Premier Partners
Galen Maki’s refrigerator has bacteria that can kill you.
He and wife Sharon Maki (pronounced Macky) co-own MAK-BEA Laboratory Inc., an outpost of death and hope in Blue Earth. It’s potential death to anyone mishandling samples of Listeria Monocytogenes, Salmonella, and E. coli 0157:H7; and hope for supermarkets, food processors, and restaurants who rely on MAK-BEA to keep millions of customers safe.
Trivia few could answer:
Name the largest business headquartered in Mankato.
Think you know? In terms of revenue, the correct answer since 2000 has been Ridley Inc., the $500 million, cash-rich corporate mammoth sitting high and dry on Riverfront Drive next to the railroad tracks and flood wall.
Linda Kluender really gets into learning, teaching and business and the three mesh well to make her Minnesota Lake consulting business. But she doesn’t teach the finer points of business buying and selling. And she doesn’t wave a magic wand over an accounting hat and out pops a rabbit of cost-cutting measures to keep your company afloat. Her business consulting solutions are more in the interpersonal realm.
Five years ago, Dr. Corey Welchlin faced an uncertain future as the only orthopedic surgeon in Fairmont.
He loved orthopedics and wanted to keep practicing in the town where he was born. But he suspected that the Mayo Health System planned to eventually import its own orthopedic specialists after buying the Fairmont Medical Clinic in 1996 and acquiring the Fairmont Community Hospital in 2000.
Son of world’s greatest singer attends Gustavus Adolphus College, marries soft-hearted Iowan and moves to Sweden, later begins long career at Gustavus Adolphus and opens gift shop in St. Peter garage. It’s tough to pick which story to write.
So let’s begin with Jussi, the great Jussi Bjorling, who from 1938-1959 sang tenor at the Metropolitan Opera. Nearly all top-hat music critics utter Bjorling’s name in the same breath as Domingo, Pavarotti and Caruso—and more than a few claim Jussi Bjorling was the world’s greatest singer of all time, of any genre.
Lora Rahe is barefoot, her blue jeans rolled an inch above her ankles. A trail of wet footprints follows her from the side door of her New Ulm business to the spot where she now stands, talking happily with one of her favorite customers.
It seems almost aeons since your five-year run as executive director of Valley Industrial Development Corp.* ended. So much has changed since 1997. You then became national marketing director of Scholarship Management Services (SMS) before joining the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce (MRCC) in 1999. You left there in January 2003 as its chief executive officer and president. You have earned a Masters from Regis University of Denver, Colorado.
And now you’ve returned home.
Ron Wenger generally launches his workday at 6 A.M., sometimes grabbing a shovel and clearing snow off sidewalks around his physical therapy clinic in North Mankato.
Even if you know zero about Wenger, his early morning shoveling helps you make a number of reasonable assumptions: He’s one of those “morning people” who can’t wait to get out of bed.
Historian Steven J. Keillor* writes in his book Cooperative Commonwealth that the cooperative was a widely used form of business organization in rural Minnesota through World War II because “business was distant” then. Rural residents and farmers organized cooperatives, such as the creamery, to provide goods and services to areas off the beaten track from big-city suppliers. Ownership in a co-op also gave these rural denizens a measure of local control over their economies.
