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.
Who’s funding your company, I asked Carla Bainbridge.
“Me,” replied the CEO of Predictive Profiles Inc., this month’s cover story subject.
And what is that like, I asked.
“Expensive,” she said.
Debt is our friend, I shot back when she said she didn’t want to go to a bank, either. It’s not venture capitalists alone that she’s shunning.
“So says my Dayton’s bill,” she replied.
And so went one of the most engaging interviews I’ve conducted in a while. Bainbridge started her employee assessment company in 2001, after getting tired of building other people’s companies and being left with too little. Now she’s trying to gain market share without raising outside capital.
Her method of talking about business — she poses questions to herself and seeks affirmation from her interviewer — must serve her well when she deals with customers.
She describes a competitor, Unicru Inc., which has put kiosks in Target stores where employees sit to take tests. To do market research, Bainbridge went to Target three times to see what it’s like to use the kiosks. She thinks Unicru will have trouble with the bulky kiosks, because hiring managers don’t want to mess with them.
That makes sense to me, I say.
“Does it?” she says. “I think about that every day. I always to go back to ‘ask the customers and they will tell you.’ ”
She’s collecting customers one at a time, and getting them to fund her market development by offering to do pilot programs for employee assessments. Retailers and restaurant companies, with high “churn and burn” of employees, are searching for ways to cut turnover costs and select better job candidates.
Not everyone is signing up after the pilots are done, but some are. Meanwhile, she can take the data developed to the next customers. Next she’s talking to distributors who want to add value for their customers. If bigger partners would sell her company’s assessments tools she can ramp up without investing lots of capital.
There’s no guarantee the method will work, true for any small business that’s trying to grow. When one considers the money that some competitors are spending to grab market share — “millions and millions and millions” is how one local competitor put it — Bainbridge’s path seems impossible.
But many business owners before her have gone the low-cost way and she’s determined to succeed.
Another business owner featured in this issue, Joyce Brenny of Brenny Transportation Inc. in St. Joseph, put the sentiment this way: “The option to fail is not an option,” she says in the articles about business in the St. Cloud area.
Carla Bainbridge says it like this, and could be echoing any number of small-business owners. “I think there’s a way to do it. I don’t know that I’ve figured it out,” she says.
Upsize expects that she will.
— Beth Ewen
Editor and co-founder
Upsize Minnesota
be***@*******ag.com
