Owner Kay Prescher said in a telephone interview, “I was always the person that wanted to be around everyone and make them feel happy.” The 38-year-old Wells native’s business, Lava Java, opened within the last year in the downtown Mankato Mall.
The new owner of Jiffy Lube franchises in Mankato and Rochester, Tony Chahine (pronounced Shuh-HEE-nee), was raised in a close-knit, middle-class family in Los Angeles where dad had a security-related job and mom stayed at home.
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.
Dan and Angie Bastian of Angie’s Artisan Treats—the parent company of Angie’s Kettle Corn—are pop artists. They have turned ordinary, slightly sweet and salty kettle corn into an artistic subject, a 180-employee North Mankato manufacturing facility into a painter’s palette, and grocery store shelves into a consumer canvas. And a ravenous public devours this pop art.
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.
Little Giant Fudge, which operates inside Shell Food Mart at I-90 and US 169, has fast become a regional magnet for attracting I-90 travelers, said 45-year-old Kitchen Manager Patti Arends in a Connect Business Magazine telephone interview.
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.”
Recently, Tammy Lillo began part-time taking over her father’s metalworking business, Timeless Images in Metal, and opened a metal work retail store at the site, called Old West Country Store.
Through the 1970 song “Stage Fright,” ‘60s-’70s country rockers The Band publicly admitted having a performance phobia. Playing that song, singer/bassist Rick Danko would repeatedly confess, “See the man with the stage fright, just standin’ up there to give it all his might. And he got caught in the spotlight. But when we get to the end, he wants to start all over again.”
