News

Cover Story, Covers, News, Profiles

Dennis Miller

/

He is on the wildest ride of his life, having recently burst through the turbulent stratosphere on his way up, up and away towards the outer reaches of the ionosphere. But don’t worry: it’s a self-imposed ride, and Dennis Miller has a wireless telephone in his rocket for emergencies to summon help if things really get out of hand.

Even though 2000 revenues for the business he pilots, Midwest Wireless L.L.C., officially won’t become known until mid-March, preliminary figures suggest the company — owned by a private group of nearly 50 independent telephone companies — has passed the $100 million mark for the first time. That’s quite an updraft for a business that didn’t officially begin until 1996, and had 1998 revenues of only $43 million. In contrast, it took North Mankato’s Carlson Craft nearly 50 years to pass $100 million.

Feature Story, Features, News, Profiles

Kiesler’s Campground

/

Every summer, a seasonal suburb blossoms across from Clear Lake, just east of the Waseca city limits on U.S. Hwy. 14.

Residents begin moving in around mid-April with the population peaking at about 1,300 in mid-summer. As in most suburbs, nearly everyone is from somewhere else. Half come from the Twin Cities, 30 percent from Southern Minnesota and the balance from other regions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and the remaining states. And, like typical suburbanites, most go to the nearest Big City (Waseca) to shop.

Feature Story, Features, News, Profiles

Winco

/

Ralph Call, 55, runs all his southern Minnesota business ventures out of his comfy home, snug up against the snow-capped Rockies in scenic Providence, Utah. He stays connected to Minnesota via a computer, fax, telephone and a 300 m.p.h. turbocharged Piper Malibu Mirage that flies back and forth monthly. It’s one heck of a commute.

Cover Story, Covers, News, Profiles

William J. Bresnan

/

Madison Lake-native William J. Bresnan, as much as any other American, made the cable TV industry into what it is today. During cable’s adolescent growth spurt, 1965-1984, he was a top executive, usually a CEO, at either the nation’s No. 1 or No. 2 cable TV company. From 1984 on he would raise up his own sizeable cable TV enterprise, Bresnan Communications – and also spearhead ventures that would thread cable TV throughout Poland and Chile. He never was as flashy as Ted Turner or Jack Kent Cooke, his former boss, but his contributions to the cable industry have been just as substantial.

Cover Story, Covers, News, Profiles

Jeanne Votca-Carpenter

/

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.

Feature Story, Features, News, Profiles

Fly Away AgriProducts Inc.

/

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.

Cover Story, Covers, News, Profiles

David Castle

/

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.

Scroll to Top