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.
Mark Hinton and Elton Klaustermeier stretch their definition of “customer service” miles beyond smiles. To them, the term means much more than common courtesy or on-time delivery.
Perhaps that’s why the “broken-down mill” they bought in 1973 survived to thrive as Big Gain, Inc., a major regional manufacturer of livestock and poultry feeds. Today Big Gain’s more than 100 employees formulate, manufacture, sell and deliver feed to dealers and beef, swine, dairy, sheep and poultry producers in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and South Dakota.
Some folks hide from their heritage, denying their humble origin. They prefer to believe they’ve never been anywhere but up, never anything but successful, self-assured and solvent.
Not many CEOs can say they grew up across the street from their current office and earned their first paycheck on the site of where their office sits today, but Mark Furth, 53, a CEO from New Ulm, can say both. His boyhood home was at 410 N. Broadway and his first paycheck, at 16, came from Madsen’s Super Valu at 315 N. Broadway. Today his office suite facing North Broadway is in the same building- and on the same spot – where he used to bag groceries. What magnifies the significance of both oddities is that Furth isn’t any ordinary CEO, but one that manages what could be the second largest business headquartered in south-central Minnesota, Associated Milk Producers Incorporated (AMPI), a colossus of a co-op, with 5,000 farmer/owners and $1.1 billion in sales.
What began as a sportsman’s show on four small Midwest radio stations evolved into a full-blown business venture that now arranges high-impact fishing and hunting adventures for companies and corporations.
Wes Schuck scratched his plan to become a lawyer. Kristi Schuck, his wife, put aside her majors in health fitness and health education.
Instead, they decided to “live a dream” and start Two Fish Recording Studios in Mankato in 1997.
She burst through a glass ceiling that had held back other women, as jagged shards flew everywhere, only to settle down with hardly a scratch on the uppermost floor of a Bloomington office building. Such a societal barrier could never hold back a person with this much drive. Once at the top, Patricia Johnson would begin gazing out her office window towards the frothy skylines of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where she saw only a panorama of opportunity for the business she led.
Artie Ayers hunted geese and duck in the swamps of Maryland’s Eastern Shore with Curty Gowdy, was a “wudderman” who owned seven crab and oyster boats on the Chesapeake Bay, ran fishing expeditions out of Ocean City, had his own national TV show called Sportsman’s Showcase, but none of it prepared him for Minnesota’s harsh winters – only the people of Minnesota did, who warmed his heart so much he left a Maryland he loved for them.
If you’re reading this after January 1, 2000, by candlelight, shivering next to a dead computer, then Bob Dale was wrong about the impact of Y2K.
As 1999 waned, he believed that 2000 would make a benign arrival, with computer clocks and calendars clicking into the new millennium relatively glitch-free. “There might be some minor inconveniences, but I’m not moving to northern Minnesota and digging my own well,” he said, defining a minor inconvenience as finding your supermarket short on some items because less confident individuals stocked up on canned goods or their favorite cereal.
