Todd Snell grew up inside Rivieras and Electras.
Similar to being a military child, he moved from town to town along with his mother and two brothers whenever his dad received marching orders from General Motors headquarters. The Snells followed their father to Minneapolis, Billings, Duluth, and Chicago, all before Todd started the sixth grade.
The orange tuxedo—complete with top hat, cane and shiny shoes—is a dead ringer for the one Jim Carrey wore in the movie Dumb and Dumber. But when Tom Fallenstein puts it on to conduct a tour of Costumes Galore, his 9,000-square-foot business in downtown Mankato, the suit is the only similarity to Carrey’s ridiculously stupid character.
At 25, Fallenstein is president and CEO of a company doing more than $2 million in sales in 2006, including $1 million in October alone. Almost 99 percent of that business was conducted online, not out of the storefront he and his family operate on the south end of Mankato’s Front Street. And therein lies Fallenstein’s genius: He’s figured out how to work the Web.
It was their wedding day—May 15, 1993—and everyone was at their home in Mankato having a good time. Then the phone rang and interrupted their party.
“It was the American Legion,” Lee Bohrer remembers. “They had a wedding of their own going on there, but they were having some problems with their drains. I looked at Kris, and she said, ‘You gotta go.’”
Sarge ordered them to march.
He was a rough-and-tumble five-foot-five, joined the Army in ’49, and fought communists in Korea from Pusan to the China border. Think Popeye after spinach. As an Army master sergeant, Vernon “Sarge” Carstensen faced the Red Menace again during two tours of duty in South Vietnam, earning the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Silver Star. He was rough, he was real, he was old-school.
Examples of how to run a highly successful $260 million corporate division roll off Bob Whitney’s pursed lips like 60 mph change-ups off Johan Santana’s spindly fingers—it’s a thing of beauty to watch, because few are better at it.
The 47-year-old Whitney is vice president of manufacturing for the Waseca division of Washington state-based, NASDAQ-traded Itron, which also has facilities in Raleigh, Oakland, Spokane, rural South Carolina, and four foreign countries.
It’s a blazing hot summer afternoon. Not a single cloud in the sky and not even the tiniest hint of relief in the thick breeze moving through the air. Outside the door of a pole barn on the shadeless side of Valley Street in New Ulm, temperatures are soaring above 90 degrees. But inside the barn, which serves as Jeremy Drexler’s shop, it is comfortably cool.
Bad news often unravels lives.
Yet it caused this passionate bunch and their co-workers to dream dreams together and plunge headfirst into business ownership. Ultimately, their bad news would precipitate great good and through it hundreds of southern Minnesotans would experience healing from life’s hurts.
You have to know where you’re going to find CHAMP Software.
The office building of the company is like a little island, separate from the apartments, houses and other buildings in its Mankato neighborhood and, at first glance, seemingly located in the middle of an intersection.
As Brian Nutter stands amid huge flasks of raw oil, explaining how the vapors from each are separated and collected in the distillery set up along the wall, he swears that what he and his colleagues at Elysian-based Nu-Chek Prep do is not as complicated as it looks.
