“Growing older presents many challenges in health, lifestyle, and relationships. We help our clients meet those challenges with dignity and respect,” said Sharon Chader, the founder and owner of Elder Care Services, which operates from the Chader home on acreage on the edge of Madison Lake.
At the time, Kimberly Danger, then of St. James, Minnesota, couldn’t completely comprehend the lifelong implications of what was happening around her. Her mother and father were prudent spenders, especially mother Jean, who regularly redeemed grocery store coupons, shopped thrift stores, and hunted garage sale deals like nobody’s business—and brought Kimberly along.
Exactly 165 years ago in March 1847, the last survivors of the Donner Party reached safety after spending a cataclysmal winter caught in the snowy clutches of Hastings Cutoff, a dead-end pass through the Sierra Nevada in California.
What business has been around for more than a half century, serves the music needs of several south-central Minnesota communities and is owned and operated by people who work there without pay?
Brian Maciej and his business, Lime Valley Advertising, are a study in contrasts. The company 47-year-old Maciej owns is located in a two-story French Second Empire home in Mankato. The 3,700 square feet of space provide an elegant setting for the 16 offices from which a staff of eleven provides integrated marketing for clients.
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.
