values, you better speak out. You better be behind it.”
Bill George is the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and currently a professor at Harvard Business School. He’s the author of several books on leadership. The latest, "True North: Emerging Leader Edition," coauthored by millennial entrepreneur Zach Clayton, calls on executives to lead with their hearts. In a wide-ranging conversation, George recounts his own path to leadership, and what he’s learned about success. Driven by Medtronic’s mission to “alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life,” the company’s market capitalization grew from $1.1 billion to $60 billion during his tenure from 1991 to 2001.
“You’re here on earth for a short time and you want to make a difference. I felt like leaders can make the greatest difference because they have such a powerful impact on people. It can be for good or it can be for ill. And I wanted to be one of those people who had a very positive impact on people I worked with.”
George offers advice on leaders taking a stand on social issues, creating an inclusive workplace, adapting to an employee driven culture. And he shares why he thinks younger generations are well equipped to take charge. “Leaders today have to understand how to work in a multi-stakeholder environment. Leaders have to male bold moves. You’re going to have people who disagree with you,” George said. “If you stand for something, people will respect you for being who you are. In the end, isn’t that what we all want?”
“We are trying to build a really amazing company founded on principles of equity that makes money…and that delivers a new future for what work can look like.”
Kate Downing Khaled is the founder and CEO of Imagine Deliver, a Minneapolis-based consultancy that specializes in transformation strategy. She takes us inside her process of finding new ways forward by putting people who have experienced a problem in the design chair. “Change is really hard,” Khaled says. “Sometimes an outside perspective can really help leverage what’s new.”
She’s also using technology to solve for the current workplace challenges around recruitment and retention and shares a preview of her new software platform Mailroom, designed to help companies maximize the potential of their own employees.
“The future of our workplaces is going to be determined by the people who work there. We can’t hold tight fisted to the old ways of being,” Khaled says. “There is no going back.”
How does one learn to become a change agent? In Back to the Classroom, University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business marketing professor Gino Giovanelli talks about overcoming imposter syndrome and embracing who you are. “Having a fresh set of eyes is valuable to an organization. Don’t try to be something you’re not,” Giovanelli says. “If you want to be a change agent, you’ve got to have the gusto to just swing for it.”
“I didn’t have a business model. I had an idea. And I refused to give up.”
Former pro athlete Tyrre Burkes is on a mission to make youth sports safer. His Minneapolis based company, Players Health, provides a platform for coach credentialing and training, injury reports, management, and abuse investigations. The company has raised $30 million since its 2016 formation. But Players Health really hit its stride just a couple of years ago when Burkes realized a huge opportunity in becoming an insurance brokerage.
In 2021, Players Health sold $7 million in insurance policies; this year it expects to top $40 million. Already one of the top 10 providers of youth sports insurance, Players Health serves 60% of U.S. youth soccer teams and more than 50,000 teams across sports in North America.
Burkes’ entrepreneurial journey is one of perseverance and pivots. The child of a single mother who grew up on the south side of Chicago, he credits sports with saving his life and taking him all the way to Winona State University and the Canadian Football League. But his career was disrupted by a series of injuries, which got him thinking about what he could do to improve youth sports.
He started in 2012 with a sports communications app and shifted to player safety. He moved his fledgling company from Chicago to Minneapolis to participate in an accelerator program run by another Minnesota-based sports tech company, SportsEngine.
Burke talks candidly about mistakes he made along the way, like hiring a developer who didn’t deliver, raising money too early, and downplaying his mission in the early days. “I was timid in beginning; I didn’t want to be perceived as a heart-led leader who didn’t understand economics. Fundraising got easier when I went all in on mission.” And he lays out his vision for the future of Players Health, to become the largest insurance provider in youth sports, drawing upon its rich data to help teams mitigate injuries and incidents.
In Back to the Classroom, University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship professor John McVea draws comparisons between sports and entrepreneurship while dispelling some cliched metaphors.
Myth 1: It’s all about competition. “You should be judged by how you manage your emotions, not how you play the game. Myth 2: Winner takes all. “Most of the gains come from participation. It’s more important than winning.” Myth 3: Chase the scoreboard. “Actually, you’ve got to manage the strategy of the game. If you’re just going for the next cheap point, you’re probably not going to win the game. Strategy matters more than points.” Myth 4: Sports is a quest for perfection. “This is a very harmful metaphor. Learn from your mistakes.” Myth 5: Out compete the competition. “Success comes from hitting where they ain’t. Your advantage is providing something no one else can.”
Julie Allinson didn’t just create a company; she invented a new product category in 2000 with the launch of Eyebobs, the eyewear brand that turned reading glasses into a fashion statement. With its bold colors and daring shapes, Eyebobs developed a cult-like following that included celebrities from Elton John to Lauren Hutton. Today, Eyebobs offers both prescription glasses and readers that are sold in hundreds of stores nationwide as well as online and at three company stores in and around Minneapolis, where the company is based. Allinson sold Eyebobs to Northwest Equity Partners in 2015 and is no longer involved in the company. She offers a rare look back at her unexpected entrepreneurial journey from recognizing the opportunity idea, to finding the right audience, to knowing when it was time to step aside.
Allinson started her career in finance at Piper Jaffray. She had moved on to a startup that she was helping to raise money when the numbers on the spreadsheet started to look a bit fuzzy. So Allinson went shopping for readers and was shocked to find the only alternative to $500-plus optical shop frames was cheap drug store readers. She set out to create something in between that would show personality and style. It took two years for Eyebobs to catch on. Allinson shares the fundamental learnings that were key to her success:
- "Get your feet on the ground and figure things out." Allinson traveled to China to learn eyewear manufacturing before developing her line.
- "Stay away from the naysayers." Go to the people thinking about a new day; not yesterday. When optical shops couldn’t sell Eyebots, Allinson took the line to a high end men’s store where customers who dressed in designer suits saw the value in accessorizing with distinctive reading glasses.
- "Know what’s going on in the marketplace, but be true to yourself." When you try to please everyone, you end up with something bland, Allinson says.
After our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship professor John McVea who offers advice on thinking creatively and recognizing a big opportunity. “It’s not what she knows, but how she thinking about it,” McVea says of Allinson. He shares lessons for other entrepreneurs:
- "There are no wrong answers, but data can prove the things you shouldn’t do."
- "The answers are unlikely to be found in publicly available information. You need to get out there and find original information and insights that only you know."
- "Expect plans to fail, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make them. You have to plan."
- "Remember that you are the world’s leading expert on yourself. Start with what you need, what you want, and what you know is unique. You won’t find that on the internet."
Manny Villafana is responsible for some of the most important breakthroughs in cardiovascular health care in the last five decades starting with Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. (CPI), the world’s first lithium-powered pacemaker and St. Jude Medical, which introduced the heart valve that became the industry standard and was sold to Abbott Laboratories in 2016 for $25 billion. He’s now working on his eighth startup, Medical 21, which is developing an artificial artery for bypass surgery. Human clinical trials could start in the next six months.
His career history reads like a playbook on innovation.
“If you don’t take risks, nothing’s going to happen,” says Villafana, who is 81 and shows no interest in slowing down. “I go after things that people say can’t be done. That’s one of the greatest pleasures in life. Just go the opposite direction.”
He charts some key career highs and lows, from being fired by Medtronic and then sued by the company that eventually gave him free access to its patents and bought his second valve company, ATS Medical, for $370 million. Villafana has taken seven companies public in his career, but still, he says, raising money is a grind, and over the course of his career, investors have become even more adverse to risk, he says.
“The work is hard in any startup, but with a medical tech company, you have to be Superman to withstand the regulatory process,” he says. “Make sure you’ve identified a need.”
Back to the Classroom Innovation at its core is knowing there’s a better way, coupled with the courage to pursue it, even in the face of adversity, says Kjrk Reyerson, executive fellow and adjunct professor of Healthcare Innovation at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business.
“There might not always be a playbook,” Ryerson says. “What is your passion? What fuels you?”
Passion is essential to moving a new idea. “What you’re representing is change,” Ryerson says. “Most human beings doing like change. How do we incentivize the way we think about change as something to be celebrated?”
When Junita Flowers was at her lowest, baking cookies became an escape. She turned that feeling into a social enterprise business. “Junita’s Jar is so much more than a delicious bag of cookies,” Flowers says. “It’s a bag of hope.”
But striking a healthy balance between purpose and profit can be challenging for a mission driven startup. The initial model of selling to businesses that would bring Flowers in for “cookies and conversation” about surviving domestic violence and overcoming adversity proved difficult to scale.
The pandemic, and the social unrest that followed the death of George Floyd just blocks away from the Junita’s Jar kitchen and offices in Minneapolis gave Flowers time to recalibrate and take advantage of mentorship and grant programs like Stacy’s Rise Project. Target also took an interest, and helped Flowers gear up for a national launch of Junita’s Jar. HyVee will follow in August.
A focus on growing the business, Flowers has realized, will give her a larger platform to share her purpose. “If it’s your dream,” she says, “Chase it.”
After our conversation with Flowers, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship Associate Dean Sheneeta White who sees growing interest in social entrepreneurship. She points out that making money is not at odds with having a mission. “It’s okay to make a profit.” White says. “But never lose your story. Never lose what drives you.”
As the co-founder of Primp, a Minneapolis-based “cheap chic” boutique chain that grew to nine stores throughout the Midwest and a robust online following, Michele Henry had barely taken time off with her first two kids. When her third baby arrived, she vowed to take a true maternity leave, and that’s when she realized that an entrepreneur never really stops. Short on time for herself with three little ones at home and suddenly dealing with postpartum skin issues, Henry wished for a spa where she could run in for a quickie skin treatment—without all the trappings, or price tag, that typically go along with a “spa day.” Express facial spas were beginning to pop up on the coasts, but there wasn’t one in the Twin Cities. She went to work on a business plan for Face Foundrie, a facial bar focused on “efficient, effective, approachable” skincare. In late 2018, Henry sold her half of Primp to her founding partner and immediately signed a lease for her first Face Foundrie, which is now a fast growing franchise chain on pace to hit 100 units sold nationwide by end of year.
“If I could pinpoint what I like most about building businesses,” Henry says, “it’s really problem solving. How do I, for the least amount of money, make this feel really high end?”
This spring, Henry also launched Face Foundrie’s first aesthetics school and a product line that is rolling out to all Face Foundrie locations.
She walks us through the process of building a franchise business, and how her role has evolved from serving customers to serving franchisees, many of whom were Face Foundrie clients that left corporate careers to start locations of their own.
“I think people came out of Covid and said, ‘Life is short, nothing is guaranteed. Am I happy? Am I going to be happy doing this long term?’ A lot of franchisees at their core, want to make people feel good. Their mission is the same as ours. It’s very easy spot who will make it in this system, who we want to partner with.”
Face Foundrie is now headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minn. with 80 corporate employees. Henry expects to scale internationally within two years.
After our conversation with Henry we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Professor John McVea points out the advantages of the franchising model—beyond the economics of lowering the cost and risk of raising capital and assembling a management team.
“There’s sheer human joy in opening an opportunity to other people – empowering other women to be business owners in their own right,” McVea says. “That’s where [Henry] gets her purpose, joy, and the mission of her organization. It’s something we underestimate – the human side, the inspiration side.”
Most people demonstrate their adoration of a consumer brand by buying a bunch of its products. Tom Sega bought the company. Since becoming the owner and CEO of Duluth Pack in 2007, Sega reinvigorated the brand's positioning, greatly expanded the product line and reach, and improved efficiencies that made the American-made, handcrafted canvas and leather goods collection profitable once again. Duluth Pack celebrates its 140th anniversary this year. In 2017, he did it again, buying another Duluth brand that had fallen on hard times. Spring Creek Manufacturing makes canoe paddles, mounts and an ever-expanding array of products.
Resuscitating an historic brand while paying homage to its culture and traditions requires a delicate yet focused act of leadership. For Duluth Pack, Sega says the key is staying true to core values: Quality, premium products, made in America, lifetime guarantee for all craftsmanship and hardware. “We don’t apologize for who we are.”
Sega shares the history of one of northern Minnesota’s most beloved consumer brands, and how it took him four years to buy it. He talks about entering the purchase with “rose colored glasses,” and the hard work he’s put in since to turn sales around, including enduring a recession and a pandemic. “It doesn’t happen overnight,” he says.
Following our conversation with Sega, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Associate Professor of Management Chad Brinsfield who encourages businesses to get clear on their values. “I’m a big fan of being explicit. A lot of companies will espouse certain values, but what they do says something different. It’s important to create consistency and cohesion.”
In the early 2000s, leading consumers to a brand on the Internet could seem like a mystery, and Nina Hale loved the challenge. After years of working in advertising and digital strategy for other companies, Hale launched her own Minneapolis-based performance marketing agency in 2005. She called it Nina Hale Inc. and specialized in search engine optimization. Clients included UnitedHealth Group, Renewal by Andersen, Land O’Lakes, and other national brands.
In 2014, with 50 employees, Nina Hale Inc. converted to an ESOP, an employee stock ownership plan. Hale then began her long goodbye, retiring in 2020 at which time the agency renamed itself Collective Measures.
Hale has become a big advocate of the ESOP model. "It's really for people who want to have some sort of legacy, and for people who want to pass wealth on to their team." Today, Hale mentors other founders on exit planning. “if you don’t have an exit plan,” she says, “You don’t have a plan.”
Hale talks about the evolution of digital marketing, and building a company that can carry on without its founder.
Following our conversation with Hale, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business to learn more about succession planning. "A lot of transitions go wrong when the CEO leaves, but can't let go," says adjunct faculty member Glen Karwoski. "You want to mentor, but not manage whomever is coming in." Karwoski also advises outbound CEOs to "avoid looking for a clone of yourself. Change is going to happen."
Spencer Johnson sketched his initial designs for Sota Clothing as part of a class project while pursuing a graphic design degree at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His clean, modern designs and signature crossed paddles caught fire, and within a few years of graduating, Sota Clothing hit $1 million in sales. Sota became a fixture at popup shopping events and the Minnesota State Fair; the apparel brand started wholesaling to more than 100 stores around the state and opened two of its own stores in the Twin Cities.
Other states got interested, which led to a second brand under the Sota umbrella, Classic State, creating designs for the other 49. Johnson is also working on designs for products that could represent all states, while maintaining the brand’s local flavor.
He talks about slow growth, social media marketing, the importance of being omnichannel, and the challenges of being a creative thrust into the role of CEO.
As Sota Clothing hits its 10-year anniversary, Johnson is actually pulling back and taking time to consider what’s working – for the business, and his life. Bigger isn’t always better, and Johnson is mindful of what inspired Sota Clothing in the first place: a love of his home state and being out in it.
In Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, Professor John McVea shares the metaphor of a “beachhead market,” defined as a small market you can capture, gaining strength and resources to expand. “It’s what we advise a lot of entrepreneurs,” McVea says. “Start simple. Own your beachhead. Pick a battle you know you can win..then go capture the big prize.”
The secondhand clothing market is growing 11 times faster than traditional retail, according to research by Global Data. Children’s clothing is the fastest growing category, which makes sense considering the typical baby churns through seven sizes in the first two years of life. Kidizen, an online resale marketplace for kids clothes, makes selling those outgrown onesies as easy as taking a smartphone photo and posting it to the site. Finally, the market has caught up with the Minneapolis tech company, which launched in 2014 and hit profitability in 2021.
“It takes way more than you think,” says CEO Dori Graff, who charts the journey she and her co-founder Mary Fallon went on from becoming moms to recognizing the opportunity to create a kid-centric marketplace. “We felt so confident in what we were doing, what we were building.” They found a devoted audience out of the gate, and its grown to nearly 1 million users as more consumers and brands prioritize sustainability. When Kidizen launched, brands worried it would cannibalize their sales, Graff says. Today, they are partnering with Kidizen to launch “Rewear” resale sites of their own.
“Brand affinity happens in resale,” Graff says. She offers lessons in entrepreneurship, e-commerce, and the importance of evolving with trends.
“Failure is just part of the process,” Graff says. “We’re not even running the business we originally ideated on.”
In our Back to the Classroom segment with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, marketing professor Gino Giovannelli points out the magic of successful ideas, like Kidizen, is in mixing data with gut instinct. Even before retail trend reports indicated a growing acceptance of an affinity for resale apparel, Graff and her partner had a gut feel. “They were mothers of young kids—they could see where the market was heading.”
Giovannelli teaches his entrepreneurial students to then evaluate their gut ideas on impact versus burden. “Not every idea should be pursued,” he says. “This is a quantifiable measure of gut feeling.” Ideas that are high impact, low burden are the gems while high impact, high burden endeavors require more thoughtful consideration. “If you’re low on both impact and burden—stay the heck away,” Giovannelli says. “Even if the burden is low, it’s just busy work.”
Chemist and professor Paul Boswell couldn’t get over how little his students knew about how computers work. He started building a three-dimensional model to teach programming and realized he could turn it into a game. Named for Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, Turing Tumble is basically a marble run that teaches people how to build computers—something no other game was doing at the time. Teachers and science nerds love it; kids of all ages will put down the screens to play with it.
But perhaps even more impressive than creating a mechanical computer both educational and entertaining, is the grassroots approach Boswell and his wife Alyssaalso a former teacher and now CEO, took to turning Turing Tumble into a $4.5 million business in just four years. No angel investors, no big branding agency, no retail partner. Just a homemade video to tell their story and a Kickstarter campaign to shore up enough money for the initial manufacturing run. They needed $40,000. They raised $400,000. And now they’ve done it again: their second Kickstarter for Spintronics, Paul’s follow-up game of mechanical circuits, raised more than $1.3 million in 2021. The Boswells, who live and run their company in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn. explain how to make a project standout on Kickstarter, starting with a compelling story, a unique offering, and a willingness to take people along for the ride.
“Quality educational toys that make things that are difficult to absorb into something tangible.” Paul Boswell says. “That’s what drives us.”
After our conversation with the Boswells, we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business marketing professor Gino Ginovannelli, who talks about the way technology “releases the shackles” and allows entrepreneurs to create their own destiny. “It might have been easier to go the venture route and focus on getting into big box stores. But this way, they’re in control of their destiny. They’re able to grow at their own pace without having to rely on others. That takes a balance of guts and humility.”
While building a career in financial services by working with large banks and investment firms, Dionne Gumbs grew increasingly bothered by the inequities in access to capital. She left the corporate world to pursue a big idea: remove the obstacles that prevent women and people of color from accessing the financial tools they need to succeed. In 2018, she launched GenEQTY, a fintech platform that provides small business owners with tools to scale their businesses.
“Build what you can until you can’t build it anymore,” Gumbs says of working for larger financial institutions. “Ultimately, I just knew it was time.”
She turned her idea into a business plan through the Bush Institute’s Presidential Leadership Scholars Program. MasterCard’s Start Path Program has given her additional runway to scale the platform.
“It’s not just about the technology and the bank products; it’s about the voice of the people we want to serve,” Gumbs says. “Small businesses are such a big market. These are businesses focused on growing and creating great products and services for the communities they live in. Let’s listen to those voices and home in on what specifically those voices need.”
Gumbs charts her path into entrepreneurship, including a disappointing failure before GenEQTY. She talks about the way the reception to GenEQTY has changed since the murder of George Floyd and the social uprising that followed.
“If I had stopped at those moments in time when people said this is not needed, I wouldn’t be here today,” Gumbs says. “There’s something special about a Black woman charting a fintech path…there’s a belief that, she’s listening to us. She’s going to get it done.”
After our conversation with Gumbs we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship and Associate Dean Laura Dunham for a conversation about access to capital and pursuing ideas that matter.
“At St. Thomas we always tell our students that entrepreneurship is about solving problems that matter to you and creating value for others,” Dunham says. For Gumbs, that means thinking about how to make it easier for women and people of color to obtain funds that are increasingly available for entrepreneurs, but still daunting to access. “Business ownership, along with home ownership, is one of the best paths to create wealth. She’s thinking about how to make that easier.”
The gig economy wasn’t a thing in 2002 when Amy Langer and John Folkestad launched Salo LLC, a Minneapolis-based professional services firm that got its start placing senior level finance experts on project work, and soon expanded to HR, consulting, and more. Today, Salo is a national firm with more than 900 employees. The company recently hit a major milestone: $100 million in annual revenue. Langer and Folkestad are still 50-50 owners of Salo, but they’ve stepped away from day to day management—a shift made easier by the pandemic. Now more than ever, it’s clear Langer and her partner were ahead of their time in building a business around project based work.
“It wasn’t mainstream then,” Langer says. “We just always believed if we created a place that people wanted to work, and we continually got them work that challenged them, and respected how they wanted to work, that it could be pretty great.”
Langer outlines some of the key steps that set up Salo for success:
- Hiring a coach to help the team work better together
- Creating an advisory board
- Setting a strategic plan that outlines the values of the organization and the work culture to strive for.
“My biggest realization was that I don’t have to know all the answers, but I have to ask a lot of questions,” Langer says.
Langer talks about the challenge of creating a collaborative office culture today, how to prioritize relationships over transactions, and knowing when to make the shift from leader to advisor.
After our conversation with Langer, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Chad T. Brinsfield Is associate professor and chair of the Management Department. He expands on the importance of self-awareness in leadership, and prioritizing people over product.
“We’ve got to make well being of employees a priority,’ Brinsfield says. “We need to make caring for others a team sport. How can you have a heathy society if you don’t have healthy work?”
Robbie Harrell started an ice company before he owned a freezer or knew anything about carving. Today, Minnesota Ice is the nation’s largest producer of sculpture-grade block ice and artisan cocktail ice, manufacturing and delivering up to 50 tons of ice per day. That’s after a pandemic setback that might have put the company out of business if not for Harrell’s doggedness.
“Give me two weeks,” he told his team when Covid-19 shut down events and bars—his two biggest revenue drivers. “I will come up with a plan. I didn’t come through all of this to not make it out.”
That attitude inspired Minnesota Ice when Harrell was an undergrad, doing deliveries for another ice sculpture company. It occurred to him that automating ice carving would make the business more efficient. When his employer said no, he left to start his own company with the help of a mechanical engineering student who built their first carving contraption. Their first sculpture nearly melted before they could deliver it, and actually broke in two, but they managed to freeze the pieces back together and carry on.
Harrell takes us on the journey, from bootstrapping the ice business by starting a second business to landing on a national stage during Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis. He talks about building demand for a product that anyone can make, and why bars around the country special order his cocktail ice.
“There’s always something to improve upon,” Harrell says. “I just love figuring it out.”
After our conversation with Harrell, we go back to the classroom with one of his professors from the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. “There’s always this drumbeat around entrepreneurship that you have to be some sort of mythical creator and it’s just not true,” says Alec Johnson, an associate professor of entrepreneurship. “You’ve got to be a great problem solver. And Robbie is a great problem solver.”
Most businesses that succeed are not making something original, Johnson says, they’re improving on the competition. “Having a curiosity and a strong desire to learn are some of the more important characteristics of an entrepreneur.
The founder of 2 Gingers whiskey is at it again with a new Irish whiskey called Red Locks. Serial entrepreneur Kieran Folliard shares the process of launching new businesses, and why he’ll never retire.
“I don’t play golf, I wouldn’t be any good on a beach," Folliard says. "I get to do something I’m passionate about, excited about.”
He grew up in rural Ireland. He liked sports and drama. He describes himself as a daydreamer—not an entrepreneur—but from the time he was 12, Folliard worked—retail, construction, farming in Saudi Arabia. Eventually, travels in the U.S. brought him to Minnesota, and a job at a search firm where he helped startups find employees. Until one day he realized he needed to flip the script and start something of his own. He started with something near and dear: an Irish Pub called Kieran’s. From there, he built a portfolio of bars and restaurants, including the Local and the Liffey. In 2011, he exited the pub business to start 2 Gingers, which he sold to liquor giant Beam Suntory. Then in 2013, he established the Food Building in Northeast Minneapolis, an incubator of sorts for artisan food brands that aims to get back to the basics of a sustainable food ecosystem, connecting farmers, makers, purveyors and eaters. And in late 2021, he launched another whiskey brand, Red Locks, flipping the old model of starting with bars and spreading to stores due to a marketplace disrupted by Covid-19.
Folliard says his favorite part of starting businesses is “anything that has to do with people and the creative process. Team building, relationship building, partnerships in marketplace, the expansion of the story. It’s the things you learn.”
He teaches us a bit about whiskey and its resurgence, about branding, and most importantly, about exploring creativity through business.
“I don’t think I’m very good at business, and I don’t think I’m very good at art," Folliard says. "And so I take the best I have of both and put them together and then it’s like yeah…I’m an entrepreneur in the sense that I do start things.”
For some takeaways from Folliard’s career, we go Back to the Classroom with John McVea–fellow Irish immigrant, longtime friend, and associate professor at the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. He says Folliard is a “wonderful example of a career of conviction.” For him, entrepreneurship isn’t a means to an end—it is the end. “It’s the idea of entrepreneurship as the good life.”
McVea points out how Folliard builds community around entrepreneurial ideas. “It’s not about the liquid. It’s about the story he weaves around it.”
Sally Mueller got inspired to become an entrepreneur as she entered menopause. A seasoned executive who launched dozens of successful lifestyle brands, product lines, and designer partnerships for big companies including Target and Clique Brands, she was shocked to find that beauty and wellness companies weren’t addressing symptoms of menopause in a modern way and set out to fill that void with Womaness. Launched as an omnichannel brand in 2021, the Womaness product line includes vaginal moisturizer, the “Gone in a Hot Flash” cooling mist, dietary supplements and serum.
“I think a lot of women are saying, ‘finally.’” says Mueller, who has a co-founder, fellow retail veteran Michelle Jacobs. Market watchers peg women in menopause to represent an opportunity of $150 billion or more.
Mueller takes us through the process of building an omnichannel consumer brand from naming it and setting the brand pillars to raising money and navigating supply chain challenges.
"I think a lot of the innovation happens after you launch. That's when it takes true grit. What you thought in your Power Point deck was going to work doesn't always work," Mueller says. "Once you launch, how do you navigate the learnings? that's when innovation happens."
Launching a CPG brand requires art and science, she says. “You have to think of it as a funnel. Customers coming in at the top may have seen [the brand] on tv, or in a magazine, so they come in aware, but then how do you bring them all the way through the purchase journey? How do you get them from awareness to conversion? And how do you retain them as a customer. A lot of art that goes into this; it’s not all science.”
For some perspective on becoming an entrepreneur over 50, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where Laura Dunham in associate dean. “Entrepreneurship can happen at any point in your life,” Dunham says, pointing out that the median age of new founders is 42 and the fastest growing segment of entrepreneurs are age 54 to 64.
Dunham details four essential components to entrepreneurship for founders of all ages:
- Start with yourself. Know what you know, who you know, and what you're good at. Think: what am I noticing out there Where could things be better?
- Get close to your customers. Talk to them—focus groups, surveys, one on one interviews. What would be a meaningful solution? Test your ideas.
- Remember that building a brand is about learning and growing. "Your business plan is never going to work out in real life," Dunham says. "There are so many things you can’t anticipate until it’s out in the marketplace. It’s all about execution: Learning, responding, continually innovating to meet new needs."
- It takes grit. "You need energy and a willingness to never take no for an answer. "
Emmy Award winning TV host Ian Grant is an entrepreneur driven by passion. He loves travel. He appreciates art. He is a gifted storyteller. And he’s found a way to turn those interests into his life’s work, culminating with his new PBS television series Culture Quest, in which he takes viewers around the world to experience different cultures through the lens of artists.
Getting there has taken creativity, hard work and lots of rejection.
“You have to be ready and willing to fail. Over and over again,” Grant says. “And be willing to go back in. You also have to be willing to accept criticism.”
Grant peels back the curtains on the TV business, from the lack of reality in reality TV to the cancellation of his Travel Channel series The Relic Hunter—right after winning an Emmy. After years of pitches and auditions, he landed his PBS series, only to be left on his own to fund it—which he did, through a creative partnership with Gustavus Adolphus College. Along the way, Grant also built a successful furniture business, Bjorling & Grant, which started as imports from around the world and evolved into built-to-order furniture. His inclination to understanding global cultures through objects is a constant theme throughout Grant’s career—from Thailand to East Timor.
“When you get past the exotic element and start talking to artists, there’s such commonality with people around the world," Grant says. "The nomads out in Mongolia want the same thing as the farmer in north Dakota. They want to make a living, they want their kids to do well, they want a happy future. That’s the same for every person around the world. I love that you can look at this artist in Ghana or this Aboriginal Yolngu hip hop artist and think oh wow, this is crazy, but, oh my gosh, I totally get this guy.”
Back to the Classroom
“Yes you can follow your dreams, and it can come true,” says John McVea, associate professor of entrepreneurship with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. “But it doesn’t come true by accident."
McVea shares four principles that help entrepreneurs like Grant take a practical approach to pursuing their passions. 1. Bird in the Hand Principle: “Start with what you have, and what you know. Don’t start with where this could be in 10 years.” 2. Lemonade Principle: “Fail, fail, fail. The inverse of failure is learning. Most entrepreneurs will say that their big insights came from accidents and saying, ‘what can I learn from this?’” 3. Crazy Quilt Principle: “Stop thinking you can do this all on your own. Most successful entrepreneurs hatch together a bunch of relationships. You never know when a relationship is going to be useful so treat everyone well.” 4. Affordable Loss Principle: “Instead of asking how much risk you can bear, only take on as much debt as you can afford to lose. Set up the business model so you could walk away unscathed; then you can afford to experiment.”
Around 60 million American children play an organized sport, according to the National Council of Youth Sports. If you’re the parent or coach of one of them, you likely rely on a smartphone app called SportsEngine to stay organized and on schedule. SportsEngine is the leading provider of enterprise software and mobile apps used by youth sports teams nationwide. The Minneapolis-based company is owned by NBC Sports. But it was founded in a dorm room by Justin Kaufenberg, Carson Kipfer and Greg Blasko. You might be asking yourself: what did a bunch of single guys in college have in common with busy parents and youth sports coaches? Not much. But Kaufenberg’s dad not only coached his youth hockey team in Shakopee, Minn., he coached his four boys to look for problems and invent solutions. So when Kaufenberg saw his dad drowning in the administrative details of coaching, he followed the advice he’d long heard around his family’s kitchen table: invent something to make Dad’s life easier.
“It wasn’t a small problem we were solving,” Kaufenberg says. For the folks who dedicate their evenings and weekends to supporting kids on ice, courts and fields, “It was a life changing problem.”
Kaufenberg shares his classic entrepreneurial story—from four years of “absolute failure” to building SportsEngine into a 300+ person company and the eventual sale to NBC in 2016, the terms of which remain undisclosed. Today, the platform boasts more than 35 million monthly users.
Kaufenberg stepped down as CEO in 2019. He’s now a managing director with Rally Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage business technology. He shares hard learned lessons, like why founders should launch early—when they are “so uncomfortable and totally embarrassed by the product”—to the importance of forming an advisory council before developing the product, and why, in an investor pitch, you should “be concise and use plain language.”
After our conversation with Kaufenberg, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Alec Johnson, an associate professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship, draws key lessons from the SportsEngine story, starting with “Knowing your purpose.” He also discusses the advantages of starting young and how to know when it’s time to sell.
“There’s a belief in our society that you have to have experience first to tackle career of entrepreneurship. Justin is the example that proves the case. There’s a lot of advantage to starting young.”
Du Nord Craft Spirits is known in the industry as the nation’s first Black-owned micro distillery. It’s a distinction founder Chris Montana would like to shed. “I’m sick of being the ‘Black’ distiller,” Montana says. “I want it to be irrelevant, but the only way to do that is to get more people into the industry.”
A year after the Minneapolis distiller nearly burned to the ground when protests turned violent following the murder of George Floyd, Du Nord is poised to take off nationally thanks to a partnership with Delta Airlines that puts its Foundation Vodka on all domestic flights.
Du Nord’s first Delta order required more proof gallons than the small company had produced in its entire eight-year history. “To make Delta work is a Herculean lift,” Montana said. One that required partners like Jack Daniels to help Du Nord step up its manufacturing.
“When Delta Airlines reached out…I told them we hardly have a distillery,” Montana said. “They made it clear they understood this would be a special deal…the business community has stepped up in a tremendous way.”
It’s the same approach Montana takes to hiring at Du Nord, where the entire leadership team, besides himself, is female and 44 percent of the staff is people of color. “We had to hire people who didn’t know everything already. People who didn’t have all the skills, but are good people and wanted to work hard. We are a force for diversification in the industry and I hope our model gets stolen.”
Getting to this point of being a successful business owner and role model isn’t something Montana could have imagined when he was a troubled teen experiencing homelessness. He shares his story of adoption, learning to believe in himself, becoming a lawyer, and then a business founder too stubborn to throw in the towel even when time and again, many around him thought he should. Today, in addition to growing national distribution deals, Du Nord runs a foundation to support its community and is working to create a business incubator for other founders in Minneapolis.
“Whenever we took a step toward the community,” says Montana, “good things happened.”
Following our conversation with Montana we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Associate professor Nakeisha Lewis, ambassador of diversity, equity, and inclusion, urges companies to examine inherent barriers and think about how to create a more inclusive culture. When it comes to hiring, she says, “Rather than looking for the right degree, think about what unique perspective a person could bring to the role.” Focus on purpose and passion, Lewis says. “When Du Nord leaned into serving first, then they found the profits.”
Angie Tebbe is on a mission to make vitamins cool.
“I believe that if you’re going to start something from scratch, dream big,” says Tebbe, who left the Target merchant job she thought she’d retire from on a gut instinct that she should be doing something tied to wellness.
Within 8 weeks of quitting, she hatched the idea for Rae Wellness, a brand of natural supplements that address big issues including stress, sex, skin, sleep, and digestion. The target market is women like herself in their 20s and 30s. “We’re all about the psychographic: I’m not putting myself on the priority list because I want to conquer the world.”
Tebbe identified a white space in the supplement market between very expensive products aimed at the “One percent” and lower end, sugar-laden vitamins that were not aimed at women. Her goal was to make lives better, in an easy, accessible manner, for as many women as possible.
“I have always thought of brands and companies, those that soar and succeed are mission based,” Tebbe says. “It makes them authentic. Consumers can see through things.
Target taught Tebbe to translate high-end products for mass, and so she set out to do just that with Rae Wellness. The brand launched in 2019 as direct-to-consumer and quickly found its audience, amassing more than 160,000 Tik Tok followers. “I knew it needed to be omnichannel,” Tebbe said. Soon after, Rae landed on the shelves at Target.
She takes us through the process of conceptualizing and building the brand, the importance of being omnichannel, and the challenges of raising venture capital, which she did—a $9.5 million Series A in June of 2021. Plus, her expansion into CBD products.
Following our conversation with Tebbe, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Kim Sovell is an adjunct marketing professor and specialist in omnichannel retail. The key today, she says, is giving consumers options. “How do I reach as many customers as I can as conveniently as they want it.” She expects to see the explosion of direct-to-consumer brands continue; DTC now represents a more than $1 billion market. Going direct allows brands to be flexible with pricing and experiment with special incentives and promotions. But don’t write off physical stores, she says. “You want to be available, multiple ways.”
“Is there a better way to find safer and more effective medicine?”
That’s the question Ping Yeh pondered as he fought his way back from the brink of death in 2012. Having survived a chemotherapy cocktail so intense that doctors worried it could destroy his heart, he found himself wondering: with all the technology available, why do we still use the patient as the guinea pig? Pursuing an answer led to the 2014 formation of StemoniX, a biotech company that makes microOrgans used for drug discovery. Says Yeh, “Instead of waiting 8-10 years to see how humans respond (to a new drug), let’s just do it now.”
In March 2021, StemoniX joined forces with Cancer Genetics Inc., a New Jersey-based drug discovery leader, and together the two formed Vyant Bio (VYNT on the Nasdaq). The new biotech business has offices around the world including Pennsylvania, California, Australia, and Germany, with StemoniX operating as a wholly owned subsidiary based in Maple Grove, Minn.
StemoniX microOrgans are now used to test treatments for Rett Syndrome, a rare form of autism.
“In the grand history of biology, you have a hand in creating a new way of doing things,” Yeh says.
He talks about the process of building a biotech business—out of his basement and into the Johnson & Johnson JLabs science incubator. He credits the lean startup method with helping him and his partner to create a product that was not only scientifically advanced, but a market fit. Almost as challenging as creating “mini brains” in petri dishes, “we had to figure out how to make them at scale, and ship them all over the world.”
The recent merger allowed Yeh to move away from the business side of StemoniX to focus on innovation. He shares two keys to innovative thinking:
- Be careful of the beliefs that you have. They are these invisible bars and walls that might hold you back.
- It’s definitely over if you choose to quit. If you don’t, and every day you wake up and say we’re going to figure it out and do our best..you’ll figure it out.
For more takeaways from Yeh’s story, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Associate professor John McVea encourages entrepreneurs to approach the problems they hope to solve from a human perspective.
“Often people start out asking: what do I have to do to become a successful entrepreneur,” McVea says. “What this story reminds us is that a much better question is: how should I be to become a successful entrepreneur.”
He points out the a fundamental tenet of lean startup: the answer is not in the room. “It’s staying in constant contact with all sorts of people…constantly networking with people who are open to new ideas and thinking about how to create something that solves something for humans. Carry yourself in a way that makes you open to entrepreneurship.”
The pandemic called into question everything that made coworking desirable: shared work areas, in-person networking. But industry pioneer Don Ball has seen work culture trends cycle more than once before. And indeed, demand for flexible workspaces is already swinging back.
“Hybrid work opens an opportunity for coworking—it’s a professional office that’s not your home, and not your [company] HQ. If you have one close to where you live, I think what we’re going to see is suburban coworking…do really well.”
The opportunity in 2021 is not unlike what inspired Ball to get into coworking more than a decade ago. A career freelancer, Ball recalls “going stir crazy” working by himself at home in the mid-1990s. He rented an office, just to get out of the house and remembers thinking: “What if I invited others to join me? It seemed like a goofy idea at the time.”
Laptop computers and high-speed internet made it more feasible. In 2010, Ball and partner Kyle Coolbroth got a good deal on a vacant space in the Lowertown area of downtown St. Paul. They resisted turning it into separate office suites—the two weren’t interested in becoming landlords; they wanted to create a community for software engineers, freelancers, and business founders to connect and share ideas. So they invested in some Ikea furniture and opened CoCo, the Twin Cities’ first modern-day coworking community. Soon after, then-Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak convinced them to open a second CoCo in the Grain Exchange Building.
“There was a hunger for people to see what happening” in the startup community, Ball says. CoCo’s expansive space in the middle of downtown Minneapolis became that symbol of innovation. “It was the first time you could walk into one space see that it’s happening here.”
But while Coco became a local success story, WeWork, which launched the same year, became an international sensation—right up until its failed IPO. Ball talks about doing business in WeWork’s shadow.
“It was fantasy fueled by funny money. That was obvious to all of us in the business from day one,” Ball says. “They were acting like [real estate] was a software platform—like they could absorb all the costs of onboarding, and it would someday make money. It created downward price pressure…coworking as a business itself is okay, but it’s not great. It’s not going to make anyone rich. We were always looking for a twist.”
In 2018, Ball and Coolbroth teamed up with Fueled Collective and set about franchising their coworking communities and turning them into modern conference centers that would keep the spaces activated beyond 9 to 5. Ball stepped away from day-to-day operations in 2019. He sits on the board of Fueled Collective, which downsized during the pandemic and now operates two Minneapolis spaces. There’s a third in Cincinnati.
Today, Ball is back to freelancing, including a project related to regenerative agriculture, which isn’t as far afield as it sounds: the concept is to create shared growing space for crops and production space for small food producers. Coworking, for the ag industry.
For more perspective on work culture, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where adjunct faculty member Rod Hagedorn teaches management.
“Instead of trying to second guess where everything is headed, we should think in terms of drivers of change," Hagedorn says. "The pandemic taught all of us about the need for agility in terms of business operations.”
And with a disruption in office work comes the opportunity to consider which activities are best done in person: “innovation, creative problem solving—two areas critical for our economy and even our national security. The best way to come up with innovative solutions is still the old-fashioned way: in the office, with colleagues. We need people around us to be able to sense what someone is feeling and see reactions that you can’t get on Zoom.”
In March of 2020, as the U.S. shut down offices and clinics to guard against Covid-19, the telehealth platform Zipnosis saw an unbelievable spike in traffic, from around 1,800 visits a week to 65,000. Founder Jon Pearce had been preaching for more than a decade that the smartphone was the medical clinic of the future, but it took a global pandemic for the industry to make significant change.
In April of 2021, Zipnosis sold to another Minnesota-based startup, Bright Health, a giant among new health insurance companies that has raised more than $1 billion since 2016. Pearce and his team joined Bright Health Group and continue to work on transforming patient and provider connections. So it may surprise people to hear that Pearce believes telehealth as we know it is dying.
“The best analogy is the difference between Blockbuster and Netflix,” Pearce says. “Remotely getting care from a doctor is the same thing as renting a movie from Blockbuster. That business model is dying—you’ve got negative unit economics. What’s coming is Amazon care, Walmart. The tech itself is commoditized and integrated into a digitally enabled business. You will have more choice. The option to get care when you want it, how you want it, at the price you want is going to be the most radical transformation.”
Of course, it takes grand vision, tenacity and sacrifice to pursue such radical transformation, and Pearce also talks about the darker side of entrepreneurship, which he says factored into the collapse of his first marriage and struggles with mental health.
“We have unfortunately created this myth around entrepreneurship. There’s a destructive cycle that comes from unwieldy expectations of financial returns,” Pearce says. “We need to reframe role of entrepreneurship. To say, my job is to help change the world, take ideas and put them into action. To be effective, I need to set boundaries, delegate, find other people. When I go back to do the next thing, I’m going to start with the thesis that my vision is big and I’m going to build and find best people to help me do that. I’m not going to work 120 hour weeks. It’s not sustainable for me, and it’s not even good for the business.”
Pearce says he’d also be reluctant to take venture capital on his next venture, particularly early in its development. “I’ve become a lot more old school. Build a profitable business with customers who pay you.”
Following our conversation with Pearce, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Daniel McLaughlin is a senior executive fellow whose research focuses on making health care work more effectively.
“it’s an exciting time for health care—the pandemic accelerated technology rapidly,” McLaughlin says. Beyond telehealth, he sees digital therapeutics on the horizon—“devices we’ll have in our homes or wear on our bodies—personal AI systems for much better, more customized health care.”
“When you bring someone to tears by describing what you do, that seems viable.”
Michael Mader and Sam Harper started their sock business, Hippy Feet, with a mission: to support young people experiencing homelessness. Inspired by brands like TOMS and Love Your Melon, they launched in 2016 with a one-for-one model, a pair of socks donated to someone in need for every pair sold. But the business, a certified B-corp, really began to gel when they integrated the mission into making their product.
“We were going into shelters, donating socks, and we started to see familiar faces,” Harper says. “We told customers we would do this great thing by donating socks, and we did, but we were seeing the same people. People were still homeless. It felt hollow.”
Adds Mader, “[Socks] address a symptom of homelessness, but by just treating the symptom, you’re not doing anything to resolve the issue itself… We realized that simply donating a pair of socks was strong marketing, but it wasn’t a strong impact. We wanted to have a strong impact.”
In 2018, Hippy Feet piloted a Pop Up Employment program, bringing socks to shelters and paying those interested in hourly work to package product. By 2019, Hippy Feet dispensed with the one-for-one model to focus on employing homeless youths. “A job moves you along the pathway to self-sufficiency,” Mader says.
But in March of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic brought Hippy Feet’s Pop Up Employment program to a halt, along with sales. Mader says the company was within weeks of bankruptcy when a new plan came together that puts Hippy Feet in a better position for long term success.
“The pandemic caused us to solve the issue of scale around employment,” Haper says. Hippy Feet now offers short term, part time contracts to those in need of a job—just enough to get them on their feet, with confidence and connections to plan their next move. They’re working on partnerships that would lead Hippy Feet workers to future opportunities. And they’re thinking about ways to replicate the Minneapolis employment program in other cities.
As Hippy Feet hit its stride on mission, sales followed. “When we got our values dialed in, it allowed us to share our values with consumer in a way that was much more digestible,” Mader says. The company improved its digital marketing and e-commerce experience to grow direct-to-consumer sales.
What this process has taught the founders about the one-for-one model: “There are much deeper ways to give,” Harper says. He encourages brands considering this approach to ask themselves, “Are you actually meeting a real need? Many times, you’re better off giving money—empowering a community, giving agency to whomever you’re trying to help.”
“We’ve been able to bake mission into our core business,” Mader adds. “We never have to ask ourselves, do we want to donate an inferior product to save money, or delay a donation. If you’re holding a pair of Hippy Feet socks, it’s gone through the hands of young person experiencing homelessness. It’s a more authentic, deeper way of giving.”
Then we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where David Alexander is an associate marketing professor. While he appreciates the Hippy Feet mission, Alexander says the founders could have crafted their business plan more efficiently.
“Hippy Feet tried to create an opportunity. What we want, from a brand perspective, is people who buy into your commitment. Do the research to figure out who is going to support you and then change your dream to satisfy the opportunity.”
Serial entrepreneur Houston White’s business endeavors include barber shop, apparel collection that has been featured by Target and JCPenney, a coffee cafe and product brand, and housing development. But he’s building something bigger than all of that combined. He’s building community.
“Culture plus capacity,” was White’s pitch to U.S. Bank, which invested in his vision. “It’s my belief that in Black communities, the smallest institutions have the greatest impact…church, barbershop. Typically, folks start big and trickle down. In community development, you’ve got to start small and level up. Let’s start with things we can do.”
What White wants to do is build a neighborhood where Black culture and Black owned businesses thrive. White’s Camdentown, as he calls the Weber-Camden area of North Minneapolis, is a place where people of all backgrounds can shop, meet for coffee, get a haircut, and live—together, at various income levels. They key, he says: it has to be fueled by Black entrepreneurs.
“I believe that Black Minnesota’s been held back because we have not unleashed human potential,” White says. “Entrepreneurs are the one missing link.”
White’s Get Down Coffee Co. will open in the fall of 2021 adjacent to White’s barbershop and store, all in a predominantly Black part of town that has lacked the sort of resources and attractions to draw visitors. Phase two of White’s expansion includes a 12-unit market rate apartment building next door. “I am a firm believer that we can’t concentrate poverty,” White says. “You need mix of incomes, race, and it has to be Black led in order to really move community forward. If we want better schools, we need to create a mix of incomes.”
The vision struck White earlier In his career. “I had done what I hoped I’d never do: get successful and leave my community. I was become a wealthy Black man and my giveback was money. I spent no time in the inner city. I realized I had no connection to a village like it was growing up for me in Mississippi. I had to figure out how to grow as an entrepreneur and maintain connection to my tribe.”
White was entrepreneurial from his days biking the neighborhood giving haircuts. Spending summers in Mississippi and the school year in Minneapolis was a “cultural collision” that White says gave him a broader perspective on race and meant he ‘didn’t grow up with an inferiority complex.” Today, he fields calls from the governor of Minnesota and the CEO of Target. And as White scales his own business, he’s plotting out the opportunity to create a local legacy much bigger than himself.
“It’s going to take a radical shift in way people think about what Black people need, and it’s much more than a job.”
After our conversation with White, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Associate Dean Laura Dunham shares White’s believe in the importance of entrepreneurship as a tool to build both wealth and community.
“Small businesses play an important role in upward mobility,” Dunham says. “Business owners have much higher levels of wealth.”
Challenging economic times often lead to business formation and Dunham notes a spike during the Covid-19 pandemic of Black-led startups. But disparities in funding for Black entrepreneurs persist.
“Give people a bit of bandwidth and capital,” Dunham says. “They have the insight, experience and knowledge to see needs to be filled.”
Manolo Blahnik. Jimmy Choo. Christian Louboutin. Marion Parke. It takes moxie, clear vision, and a major investment to launch a luxury footwear brand with no experience in the field. But Marion Parke has something those other designers don’t: a medical degree. As a podiatric surgeon, Parke, who counts First Lady Jill Biden as a fan of her collection, spent a lot of time thinking about shoes. “Every patient consultation led to talking about shoes,” she recalls, “because everyone is there for a foot problem.”
That’s when inspiration struck the Oklahoma native: her knowledge of the foot and biomechanics, combined with her love of fashion helped her see the opportunity to create a luxury footwear brand that delivers on both style and comfort. “The novel concept was doing it in an elevated and tasteful way—that didn’t scream you’re wearing a shoe that’s designed by a doctor.”
She launched in 2015 and Bloomingdale’s became the brand’s first major retailer. Parke learned the business through trial and error: pattern making, production, wholesaling, e-commerce, branding. Heading into 2020, Marion Parke shoes were sold through nearly 50 boutiques and stores including fashion sites like Shop Bop.
But the Covid-19 pandemic caused a major disruption—not only in distribution, but in shopping habits. Suddenly, in early 2020, no one needed heels. Marion Parke made the decision to skip an entire season of heels and stilettos, instead broadening the collection to include flats, sandals and wedges for the first time. “Covid fast-tracked that for us,” says Parke, a mother of three who suddenly found herself trying to save her brand while homeschooling her young children. “We had to think about what women’s activities were like.”
Now with the backing of investors who are experienced in the shoe industry as the owners of Minnetonka Moccasin, Marion Parke brought on its first CEO in late 2020 to “professionalize the business.” The move allows Parke to focus on what she loves most: design.
“In fashion you’re expected to see the future, to know what women want a year before they want it. The stakes have never been higher,” Parke says. I believe that our relationship with clothing has changed. Women have gotten comfortable, and they want something more functional, more wearable. I believe women aren’t going to want to go back to the traditional high heel….we want to show that we’re here to support women, so that you’re not distracted by shoes at the most important moments in your life.”
Following our conversation with Parke, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Marketing professor Steve Vuolo explains the four key components to clarity of positioning that help a brand gain traction. Clarity: “Clarity is the art of sacrifice. You’re not going to be relevant to some in order to be really important to others.” Target: “Know who you’re marketing to.” Frame of reference: “Understand the arena in which your product is competing.” Market differentiation: “What reason do consumers have to believe your claim? In Marion Parke’s case, being a doctor gives her instant credibility. Plus, her shoes being manufactured in Italy adds believability.”
"It's amazing how many entrepreneurs don't take the time to write these things out," Vuolo says. "Think about the persona of your brand."
Before the boutique fitness craze that landed spinning studios and bootcamp gyms on every corner, there was Steele Fitness, a team of personal trainers who would show up at your home in a BMW and provide one-on-one fitness training. Behind the VIP service was an ambitious entrepreneur named Steele Smiley, whose first exercise in creating a brand was remaking himself into the businessman he wanted to be.
“In 2000, I said: I need to become a different person in order to manifest my life,” Smiley says. “You have to play the part.”
Since selling Steele Fitness to the private equity firm that owned global chain Snap Fitness, Smiley moved into the business of healthy eating. First came salad chain Crisp & Green, and in April 2021, he launched his newest venture, a fast casual plant-based burger shop called Stalk & Spade. “Plant-based eating is the future,” Smiley says. The first Stalk & Spade opened in Wayzata, Minn., where all of Smiley’s businesses have launched. But he’s thinking big.
“Ultimately, our goal is to be the fastest growing restaurant chain in American history,” Smiley says.
He plans to grow Stalk & Spade through franchising, just as he’s done with Crisp & Green, which will soon surpass 60 locations in eight states. But Crisp & Green didn’t take off until the pandemic, thanks to Smiley’s early investment in digital ordering technology, which made it easy to pivot to online purchases when in-store dining shut down in March of 2020. Before Covid-19, 7 percent of customers used the app. Now, Smiley says, more than 60 percent of Crisp & Green orders come through the app. Online orders are holding steady even as dining in returns
Smiley talks about his approach to building companies, and the challenges and opportunities of working ahead of lifestyle trends.
“Ultimately you’re only as successful as your ability to listen to your inner voice,” he says. “The times when I’ve made wrong decisions, I haven’t listened to it.”
Following our conversation with Smiley, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Associate Professor Mark Spriggs offers franchising advice. “A franchise system is all about replicating the corporate model. The founder has to create a reliable business model that can be learned and operated quickly by a franchisee.” The question for Stalk & Spade, he says, is, “will this concept travel…without Steele?”
Seena Hodges is that person everyone calls when they want to learn about racism and equity building. When they want to get woke.
“I always love having the conversation, helping people unpack the things they don’t see, I just don’t want to do it for free.” Hodges parlayed her background in nonprofit, social justice, marketing and theater work into The Woke Coach, a Minneapolis-based agency that offers programs for businesses and individuals designed to help them understand bias and become antiracist. Launched in 2018, demand for The Woke Coach’s services skyrocketed following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd.
“Once you start to see and witness, injustice you can’t unsee it. And it’s absolutely everywhere,” Hodges says. “At this point there’s really no denying that we have to have these conversations. We have a moral imperative to put our best foot forward.”
Hodges shares the personal journey that led her to the work, and the challenge of a job she can’t ever leave at the office.
“While I do this work—the work of creating equitable environments—for a living, I’m always impacted by what’s happening in the world, when someone is murdered, when someone puts it on Facebook,” Hodges says. “Sometimes white folks can put their own desire for learning ahead of the feelings of other people. I want to encourage people to have more grace around their process even when they’re seeking to learn. It’s been hundreds of years that we’ve lived with inequity and the circumstance of blatant racism, and it’s going to take us some time to get out of here.”
The key to lasting change, Hodges says, is self-awareness. “We talk about leaders being strong, visionary, empathetic. What we’ve never said is a leader has to be antiracist. You don’t learn that in business school. It’s something you have to really internalize.”
Becoming antiracist means being fearless. “We can’t focus on the why we can’t,” Hodges says. “We have to focus on the how we can. There’s always something any one person can do.”
For more perspective on how business can play a role in shifting broader conversations about race, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Nakeisha Lewis serves as associate dean of undergraduate and accelerated master’s programs. She quotes a survey that found 75 percent of professionals say their company has enhanced its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts this part year, but only 19 percent rate those efforts as effective.
"The real conversation is not just, can we have more conversations, but are those conversations leading to change." Action, she says, must involve building pipelines to support advancement of BIPOC employees, and more educational opportunities. “The business setting is an excellent place to start…to make the future of business more unapologetically equitable and inclusive.”
Special education teacher Angie Gallus made dog treats in class with her students as a way to help them learn job skills. They would bake, package, and sell to friends and family. When Angie reunited with a couple of former students who hadn’t been able to find jobs after graduation, she and her husband Kyle, also a special ed teacher, decided to fire up the oven again. The combination of producing treats that dogs love and creating jobs for individuals with disabilities made the Galluses realize: “There’s something bigger here.” On the spot, a company was born. They named it Finely’s after their own pocket shepherd. Brand motto: “Treat with kindness.”
That was 2016. For the first two years, they worked nights and weekends with their former students, and sold the treats at farmer’s markets, breweries, and online. Then came their viral accelerator: Ashton Kutcher heard about Finley’s commitment to being an inclusive employer. His A Plus news site published a story, which the actor/entrepreneur shared on his own social media, and the orders poured in. It prompted the Galluses to professionalize their packaging and step up manufacturing, paving the way for partnerships with regional grocers and pet specialty stores.
Toward the end of 2019, after three years of bootstrapping the brand, they raised a $650,000 seed round through friends and angels—many of whom the Galluses say have children with disabilities and deeply appreciated the brand’s mission. They were poised to begin 2020 with a launch in the Pacific Northwest. But before the product could reach shelves, stores shut down due to the Covid-19 outbreak in Seattle.
Flush with product, Finley’s pivoted to online, launching on Chewy.com and then Target.com. They also sell through Amazon. The pandemic turned out to be a great time to scale a dog treat brand. U.S. pet industry sales exceeded $100 billion for the first time ever in 2020 with pet food and treat sales leading the pack at $42 billion, according to the American Pet Products Association.
That wasn’t Finely’s only lucky break. With the capital they raised months before the pandemic, Finley’s had launched a line of trainer bites, just 3 calories each.
“We had no idea all of these dogs were going to get adopted, and then spend time with you on Zoom,” Kyle says. “The No. 1 thing people wanted was the dog off their laps and something to keep them happy.” Finley’s trainer bites outperformed the original biscuits last year in what Kyle describes as an “inferno of opportunity.”
Having proven itself online, Finley’s is prepping for major store growth in 2021 including select Target and Safeway/Albertsons stores. The grocer is supporting Finley's mission of inclusivity by waiving slotting fees that most brands pay to get on shelves.
In addition to hiring people with special needs, Finley’s added profit sharing to support the organizations that support its employees. “You can employ people with disabilities, but there are so many other barriers: transportation, job coaching. We want to give back to that as well.”
Angie’s advice to other employers that strive to be more inclusive: “Make sure you’re actually asking employees what they need.” Often, what they need is the opportunity. “Sometimes you can’t see potential until you give someone a chance.”
The Finley’s story made Associate Professor John McVea think about the value of work. In Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, McVea points out that there’s much to learn about work from a group that is often excluded from doing it.
“There’s this old idea that we work to earn and leisure is an escape from the drudgery.” A more modern take, says McVea, is careers of conviction: “We work for purpose and leisure is time to reflect. For people who are excluded, they don’t have the opportunity to continuously learn. Work is not just busy stuff, not just about making money. The actual act, the process of work transforms us.”
Dr. Jeremy Friese left a prestigious medical practice at Mayo Clinic to solve one of healthcare’s great headaches: the prior authorization process. Three years later, in December 2020, he sold his venture-backed AI technology company Verata Health to its biggest competitor, Olive, for $120 million. He brought almost the entire Verata team of around 60 with him, and took on the role of president of Olive’s Payer Market. His work to automate the administrative side of health care services continues, now with a much larger team. He’s yet to meet any of them in person or visit Olive’s Ohio headquarters. The entire acquisition transpired virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Verata, which was a “Zoom company” with employees spread around the country even pre-Covid, saw the adoption of its software services accelerate during the pandemic. “One of the positives [out of this time] is the way our healthcare system has embraced a new way of working—the adoption of tele-health and a variety of other technologies. There’s a newfound appetite and willingness to bring in tech to solve problems.”
Although he spent nearly 20 years in radiology at Mayo Clinic, Friese initially chose medical school with the goal of “solving systemic problems.” His first exposure to the stresses of health care came as a high school sophomore in South Dakota, when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. “So much time and angst is wasted sharing information among physicians and with payers,” Friese says. “It causes delays and uncertainty in care, and it hasn’t gotten a whole lot better in the last 20-30 years.”
“Helping the system get better through capitalism is something I’m wired to do.”
But along the way, Friese got drawn into patient care and became an internationally recognized doctor. All the while, he took on executive roles on the business side at Mayo and earned an MBA at Harvard. With patient paperwork piling up on his desk and keeping him out of the exam room, he decided to finally take the leap and step away from practice—and his doctor’s salary— to start Verata.
“To be an entrepreneur, you have to be a little crazy,” Friese acknowledges. “But I did know that it was a massive problem that would have a massive impact.”
Following our conversation with Friese, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Daniel McLaughlin is a senior executive fellow whose research focuses on making healthcare work more effectively. McLaughlin sheds some light on the complexities of the prior authorization process. “Throughout the country there’s been a problem of over treatment or ineffective care.” Both ends of the spectrum add up to billions in waste, he says. “Insurance companies don’t want to pay for either so they set up a complicated system. There’s a real opportunity to use emerging tech tools to make the process easier and cheaper.”
The number of medical doctors seeking MBAs, particularly in St. Thomas’s health care business program, continues to grow, McLaughlin says. “There’s an increasing number of physicians who are so frustrated in practice, they want to figure out how to fix the healthcare system.”
Having reached her ultimate career goal before age 30—New York Times best-selling author; staff writer for ESPN—Maria Burns Ortiz turned her attention to a new challenge: promoting equitable education. She’s the co-founder of 7 Generation Games, a mission-based ed-tech startup focused on closing the math gap for students from Native American, Latino, and underserved and rural communities.
She started the company with her mom, Anna Maria De Mars, World Judo Champion turned educational psychology professor. Since her days as an eighth grade math teacher, De Mars wanted to make video games to teach kids math, but at the time, the technology didn’t exist. With Burns Ortiz’s career at a crossroads, her mom convinced her to take the money she would have spent on an MBA and invest it in starting a business.
Eight years later (five, full-time), 7 Generation Games counts more than 40,000 active uses in schools and homes across the country. The company recently received $1 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for Growing Math, a new learning platform aimed at helping meet the needs of students and educators in Arizona, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, and South Dakota.
“There’s a disconnect between what software companies think teachers need, and what they actually use,” says Burns Ortiz, who runs the company from Minneapolis with a team of 11 spread around the country. Although 7 Generation was focused on rural and underserved urban communities pre-pandemic, distance learning has heightened the awareness that “the digital divide is a lot greater than we thought.”
When schools closed in early 2020 due to Covid-19, 7 Generation lifted its paywall to get software to teachers. But in some of the communities it serves, nearly half the students don’t have Internet at home. “No one can learn from software they can’t use,” Burns Ortiz says. In the past year, 7 Generation more than doubled its offline game usage, from 40 to 85 percent of its collection.
“Making something that seems high tech run on something low tech is really hard,” Burns Ortiz says. “Maybe it’s not the coolest, 3D virtual world, but it runs on a phone.”
Despite early difficulties convincing investors, Burns Ortiz and her mom felt strongly about setting up 7 Generation as a for-profit company. “Social impact is not a charity,” Burns Ortiz says. “You can make a positive societal impact and also have that be a profitable enterprise. When it’s non-profit, often that doesn’t encourage people to go in and innovate on solutions.”
Her goal now? “I want 7 Generation to be as ubiquitous in the classroom as text books.”
After our conversation with Burns Ortiz, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, where Kevin Henderson is a professor of management with a focus on universal design for learning. “We want to give everyone in the classroom an equal opportunity to succeed.” That starts with material that feels relevant to a wide variety of cultures and communities. “It’s so important for students to see themselves represented in curriculum.”
Bizzy Coffee isn’t like most other coffee brands. No coffee shops. No single serve bottles or cans or pods. Bizzy founders Alex French and Andrew Healy are singularly focused on a fast-growing segment of the coffee industry: cold brew. And by staying laser focused, they’ve become the best-selling cold brew brand on Amazon. Meanwhile, their grocery store presence is steadily growing. The momentum they have today is proof that picking a lane can pay off. Determination and a willingness to learning from failures can help. And caffeine is essential.
A born entrepreneur, French studied entrepreneurship and finance at the University of St. Thomas and tried as many as 20 different startup ideas before landing on Bizzy with his friend Healy. One of those early attempts was a snowboarding accessory called the Lifty. Its failure to take off gave them a key insight: “no one was searching for it.”
So French and Healy studied Google search trends to identify a consumable product people were actively looking for. At the time, the two recent college grads were making their own cold brew coffee at home to save money and it didn’t taste as smooth and sweet as the cold brew from their local coffee house. Both had serious day jobs—French was working in consumer research at General Mills; Healy in research and development engineering for St. Jude Medical. Pooling their knowledge, evenings were devoted to creating a better testing cold brew coffee for home brewers. According to Google, searches for cold brew were growing 100 percent annually.
“We just didn’t fully understand how challenging coffee was going to be,” French says. “But we wanted to create a new product for a new consumer entering the coffee category for the first time who doesn’t want to drink Folgers and wants a brand that resonates with their own personal belief system.”
Knowing that they were their own target market, French and Healy studied their shopping and consumption patterns. “And so we said to ourselves, let’s go sell something on the internet for the next generation of shopping.”
French shares many hard-learned lessons, like a product that sells well on the Internet does not easily translate to stores. The competition for shelf space is tough, and the wrong placement can ruin your odds. And creating a product with the intention of competing with the category leader only works if you can demonstrate that yours is a better value. Mistakes are part of the journey, French says.
“You only learn to be an entrepreneur by being an entrepreneur. You will fail, but the faster you fail, the faster you’ll succeed.”
For more perspective on the entrepreneurial journey, we go back the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where John McVea is an associate professor. “Anybody can say, ‘I like cold coffee.’ What Alex had to do was look at the world the way the market is, the way people are drinking coffee, and say, ‘how could we do that differently?’”
Aspiring entrepreneurs often get too hung up on coming up with an original idea, McVea says. “You don’t succeed because of an idea no one thought of. Probably millions of people thought the future is cold coffee. But that’s a far cry from understanding how you build a sustainable business to succeed at cold brew coffee.”
What’s even more important than the idea? “You have to love rigorous inquiry,” McVea says. “You have to be able to listen and empathize with others, and you have to enjoy problems coming at you. They love the journey more than the destination.”
Perhaps you’ve noticed when you hit the checkout button on your online purchases there’s often an option to buy now, pay later. It’s reverse layaway—you get the goods now, and you pay them off in a four or six interest free installments. No fees, no need for credit. Young consumers seem to love it and so buy now pay later is being embraced by more and more retailers, from small indie shops to the big direct to consumer brands like Peloton and Warby Parker.
The pandemic only accelerated adoption rates and analysts project buy now pay later solutions could rack up $680 billion in transaction volume worldwide by 2025. There are several big players in the field, like Afterpay and Affirm, which hit a $24 billion valuation after going public in January. But that hasn’t deterred Sezzle, a Minneapolis-based buy now pay later platform that went public on the Australian securities exchange in 2019 and continues to gain traction in the U.S.
“I want to win,” says Sezzle founder/CEO Charlie Youakim, who was featured on TCB's Tech 20 in 2020. “We’re still in last place in the payment space, even though we’re having success. That’s what drives me. I know we can beat them. We just have to keep on innovating and listening to our stakeholders.”
Yoaukim didn’t set out to create a payment platform. His is a winding founder’s tale that includes many startup signatures: sleeping on a couch, a fallout with a co-founder, a failure that eventually led to the big idea.
"Start small," he advises other founders. "Find that first customers. Make it work great. Listen to that customer. When they have issues, fix them. When they have ideas, do them. Keep on walking forward."
Sezzle launched in 2017 as a payment processing platform. Retailers liked the model because it was less expensive than credit card fees, but consumers didn’t latch on.
“We ran with the idea that [a digital payment option] was a preference," Youakim says. "But what if it’s not a preference? What if it’s a lack of access? We flipped the hypothesis. We had to build a credit system.”
Investors weren’t initially sold on the pivot. Youakim shares the process of winning them over, the advantages of going public in Australia, why buy now, pay later resonates with consumers, and how he’s placing purpose alongside profit with new products designed to help consumers build their credit scores. Everything is clicking now: Sezzle doubled its headcount in 2020 to more than 200 employees. The Minneapolis-based company just recently announced its certification as a B Corp, emphasizing its mission to "financially empower the next generation."
“You just keep on pushing ahead,” Youakim says of building a business. “It’s like mountain climbing. Know where the pinnacle is, and keep picking a path with the goal that you want to get to the top.”
Following our conversation with Youakim, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Consumer behavior expert Kim Sovell, a participating adjunct professor of marketing is tracking the rapid adoption of buy now pay later platforms, particularly among younger consumers. Usage skyrocketed from 2019 to 2020—200 percent among Gen Z; 86 percent among millennials. “It allows an individual to get immediate satisfaction out of a purchase but not go into debt.” But Sovell worries that the interest free, penalty free offers Sezzle and its competitors currently offer may evaporate. “I think they’ll start charging individuals that miss payments. I think that’s going to change. I also think people need to be aware: it does entice buying more.”
Growing up in and around computer labs, with a mother who was a trailblazer in computer sciences, Yu Sunny Han developed a knack for solving problems through technology. He built computer games as a kid and sold his first piece of software at age 12, requesting the $500 fee be paid in quarters to play arcade games.
Determined to chart his own course, Han chose chemistry as his college major but says “most of the problems I solved in school ended up leading me back to computer sciences.” So it happened that while working as a business consultant, he identified a problem in the manufacturing industry: a lack of modern business software to connect companies. “Manufacturing adopted so many aspects of technology first…20 years ago, but they haven’t changed since. And they expect it to be a painful process to update. I thought: what if all of these companies and people were connected: how much faster could we make stuff?”
Still, it took Han a year and a half to quit a good-paying job and start a company with his own savings. He didn't aspire to be an entrepreneur. “No one else was doing it, and it needed to get done.”
He built Fulcrum, a cloud-based software system that supports the business of manufacturing for a new generation of production. That’s everything from planning to quality control to inventory. Han estimates that as many as 12 million American manufacturers use outdated software. Fulcrum is poised to help the multi-trillion dollar industry take a giant leap forward, and that’s why investors are lining up. Fulcrum raised just over $3 million dollars in 2020 to expand its platform. He's listed on TCB's 2021 Tech 20.
The momentum didn’t happen overnight. “We started out too unfocused, trying to serve every industry,” Han says. “We honed in on where we knew how to deliver the most value.”
The number of customers on Fulcrum's platform multiplies every month and Han keeps hiring to stay ahead. The seed funding “added momentum to hire ahead of need.” In doing so, Han thinks as carefully about company culture as he does software—extra challenging in a pandemic, and with employees spread across the country. “There’s always so much to do, but we have to be able to say, no matter what, we’re going to get together online and play Among Us, or hang out on Zoom. We make time for every new hire to be grilled with questions from the team. We talk about everyone we lay off—what did they do well, and what could be better. What gels a team together is working on things, overcoming challenges, and being really transparent and honest with each other.”
A product of the Twin Cities tech community, Han saw the great potential of the ‘80s, in the heyday of Control Data and IBM, and watched it slip away as companies were acquired and tech talent moved to the coasts. But a new generation of modern software companies like Code 42, Jamf, and his own, coupled with new seed funds like Ryan Broshar’s Matchstick Ventures and Mary Grove’s Bread & Butter (both previously featured on By All Means), gives him hope for the future of tech in Minnesota. “I wish people would think bigger. It takes as much effort to build something small as something big, and the value is compounded greatly.”
After our conversation with Han we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business professor Lisa Abendroth, academic director for Business in a Digital World. “Because of social media we take for granted the ease of connection today. He saw the pain points in manufacturing and how to deliver unique value to the market.”
Of course, it takes humans to build smart technology. Abendroth points out the power of building a collaborative team. “We often take for granted the importance of a Taco Tuesday or group Pictionary. You have to be cohesive and communicate. Sunny’s product is trying to do that, too.”
“Video games are an amazing covert teaching mechanism,” says Jules Porter, founder of Seraph 7 Studios, a Minneapolis-based videogame development studio on a mission to fight racism and build empathy by creating diverse characters and games that show the BIPOC community in a positive light.
The epiphany hit as she toured Rome for the first time and realized she knew her way around because she had learned the city through a video game. Porter was a law student at the time, a path she decided to pursue following a troubling string of shootings of Black teenagers by white police officers.
“I just felt so powerless,” Porter says. She listened to a Tedx Talk given by Dr. Artika Tyner, a University of St. Thomas law professor who said: “Law is the language of power.” And that solidified Porter’s decision to enroll. But midway through, Porter began to question whether it was enough.
“The law can provide consequences, it can help set policy. But the issue, if a person doesn’t even see us as human, there’s something in the heart that the law can’t reach. How do we build empathy from the inside out?”
Porter’s answer: video games.
“Eighty percent of Black youths play video games, but only 3 percent of the protagonists look like us and they’re not even good guys. It’s so rare to find positive Black characters,” Porter says, pointing out that the number of BIPOC individuals and women who work as gaming programmers is negligible. “The decision makers are white men…in order for us to change the narrative and put more positive images out there, we need BIPOC folks to be part of the creative side.”
Porter started sketching out game ideas while finishing law school. For a while, she clerked for a judge by day, and worked on her startup by night. Being accepted to the Finnovation Lab accelerator allowed her to finally focus on the business. Additional mentorship and funding comes from the American Express x iFund Women of Color 100 for 100 program.
Porter’s first console video game, due out later this year, is called Elder Battle Royale and features an even split of male and female characters from diverse backgrounds. The characters are also seniors who fight enemies with weaponized walkers.
There’s another side to Seraph 7 Studios. Porter wants to raise up a more diverse generation of coders by teaching BIPOC students to code. “There’s a lot of untapped opportunity.”
The early attention Porter has received for her efforts, coupled with a string of grants and awards, could create undue pressure for a first time founder. But Porter says she feels driven, and optimistic. She thinks often of a favorite Oprah Winfrey quote: “Don’t focus on being successful; focus on being substantial and the success will come.”
Following our conversation with Porter, we go Back to the Classroom with AnnMarie Thomas, professor of entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business and director of the UST Playful Learning Lab where she's observed firsthand how much kids absorb through play.
“We know that kids are engaged differently in their learning when they’re having fun, seeing people who look like them,” Porter says.
Thomas also points out how Porter’s eclectic interests—gaming, law, travel, theology—led to her idea for Seraph 7.
“The secret to new ideas: they don’t come from just business classes; they come from all aspects of life. Ideas are everywhere,” says Thomas, pointing out that a liberal arts college like St. Thomas was able to support Porter as her interests and focus evolved. “Ideas are everywhere. Put yourself in situations for lifelong learning. Jules brings one heck of a toolbox to everything she does.”
Never in modern history has office space been more disrupted than during the Covid-19 pandemic. And as CEOs contemplate how to bring workers back—whether they’ll bring workers back—architect and commercial designer Betsy Vohs is helping businesses reconsider the purpose of the office.
“When else do you get a chance like this, to rethink the office?”
Vohs is the founder and CEO of Studio BV in Minneapolis, a boutique design firm that works across industries, from medical clinics to apartment buildings to the headquarters for companies such as Digi International, nVent, and Evereve. Studio BV’s pro bono arm, Design Forward, works on projects for non-profit clients.
“Good design creates something powerful,” Vohs says. “Space can tell your story.”
How does that story change as a result of Covid-19? “Now we know why office space matters,” Vohs says. “We can do a fine job on Zoom, but we can’t innovate, we can’t create culture.”
Not one Studio BV client plans a full-time return to the office. Vohs expects more independent work to happen at home, even when it’s safe to come back, so that means fewer cubicles and dedicated workstations while upping the emphasis on what she calls “innovation space.”
Take note: Vohs shares some of her favorite design tips and resources.
After our conversation with Vohs we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Associate Professor of Management Erica Diehn studies meaningful work, and in the wake of Covid, that includes thinking about where we find meaning, and the important role place plays in creating high quality connections.
“Our best work—curiosity, new ideas—that kind of creation doesn’t happen in solitude or when we’re powering through tasks. We need idle space in our brains.” Commuting to the office used to provide that time, and part of the reason working from home is proving stressful to many is that “every second of time is taken up by a present need.”
“Stepping into the office can be a relief,” Diehn says, echoing Vohs’ sentiments on the way companies are going to rethink the office. “How do we create environments that reward the fact that I get to go to the office today. How do we make spaces that inspire more of that?”
Renay Dossman built her career with Fortune 500 companies, moving from Cargill to Target, where she found her passion in food innovation. But after years of traveling the world for food trends, developing products, and eventually taking her expertise to Winn-Dixie where she developed concept stores to serve Black and LatinX neighborhoods, Dossman left the corporate world in search of something more. She found her way to the Neighborhood Development Center, a nationally lauded community development financial institution that provides training, small business loans, and incubator space to low income and BIPOC entrepreneurs.
“NDC believes in building communities from within,” says Dossman, who became president of the nonprofit in 2019. “They believe in the power of entrepreneurship to develop generational wealth, to develop a community.”
That mission resonated with Dossman, who grew up in Chicago public housing projects. “Where I lived, we didn’t have a lot of businesses. If you saw a business owner, they were usually a leader in the community.”
NDC has helped more than 6,000 entrepreneurs. The organization estimates that for every dollar put into a local business, $40 goes back to the community. And the entrepreneurs who come to NDC don’t have options like angel investors or friends and family funding.
“These are people coming to this country – what America is about,” Dossman says. “You should be able to come here and do things and make it. They just need a leg up, just need an opportunity.”
NDC co-owns the Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis, home to many ethnic restaurants and retail businesses started by immigrants from all parts of the world. The market was particularly hard hit by the pandemic—many of its vendors don’t even have websites, let alone the ability to offer e-commerce or delivery. So NDC introduced tech support, reduced rent, and stepped up loans. And just when it felt like they were getting a handle on the economic impact, George Floyd was killed eight blocks from the market.
“It just felt like everything stopped. I honestly didn’t know how to go on.”
But there was no time to grieve as the market and the small businesses that surround it were threatened, and in many cases, destroyed, in protests that turned violent. “These are immigrants—people trying to make a living, and they’re trying to burn the market down,” Dossman recalls of that harrowing week in May, choking back the tears. “These were not people from our community who know what that market means.”
The work continues, from more funding to help with rebuilding efforts to legal assistance and culturally specific mental health services. “We dug in and stepped up. I’ll do everything I can to keep these entrepreneurs going. I’m not giving up.”
Following our conversation with Dossman, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business associate dean and diversity, equity, and inclusion ambassador Nakeisha Lewis to talk about disparities in funding for entrepreneurs of color.
“Minority businesses are three times more likely to be denied credit, they rarely VC funding, they often pay higher interest rates. There are distinct differences and gaps in how they’re treated as entrepreneurs,” Lewis says.
The answer, she says, is more tools, resources, and a fair chance at capital. “As we’re designing solutions for entrepreneurs, they should reflect local realities. We need programming that speaks to what’s culturally relevant and important to these groups.”
Behind every plant-based burger, oat milk latte, and protein shake is one essential ingredient: pea protein. Without it, there’s no Beyond Meat.
Minneapolis-based PURIS, fueled by a $100 million investment from Cargill, is the largest U.S. manufacturer of pea protein, and PURIS CEO Tyler Lorenzen says the company is just getting started.
“Anything currently consumed as animal protein, PURIS is going to solve with plants to build a more efficient, sustainable, resilient food system,” Lorenzen says. “If we can do it in the U.S., we can do abroad.”
Lorenzen didn’t expect to be leading a division of PURIS Holdings, the company started by his visionary father Jerry Lorenzen in 1985 in Iowa to develop high protein crops. Tyler Lorenzen played professional football for the New Orleans Saints, which won Super Bowl XLIV his rookie year. But when his football career ended sooner than expected—“I got cut,” Lorenzen deadpans—he quickly shifted to the other field that had figured prominently in his life thanks to his father’s work as a plant breeder: the farm field.
“My dad saw in the mid-‘80s that eating animals to get protein was not sustainable. We needed to grow plants to feed people. And if we can make plants higher in protein, we can build a more efficient food system. That was the business my dad started, and the business we operate at scale today.”
With the support of Cargill, PURIS will open a new pea protein processing plant this year in Dawson, Minn. Lorenzen expects the business to double in 2021 as PURIS continues to make strides in regenerative agriculture—from seed to shelf.
“How do you create something game changing? It’s this concept of not being afraid to fail,” Lorenzen says. “You’ve got to be willing to take risks to do things that can change the world.”
His goal is lofty: improve the health of people and planet. But he relates that mission back to football. “Having the drive to do things bigger than myself—that’s what sports has helped to create. Winning is so much better than losing. So we try to win as much as possible.”
Fun fact: Tom Brady’s TB12 plant-based protein mixes are made with PURIS pea protein.
After our conversation with Lorenzen about innovation and the future of food, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Executive Fellow and adjunct marketing professor Craig Herkert encourages entrepreneurs to “do something you believe in.”
“I don’t know that we can point to any successful business person who says the goal was to get rich. The goal is do so something big, something that matters.”
After 15 years at Google, Mary Grove made a sharp career turn that baffled many Silicon Valley insiders. She decided to become a venture capital investor—in Minnesota. “We got a lot of raised eyebrows…it didn’t necessarily make linear sense.” But Grove looked ahead, thinking: “where is the future of the innovation economy going to be written?”
Serving as founding director of Google for Startups, supporting entrepreneurs in more than 100 countries gave Grove a taste of the innovation happening far beyond Silicon Valley. She joined Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund with a focus on Midwest ventures. In 2020, she co-founded her own VC firm with entrepreneur Brett Brohl called Bread & Butter Ventures—a nod to her adopted home state and to Minnesota’s deep industry expertise and corporate connections. Bread & Butter focuses on early-stage ventures in ag tech, med tech and enterprise software—with an emphasis not only on the products, but the people. Of the 36 companies they’ve invested in so far, 43 percent have a founder of color; 30 percent are female.
“We invest in team, team, team, product, market, traction,” Grove says emphasizing that the product might change, but “if we pick the right team, we’ll find the answer.”
She believes in providing opportunities to entrepreneurs who don’t fit the mold, and that starts early. Grove is the co-founder and executive director of Silicon North Stars, a nonprofit that she and her husband Steve founded in 2013 to help young Minnesotans from underserved communities pursue careers in tech. She also serves on the boards of Vital Voices, the Minneapolis Foundation, and the Techstars Foundation.
Grove talks about the experience of working for one of the ultimate Silicon Valley startups, offers advice for entrepreneurs who seek funding, and discusses how Covid-19 will change the innovation economy.
After our conversation we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Associate professor of entrepreneurship John McVea points out several takeaways that have contributed to Grove’s success in tech without being a technologist. “She loves to find new areas, dive deep, learn fast, and immerse herself. Critical thinking will never go out of date.” Don’t be afraid of failure, he adds. “Reach for partners, take small risks. Start where you are—know what you know, who you know, and build out from there.”
In the 1990s, when Lee Wallace told business schools she was interested in studying the intersection of mission and money, they steered her into public policy. It was a time before B-corps and one-for-one brands. “Purpose” wasn’t the business buzzword it is today. But even armed with that master’s degree in public policy, Wallace continued to believe in the power of doing good while doing well. Eventually she found her way to a for-profit company founded on a mission to help farmers. That was Peace Coffee, an early champion of the fair trade model to create a transparent and sustainable system that directly benefits farmers and their communities.
“The thing that’s so amazing about being presented with the opportunity to run a business founded to do the right thing is authenticity,” says Wallace, who came on as CEO in 2002 and bought the business in 2018 from its founding nonprofit, the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy.
Today, Wallace is a recognized leader in social enterprise business, as well as fair trade enterprises and specialty coffee importers. She holds leadership roles in the Climate Collaborative and the B corps movement. And she doesn’t apologize for Peace Coffee’s success, because selling more coffee means purchasing more coffee beans at fair prices from farming cooperatives around the world.
With a new eco-friendly Minneapolis manufacturing facility, Peace was well positioned at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis to respond to the sudden spike in coffee bean sales for home brewing. In 2020, Peace Coffee doubled its store accounts with Target and added 70 more Whole Foods stores. Despite losing the 15 percent of sales that came from restaurants, theaters, and offices, Wallace says she expects to end the year up 17 percent.
But the challenges persist. The Peace Coffee headquarters is just off East Lake Street, near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct that was burned down in protests following George Floyd’s killing. She talks about what it will take to restore the multicultural neighborhood’s vibrancy. And although it had not yet been announced publicly at the time of this conversation, Wallace shared that Peace Coffee is getting out of the coffee shop business to focus on growing wholesale. But even in that, she found a way to make it count, by partnering with nonprofit Wildflyer Coffee, which provides jobs to homeless youth.
After our conversation with Wallace, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Case Frid is an assistant professor in the department of entrepreneurship whose work focuses on how business relates to community. “A corporate purpose is about your core reason for being and the impact your organization wants to have on the world,” Frid says. “It’s got to be relational, not transactional.”
Have you ever come up with what you thought was a really clever social media handle, sure to be your key to fame and fortune, only to find it’s been taken?
Ahmed El Shourbagy is the envy of all would-be influencers. He’s the guy who grabbed the handle @dogsofinstagram in 2011. It happened not with a business plan in mind—influencer marketing wasn’t even a thing back then in the early days of Instagram—it was just a fun way to gather cute images of dogs, like his own Boston terrier/pug mix, Lucy. But as the following quickly grew to hundreds, thousands, and then millions, Ahmed and his now-wife Ashley, whom he met on day 10 of @dogsofinstagram, started seeing possibilities.
They also saw the limitations of building a brand on a social media platform. Ahmed and Ashley parlayed a social media following that now stands at 4.7 million into a retail brand and platform they own. Lucy & Co. is a direct-to-consumer brand specializing in stylish dog accessories and apparel (the likes of which you might find on @dogsofinstagram). It took a while to find its footing, but Lucy & Co. it is now the fastest growing and most lucrative part of their business, with demand accelerated in 2020 thanks to a pandemic uptick in dog ownership and online shopping.
Ahmed and Ashley talk about the paths that led them to entrepreneurship, the evolution of influencer marketing, and the transition from founder to CEO of a growing company.
Then we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Retail marketing expert Kim Sovell, participating adjunct marketing faculty, says the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated conversion to online shopping. “We’ve seen 10 years worth of changes in the way we shop in just a few months,” she says. Her best advice to retail brands launching today: “Know your consumers at a granular level.”
“Sales will take you anywhere.”
That skill took Jill Blashack Strahan from a small farm town where she ran a café and didn’t dare to dream much bigger to founder and CEO of national meal prep brand Tastefully Simple. At its peak in 2008, Tastefully Simple hit $143 million in sales with 20,000 sales associates executing home parties in small towns and big cities across the country. Mission: bringing people together to answer that age-old question, “What are we going to eat for dinner?”
But after hitting that peak, sales began to slide. And slide. For 11 straight years, Tastefully Simple lost ground. For nearly seven years, there was no profit whatsoever. Strahan invested her own money to keep the company afloat—ignoring the advice of several turnaround consultants. “I just believed in my heart it was not time to give up on this.”
Indeed, Tastefully Simple is once again profitable. With a much leaner executive team and renewed focus on sales and marketing training, Tastefully Simple was well positioned to pivot to virtual parties during the Covid-19 pandemic and has benefitted from renewed interest in home cooking and a desire to socialize—even if over Zoom—around food.
Strahan takes us on her entrepreneurial—the jobs that led to her a-ha moment and the sacrifice it took to pull it off. “Fear is a great motivator,” she says.
But what would a business professor have told her during the dark days of declining sales? After our conversation with Strahan, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship points out the fundamental difference between founder and CEO. “There’s a commitment and passion in an entrepreneur that is different than in a CEO. In terms of economics, she should have found a buyer. But from a personal standpoint, it made sense to keep going.”
“Our vision is to be a role model for inclusion in the industry,” says Rosemary Ugboajah, founder and CEO of Neka Creative, a Minneapolis-based brand development agency that makes inclusion a centerpiece of every project it takes on through a proprietary process dubbed Inclusivity Marketing.
She entered the advertising industry without many preconceptions, having grown up primarily in Nigeria, without television. While in college in London to study engineering, she found herself drawn to design; an opportunity to learn the business side of advertising led her to the University of Minnesota.
Ugboajah started her agency a decade ago, after years of working in other agencies and for Target Corp. She calls Neka Creative her “protest movement”—a response to stereotypes being perpetuated in marketing and a lack of diversity in the field. Her efforts toward inclusion included eliminating set office hours and diverse hiring practices. “We made a commitment and we’re still working on it. You’re always working on it.”
The racial reckoning sparked by the death of George Floyd left Ugboajah feeling frustrated. “I was so angered by all the commitment emails I received—‘We’re committed to racial equity; we’re committed to diversity and inclusion.' I kept reading for concrete action steps, thinking: there’s no plan here. You have to tell us what you’re going to measure….People don’t want to stay in an uncomfortable place, but there’s no quick fix to becoming inclusive.”
Ugboajah shares how her upbringing in Nigeria and London influenced her views on equity and inclusion, and steps businesses can take to move toward transformative change. After our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business diversity, equity and inclusion ambassador Nakeisha Lewis.
“It’s a great time for making change, holding people accountable,” Lewis says. “My suggestion: think about what are some actionable things we can hold our organizations to. Business organizations understand metrics: recruitment, retention, how are we ensuring voices are amplified.”
It’s a good time to be in the business of selling immunity. Minneapolis-based wellness company So Good So You makes plant-based juice shots packed with probiotics that support the immune and digestive system. Each variety is named for the “need’ it addresses: Energy, Sleep, Detox, and the No. 1 seller, Immunity. At the start of 2020, the 2-ounce So Good So You shots were sold at 3,000 stores; now they’re at more than 4,000 stores in 47 states including Target, Publix, and Sprouts. The company, which has the backing of investors, managed to meet and exceed its 2020 sales projections and hit profitability.
“What the pandemic has done is accelerate this movement of people understanding that investing proactively and managing their own health pays dividends when it comes to their immunity,” says co-founder Rita Katona. In 2014, she left a corporate job at Target Corp. to start a health and wellness company with her husband Eric Hall, a serial entrepreneur. It started as a cold-pressed juice café called Juice So Good, which expanded to three Minneapolis locations. Juice shots were simply an item on the menu, but became so popular, Katona and Hall decided to packaging them for wholesale and quickly realized the shots were a far bigger opportunity.
“In entrepreneurship, you can’t let any single failure stop you,” Hall says. “You have to keep iterating.”
So Good So You recently introduced its biggest innovation to date: a sustainable bottle it calls the BtrBtl that features a proprietary additive which allows it to biodegrade in landfills at an accelerated rate.
“Everything we do goes through the filter of is it the best we can do at this moment for the environment?” Hall says. “This a long-term investment that is authentic to who we are, but we did it because we think it’s the right thing to do.” It’s one of many things the couple loves about building their own company: “As a company, you can do more good in the world than you can as an individual.”
Katona and Hall talk about their very different paths to entrepreneurship, the opportunities ahead in the wellness space, and the importance of being willing to pivot. Afterwards, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, emphasizes the important of listening to consumers in the early days of a startup.
Abilitech Medical is on the brink of launching the first-of-its-kind wearable assistive device that makes it possible for patients with upper-limb weakness or injury to use their arms for everyday activities. “This is my imprint on the world,” says founder Angie Conley. Even before the Abiliitech Assist device becomes widely available through hospitals and clinics, it has already won numerous awards including the Tekne Award for innovation from the Minnesota High Tech Association and the Grand Prize and Top Woman-led Business at the Minnesota Cup, which is the largest state-led business competition. Abilitech has also been recognized as a Top 20 Medical Device Startup You Need to Know by MassDevice magazine; and a Top Promising Life Science Company by Rice University. So far Conley has raised $12 million, primarily in equity funding.
Abilitech is Conley’s first startup, but years of experience in the medical device industry prepared her for the challenge. Following several years as a senior product marketing manager for Medtronic and a medical device marketing consultant, Conley took on the executive director role at Magic Arms, a Twin Cities-based nonprofit that works to help children with orphan medical conditions including muscular dystrophy. It exposed her to the need for an assistive device, and she quickly realized it would take more money than a nonprofit could raise to solve it.
“The mission is what carries you through,” Conley says. The opportunity is significant: Abilitech’s initial market of multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy patients with enough hand function to operate the device is around $2 billion; Conley has her sights set on the stroke rehab market, which she says pegs at $30 billion.
“It’s an exciting opportunity to fill an unmet need and change the lives not just of patients but their caregivers,” Conley says.
After our conversation with Conley, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Dan McLaughlin, director of the Center for Innovation in the Business of Health Care at Opus discusses the med tech innovation happening beyond computers, in the area of motors and sensors. Emerging technology is an area of particular interest at St. Thomas.
“That’s the best part of health care,” McLaughlin says. “You get to make those human connections and really change people’s lives.”
Tammy Lee launched a line of wearable cool therapy medical devices in February, 2020, and one month later, she had to shut down her new company due to Covid-19. It wasn’t the start she dreamed of for Xena Therapies. But then, Lee’s entire career is built on unexpected turns.
Lee studied journalism and political science and landed a job as a Washington D.C. news correspondent. She crossed over to politics to become press secretary for then U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan, a “prairie populist” from North Dakota. “I loved helping to influence public policy.” In 2006, she ran for U.S. Representative of Minnesota’s fifth district and lost. “The way I ran that campaign opened the door to the next great opportunity.” Lee was hired by Northwest Airlines to oversee communications during the Northwest-Delta merger. Then after vice president roles with the University of Minnesota Foundation and Carlson, Lee was recruited for the role that changed her career trajectory. Recombinetics, a St. Paul-based gene editing tech startup hired Lee for its No. 2 spot. She led the government approval process for Recombinetics’ technology. When the company’s CEO left, she took over.
“I didn’t know anything about gene editing,” Lee says. “But what the board needed was someone who could tell the story of Recombinetics, raise capital and launch the company into the future. I knew how to raise money, and I knew how to tell a story.”
She raised $34 million for Recombinetics. That success led to the next opportunity, at Nanocore, a Red Wing, Minn. startup that was developing cool therapy devices made with “phase change material” formulated to 58 degrees. Lee says she fell in love with the products—particularly a vest designed to cool women experiencing hot flashes due to menopause.
But she left Nanocore in December 2019 after less than a year on the job. “It was a great product, but not the right business plan or access to capital.” In January, 2020, Lee launched Xena Therapies and hire back all 10 of Nanocore’s employees. She built out two product lines: Opal Cool wearable cooling devices for women—like the “Gal Pals” bra inserts; OnyxCool for orthopedic pain relief.
The plan was to start by selling into hospitals and rehab centers, but just weeks after Xena Therapies' launch, most were shut down due to the pandemic. Pivoting to direct to consumer was tricky—“The product is so new, people don’t know to search for it.” Lee says she made the decision to ramp up marketing. “While many were retrenching, I decided to double down on my investment.”
It’s slow going, but she says OnyxCool will soon make its QVC debut; Opal Cool is starting to get picked up by obstetrics and chiropractic practices. Lee estimates that the pandemic has set her business plan back only by about six months.
Lee says everything she does even today comes back to storytelling.
“What I think the common thread is for those of us who are entrepreneurs: we are naturally curious about learning about new things. And when you go into journalism, I think that’s your primary driver: you love to hear other people’s stories, you love to learn about them and you love to tell a story that is compelling to your audience. Founders and entrepreneurs are very much that way. They’ve got a story about a product that they want to tell the world.”
After our conversation with Lee, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Dan McLaughlin, director of the Center for Innovation in the Business of Health Care at Opus thinks that in the wake of Covid-19, more startups will take a consumer-driven approach to pain relief and med tech.
“A lot of health care system I grew up with has been turned on its head,” McLaughlin says. “A lot of people getting virtual care, and it works great. Direct to consumer is really strong…I don’t think we’ll ever sit in a waiting room for a doctor again.”
Aneela Idnani Kumar started pulling out hair from her eyebrows and eyelashes when she was a girl. In her early 20s, she Googled her secret habit and discovered it had a name: trichotillomania.
An estimated one in 20 Americans suffer from what Aneela calls “the most common disorder you’ve never heard of.” In 2013, she finally revealed her struggle to her husband Sameer Kumar and together, they set out to find a solution—something that would alert Aneela when she started to reach for her eyebrows. They tried bangles; they created slap bracelets with craft store supplies. “We knew we needed something that would detect movement in hands,” Sameer says.
Armed with that conviction, the couple entered a Minneapolis hackathon, where they met their chief technology officer and lead hardware engineer. Within 48 hours, they had the foundation for what would become HabitAware’s innovative product, the Keen, a behavior alert bracelet that sends vibrations when it detects movement. That awareness helped Aneela retrain her brain and stop hair pulling.
“Our a-ha came at a moment when the technology was available and the Fitbit had made it cool,” Sameer says.
Since launching in 2017, HabitAware has sold tens of thousands of Keen bracelets and won numerous startup awards, including Time magazine’s Best Innovations, and a 2019 National Science Foundation research grant for $225,000. The Kumars hope to grow HabitAware into a company that “helps with any behavioral problem where lack of awareness is the hurdle.”
Prior to starting HabitAware, Aneela worked in advertising and Sameer in finance. “I truly believe that the ad industry is the basis for everything a startup needs to do: understanding your market, understanding that messaging. In that respect, I had been helping that process along for a number of years.”
Having a mission has made it easier to keep moving foward, Sameer says. ""When things get hard, you have to focus on the reason why you're in it, which for us was to solve this problem."
“It feels incredible,” Aneela says of HabitAware’s success. “Growing up, I assumed I’d have a regular, normal American life. Now I get to have the American dream.”
After our conversation with Aneela and Sameer, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. “Technology is transforming healthcare,” says Dan McLaughlin, director of the Center for Innovation in the Business of Health Care at St. Thomas. He suggests other possible applications for the HabitAware technology.
“We do not want to go back to being the way we were,” says Chuck Runyon, co-founder and CEO of Self Esteem Brands, the parent company to Anytime Fitness, Bar Method, Basecamp, and Waxing in the City. Anytime, the largest of the brands, has nearly 5,000 franchise locations on seven continents—all of which had to shut down over the course of about five weeks due to Covid-19.
For a company based in Minnesota, Anytime Fitness was early to realize the potentially catastrophic threat of the coronavirus because of its clubs in China. But even as those locations shut down, Runyon says, “We thought it would be contained. After Anytime’s 20 clubs in Italy closed, “it escalated quickly.” In the U.S., Missouri clubs were the first to close and then every day, every week, came another. “Like dominoes.”
“In all the years we’ve sat around in meetings of what if…never did any of us anticipate shutting down nearly 5,000 clubs around in the world in five weeks.”
But since they have, Runyon says he wants to make the most of the unprecedented experience.
“Let’s learn, let’s adapt, and let’s be better because of it.”
Anytime, Bar and Basecamp have been releasing digital content including coaching, workouts and even recipes and nutrition tips. Some of the content is free to the public and has drawn a new audience. Going forward, Runyon says, “We want to make sure we offer an omni channel experience.”
Changes will also come to Self Esteem Brands’ home office in Woodbury, Minn. where around 350 employees work. “We’ll be more nimble, faster, and adopt some work from home policies. We’ll analyze travel…I think we can be leaner, and every bit as productive.”
One thing Runyon doesn’t think will change: enthusiasm for the gym. “Eighty percent of health club members say they are looking forward to getting back,” Runyon says. “I think it’s going to be a mini-January…. with a nice surge of people wanting to get back to normal.”
Anytime is prepared to step up its cleaning protocol, modify traffic, and whatever else is required. “There’s no playbook for this,” he says.
“I’ve been unbelievably proud of how the team has adapted so quickly, It’s been an incredible experience in so many ways.”
After our conversation with Runyon, who previously appeared on By All Means with his co-founder and president of Self Esteem Brands Dave Mortensen, we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas marketing professor Gino Giovanelli. “The thing I loved about my classroom was the community. It’s the same for a health club. What they’re selling is camaraderie.”
Anticipating that face masks are going to be a necessary accessory for the foreseeable future, Love Your Melon is ramping up its collection and returning to the buy one, give one model that made the beanie brand famous: for every mask purchased, the company will donate one to someone in the medical community.
“Seeing how people are being instructed now to wear them whenever they’re out in public, I don’t think there’s any chance that this production goes away for the next 6 to 12 months at least. They need to keep being improved,” says Zachary Quinn, LYM co-founder and president. Quinn appeared on this podcast in 2019 to share the LYM founder’s story, which started as a classroom project at the University of St. Thomas. To date, LYM has given more than $7 million to the fight against pediatric cancer and 191,000 hats to children battling cancer.
Now, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, LYM is making face masks for hospitalized children and their families, who are at high risk of contracting Covid-19. The company committed to donating 50,000 masks and is now making masks available for purchase to support the cause. A few styles and colors are being made in both cotton and surgical wrap material.
Quinn talks about the process of quickly jumping into production, while also responding to increased online demand for Love Your Melon's core products. “People are coming out to support brands that are working hard to make a difference,” Quinn says. But the fate of LYM's flagship showroom in the North Loop of Minneapolis is up in the air, he says. The lease is up at the end of the year.
As for leading his team, which is now working remotely, Quinn says he is “making myself available – no matter whether the request is large or small. Everyone is trying to help, everyone has something to offer. I’m trying to focus on being inclusive.”
The added pressure is actually helpful, Quinn says. “Under pressure you find a lot of peace and calmness. I’m excited to be hands on and have a purpose. That’s what I’m feeling good about: having a purpose and a unified mission.”
After our conversation with Quinn, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Digital Marketing Professor Gino Giovanelli says LYM is well positioned to succeed in these unusual times. “They have the ability to reach customers through social media, which is very powerful. And they’re not dependent on bricks and mortar retail.”
In the course of three days in March, Punch Pizza went from record sales to shuttering its dozen Twin Cities restaurants and furloughing nearly 400 employees.
“It took us by surprise how quickly it happened,” co-owner John Puckett said. With businesses like Punch upended by coronavirus, we're checking in on some of the entrepreneurs who have shared their founder’s stories on past episodes of the podcast to learn how they are navigating uncertain times.
Prior to the crisis, about a third of Punch Pizza’s business was takeout. When it became apparent to Puckett and his partner, Punch Pizza founder John Sorrano, in mid-March that they may need to temporarily close their dining rooms, they installed phone stations in the basement of their Highland Park location in St. Paul to prepare for going takeout only. But an internal virus scare derailed that plan. “We thought we had a Covid-19 infection among staff. It turned out to be a false alarm, but we just realized, given the outbreak, we were going to have sick employees. We just said, there’s no way we can operate in a safe manner.
“The world can live without Neapolitan pizza for a couple of months.”
That was March 14—three days before Gov. Tim Walz ordered restaurants in Minnesota to shut down their dining rooms. Since then, Puckett says he’s been working around the clock on disaster aid, business interruption insurance, and planning the reopening.
One of his biggest learnings: “Do not work with a bank that you don’t know the owner and senior management team. I thought it was smart to have a big national bank with resources, but those big banks neutered all the local bankers….we got burned. I feel so grateful to the small community banks that have been working around the clock to help small businesses.”
Another change likely to come out of this disruption for Punch: “I don’t think we’ll be buying a lot of things from China after this. Domestic sources, U.S.-made products, even if it costs a little more…we will appreciate those local relationships a lot more.”
As they begin to hire back some staff and prepare for reopening, Puckett says everything is on the table—like the possibility of remaining closed on Sundays.
“When you go to 0 revenue, 0 profits from having a very successful business, you think differently about work/life balance,” Puckett says. “Restaurants are notorious for eating up people. A mandatory day off is an idea my partner and I think would help our culture and make it even stronger.”
A May opening feels overly optimistic to Puckett. He says Punch won’t reopen until he can be sure employees are equipped with protective gear. He estimates recovery could take more than 2 years. “Quick service formats generally have an advantage. We’re going to make sure we have a really great value offer for our quality.”
And when they do open, Puckett says, “I’ll be right in there making pizzas, serving customers on a hands-on basis until we get too big to do that. We want to reengage our entire team on serving the customers.”
After our conversation with Puckett, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Marketing professor Gino Giovannelli emphasizes the importance of taking a wholistic and strategic approach to challenges. "We've got to come out of this better than we came into it."
Proozy just may be the biggest overstock deals website you’re not shopping—yet.
But hundreds of thousands of people have discovered Proozy, which, like Nordstrom Rack or T.J. Maxx, offers discounts on brand apparel from Nike, Adidas and many others. Unlike its big box competitors, Proozy is strictly e-commerce—emphasizing daily flash deals and relying on analytics to determine its inventory. Based in Eagan, Minn., Proozy hit $40 million in revenue for 2019 and Segal expects to double that in 2020.
The company started out in 2006 as Lyon’s Trading Company. Jeremy Segal was just 16 years old when he started buying overstock golf equipment from pro shops and selling it to support his own golf aspirations. Realizing his knack for selling was greater than his game, he expanded into activewear and then apparel and accessories for the whole family.
“We don’t function like other retailers,” Segal says. “We’re using data to make decisions, and optimizing with tech. We’ve built repeatable, predictable business you can replicate.”
Segal talks about his strategy and plans to grow Proozy into a $160 million company.
This interview was recorded back in December, before the Covid-19 pandemic, but Proozy has continued to grow and make news. Proozy is hiring to keep up with demand, which Segal predicts will only grow as consumers become more price-sensitive coming out of the global crisis.
After our conversation with Segal, we go Back to the Classroom with Dan McGlaughlin, a faculty member in the operations and supply chain management department at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. He says Proozy is “using data in a fascinating way.”
McGlaughlin uses Amazon as a case study in the classroom and points out the retail giant started with one product: books, much like Proozy started with golf equipment. “Amazon found one thing it was good at and the same thing is happening here.”
Marco was a typewriter dealer when Jeff Gau landed a sales job with the St. Cloud, Minn. company in 1973, fresh out of college after serving in the U.S. Air Force. He steadily rose through the ranks and helped Marco evolve from selling printers and shredders to businesses into a full-fledged IT services provider with 60 offices throughout the U.S. and more than $400 million in annual revenue.
Through the years, Marco has continued to evolve with technology and grow—even as some of its early products became obsolete. “Change is great as long as it’s happening to someone else,” Gau jokes.
But Gau got comfortable with change, overseeing dozens of acquisitions for Marco, which was employee owned from 1989 to 2015. When it was acquired by Norwest Equity Partners, many employees became millionaires overnight. And proof positive of the company’s strong culture of community and collaboration: they kept right on working.
“Running a business is a team sport,” Gau says. “We play to our strengths.” Gau says the key to being a strong leader is not only knowing your personal strengths, but recognizing things that others can do better. “You need to give up control to get control.”
Gau shares lessons he’s learned in leadership, collaboration, culture and adaptability. Afterwards, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, who zeroes in on the way Gau has continued to welcome change and even seek it out. “Analyze your market, understand what’s going on," Deeds says. "Know your core capabalities and keep expanding on them. That’s how you win."
His company makes lifestyle products out of wood, but when the coronavirus crisis hit the U.S. in March, Woodchuck USA founder Benjamin VandenWymelenberg immediately started thinking about how he could help. His wood laser cutting machines proved ideal for making the face shields needed by health care professionals. By the end of March, Woodchuck had produced more than 200,000 PPE products.
Last summer, Ben shared his founder's story with host Allison Kaplan and talked about how he stays motivated and engaged as a leader. This episode was originally released Sept. 4, 2019.
Wiping out on Rollerblades and cracking his iPhone prompted Benjamin VandenWymelenberg to make his first phone case out of wood scraps. An architecture student who had grown up on a farm, he liked the idea of bridging technology and nature. Friends asked him to make phone cases for them, and that was the beginning of Woodchuck USA. In a matter of months, Woodchuck was selling through Best Buy and Target. Now seven years old, the Minneapolis-based manufacturer of wood products counts Google, US Bank, Ecolab, and Aveda among its custom clients, and sells in gift stores across the country. Woodchuck plants a tree for every item sold, which has resulted in millions of trees planted on six continents.
From the start, Woodchuck’s mission was far broader than its product collection: “Nature back to people. Jobs back to America. Quality back to products.” Says VandenWymelenberg, “We might give up on the product, but we’re not going to give up on the mission.”
While the core company continues to grow, Woodchuck also added an interiors division which makes wood dividers and panels for offices. Meanwhile, VandenWymelenberg, 28, has gotten into real estate development, buying the building that houses Woodchuck and creating a startup hub in Minneapolis. He’s also building a nature center in central Minnesota. And he found time to visit all seven continents, and write a book about entrepreneurship called “The World Needs Your F-ing Ideas.”
On this episode of By All Means, VandenWymelenberg talks about mission, marketing and the challenge of shifting his focus from founder to leader. He shares some early failures and missteps that he believes helped him get where he is today. Success, he says, is “literally a lot of failing and getting back up.”
After our conversation with VandenWymelenberg, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Faculty Director Mike Porter sheds light on how to get new products on store shelves, and the potential pitfalls of borrowing startup capital from friends and family.
On Monday March 16, in the face of a national emergency, John Puckett joined Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at a press conference announcing that restaurants and bars must close to stop the spread of coronavirus. It's a death blow for many in the hospitality industry, but Puckett said "it's time to hunker down and protect our vital resources." How do you lead through crisis? This conversation from our first episode of By All Means in April 2019 is sure to provide some inspiration.
John Puckett and his wife Kim had a case of “the Mondays” that struck almost as soon as they landed corporate jobs after business school. “Life is too short to spend Sunday night dreading going in to work on Monday,” John says. “We felt like life is … too precious to not really feel connected to your work and passionate about what you’re doing.” That conviction led to the creation of Caribou Coffee, now the No. 2 coffee chain in the U.S. It's No. 1 in Minnesota—the one market Starbucks doesn’t dominate—and that’s because of several strategic decisions made by the Pucketts. They grew the chain to more than 100 stores before selling in 2000. A year later, John became co-owner of a small but beloved St. Paul restaurant called Punch Pizza. He’s spent nearly 20 years growing Punch slowly, locally and without any outside investors. Puckett explains why he was determined to build a different sort of company his second time around. Following our conversation with Puckett, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, who explains the pros and cons of venture capital and why slow growth is under appreciated in business today.
Behind every successful founder are the advisors, investors, mentors, and marketers who are integral to getting it right. Kent Pilakowski is one of those behind-the-scenes experts who helped to build Beyond Meat, Talenti, Good Karma and other hot food brands that have sold or gone public. Pilakowski shares his journey from General Mills to entrepreneurship and talks about the evolution of the food industry and what it takes for a new brand to break through today.
“Food has become a lot more fashionable,” says Pilakowski, who got a sales job with General Mills out of college in the 1990s and moved more than a dozen times before landing in general management at corporate headquarters in Minneapolis. He worked on two organic acquisitions: Muir Glen and Kaskadian Farms, and that opened his eyes to the opportunity for industry disruption.
“Entrepreneurs start a business for passion, for health, to save the world, to save the environment. I saw a groundswell happening.”
Pilakowski likes to say he isn’t the “ideas guy,” but he can spot a good one. He took six months to de-program himself from corporate culture and spent time talking to entrepreneurs before setting up a team and getting into position to help build businesses.
“Early on, it’s all about the entrepreneur—not the business. You’re betting on the scrappiness that they’re going to figure it out. Often, the business itself has to do a complete 180.”
Pilakowski has seen seismic change in food entrepreneurship since the early days of his career. There’s more money, more innovation, and actually, he says, it makes success that much more elusive.
“A lot more people want to change the world. Now when you walk the halls of food industry shows, there are 8 million different ideas. There’s more money coming in, which enables entrepreneurs to do stupid, non-scalable things. Very few are making money.”
Pilakowski offers advice on defining success, and knowing when to sell. He also talks about the decision to sell his own firm to spend more time with his three young children.
After our conversation with Pilakowski, we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship. Deeds points out the important role a partner like Pilakowski can play for an entrepreneur. “They bring things to the game you don’t have: branding, marketing, fulfillment. You either have to find it, or learn it.”
Growing up on an Iowa farm taught Ryan Broshar about taking risks and working hard. And it made him realize at an early age that he’d rather sell the corn than harvest it. His first startup, a university-based publication business called University Guide, grew out of an entrepreneurship class assignment at the University of Minnesota. It became a profitable business that Broshar sold two years out of college. While pursuing an MBA at Colorado University-Boulder, he got involved in the emerging startup community and worked for an investment fund. It was 2008—“the economy was crashing, but (tech startups) weren’t going down; they were thinking forward.”
When he and his wife moved back to Minnesota to be closer to family, Broshar saw an opportunity to support the Twin Cities startup community. He co-founded BetaMN, a support system for founders that puts on a showcase-style event to connect founders with investors. Next, he co-founded Twin Cities Startup Week, which has become a national draw, attracting large companies and investment dollars to Minnesota. He was instrumental in bringing the Tech Stars Retail Accelerator program to Minnesota, and served as managing director for four years before leaving to concentrate on Matchstick Ventures, a seed stage firm focused on early stage tech companies in the Midwest and Rockies. In 2019, Matchstick raised $30 million in its second round. The fund has invested in 50 companies to date including Upsie and Inspectorio.
“What I really liked about my own startup was the start,” Broshar says. “I like the zero to one of building a company. One to 10, I get kind of bored and start thinking, what’s the next idea? When you’re investing, you’re always starting. It’s a great fit for me.”
Early stage investing appeals to Broshar because of the mentorship component. “You have to have empathy for the founder and understand there are going to be pivots. When you’re an early investor in an early stage company, it’s part financial support, part cheerleader, party psychologist. Being a founder is a lonely road and a lot of times, they look to investors as their strength.”
What do Broshar and his Matchstick partner look for in startups? “We like to support founders that are underdogs. That come from untraditional backgrounds. People who have the feeling they were put on Earth to solve this problem. They’re obsessed with what they’re doing.”
Being a venture capitalist isn’t for everyone. “You’ve got to love coffee,” Broshar says—only half jokingly, describing the significant amount of time he devotes to meeting potential founders, partners and investors. And you have to get comfortable saying no. “The Midwesterner in me wants to please everyone,” Broshar says. “It really comes down to: Is this a fit, is it a good use of my time. I’m trying to be very clear about the kind of stuff Matchstick likes to invest in. And if I can make connections, I'm happy to do that.”
As for the VC world in general: “Venture capital is insanely risky,” Broshar says. “It’s the only profession in the world where you can be wrong the majority of the time and still be the best at it.”
After our conversation with Broshar, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Entrepreneurship professor John McVea points out that less than half of a percent of all startups get venture funding. Of them, less than 1 percent make it to $1 billion in value, but those “unicorns” as they’ve come to be known, generate the lion’s share of publicity.
While VC money is less prevalent than the media would have you believe, “Venture capital has had a huge cultural influence,” McVea says. “Along with the VC model came the idea of the lean startup: get a quick product out the door really fast, try it, measure and learn, pivot, redesign. It’s opened the door to a lot of people who would have been reticent—afraid they didn’t have the perfect idea. Many entrepreneurs learn as they go.”
Atif Siddiqi knew he wanted to build a business. When considering problems to solve, he harkened back to his high school sales job at a t-shirt shop, where there was no automated system for employees to trade or pick up available shifts. Years later, he discovered, not much had changed. He launched Branch in 2014 as a scheduling tool for hourly employees. It has since evolved into a mobile-first platform on a mission to “make the lives of hourly workers financially better.” Branch provides no-cost advances on earned wages. The app is used by hundreds of thousands of hourly employees at large companies including Life Time and Target. Along the way, Siddiqi has become an authority on the topics of employee satisfaction, financial wellness, and how employee engagement can help a company’s bottom line.
“What we hear is employees are looking for more predictability in their schedules as well as flexibility. Uber has made it possible to pick up a shift any time—that’s driving consumers to want that from their workplace,” Siddiqi says. “Unemployment is at all time low. Companies are having a tough time attracting talent. When they do, the vast majority are seeing 60 to 100 percent turnover annually. The average cost to hire a new employee is $2,500—that’s recruitment, on-boarding, training. Anything we can do to slow down churn goes a long way toward the bottom line. It’s investing in growth.”
Forty percent of Branch users have no money in the bank; 75 percent have less than $500. “An unexpected expense can really derail their personal and work lives,” Siddiqi says.
A California native, Siddiqi moved his company to Minnesota in its early days to participate in Target Tech Stars. The experience was critical to Branch’s success. “For an entrepreneur, working with a big organization is like a black box—you don’t know how decisions are made. It allowed us to peer inside the black box, understand how tech initiatives are implemented, how they’re deployed, how new tech interacts with all the existing tech already in place. It was really fundamental to us understanding how to deploy within an organization. One of the things we got really good at: reducing amount of friction to implement.”
By the time Branch completed Target Tech Stars in 2016, the company was growing and Siddiqi decided to make Minneapolis headquarters, and home. “The Twin Cities has a lot of great talent, especially around enterprise B-to-B software.”
Branch employs 65 (up from 45 when this interview was recorded just a few months ago), has raised more than $10 million, and is making money, Siddiqi says. “If we can help employees continue to grow their account balance over time after downloading the app, that’s success for our team—our North Star and what guides us.”
As far as advice for other entrepreneurs? “Start building,” Siddiqi says. “There’s no substitute for actually building product, learning from customers and hearing what they have to say.”
We dig into that strategy in Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. John McVea, an associate professor at the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, says there’s been a huge change in emphasis on entrepreneurial strategy from ready, aim, fire, to fire, ready aim. “We used to teach: think, research, plan, execute. Logical, not random. But when we talked to real life entrepreneurs, very few operate this way. They jump off a cliff and try. They make mistakes, pivot, learn, and keep going. Often they end up in a place that is different than we would have ever intended.”
The takeaway? “I’m not saying don’t plan,” McVea says. But he urges entrepreneurs to take a more outward focused approach. “Spend time making a product, making mistakes, and learning.”
From maker to manufacturer: Mercedes Austin started making ceramic tiles in her apartment 18 years ago, and today, her company, Mercury Mosaics, occupies a 15,000 square foot factory in Minneapolis that produces tile for Room & Board, lululemon, PF Chang, major hotel chains, and other large clients as well selling direct to consumer. In the next year, Mercury Mosaics will open a second manufacturing center in Wadena, Minn. and a third is already being planned—both with a focus on creating jobs in small towns.
It’s been a long and winding road for Austin, who stumbled into ceramics while studying psychology and took on apprenticeships to learn the trade while waiting tables to pay the bills.
“I didn’t start out with the greatest self-worth,” Austin says. “My mom didn’t give me money, so I always had to figure out a way. Becoming resourceful, not having anything handed to you—it always motivated me to do really well by any means necessary. I’m most proud that I didn’t turn out how everyone said I would.”
Ten years ago, as Mercury Mosaics gained momentum, Austin stopped making tiles so she could concentrate on growing the business. She shares stories of how she gave tile away to make connections with architects and how she changed her sales strategy seven times and eventually stopped paying commission to create a more cohesive team focused on growth.
“I’m not afraid to start things over,” Austin says. Since eliminating the commission structure, sales have grown by 25 percent. “We formed a team that is working together versus internal opponents.”
After our conversation with Austin, we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship. Deeds zeroes in on the key to Austin’s success. “She started with passion for art and craft. But her passion today is about managing this business. She’s really evolved. She’s been open to learning and picking up the skills she needed.” That transition is essential, he says, for a founder to become a successful CEO.
Erik Brust was still a teenager when he came up with the idea for an all-natural popsicle—a fruit smoothie on a stick. He and some friends started making them in their dorm at St. Olaf College and by the time they graduated, Jonny Pops was a brand on the rise in the frozen foods industry. Eight years later, St. Louis Park, Minn.-based Jonny Pops is sold nationwide at Target, Costco, Sam’s Club and many other chains. In 2018, Brust and co-founder and chief financial officer Connor Wray were named to Forbes 30 under 30 list of young entrepreneurs. At 27, Brust is CEO of a fast-growing company with nearly 50 employees…most of whom are older than he is. “They love telling me I’m younger than their kids are,” he says.
Brust talks about how he got Jonny Pops off the ground (“I don’t see any other way to get a business going unless you commit 100 percent to it.”), the lonely process of raising money (“It’s very humbling to go out there and pitch your idea and hope that people are going to believe in you and then give you money to go live that out.”), and transitioning from founder to leader. “I’ve shifted from individual contributor–making pops, working farmers’ markets—to, how do I hire people who are better at this than I could ever be, and have a consistent culture.”
He shares his biggest mistake: being too slow to hire. “You realize how much stronger you are when you have amazing people working on the business.” And Brust discusses the opportunities ahead for Jonny Pops. “We’re in 12 to 15 percent of grocery stores. Now we’re setting our sights on 60 to 70 percent and thinking about how to kick off big advertising campaigns and innovate new, exciting flavors. All of those are fun for us right now.”
After our conversation with Brust, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. John McVea, an associate profession in the entrepreneurship department, talks about the different leadership styles require to take a company from startup through growth. “In the startup phase, you need someone with really clear vision. Almost autocratic. Never compromise. You also need a person who is charismatic,” McVea says. “You get to a certain point in growth when suddenly growth is not the singular objective. Consistency, efficiency, cost, management become important as well. This is when you see many serial entrepreneurs leave. They don’t find it fun, and don’t make it fun for anyone else.”
Throughout his career as a TV meteorologist, Paul Douglas has found ways to turn weather data into business. He's launched and sold more than one weather related startup and has several others up his sleeve.
"i love the intellectual challenge of launching new businesses," Douglas says. But he also loves telling weather stories, and finding ways to innovate.
During his time at NBC affiliate Kare 11 in the 1980s and early 90s, Douglas launched the “backyard” format, which is still used today by that station, and many others nationwide. He also became one of the first meteorologists in the country to use graphics in his report. He worked for a time at WBBM-TV in Chicago, where he made occasional appearances on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Then he became Minnesota’s first certified broadcast meteorologist, and returned to Minnesota where he served as Chief Meteorologist for WCCO-TV from 1997 to 2008. Meanwhile, off camera, he started realizing the opportunity to pair his meteorological expertise with technology.
It started with creating better TV graphics. “I wanted to disrupt what had become boring,” Douglas says. He launched EarthWatch Communication, delivering weather graphics to hundreds of television stations in the United States and 20 other nations. And he founded Digital Cyclone, Inc. (DCI), which, in the pre-iPhone era, personalized the weather forecasting experience for consumers on the web, e-mail and cell phones. In 2007, he sold DCI to Garmin, Inc, for $45 million.
Douglas has three new companies that offer weather data to businesses, from farming to manufacturing to Netflix, which, he says, knows that viewing habits change based on the weather. “Weather directly impacts about one third of the GDP,” Douglas says. “Smart companies are pulling data in, they’re not just watching weather shows.”
His next venture: helping businesses estimate the impact of global warming and weather volatility on their supply chains and facilities. “Sustainability is not a fad; it’s a trend,” Douglas says. “I’ve been talking about climate change for 25 years. I’m a conservative, but the data is the data. We have to figure out how to keep the economy rolling along, keep people employed while putting a lighter footprint on God’s creation.”
Douglas talks about the challenges of being both entrepreneur and media personality. Today, he provides daily print and online weather services for Star Tribune in the Twin Cities, and co-hosts WCCO Radio’s afternoon show with Jordana Green. During extreme weather, you’re likely to find him on MSNBC or CNN.
After our conversation with Douglas, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, who shares his take on why Douglas has been so successful as an entrepreneur. “He leveraged a core skill and married it to different kinds of applications.” When you know the subject matter, Deeds says, it’s easier to understand the problems, and spot opportunities for disruption.
John Butcher held 15 jobs in 20 years with Target Corp. and it taught him to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. So when an executive recruiter called about a leadership role at Caribou Coffee, the Minneapolis-based premium coffee chain with nearly 700 locations worldwide, Butcher said yes to the interview, even though he knew very little about coffee or the restaurant business. “Any business that can strike an emotional chord is interesting to me,” he says.
Butcher joined Caribou as president in 2017, at a time when the company was “not reaching its potential,” Butcher says. “Ultimately, we weren’t being very guest focused." Butcher talks about how he listened, learned, and made purposeful changes that have resulted in improved sales, employee retention, and the best customer service feedback Caribou has ever received.
In 2019, Butcher was named CEO of Caribou, which is owned by Luxembourg-based JAB Holdings Co. but has its headquarters in a suburb of Minneapolis. He has since embarked on plans to redesign Caribou cafes, open smaller format stores, and move into canned beverages. He talks about coffee trends, shares leadership advice, and offers tips in shifting culture and adding purpose. Says Butcher, "It’s important to me to know the effort I’m putting forth every day is doing more than making money."
After our conversation with Butcher, we go back to the classroom with Gino Giovannelli, a digital marketing professor at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, who points out some of the leadership decisions that have allowed Butcher to thrive as a newcomer to Caribou. “The answers come from within. But you have to be willing to ask, and not immediately try to fix.”
Chuck Runyon and Dave Mortensen opened their first Anytime Fitness gym in 2002. Their concept was an alternative to big box gyms: A no-frills space with little supervision…just workout equipment that was available literally any time. Seventeen years later, Anytime Fitness is the world’s largest fitness franchise company with $2 billion in annual revenue and nearly 5,000 locations on all seven continents, thanks to a recent opening on a ship that spends half the year in Antarctica.
Runyon and Mortensen created a parent company, Self Esteem Brands, that also includes Waxing The City, Basecamp Fitness and Bar Method. They’ve earned just about every entrepreneurial award imaginable – they’ve been recognized as one of America’s most promising companies by Forbes, and the fastest growing fitness club by the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association. They did it all on instinct and “grit.” As Runyon says, only half jokingly, “Our company wouldn’t hire us today.” The two share the lessons they’ve learned about leadership, wellness, and strategic growth. Says Runyon, “As leaders we need to celebrate when our team is doing well, but then we need to raise the bar again.”
After our conversation with Runyon and Mortensen, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Marcella De La Torre, who teaches course on leadership and business ethics, highlights some of the keys to Anytime’s success. “They are constantly adjusting to the complexity of the business. As you grow, you need more complex strategic plans. They are not naïve.”
Nineteen years after mortgaging their home to open a neighborhood ice cream shop in St. Paul, Minnesota, the founders of Izzy’s are poised to take their ice cream national. “Our vision is to compete directly with Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s,” says Jeff Sommers, who focuses on sales while his wife Lara Hammel is the mastermind behind popular flavors like Midnight Graham Crunch and Butter Caramel Salted Swirl.
Sommers, a former high school teacher, and Hammel, a lawyer, talk about what prompted them to leave their careers to get into the ice cream business, and how they’ve grown from one shop to two, plus grocery and restaurant distribution in Minnesota. Also why now feels like the right time to expand. “There’s a whole bunch of space in the middle now for classic ice cream,” Sommers says.
From their patented “Izzy Scoop” to a collaboration with musician Dessa, the husband and wife duo talk about what drives them. Says Sommers, “You just have to be passionate about the thing you want to do in business.”
How do you know when the time is right to grow? For perspective, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business associate professor John McVea. Too often, he says, entrepreneurs get hung up on the idea that any growth is good growth. “That can be a terrible mistake. Growth brings with it great opportunity, but great risk,” McVea says. “Growth is a choice, and it must be a strategic choice. The first question to ask: Why do you want to grow? What is your objective?”
Larissa Loden is a jewelry designer whose line is now sold in more than 800 stores nationwide including high profile names like Modcloth, WildFang and the Smithsonian Museum. And only four years ago, jewelry was a side hustle to her day job as an art teacher in the Minneapolis public schools.
Loden grew up in retail—her parents own a gift store in upstate New York and she knew didn’t want to go into the business. Making jewelry was simply a hobby in the quiet hours after teaching. But as the necklaces piled up, her entrepreneurial instinct kicked in and she began to sell—first on Etsy, then at pop-up markets, and when she went to her first trade show, the orders from gift stores and museum shops began pouring in.
Today, she manages a growing team of 9 full-time and 15 contract employees and balances the growing demands of a creative profession with the details of running a successful business. “The past two years I’ve really tried to level myself up,” Loden says. “Creating something from nothing keeps you on your toes, but I love the exhilaration of it.”
Loden talks about why she still sells at pop-up events, how she’s able to keep her average price below $50, and her decision to be a brand that stands for something–even at risk of alienating potential customers.
After our conversation with Loden, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, talks about the transition from artist to entrepreneur. “You start off as the designer or the chef or whatever it is – the skill that gets it all started. But you eventually become a manager, so you have to build the skills.”
Fitness wasn’t a career path when Chris Freytag attended college, but her lifelong passion for movement and wellness led her to become an entrepreneur—even before she knew that's what she was doing. Today, Freytag is a national fitness expert and author with a massive social media following. She's the founder of content platform Get Healthy U and on-demand subscription workout program Get Healthy U TV.
Freytag walks us through the many paths she pursued along the way to running her own business—from making dance aerobics VHS tapes in the 1980s to selling smoothie makers on QVC. Through it all, her mission is clear: “I want to educate, inspire, and sometimes make people laugh…because you’ve got to keep it real.”
Freytag talks about aging, as well as fitness trends and what it means to live a healthy life. “The fitness industry is about looking good. But if that’s your only why, it won’t last. You have to have deeper ‘why’s.’”
Through it all, Freytag says she’s learned a lot about herself, and business. “Use your connections. Get to know people. Be kind-hearted. Give to people, and get back from them because you never know where it’s going to take you.” After our conversation with Freytag, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Marcella de la Torre, who teaches courses on leadership and business ethics, talks about turning passion into a profession.
We talk endlessly about diet and exercise. But what about sleep? There’s no class in school, and in the workplace, there’s often a stigma around admitting fatigue. That’s where Sarah Moe saw her opportunity. "I tell people: I work in sleep medicine. That's a real job."
A Board Registered Polysomnographic Technologist (RPSGT) who spent 10 years working for sleep medicine clinics, Moe created her own consultancy called Sleep Health Specialists. She spends most of her time helping businesses learn how to make their culture more sleep friendly. Today, 20 percent of the population suffers from a sleep disorder. The average employee costs an employer $3,000 per year from being tired—that’s illness, absenteeism and lack of productivity.
Moe talks about how she set up her practice, how the corporate community is responding, and the enemy of sleep that’s even worse than caffeine: blue light. And what to do about it.
After our conversation with Moe, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Mike Porter is faculty director of the health care innovation program. He says that a lot of times, entrepreneurs who are so passionate about their pursuit can be challenged to make good business decisions. He talks about what Moe is doing right and what’s in it for companies that promote sleep.
At a time when modern design wasn’t readily accessible to the masses, college friends Maurice Blanks and John Christakos, with their friend Charlie Lazor, channeled a shared passion for art, architecture and design into contemporary furniture brand Blu Dot. “There was a whole segment of the market unexplored,” Blanks says. “The J.Crew of furniture.”
The line was a hit when it launched at a trade show in 1997 and the founders never looked back. Today, Blu Dot has stores in eight U.S. cities and in Mexico and Australia and a growing commercial interiors division. Blu Dot won the 2018 Cooper Hewitt National Design award for Product Design.
“It's great to see the vision really coming to life now, 22 years later, the way we always wanted it to," Blanks says. "There’s just so much room for continued growth."
Blanks and Christakos discuss design thinking—an approach they apply to both furniture and leadership. “Our core value: good design is good. We see everything as a design opportunity,” Christakos says. “It’s not just products, but organizational structure, compensation. Business decisions are design decisions.”
To that end, the founders say Blu Dot started as a design company. "It could have been picture frames, knick knacks—we talked a lot from the very beginning about what the brand would be about and how could we create a company that someone would describe like they would describe a person," Blanks says. "With a real sense of self."
Christakos adds one of the best pieces of advice he received from a mentor: "Pick something you love to do and trust you'll do it better. It was a real epiphany for me. A lot of folks think when they start a business they have to come up with the big idea, something new. Starting a furniture business is not a new idea."
Blanks and Christakos talk about building a company the old-fashioned way: by reinvesting profits rather than taking outside investments, and why they think the availability of VC money has actually made starting a business more difficult. They also talk about the changing retail landscape and how it shifted their sales strategy.
After our conversation with Blanks and Christakos, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Alec Johnson is an associate professor in the department of entrepreneurship. “Most good design is human-centered design,” he says, and offers tips on how to think about a design centered approach to business.
While working at HealthPartners as a front desk registrar, Katrina Anderson noticed that medical students were having trouble getting signed up for clinical rotations. She had the idea to create a platform that would allow hospitals to post their schedules online so students can easily and securely sign up. LinkedIn meets Airbn is how Anderson describes it. She and her partner called their software program Clinician Nexus. Founded in 2016, the startup has already raised $750,000 and is being used in 95 hospitals and 136 school schools around the country. They're just getting started.
Clinician Nexus is about more than real-time scheduling, Anderson says. The platform addresses what has become a major problem for hospitals and medical schools: providing medical students with enough clinical hours to finish their degrees. “We might not have enough physicians if we don’t have enough slots to teach them and they can’t graduate on time. When you invest in the health care system, it improves patient outcomes.”
Anderson talks health care, technology, raising funds (Clinician Nexus investors include the University of St Thomas, where Anderson earned her MBA) and becoming an accidental entrepreneur. “I’m trying to grow into being a CEO. It’s not an identity I ever thought I’d work with.” So what convinced her to go for it? “A world without Clinician Nexus was scarier than quitting my job.”
After our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with Dan McLaughlin, director of the Center for Innovation in the Business of Health Care in the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. He says Anderson used classroom lessons in founding her business. “It’s the theory of constraints: you look for a bottleneck,” McLaughlin says. “She found one in scheduling.”
Fred Haberman is co-founder and CEO of Haberman, a Minneapolis-based branding, advertising, and public relations agency that counts Volvo, Organic Valley and Boston Scientific among its clients. But he’s also a social entrepreneur with a passion for organic foods, wellness, and the outdoors, and so Haberman continues to launch other ventures, even while running his agency.
Haberman founded the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships and grew it into an annual event drawing well over 20,000 players and spectators from across the country. He also co-founded Urban Organics, one of only two USDA certified organic aquaponics facilities in the country, which was acquired by Pentair in 2017.
His latest venture is Freak Flag Organics, a line of flavorful condiments and sauces now sold online and in local grocery stores. “The idea is to be yourself in the world, and in the kitchen,” he says, adding that this is the brand he intends to focus on for the foreseeable future. But as you’ll hear, Haberman always has another idea.
“Starting a business is kind of like a disease. It’s not always the healthiest thing to be creating things. I can't help myself.”
How do you strike the right balance between passion and profits? We talk about working on things you believe in, building partnerships, and managing the instinct to keep starting things.
After our conversation with Haberman, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Katherina Pattit is an associate professor of ethics and business law. For a serial entrepreneur, “the partnership piece is critical,” Pattit says. “When you have partners who understand the mission, you can work together for the benefit of each other’s strengths.”
By All Means host Allison Kaplan sits down with one of her mentors, Burt Cohen, founding publisher of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine and Twin Cities Business, to talk about the magazine business, leadership, and sandwiches.
A 1955 graduate of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Cohen’s publishing career included management roles with the New York Times Media Company, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Modern Medicine Publications. He purchased a small city magazine called MPLS in 1978 and transformed it into Mpls.St.Paul, now the Twin Cities’ leading lifestyle magazine and a leader in the field of city and regional magazines nationally. That was the beginning of MSP Communications, one of the first publishing companies in the country to create content for brands. MSP-C, the company's custom division, has developed more than 225 print and digital titles and platforms to date. In 1993, Cohen created MSP's second editorial magazine, Twin Cities Business, with the help of partners Gary Johnson, president of MSP Communications, and Brian Anderson, who served as editor of Mpls.St.Paul until his death in 2010. Cohen is TCB's founding publisher.
A mentor to many in business and publishing, Cohen has served on numerous boards including Medica, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and University of St. Thomas. He played a key role in modernizing the mission of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism.
Cohen continues to write a monthly column for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. He is likely the only person on Twitter who types his tweets on a manual typewriter and hands them to an intern to be posted online @thecohenreport, which he never looks at. His LinkedIn profile, which is is also unaware he has, lists him as “old columnist.” But Cohen says coming to the office every day, lunching with business leaders and politicians, and reading several newspapers a day keeps him young.
His motto, in life and business: “Be gracious as you can and respectful and appreciative of everyone. If you’re polite and nice and civil and openminded to people’s thoughts and ideas, it will lead to success for you and will be heartwarming to them.”
Sisters Isabel and Caroline Bercaw started making bath bombs for fun when they were just 10 and 11 years old. Entrepreneurial at heart and encouraged by their parents, Kim and Ben Bercaw, the girls entered the youth division of the Uptown Art Fair in Minneapolis and sold out of bath bombs in a day. They came back the next year and caught the eye of a spa owner who wanted to sell their fizzy bath bombs with a “surprise” inside at his shop. They never looked back. Today, their bath bombs are sold at Target, Costco, and many other national retailers. Da Bomb Bath does around $20 million in annual revenue. And that figure could catapult, thanks to new branded partnerships with Barbie, Hot Wheels and Disney.
Isabel, 18, is now a freshman at the University of St. Thomas—part of the Schulze Scholars program for students who have demonstrated entrepreneurial leadership. Caroline is finishing her senior year of high school. The two are co-creative directors of the company they started before they were old enough to incorporate on their own. Their mom Kim serves as CEO and dad Ben is CFO and COO of the Edina, Minn. Based company, which employs more than 150.
“Our parents have always inspired curiosity rather than fear in us,” the Bercaw sisters say.
The sisters talk about what it's liek to make it big before high school, from their surprise success to what they’ve sacrificed along the way. They explain why they want to go to college, and what they want for their company as it continues to grow.
After our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. “This generation of students, Generation Z, are a far more entrepreneurial generation,” says Laura Dunham, associate dean of the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. “They are learning a lot about entrepreneurship at an early age—there are tons of resources online, more programs at the high school level, and the world has changed, making it easier for any company to access customers, build capital-efficient supply chains. There’s more opportunity out there, and young people are grabbing it.”
David Kristal had no intention of going into business with his father Henry, co-founder of the Ember’s restaurant chain. But with the heyday of the 24-hour diner coming to an end and the 80-restaurant Midwestern chain losing money every month, Kristal joined his dad in 1997 to try to save the business.
He managed to slow the bleed, although the restaurants never fully rebounded. In the process of trying, however, Kristal steered the company into the loyalty business. “We were in total crisis mode trying to figure out how to cash roll the business to avoid bankruptcy. We didn’t have a reputation in the loyalty space; we had to create it.” One service client turned into many and soon, the company had an entirely new focus in engagement and loyalty management programs.
Now called Augeo, the St. Paul-based company with more than 200 employees offers incentive and debit card membership programs in more than 50 countries. In 2018, Augeo spun off a fintech loyalty division for $140 million, and the company is growing again. In September, Augeo acquired enterprise engagement company MotivAction. It is expected to generate $350 million in annual revenue.
Kristal talks about fostering a company culture that can withstand a total pivot, and being willing to fail. “There ain’t no magic to this stuff,” Krisal says. “You’ve got to keep pounding it out every day. You hope you have more good days than bad days and hope you can make your good days great.”
After our conversation with Kristal, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Dan McLaughlin teaches in the Operations and Supply Chain Management program. He points out how culture can impact a company’s ability to pivot. “The is a classic example of agile business: you try stuff. I bet in seven years, Augeo will be doing something else because they’re willing to try things and move on.”
Chris Plantan traded building high rises for designing three-ring binders. Surprised that she couldn’t find stylish school supplies for her daughter to use in middle school, Plantan left a lucrative career as an architect in 2003 to start russell + hazel, an office products line that changed an industry. Hers was the first brand in a commodity driven category to treat paper products and office supplies as design objects. Her patterned binders, lucite sticky note holders and gold staplers blended function and fashion, and even inspired Martha Stewart who became a big fan of the brand and helped create national demand.
Plantan sold russell + hazel, which is named for her grandparents, to Gartner Studios in 2009 and stayed on for three years. Next she co-founded a company called West Emory and took a very different approach, staying behind the scenes to design products for other retail brands including Crate & Barrel, Vineyard Vines, J.Crew, Target, and Nordstrom. She left earlier this year to recharge her creative battery. “I’m trying to take the advice I give to everyone about entrepreneurship: You don’t have to define it. To get to where you want to get, it’s stepping stones. Just take the next step.”
Plantan talks about finding the “white space” in consumer product goods and what makes architecture a great background for entrepreneurship. “It’s a classical education. You do have to have that right brain with all that engineering so it’s a good foundation, but still so lofty in your thinking. The top of that building is always in the sky. How you design a building is fundamentally product solving.”
She also shares her formula for staying head of consumer trends: “Read the Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, and throw in a little Cosmo. Understand your consumer. Make sure (your product is) relevant, and looks great.”
After our conversation with Plantan ,we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. David Deeds, the Schultz Professor of Entrepreneurship, points to what made russell + hazel a success. “If you’re going to do an entrepreneurial business, you need to be differentiated. She figured out way to get the customer to look at product, not the price.”
You might not know the name Sue Remes, but you’ve no doubt come in contact with her work for Kiehl’s, Frederic Fekkai, Lancome, Murad, Bumble and Bumble, Kevin Murphy, and others. She started her career behind the makeup counter for Clinique and worked her way up to Regional Training Manager before moving to Aveda Corp. where she was National Sales Manager and learned from industry visionary Horst Rechelbacher. The experience informed her entire career, but it was the last time Remes worked on staff. She went on to found Sue Remes Resources and become one of the most sought-after experts in the beauty business.
Remes talks about the art and science of being a consultant and maintaining an outside perspective even while working on a brand for five to seven years. “I serve my clients better by being independent. I’m always thinking or looking at whatever they’re not thinking or looking at. What’s the thing right in front of you that no one else is seeing? That’s what I learned from Horst.”
For those who go into consulting for the flexibility, take note. “As a consultant, you’re always thinking about what you’ll do next.” Remes also spends nearly as much on the road as does at home. Often, she goes from exotic locales like Dubai and Singapore to the off-the-grid cabin she and her husband built in Ely, Minn. “Living in a situation where you don’t have electricity and you don’t have running water pushed everything I thought to be true about myself. I live this incredibly weird life where I’m on the road, I’m keynote speaking, I’m meeting people. Going to Ely takes it all down a notch for me so I can go back out there into the world.”
After a conversation with Remes that includes a look at market trends including genderless beauty, sustainability and purpose, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Associate Professor John McVea from the Schultz School of Entrepreneurship suggests consulting as a useful apprenticeship before starting a venture. “You’ve got to be a fast learner. Absorbing all the details of somebody else’s business is exhausting. But that mindset is what makes consultants tick.”
Nancy Lyons is the founder and CEO of Clockwork, a Minneapolis-based experience design and technology agency that works with clients across industries. She’s a leader with a personal mission to “think strategically, act thoughtfully, be a good human.”
As such, she spends much of her time speaking, writing, and thinking about the intersection of leadership, entrepreneurship, technology and people. “I don’t love tech,” Lyons says. “I love people and how tech supports and empowers people.”
In this episode, Lyons walks us through her path into the tech industry—back when the Internet was in its infancy. She talks about learning how to code, learning project management, getting to a place where she feels comfortable being herself at work and speaking her truth.
“What Clockwork is doing that I’m proud of is creating the space for uncomfortable conversations that ultimately lead to change,” Lyons says. “We have this idea that success looks a certain way—especially for women. We need opportunities to see ourselves. Success comes in a wide variety. People have to see themselves in the work to believe they belong there.”
Lyons serves as the chair emeritus of the National Board of Directors of the Family Equality Council. She sits on the Minnesota Governor’s Blue Ribbon Council on Information Technology. She is on the Open Twin Cities Advisory Board, as well as the Amplified Voices Board, and is a member of the advisory board for the innovative entrepreneurial conference, Giant Steps. She co-authored the book “Interactive Project Management: Pixels, People, and Process.”
After our conversation with Lyons we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Marketing professor Gino Giovannelli talks about why Lyon’s outspokenness works for her in business. “She is who she is. She’s putting it all out there. In order to establish relationships, you need to be authentic.”
Brandon Sampson almost lost his hand in a farming accident when he was 8 years old. Nine surgeries and months of physical therapy sparked his interest in orthopedic medicine and rehabilitation. He was pre-med at Luther College, until a mentor introduced him to the field of prosthetics and orthotics. “When I saw people building a functional tool that never existed before for people missing limbs, I thought, this is what I want to do.” What he didn’t fully realize, as he started his career working for an artificial limb maker, was the power of his own entrepreneurial spirit. “I didn’t care if I succeeded or failed. I just wanted to feel like it was my doing.”
After 15 years of working for another prosthetist, and many failed attempts to show his employer how to innovate and reinvent, he left to start a different kind of artificial limb company—one that focuses on function over form. Limb Labs opened near Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. in 2014. It looks more like a design lab than a medical office, with the fabrication center visible from the lobby and street.
“We wanted to design the patient experience to feel like they are part of the process,” Sampson says. Today, the privately owned Limb Lab has four offices in Minnesota and Wisconsin and plans to continue expanding. "We must be disrupting something," Sampson says, "because when we go to conferences, people want to have lunch.”
Sampson talks about innovation in the field of prosthetics, the impact of insurance changes, and balancing his patient focus with running a business.
“I just love getting up and going to work," Sampson says. "Every day there’s a chance I might be able to create something that never existed before.”
After our conversation with Sampson, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Dan McLaughlin, director of the Center for Innovation in the Business of Health Care, talks about how innovation in prosthetics is starting to benefit other fields, like agriculture.
“Crops need to be hand picked and no one wants to do that job, so they are investing in robotic pickers,” McLaughlin says. “it’s a very exciting future.”
When Maia Haag told her boss at General Mills that she was leaving to start a personalized children’s book company, he told her to call him when she wanted her job back. “That just made me want to prove him wrong,” Haag says. That’s just what she did. Her Minneapolis-based company, I See Me! is now the largest publisher of personalized books in the U.S. With more than 50 titles and many other personalized products, I See Me! has sold millions of books for kids as well as pets, dads, and grandparents. Haag walks us through how she set herself up for success, from taking time to write the business plan to working for other Internet startups to learn what to do, and what not to do.
Launched in 2000, I See Me! found its audience without the aid of social media. Haag reflects on her earliest days in e-commerce and how direct-to-consumer retail has evolved—for better or worse. In addition to e-commerce, I See Me! sells through retailers and has strategic partnerships with Shutterfly and other brands.
In 2014, Haag sold I See Me! to Chronicle Books, but she has stayed on as president. She talks about going from founder to president and having to answer to stakeholders. She talks about working with her husband Allan, a graphic designer whose firm designed I See Me! products, and why they decided he should leave the business. Plus, how she’s learned to let her leadership team handle the day-to-day operations. “Letting go has made it so much more enjoyable,” she says.
After our conversation with Haag, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business professor David Deeds who offers advice and insight to entrepreneurs. “Learning on other people’s money is always a good thing for an entrepreneur,” Deeds says. “Businesses don’t die from bad ideas as often as they die from lack of cash."
Wiping out on Rollerblades and cracking his iPhone prompted Benjamin VandenWymelenberg to make his first phone case out of wood scraps. An architecture student who had grown up on a farm, he liked the idea of bridging technology and nature. Friends asked him to make phone cases for them, and that was the beginning of Woodchuck USA. In a matter of months, Woodchuck was selling through Best Buy and Target. Now seven years old, the Minneapolis-based manufacturer of wood products counts Google, US Bank, Ecolab, and Aveda among its custom clients, and sells in gift stores across the country. Woodchuck plants a tree for every item sold, which has resulted in millions of trees planted on six continents.
From the start, Woodchuck’s mission was far broader than its product collection: “Nature back to people. Jobs back to America. Quality back to products.” Says VandenWymelenberg, “We might give up on the product, but we’re not going to give up on the mission.”
While the core company continues to grow, Woodchuck also added an interiors division which makes wood dividers and panels for offices. Meanwhile, VandenWymelenberg, 28, has gotten into real estate development, buying the building that houses Woodchuck and creating a startup hub in Minneapolis. He’s also building a nature center in central Minnesota. And he found time to visit all seven continents, and write a book about entrepreneurship called “The World Needs Your F-ing Ideas.”
On this episode of By All Means, VandenWymelenberg talks about mission, marketing and the challenge of shifting his focus from founder to leader. He shares some early failures and missteps that he believes helped him get where he is today. Success, he says, is “literally a lot of failing and getting back up.”
After our conversation with VandenWymelenberg, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Faculty Director Mike Porter sheds light on how to get new products on store shelves, and the potential pitfalls of borrowing startup capital from friends and family.
Claire Powell is CEO of J.W. Hulme, the century-old leather goods brand based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She didn’t start it; she was brought in to resuscitate it. J.W. Hulme road the wave of the heritage movement—enjoying national media buzz around its history of U.S. manufacturing, but that hype didn’t add up to profits. Unable to succeed as a vertically integrated manufacturer that relies primarily on catalog and online sales, Powell found herself in the challenging position of having to change the business model. “We ended up having to make a really difficult decision,” Powell says. “Are we a manufacturer? Are we a retailer? Are we a brand? Who are we? Ultimately, a business has to sustain itself. It was really a fork in the road moment.”
In 2018, J.W. Hulme, which is owned by a private equity firm, stopped manufacturing and outsourced production. Around 30 employees were laid off, and only a small marketing and sales team remain. “I’ve had a lot of difficult conversations over last year,” Powell says. “I’ve tried to always be honest, as kind as you can, as supportive as you can, but not hide anything.”
J.W. Hulme opened a retail store in St. Paul with plans to focus on broadening its brand. Powell shares her perspective on retail today, and how a 114-year old company can pivot while staying true to its character. She also talks about the challenges of U.S. manufacturing of artisan goods and the perception of the heritage movement, where buzz “doesn’t always translate into sales.”
Having held management roles with a number of consumer product goods companies both large and small, including Bali, Wonderbra and American Giant, Powell describes the differences, and the perspective of coming in as a leader, not a founder. “It’s really healthy to have both of those in the organization. The founder can be almost irrationally attached to certain things in the business. Someone coming in can feel as passionate about driving success. But you might have a different perspective and a little less deep attachment.”
After our wide-ranging conversation with Powell, which includes her self-care techniques to be a more effective leader, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Associate Professor Patricia Hedberg offers advice on leading through turmoil, and accepting that not everything works out as you might hope. “Failure is a beautiful moment for learning,” Hedberg says. “The idea is that by taking risks, you learn a lot about yourself and how to do it better the next time."
Joe Keeley’s story is the stuff of business school legends—particularly at the University of St. Thomas where he was a student when he got the summer babysitting gig that sparked the idea for College Nannies, Sitters + Tutors, which he grew into the nation’s largest employer of nannies, sitters and tutors. Today, the company, which Keeley sold in 2016 to Bright Horizons, operates close to 200 franchises and has provided more than 2 million hours of child care.
In 2000, Keeley answered an ad from parents who were looking for a college hockey player to nanny their two boys for the summer. Other parents started asking if he could help them find them a college student to watch their kids, and Keeley quickly realized the market was ripe for a professional placement service that would vet childcare providers and treat them as “role models” for kids. It made for a great news story, too, which is how Keeley built an early buzz without a marketing budget.
But even as College Nannies, Sitters + Tutors was gaining momentum, Keeley didn’t see himself as an entrepreneur. “You get that job, a 401K, you have 3.2 children, you retire, and you die. That’s kind of the American dream, that’s the path.” Or it was the path, 20 years ago. “The times have changed—certainly a lot of companies are valuing entrepreneurship majors as intra-preneurs quite highly. As more and more industries get disrupted by entrepreneurs, they’re looking for the entrepreneurial thinking. So I think the major is something that’s even more sought after because large companies need to have small divisions that have independent thinkers.”
Keeley did become an entrepreneurship major and by the time he graduated from St. Thomas in 2003, he was running a profitable business. He made the key decision to structure College Nannies as an employment agency rather than a placement service. He began franchising in 2005. By 2010, dozens of new franchises were opening each year. Then in 2014, Keeley created an app that expanded his company’s services to provide on-demand sitters, creating the Uber of licensed childcare. But always, he says, the people are at the center of the business. “We’re a childcare company with good technology.”
Keeley talks about his decision to sell College Nannies to Bright Horizons, the largest provider of corporate child care in the U.S. He stayed on to run College Nannies under Bright Horizons for three years and stepped away from the business completely this summer. He offers advice for other would-be entrepreneurs and talks about what's next in his career.
After our conversation with Keeley, we go back to the classroom with one of his former professors. Alec Johnson is an associate professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. “No one would have doubted Joe’s intentions,” Johnson says. “He hasn’t changed a bit.”
As for the role St. Thomas played in Keeley’s business, Johnson says, “We can’t make entrepreneurs, but we can teach them.”
About every five minutes, someone, somewhere in the world, creates a CaringBridge page. The Minneapolis-based social network makes it easy for people to communicate with loved ones during a health crisis by creating a centralized, private place to share updates and ask for help. Sona Mehring created CaringBridge in 1997. It started with a simple website designed to help friends share news about their premature daughter, Brighid. The power of that instant connection—at a time before Facebook and Twitter—prompted Mehring to build CaringBridge, a platform that was available, for free, to the public. From the newborn intensive care unit at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics in St. Paul, CaringBridge has grown into a global nonprofit with users in 235 countries.
Mehring, a tech entrepreneur who was early to the Internet—launching her own web page design firm in the 1990s—talks about her decision to turn CaringBridge into a nonprofit, and leave her day job to run it. “I have a nonprofit heart with a for-profit mind,” she says. She also discusses why she believes CaringBridge has continued to thrive despite the proliferation of social media.
“What I realized is, it’s not just a service; it’s an amazing way of people connecting. CaringBridge is actually something that helps people heal.”
After our conversation with Mehring, we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business marketing professor Gino Giovannelli who points out what any founder can learn from CaringBridge. “If you have the right product that solves a need in the market,” Giovannelli says, “you don’t need to go broad.”
Kate Arends’ eye for design and instinct for connection helped her build an audience of more than 3.3 million for Wit & Delight, her blog turned social media platform. How to leverage that devoted following and capitalize on the opportunities that come with being a lifestyle brand continues to be a work in progress. Today, Wit & Delight operates its own rentable studio space in Minneapolis, creates products, content, and consults with major brands including Nike, Amazon, Fossil, and Sleep Number.
But Wit & Deight didn’t start with a business plan. It started as a creative outlet for Arends, and it grew organically for five years before Target came calling and offered her a limited edition design collaboration she couldn’t refuse. “It wasn’t until the opportunity became so apparent that I thought, if I don’t seize this, I’m going to regret it.”
Even now, with a team of six and national sponsorships, Arends is constantly reevaluating her influence and opportunities. She’s thinking about how to scale a business that is so closely tied to her personal story. She talks about creating boundaries between her private life and public persona, and how to move past being identified as a blogger or influencer. “If there’s anything I’ve learned from running my own business, it’s that there’s a lot that comes from knowing when to say no.”
After our conversation with Arends, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Katherina Pattit, associate professor of ethics and business law, reflects on the role of the influencer among consumers today.
“We used to go to Consumer Reports and friends to find out what to buy. Now we have people on social media, where boundaries are starting to blur. We need to recalibrate what types of things are important to us in our own judgement.”
Clarence Bethea does not fit the typical venture capitalist’s profile of a promising founder. He grew up in a broken home, got into trouble with the law, dropped out of college. But when he started working in a group home with vulnerable adults, something clicked.
Through a series of jobs and mentorships, he realized what he was meant to do: start something. “My heart and soul is built to build something big.” In 2015, he launched Upsie, a warranty app designed to make it easier and more affordable for consumers to protect their purchases. Very quickly, Bethea pitched Upsie for the Techstars business incubator program and since then, it has grown 300 percent every year, with customers in all 50 states. Bethea has raised $8.5 million for Upsie, despite odds stacked against him. “People invest in people who look like them. Venture capitalists are mostly white guys. I definitely don’t look like them.”
Bethea talks about the challenges of raising money and the vast inequities that exist in the VC space. “if I was a white guy in Silicon Valley, I’d have a lot more money,” he says. “The vision is that big. Warranties are a $47 billion industry that hasn’t been tapped into from a consumer standpoint.”
His plan now? Focus on growing Upsie, and mentor other minority entrepreneurs. “We’re going to see more entrepreneurs of color creating great businesses. They’re just going to outshine everyone else.”
After our conversation with Bethea, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Katherina Pattit, associate professor of ethics and business law, shares strategies for overcoming bias in business. “We know from research that once someone knows what his or her biases are, they have an opportunity to start counteracting that.”
Kristin Shane is the founder and CEO of Fly Feet Running, a group fitness workout with two studios in the Twin Cities and hopes of going national. Launched in Minneapolis in 2016, Fly Feet is thriving in an increasingly crowded field, and Shane says she’s proud to be among the 2 percent of women-owned businesses to make it over the $1 million mark in annual revenue.
But she still has big hurdles to clear to achieve the goals she’s set for Fly Feet, and getting this far did not happen by chance.
Shane charts the experiences that led to starting her own business—from consulting for Accenture, to a stint in the Peace Corps, and an 11 year climb at Target, where she eventually landed as a vice president in the beauty division. Shane was part of the team that led Target’s disastrous expansion into Canada. She talks about what she learned from that failure, and how it set her up to become an entrepreneur. “All the ingredients are here for a personal disaster,” she recalls of her time in Canada. “And I’m not willing to let that happen.”
Shane takes us through the two years of work she did to plan Fly Feet Running before leaving Target. She talks about what it will take to get Fly Feet to the next level, and aspirations of her own.
After our conversation with Shane, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas. Alec Johnson, an associate professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship at the Opus College of Business, discusses the challenges facing startups after initial success—particularly in the competitive field of fitness. “She needs to grow or she’ll find herself shrinking as part of the overall industry,” Johnson says. “The journey keeps throwing entrepreneurs challenges and hurdles to get over.”
Rhoda Olsen didn’t grow up thinking she’d one day run a $1.5 billion company. She didn’t have any female role models in business. But she found the way to lead with heart, and data, and in the process, she helped Great Clips become the world's largest salon brand.
Olsen is vice chair of the board of Great Clips, a Minneapolis-based franchise salon chain with 4,400 locations and more than 40,000 stylists nationwide. She stepped down as CEO in 2018. But she continues to work closely with leadership, and franchisees. She’s considered the heart and soul of the company, and a major factor in its epic growth over the past 30 years.
Olsen went to college at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing careers in math, so despite her natural talent with numbers, she focused on social work and started her business career in human relations. It took her brother Ray Barton’s encouragement for her to not only come to work with him at Great Clips in the 1980s, but to buy stock in the company at a time when she and her husband barely had enough money to pay for their three sons' hockey gear. It paid off.
“Four to 5 percent growth a year may seem boring to people, but when it goes on for 15 years, it’s not so boring anymore,” she says.
Olsen, who still goes to the office almost every day, talks about leading with heart, and data. “Data is a powerful way to drive success,” she says. “There’s nothing more caring than being honest with someone. If you care deeply, how can you not provide someone with honest feedback?”
That honesty extends to Olsen's personal story, too, from growing up poor to having an alcoholic father. Olsen says she's realized that sharing her own vulnerabilities and struggles helps to motivate her team. “I stopped trying to speak, and started telling stories. People keep pretending that their lives are perfect. And life isn’t perfect. If you share, you give everyone the opportunity to feel like they aren’t alone.”
After our conversation with Olsen, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Distinguished Service Faculty Mike Porter, who talks about the art and strategy of building a franchise business. “You’ve got to try to build a community among franchisees.”
Michael Fanuele is a brand strategist who has worked at JWT, Havas, Fallon, and most recently served as chief creative officer at General Mills. There, he tried to inspire a big food company to be a good food company, and in the process, helped Cheerios and Nature Valley grow for the first time in a decade. Currently, he’s the founder and CEO of Talk Like Music, a consultancy that helps people, places, and brands become more inspiring. His new book is called Stop Making Sense: The Art of Inspiring Anybody.
Fanuele became interested in the topic of inspiration when he found himself caught up in the theatrics of U2, a band he despised. He wondered what it was about Bono that had the power to move even the most reluctant fan. And he started thinking about how that same feeling could apply to other aspects of life and work.
“The inspiration equation is pretty simple: passion minus reason is inspiration,” Fanuele says. "You’ve got to find a way to make things odd enough, strange enough—music-like enough that spirits soar, bodies move.”
Fanuele walks us through some of the ways we can bring emotion and inspiration to work. He shares examples of techniques that brands, businesses, and politicians use to move people.
“The two ugliest words in the corporate lexicon? Chill out,” Fanuele says. “Why would you tell people who are obviously roused, rallied, passionate to chill out? That’s when you say, go. We need to learn how to express our feelings in places where feeling are not welcome.”
After an inspiring conversation with Fanuele, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. John McVea, who teaches entrepreneurial strategy, says the key to getting at feelings is empathy. “It’s hard to inspire anyone without truly understanding the person you’re trying to serve. We’re in the business of finding surprises.”
Dave Kapell founded Magnetic Poetry, a first-of-its-kind novelty item that brought poetry into the kitchens and onto the refrigerators of millions of people around the world in the mid-‘90s. An accidental entrepreneur, he came up with the idea of putting words on magnets while writing song lyrics, and when friends wanted magnetic poetry kits of their own, he turned it into a business. “I went viral before there was going viral,” he says.
To date, Magnetic Poetry has produced more than one billion world tiles in more than a half dozen languages and sold more than 3 million kits worldwide. Kapell still runs the Minneapolis-based company, and has never taken a dime of outside funding.
His unlikely path to entrepreneurship includes a garage band, writer’s block, arts and crafts, Davanni’s magnets, a house party, student loan debt, and a very memorable sneeze. On this episode of By All Means, Kapell shares his entertaining founder’s story and what he's learned about running a business along the way.
After our conversation with Kapell, we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Senior Associate Dean Michael J. Garrison, professor of ethics and business law to get advice on the importance of pursuing patents for your unique product ideas.
New episodes of By All Means are on the way! We talk to entrepreneurs, CEOs, authors and visionaries. Leaders who make business work in Minnesota. Coming up this season: the founders of CaringBridge, College Nannies & Tutors, Woodchuck USA, Flyfeet Running, Upsie and many others. Plus tips and tactics that may apply to your next venture. Get ready to be inspired.
Ann Kim is the James Beard Award-winning owner and executive chef of Young Joni, Pizzeria Lola and Hello Pizza in Minneapolis. She and her husband and business partner Conrad Leifur created parent company Vestalia Hospitality and, without any outside investors, formed a team that is now working on its fourth restaurant concept slated to open in 2019 in Uptown Minneapolis.
Kim did not follow a traditional path to the restaurant industry. She pursued an acting career after graduating from New York’s Columbia University with a degree in English. Burnt out after eight years of theater and commercial work, she and Leifur decided to open the neighborhood restaurant of their Minneapolis dreams and New York memories. That was Pizzeria Lola.
Kim didn’t attend culinary school; a Korean immigrant, she grew up watching her mother and grandmother make kimchi from scratch out of necessity—no restaurants in Minneapolis had it on the menu. “It wasn’t unusual for me growing up as a kid to have a dinner table that had a bucket of KFC and biscuits with kimchi and a side of rice,” Kim says. “So to have Korean short ribs, with three kinds of kimchi and a pepperoni pizza and cauliflower is not foreign. It’s totally normal.”
In fact, Kim believes being an industry outsider has worked in her favor. "Instead of listening to the rules of opening up a restaurant—where you put the seats, what you can and can’t put on a pizza—those were all thrown out the window and we just followed our guts and what we thought was missing from the pizza landscape. That worked for us. When you do something that’s against the grain, people are hungry for that."
Following the success of Lola, she opened Hello Pizza, a New York-style slice shop, and then came Young Joni, the critically acclaimed restaurant she describes as “my heart and soul.” She talks about learning to work on the business rather than in it, and realizing that her favorite part of the process is creating new things. “I’ve got a million ideas in my head. I love the idea of creating things, coming up with an environment in which people can eat that makes them feel good and special. That’s the part that drives me.” As much as she loves designing a restaurant and menu, Kim takes just as much joy and satisfaction in the business. “Creation is not just about the next dish. To me, creativity is how can you take an organization and grow it in a sustainable way.”
Kim talks about the shock of being nominated for the culinary industry’s top honor, a James Beard award. Shortly after this recording, she won the 2019 James Beard Award for Best Chef Midwest.
After our conversation with Kim, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business associate professor Alec Johnson to discuss how entrepreneurs can successfully move from creative inspiration to scalable business.
Liz Giorgi founded Mighteor, one of the first video production companies focused on creating content for the Internet. With clients including Facebook and the NFL, Mighteor has helped businesses achieve more than 500 million organic views and receive international attention. Now, the Emmy award winning Giorgi is launching a second business called Soona—a same-day photo and video production studio. “It came from years of listening to our customers—whether it’s Facebook or a small liquor store, they all had this problem: they can’t scale content affordably or quickly…We took every idea we had about production turned it on its head and said it’s not impossible to do this in a day.” Described as the Kinko's of content, Soona recently opened in Denver and Minneapolis. Giorgi wants to take it global. “We can completely change the game for how content is made; make it accessible to any brand at any time.”
But Giorgi didn’t intend to be an entrepreneur. When she couldn’t find a newsroom job after graduating from journalism school in 2007, she landed a freelance gig with Apartment Therapy and started learning digital content creation. She spent two years at an agency managing web strategy for clients and also helped the University of Minnesota take video to YouTube. Her combined experiences in storytelling, social media and client work led to the creation of Mighteor in 2013. The company now has 15 employees and offices in Minneapolis and Denver.
Giorgi talks about her evolution from filmmaker to business leader and how she stepped away, two years in, to learn the difference between a P&L and a balance sheet. She also talks about influencers and the power of social media marketing. “If a brand thinks we have these social channels just to sell, they’re missing the greater opportunity, which is to build trust with an audience and develop a community around your organization.” Having recently completed the Tory Burch Foundation Fellows Program, Giorgi reveals the advice that resonated most as she seeks investors for Soona. “You can never take too long to ensure that someone’s money is the right money for your business,” Tory Burch told Giorgi.
After our conversation with Giorgi, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business entrepreneurship professor John McVea and talk about the misconception that business founders are either creative or practical. “A lot of inspiration for creativity comes from constraints,” McVea says. On the flip side, he says, “It’s perfectly possible for people with business training to become part of the creative process.”
How do you define success when your family names are Dayton and Rockefeller? Andrew Dayton is the son of former Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton and philanthropist Alida Rockefeller Messinger, daughter of John D. Rockefeller III. His grandfather, Bruce Dayton, was CEO of Dayton Hudson Corp. and a devoted trustee of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts who was once described in the New York Times as the “Dean of American corporate arts philanthropy.”
“My grandfather had a lot of sayings…’the only thing worse than a bum is a rich bum. It wasn’t that you’re expected to follow in retail or philanthropy or politics, but you’ve got to contribute something. You have a responsibility to pay it forward,” Andrew says.
Andrew and his brother Eric Dayton are co-founders and co-owners of North Corp., the parent company to the Bachelor Farmer restaurant and cafe, Marvel Bar, and retail store Askov Finlayson, all located in the North Loop of Minneapolis.
Andrew’s passion for public policy led him to serve as the Deputy Legislative Director to former San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee. But his concern about growing inequities in Minnesota brought him home. “Minnesota is the most generous state in country in terms of dollars and volunteer hours, but we’re dead last when it comes to metrics around poverty. The percentage of people living in poverty has risen by 60 percent in the last 20 years…how can we be so generous and not see the results?”
Andrew recently launched Constellation Fund, a grant making organization inspired by New York’s Robin Hood that uses data, research, and predictive analytics to identify, fund, and partner with the people and organizations making the biggest demonstrable impacts in the fight against poverty in the Twin Cities. On this episode of By All Means, Andrew explains why he created Constellation Fund and how he will evaluate its effectiveness.
After our conversation, we talk to Katherina Pattit, associate professor of ethics and business law at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, about how businesses can apply an investor’s eye to philanthropic initiatives.
Jacquie Berglund is co-founder and CEO of Finnegans Brew Co., the first beer company in the world to donate 100 percent of profits to charity. Finnegans turns beer into food by purchasing produce from local farmers and donating it to food banks in every state where the beer is sold.
In 2018, Finnegans opened its own brewery and tap room in downtown Minneapolis and launched the new Finnovation Lab for co-working and incubating socially minded startups. “I think I’m hardwired this way,” Berglund says. “I always wanted to make a difference.”
On this episode of By All Means, Berglund talks about how she came up with the idea to launch a beer company that “does well and does good,” and how she structured her for-profit company to benefit Finnegans' non-profit arm. She addresses the challenges of growing a benefit corporation, and how, with guidance from Newman’s Own Foundation, she changed her model to bring on investors and fund expansion. “If you want to go dood, you’ve got to figure out how to fund it.” Berglund offers advice for the next generation of social entrepreneurs.
After our conversation with Berglund, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship Associate Dean Laura Dunham who offers insight on adding a philanthropic element to your business. Says Dunham, “Entrepreneurship is about solving problems that matter to you, and creating value for others.”
Erin Newkirk is an award-winning innovator, tech entrepreneur, brand builder, and champion of problem solvers. After working her way up the ranks to senior marketing manager at General Mills, she left to start Red Stamp, a modern correspondence company, which she built into a mobile app that made it possible to send personalized cards and invitations on your phone with a couple of clicks. With 10 million cards sent, Red Stamp was acquired in 2013 by Taylor Corp., one of the largest privately held companies in the U.S. Newkirk continued on as CEO of Red Stamp within Taylor until 2016 when she left and quickly became chief marketing officer of one of the hottest Minneapolis-based insurance ventures, Bright Health, which made Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list for 2017. Then last year, she joined another Twin Cities startup, this time in the food industry. Newkirk is now chief marketing officer of Local Crate, a meal kit company on a mission to source locally, from farm to chef to kitchen. How does she continue to leap between industries? “My North Star, what guides me: I’m all about doing good with good people. Where there’s a problem to be solved, you should go there.” That’s the approach she brings to her newest project, Satya, an initiative she says is based on “helping founders and leaders succeed through speaking their truth.” After our conversation with Newkirk, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, who talks about capitalizing on an entrepreneurial mindset.
His story has become legendary at the University of St. Thomas—and beyond. Zachary Quinn was a sophomore when he enrolled in an entrepreneurship class. There, he met Brian Keller, and together, they turned an assignment to create a business into Love Your Melon, the $40 million hat company that donates half its profits to fighting pediatric cancer.
“We wanted to start something that would make a difference,” Quinn says. On this episode of By All Means, he outlines the key moments and decisions that set Love Your Melon up for success, including its college ambassador program, a hockey bus tour that garnered national press, and brand building through social media. Quinn talks about Love Your Melon’s commitment to U.S. manufacturing and its first brick and mortar store, which the company is using for special events designed to tell the brand story and build engagement.
What’s next? “I never look more than six months out,” Quinn says. But he does have “more crazy stuff” in the works, including a concert series and e-gaming competition.
After our conversation with Quinn, we go Back to the Classroom with his entrepreneurship professor at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Jay Ebben. “We really push students to build their career or a business around their own values, their own sense of purpose and mission,” Ebben says. He describes what it was like to have the Love Your Melon founders in class, and why he gave them an A- for the semester—a grading decision he’s never quite been able to live down.
Megan Tamte was a new mom who wanted help putting together fashionable outfits. A bad experience at a northern California boutique sparked the idea for Evereve, which is now a national women's specialty retail chain with 85 stores, a fast-growing e-commerce business and a subscription service called Trendsend. “I left the store crying," Tamte recalls of that fateful shopping experience more than 20 years ago. "I remember thinking, someone should create a retail concept that helped women like me who wanted help finding items that would fit their body type. I wanted clothing that was modern and versatile…and I wanted connection.”
Five years later, in 2004, Megan and her husband Mike opened their first store in Edina, Minn., called Hot Mama. Their unique proposition: trendy fashion, warm service and a kid-friendly environment with toys in the fitting rooms so moms could take a moment for themselves. That boutique grew into Evereve, which now generates $120 million in annual revenue.
In a wide-ranging conversation, the Tamtes explain how a detailed business plan set them up for success. They reveal why they changed their company name right as the brand was taking off. They talk about balancing parenthood and running a business together, about leading a brand that has grown far beyond their dreams, and about the future of retail.
After the conversation with the Tamtes, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business digital marketing professor Gino Giovannelli, who shares tips on using social media to your brand’s advantage, as Evereve has done. And, from his own personal experience, Giovannelli highlights pros and cons of going into business with a spouse.
John Puckett and his wife Kim had a case of “the Mondays” that struck almost as soon as they landed corporate jobs after business school. “Life is too short to spend Sunday night dreading going in to work on Monday,” John says. “We felt like life is … too precious to not really feel connected to your work and passionate about what you’re doing.” That conviction led to the creation of Caribou Coffee, now the No. 2 coffee chain in the U.S. It's No. 1 in Minnesota—the one market Starbucks doesn’t dominate—and that’s because of several strategic decisions made by the Pucketts. They grew the chain to more than 100 stores before selling in 2000. A year later, John became co-owner of a small but beloved St. Paul restaurant called Punch Pizza. He’s spent nearly 20 years growing Punch slowly, locally and without any outside investors. Puckett explains why he was determined to build a different sort of company his second time around. Following our conversation with Puckett, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Professor David Deeds, the Schulze Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, who explains the pros and cons of venture capital and why slow growth is under appreciated in business today.
What does it take to build a business? Change an industry? Lead with purpose? Twin Cities Business Editor-in-Chief Allison Kaplan sits down with entrepreneurs and leaders who make business work in Minnesota—and beyond. Learn how they got started and gain insights to apply to your own ventures.
By All Means launches in April and will be available on iTunes Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, Soundcloud, and at tcbmag.com.