In 2003, Bill Eckles felt undeserving and unworthy after his father named him chief executive officer of Blue Earth-based BEVCOMM. In 2012, he feels undeserving and unworthy after being named a Connect Business Magazine Business Person of the Year finalist. In both cases, the evaluators—the first, his father, and the second, our panel of Minnesota State College of Business judges—saw something in Eckles he didn’t.
If tomorrow is likely to look like yesterday, Cyndi Zarbano will do something to change that today. She sits forward on a chair in her St. Peter home and says, “This life is not a dress rehearsal. I believe life’s a journey, and I don’t want to keep doing the same thing.”
She was the kid most likely to enjoy Scooby-Doo and Inspector Gadget, and later on, Columbo and Murder She Wrote, and most recently Law and Order and CSI—in other words, practically any detective or whodunit show with a puzzle needing solving.
From Minnesota and Iowa to New Jersey to Minnesota and Iowa to California—and back again to Minnesota. CEO Paul Johnson of Express Diagnostics Int’l (EDI) took the long way home after graduating from Mayer Lutheran (Minn.) High School in 1988. And the business he has co-owned with four others since 2004 took the long way home, too.
Perched on a New Ulm hillside overlooking the Cottonwood River, Schell’s Brewing Company produced 115,000 barrels of beer last year. Each barrel filled 14 cases. That’s a lot of suds.
Many people reading this now have let more than their fair share of incredible career opportunities slip right through their fingers. Mike Foty of Fairmont-based Foty Lock & Safe would openly admit being part of that crowd. Yet rather than resign himself to an existence of continual, lifelong regret—as perhaps most people would if having lived his lot—feisty Foty flailed away and eventually late in life carved out a successful business niche.
The three-year-old boy recovering from surgery watched Nancy Dobson demonstrate a sequence of activities for him—walking on a balance beam, stepping on and off a stool and crawling through a barrel. Then he said, “You got through there with your big butt, didn’t you, Nance?”
“Aw, you’re a girl.” The chagrin was evident in the coach’s words when 10-year-old Sarah Richards was drafted to play baseball the first year Little League went co-ed. She didn’t let the coach’s response to her gender deter her. Her parents’ advice—now that she took seriously.
Most young Minnesotans simply don’t aspire to having a career caring for dairy animals 7-days-a-week, 365-days-a-year for years. Jerry Van Oort lived that hard life early on. It would teach him nearly everything necessary for later business success, including the art of surviving change and adversity, of which he would have plenty.
