Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
It’s Grill Day at WaterFilters.net, a monthly event, and 60 employees are packed into a warehouse in Zumbrota wolfing down home-baked ham, roasted turkey and lots of pie. They’re asked to raise their hands if they’ve been there one year, and most hands shoot up. Two years? Most hands go down, and by six years only one hand remains in the air.
That’s because in 2008, “we had one person here,” says Jamin (pronounced JAY-min) Arvig, who started the company in his tiny apartment while attending law school at the University of Minnesota. It was a way to get into the e-commerce business and generate some cash—$1 million in revenue by that year, selling water filters—and also the year he decided to fully commit.
Since then the growth has been impressive, doubling in revenue each year, he says, and last year hitting $37 million. After the grub, he and other leaders outline more ambitious goals for 2016—tripling revenue and doubling the number of employees. He’ll need all the “core values” and “weekly pulse metrics” and “merchandising accountability charts” and “culture ambassadors”—all presented in great detail to the assembled staffers—he can muster to get there.
Arvig seems intent to leave his startup days behind and instead embrace the trappings of much larger corporations. In addition to the items mentioned above, he has a formal board of directors, for example, and he’s hired consultants to help the company identify opportunities and grapple with growth. He’s pushing his team to not be the amazon.com of the water filter business, but rather to go higher level.
“It’s a pain in the neck to find this stuff,” he says about water filters and air filters and other “healthy living products,” as he encourages his employees to think about their offerings, when the big-box stores may carry them but then quit. “We’ve made a way to make it easy.”
This isn’t the first venture for Arvig. That would be the mini-golf course he started in his backyard in Plymouth when in grade school. “I figured it was a waste of space to have all that grass there,” he says. “I was selling things literally before kindergarten. Through elementary school I had all kinds of little businesses, and through junior high.
“I don’t think it was highly profitable,” he says with a laugh about one venture, when he received a bowling set as a gift and set up a bowling alley for the use of paying clientele. “But it was fun to come up with things that customers could enjoy and provide a value.”
Arvig is the Upsize Business Builder of the Year, selected by our judges for strong revenue growth at WaterFilters.net, to be sure, but also so much more. He’s a young man who can make selling a water filter—or to be precise, $37 million worth of water filters a year—sound like the key to world harmony.
Based on the growing numbers of people signing on to help him reach his goals, we at Upsize are believers, too.
