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.
This November Kirk Hoaglund and his IT consulting company Clientek will celebrate its 30th anniversary. “We have offices in four countries; we have a couple hundred-ish people and we work with clients all over the world,” said the Renaissance man, a bass who sings opera, started 26 companies and counts his small-town roots as key to his success.
“We’re still a small company, in the tens of millions, but we primarily do business with really big companies. And it’s for the same reasons that a lot of small companies like ours are favored. We can move fast, we have a sharp focus, they can meet the owner,” he said.
He also has been a friend to Upsize since the beginning, in 2002, sponsoring events and lending advice to other business owners. He counted Wes Bergstrom, the late founder of Upsize, as the embodiment of our mission: to connect business owners with experts who can help.
Hoaglund always relied on “just simple advice from others. I never used the Yellow Pages. I always used the telephone and called somebody I knew.”
Hoaglund has taken a winding road in his four-plus decades in business. He grew up in Pine Island, Minnesota, 1,800 population. “People kind of let me be what I was. I didn’t feel a lot of shaping sort of expectations from my parents or teachers or community. It was more like, ‘Oh, this is what Kirk likes to do and is good at, so that’s cool I guess,’” he said.
At the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, “I was planning to triple major as a silly young thing. I was way into music. I was also way into visual arts and way into computers. I wanted to get two B.F.A.s and a B.S. and some might say that’s a load of B.S,” he said. “Then I met Anita,” his wife. “She was the principal violinist for the orchestra and I was section leader for the bass section of our choir.”
His plans changed. “I thought, ‘hmmm, I can’t be in college for 15 years here.’” He took a job with Control Data Corp. “At that time they were ‘the thing’ in Minnesota. That was an incredible job for a geek.” After 10 years Clientek was born.
Hoaglund isn’t one to “wax philosophical,” he says, but he indulges my question about the roads not taken. Any regrets? “You have to make it be about the journey and not about the destination. There’s no way I could have planned or predicted what happened and where I landed. But if I look at the list of the people I’ve met from all over the world, that’s one of my favorite things about landing where I’ve landed.”
His last conversation with Bergstrom yielded a promise that Upsize would run a full-page ad for Hoaglund’s not-for-profit music performing company, The Orpheus Project. Orpheus was set to mount a new opera in January 2020, but the pandemic scuttled those plans. Bergstrom, a philosophy major who was always seeking knowledge, said, “You know what, maybe I should take Upsize to a non-profit. Maybe I should develop a mission like you’re talking about now,” Hoaglund recalled. “That was the last conversation I had with him. He was one of a kind.”
