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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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Big Gain, Inc.

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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.

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Mark Furth

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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.

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