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Jeanne Votca-Carpenter

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The lady next to the Trix rabbit ears who has been wringing stories about a kid burping the alphabet on Jay Leno will do almost anything to let the whole world know about her employer and her industry. She’s Jeanne Votca Carpenter, 49, Senior VP of Marketing & Business Development at the 230-employee Bloomington office of Shandwick International, the world’s No. 3 public relations firm.Though usually she doesn’t spend time inside this particular Shandwick brainstorming room (see above), she still must sell and market the creative juices flowing inside it. In a way, she is the top public relations person for a top public relations firm.

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Fly Away AgriProducts Inc.

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Boo-hoo, said the businessman because he couldn’t find enough qualified workers to help him make his product line. The labor shortage in Minnesota had inflated his wage costs and cut his margins to the bone in a dog-eat-dog industry. What was he going to do?

When Duane Sibbet was hit with the above quandary, he didn’t boo-hoo. Rather he did what he thought made sense: he closed up shop. And close he did – his Twin Cities home construction business – and began a whole new career and business at age 40 in Blue Earth, Minn., compliments of that city’s economic development authority and an idea gleaned from his parents’ horse blanket business.

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David Castle

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A few decades back if a corporate executive even brought up the notion at a board meeting that their $127 million company ought to buy out a $254 million foreign rival, he or she would have been laughed out of the board room. But this is the ’00s. When Fairmont’s Weigh-Tronix did it by buying out British rival Avery Berkel in late 1999 with the leverage of Berkshire, a U.S. investment group, it became the second largest scale manufacturer in the world behind Mettler Toledo. And for the record, nobody laughed at them.

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Johnson Components

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Ernie Glass, 62, president of Johnson Components and survivor of five buyouts over the past thirteen years, leans across his desk to explain why his Waseca office has few furnishings. “My tradition of a bare office dates to my General Electric days,” says Glass, a hint of a smile breaking across his lips. “I moved every two years then so I never really bothered to fill my office up with things that would need to be packed and eventually unpacked. Then I came to this company where I’ve had six different office suites at three different plant sites since 1987. I carried on the tradition.”

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Agri-Comm Alarms

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Journalists believe everyone has a story worth publishing, maybe more than one.

But Mankato’s Charlie True, face-to-face with a journalist, seemed to mentally recoil from that notion, wondering aloud if he “was worth a story in Connect Business Magazine.”

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Paul Wilke

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Paul Wilke, 38, wouldn’t want to be called the “King of Mankato Retail.” He would feel the title carried a connotation of him as the inflexible tyrant, the arrogant king of the Mankato hilltop, le roi le veut and therefore it must be so. Rather he would say – no, insist – that he’s only the humble gatekeeper who shepherds others along the retail journey so they can become retail kings themselves.

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