If not for being shaped and sharpened by challenge after challenge, Brett and Dynette Niebuhr almost certainly wouldn’t have had the background or passion to start Wells-based B&D Metal Works—let alone grow and adapt it so well—to serve the metal working needs of Upper Midwest customers.
“Many businesses manufacture hardware, many produce software; we do both,” said Mark Gaalswyk, owner and CEO of Easy Automation, Inc. “Our business hits dead center on the line where those two meet.”
CEO of $2.5 billion Fairmont corporation ranked No. 184 on Forbes 500 listing of privately owned businesses.
A Mankatoan, upon first learning of Rosen’s Diversified and its $2.5 billion beef processing and agriculture-related corporate empire, likely would begin thinking of Chief Executive Officer Tom Rosen as the “Glen Taylor of Fairmont.”
Brothers help third-generation, 300-employee, Mankato family business expand into national entity.
Lewis and Clark, Simon and Garfunkel, Brooks and Dunn, Procter and Gamble, Currier and Ives, Gilbert and Sullivan. Each male duo noted above has at least one attribute shared with the others: each developed (or has developed) synergies from their partnership to accomplish much more than each person could have individually.
Since the early 1700s, when John Peter Zenger was tried for seditious libel (and exonerated), American journalists have been willing to go to jail to uphold the principles of a free press. Jerry Groebner, the editor and publisher of the Lake Region Times, has taken the journalistic tradition to a new level.
Since the early ‘80s, NadelKunst has served the knitting, hardanger, embroidery, lacemaking, needlepunch, and tatting needs of hundreds of southern Minnesota and national customers. It’s the distinctive way 58-year-old Hillesheim operates that makes NadelKunst—roughly translated “needle-art cabin” in German—so interesting to its customers.
Le Sueur: KOSA, Inc. – Sandra and Jorge Brenes have turned love into a full-time business teaching Spanish.
Mankato: Office Space Design – “I found there wasn’t really anyone competing here in office furniture and design, so I developed my own business plan.”
St. Peter: Pheasant’s Ridge Memory Care Center – “We realized there was a need for assisted living for seniors in St. Peter. From there, we opened a building with 16 assisted-living units three years ago.”
Although not knowing it, movie producer George Lucas is responsible for the creation and growth of a video production company in Mankato. Rob Petersen, co-owner of All Pro Media LLC, saw his first Star Wars movie in 1977 and said, “I want to do that.
You can get a feel for Arabian Horse Times from reading a recent feature article: “Da Vinci is the quintessential Classic Arabian—both in phenotype and genotype. His head is exquisitely short and from the front perfectly triangular; the eyes, set low on a wide forehead, are large and dark, surrounded by pronounced and chiseled occipital and cheekbones.”
