First, meet Kevin Santos.
Over the years some of his favorite wrestlers have been The Undertaker, Sergeant Slaughter and Rowdy Roddy Piper. And he likes watching the Minnesota Twins hammer away at the Metrodome.
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.
Up North, amid emerald-green Norwegian pine forests that overlook crystalline walleye lakes and throngs of moose and bear and wolves, grew Dr. Bill Rupp, president and chief executive officer of 2,100-employee, $200 million ISJ-Mayo Health System.
He spent his first 18 years of life in 5,290-population Chisholm, a boom-and-bust mining outpost that straddled U.S. 169 seven miles north of Hibbing. There, Rupp’s father Clarence and uncle Glenn co-owned two businesses, Rupp Furniture and Rupp Funeral Home.
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.
The world loves a big-screen pig.
Over the years, moviegoers have bonded with Porky Pig (“Th-th-that’s all folks!”), Piglet (Winnie-the-Pooh’s sidekick), the Muppet Show’s Miss Piggy, Arnold Ziffel (remember the wacky TV show Green Acres?) and most recently, the kindhearted movie pig Babe.
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.
If Tom Langhoff were a fish, he’ d be a minnow at best, likely considered a tasty delicacy by sharks swallowing him whole.
He stands only 5’ 3” and from the side looks slender as a rod and reel.
Fortunately, he’s not a fish.
