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.
Angie and Dan Bastian started Angie’s Kettle Corn in 2001 out of the garage of their Mankato, Minnesota house with little more than a desire to work together and build up college funds for their three children.
By the time they sold what became Boomchickapop in 2017, they had filled the funds of not just their own kids, but those of many other families who invested along the way.
“We didn’t have any money, but what we did have was a zero percent-interest credit card solicitation for $10,000,” Angie Bastian said at a 2015 WomenVenture event attended by Upsize Founding Editor Beth Ewen.
They used that credit to purchase equipment allowing them to pop and sell the healthier snack option, first at fairs, amateur sporting events and farmers’ markets and then at Vikings games and, ultimately, grocery stores and other outlets around the world.
Angie, a nurse by trade, and Dan, a teacher, eventually had to ramp up to a more legitimate production facility when a buyer from Lunds and Byerly’s liked the product. Then, when Martha Stewart called, “Things got crazy and it started taking over our life,” Bastian told Ewen in 2016.
Soon after, in 2017, the Bastians and TPG Growth, the second equity investment company to buy in to Boomchickapop, sold the company to Conagra Brands for $250 million.
The sale to Conagra allowed the Bastians to savor their unlikely success story and take a break. But it was a short one.
“We were tired,” she says. “But I went with a group of women on an Insight Trip with an organization called Opportunity International.”
Opportunity International is a nonprofit microfinance organization that offers financial solutions to help families that are living in poverty build sustainable livelihoods and access quality education for children.
“Their target audience, they work with people that make less or live off of less than $2 a day,” Bastian says. “This is significant poverty around the world. They support entrepreneurs, they do farm-agricultural loans, they help people build schools, that kind of thing.”
The mission spoke to her. She went to Uganda and Rwanda in 2016 getting to know the organization and in 2018 spoke at one of the organization‘s meetings in Nicaragua.
The organization had started working with small shareholder farmers and built a production plant for process yuca into cassava flower. Bastian now chairs the board of Prospera Foods, a benefit corporation that spun off from Opportunity International to provide sales, marketing and distribution of the resulting product into the U.S.
“We’re shipping quite a bit of cassava into the U.S. market with brands I knew from way back and they are buying our product,” she says.
It’s a day-by-day business in Nicaragua, with the poverty and dictatorial government. You never know what might happen, Bastian says, but the organization pays its taxes, does its work and intends to keep moving forward until told otherwise.
“We just keep our noses down, do the work, do what we can and stay out of politics,” she says, adding that the mission fuels her. “It’s educating the next generation. We can employ these farmers or we can buy the farmers’ goods but then you have to educate the next generation. This school was going before I got involved. We just are now about 100 percent sustainable.”
The Bastians, Angie says, are too young to retire and are happy to have the opportunity to give back after having achieved so much success themselves.
Their successes continue to be noticed. Last year, in Mankato, the U.S. Small Business Administration recognized them as an example of what the SBA hopes for in assisting businesses. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Gov. Tim Walz, SBA Regional Administrator Geri Aglipay and many other dignitaries attended.
Many Mankato residents spoke highly of the family and they got a chance to thank many who supported them in their early years. She acknowledges it was hard — all consuming — for 17 years and that “if we had to do it over again, we would try and create a little bit more balance in our lives or maybe take some time out for ourselves, just a little bit.”
Angie says now they learned a lot of lessons about perseverance along the way. She also wants entrepreneurs, even as they grow beyond being small businesses, to remember they know their companies better than anyone else — including equity firms that buy in to help them grow.
The Bastians took on private equity twice, first in 2014 and then again in 2017. The second time, when TPG Growth bought in, she remembers being intimidated at first being on the 50th floor of a large office building in San Francisco full of smart board members who had backgrounds in business that she lacked.
“Dan and I were completely intimidated,” she says.
The equity firm’s team knew business in general, she says. But when they talked about shutting an innovation lab as a cost cutting measure, Angie found her voice, spoke up and said doing so would be a mistake because that was how Boomchickapop discovered many of its new flavors.
“They want to trust you and they want to work with trustworthy people,” Bastian says. “They have a method by which they create value in the business and I think they would have been receptive with us had we been way more assertive.”
And it all worked out even better than they expected. They’re busy, but comfortable — able to afford a few niceties, such as a beach condo, though they rarely use it.
“Dan and I can’t sit still,” she says. “We were too young to retire, so we needed to keep doing stuff. We are still grateful that we got the chance to build the business and get a chance to retire and do some of these other kinds of things that are really meaningful to us.”
