Premier Partners
While spraying out ideas like bullets from a Gatling gun, Blue Earth’s Neil Eckles, 59, leans forward to make another salient point about the Internet. “If we could speed that up,” he says rat-a-tat-tat, “man, there’s no end to that thing.” His mind seems perpetually locked on rapid fire and sometimes his mouth has a hard time keeping up with all his ideas. He has a boyish enthusiasm about his work.
Tim Mullen dreamed of starting his own business for years, but never once fantasized about building the world’s smallest hearing-aid amplifier. Now he’s done both.
In December of 1991, Mullen and three like-minded partners put their new company together on paper, incorporating as Hybrid MicroCircuits, Inc.. In February of 1992, they opened their doors in Belle Plaine, long on experience but a tad short on capital and pinched for space. In 1993, they alleviated their capital and space situations by moving 110 miles south on Hwy. 169 to Blue Earth.
Eight magic words give job applicants an edge anywhere in Brown County. All they need to say is “I grew up on a farm near Leavenworth.” To prospective employers, that short sentence means an applicant understands order, discipline and hard work.
Leavenworth is a tiny settlement southwest of Sleepy Eye with a few houses and a large Catholic church, the Church of the Japanese Martyrs. Big families from small farms make up most of the congregation.
How many Blue Earth Countians regularly drive a jet boat to work?
How many peddle a bike ten miles to work through ten-below weather? How many own a 1902 steam fire engine and a 1921 International truck? How many downright dominate commercial real estate sales, property management, and commercial development in Mankato? Only one character could fit the bill on all four questions: Curt Fisher.
True or false: Only in America do brainstorms strike adventuresome folks, who quit their jobs, convert their garages to makeshift factories and grow multimillion dollar companies. False.
It also happens in Japan. Despite that country’s industrial reputation for patient teamwork and polite consensus, entrepreneurial adrenaline and rugged individualism flow just as strongly and swiftly through Japanese veins.
Remember that curious boy in high school whose shirt pockets were always stuffed with sharpened #2 pencils, who actually enjoyed algebra and physics, and who tore down his mother’s car piece-by-piece just to see how it ran? If you went to Mankato’s Loyola High School in the late ’50s, that kid was Jerry Dotson.
Up until he opted for early retirement in mid-May of this year, Jerry was Director of Technical Education for Seattle-based AT&T Wireless Services. And while he was with AT&T Wireless Services he helped lay the groundwork that could make Mankato the international mecca for wireless education.
It sounds like a fairy tale, but once upon a time creameries discarded whey and buttermilk, giving it to farmers who spread it on fields or fed it to calves.
Now an entire industry exists to capture the nutritious ingredients locked in these once-snubbed fluids. One of the leaders in that industry is Davisco Foods International, Inc., based in Le Sueur, where veteran employees still remember the days of whey-splattered fields and calves suckled on buttermilk.
Lessons learned the hard way tend to be lessons remembered. Richard and Debbie Halvorson, who are tantalizingly close to profitability at Rainbow Woods, Inc. in Le Center, digested their share along a red-ink road since 1990. After nurturing two radically different product lines in three different communities for eight years, the Halvorsons now realize: Marketing means making more than one sales call.
CONNECT: What personal traits do you have that helped you grow Carlson Craft?
CARLSON: Being optimistic, which I think is related closely to having a Christian faith. I see the positive things of life. I have patience too, which is also related to my faith in God. I was blessed with good health, and again, I give credit for that to a Higher Power. I know of many friends who haven’t been blessed with good health and they had to retire very young.
