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.
Sona Mehring was an information technology consultant when she started CaringBridge in Eagan, a service that allows users to easily and for free build a Web page to communicate with friends and families during a health crisis. More than 270 million visitors later, she reflects on the two different worlds.
IT WAS 1997, and a friend was having a baby. She developed a life-threatening condition.
I was literally trying to have a garage sale and the phone rings. I was playing the role of the central person, telling everybody what was going on, and I was losing the game.
I had a small consulting firm that did Web design, among other things. The same day the baby was born the first CaringBridge page was born. Bridghid didn’t survive after nine days. But the feeling of isolation disappeared. It was such a phenomenal experience. We knew we had to continue.
It was going to be a sideline. It continued to grow and grow. It doubles every year. The first year, there were 50 sites made on CaringBridge. There were 45,000 sites this year.
I made the leap in 2001, to making CaringBridge a full-time business.
We always wanted it to be free. The last thing people need is another expense when they’re in a health crisis.
It was a leap of faith to go from the for-profit world to providing a not-for-profit service. The first few years were on a shoestring. We relied heavily on our board.
We’re 90 percent funded by individual contributions: people who have used it, and donated afterward. We’ve been able to become more established and have hired staff. We keep CaringBridge up 24 hours. Onvoy partners with us pro bono to do our Web hosting.
Our budget is $1.6 million, and it doubles each year.
It was a traditional startup. The big difference was you didn’t have any angel investors or venture capitalists. I was with another firm for a while, a dot-com, and we raised $8 million. We were pretty good at spending it, too.
There are lots of lessons learned: to be pretty frugal, even though you’ve had success. Our nonprofit board has been a wonderful guiding influence.
At a nonprofit, you still need to have that reserve, if you don’t get those donations, or something like Hurricane Katrina comes along. You have to be financially stable, especially with a service that needs to always be there.
The end of the year is our watershed. It’s the fourth quarter, when almost all the donations come in.
I started it in ’97 and in ’01 I really made the leap. The transition that happened was the ability for CaringBridge to help people. We get so many messages about how it helps saves lives.
I’m passionate about technology. I always have been. I was on the Internet before Al Gore invented it [laughs].
To be able to use technology to help people, I knew it’s what I had to do. It sure beats some of the other technology I’ve worked on, like for banking.
I’ve never regretted the change.
We now have a staff of 16. It’s exciting to think through how to take the nonprofit model and grow it. We’ve just scratched the surface of how big CaringBridge can be. Literally everyone in the world could use that at one point. As one of our board members said, that’s a pretty big target audience.
Our users are all over the world: 6 percent are international; 20 percent are here in Minnestoa, where we grew up; the rest are national. We have contributors from every single state.
We’re going to add multilanguage support in ’07. Part of my nonprofit learning experience is I’ve learned that things like multi-language development can be funded with grants.
At a nonprofit, you are driven by your mission every day. For-profit companies spend a lot of time and money trying to instill their mission.
It’s very important to keep cultivating the mission. Every week we send out the profit-sharing messages we’ve gotten. In a nonprofit, that’s your profit, the messages from the people you’ve helped.
I came from the for-profit world. It’s amazing to me, the nonprofit world is very rich in entrepreneurial spirit, especially in Minnesota. A lot of the nonprofits started on the kitchen table. The creative solutions that happen in the nonprofit world is phenomenal.
The area of partnership is maybe even more important in nonprofits than in for-profit business, because it has to help both parties.
We’ve been really grassroots up to now, and to continue this rapid growth we have to be more proactive. The job we have open now is a marketing position.
We have a five-year plan, and we’re focusing first nationally. One, we take a community-based approach that gets you ingrained in a community, with the Lions Clubs and so on. We want to replicate that in other communities.
Two, we work with hospitals, they can either sponsor us with a financial contribution, and they get an exposure on the site, or there’s an alliance if they can’t do a financial contribution.
Three, we’re looking for national partnerships, like the Lance Armstrong Foundation, also the 3Ms of the world. We’re just getting started.
Within five years we’ll be focused on the global market. The joke around CaringBridge is if you start talking about something it happens.
We want CaringBridge to be almost a prescribed thing for a person in a health crisis, that CaringBridge is the tool they turn to.
So that’s our goal. That’s a big goal.
— As told to Beth Ewen
[contact] Sona Mehring, CaringBridge:
651.681.7143;
so**********@**********ge.org;
www.caringbridge.org
The use of fractional executives — those hired by companies on contract to work a fraction of the hours at less cost than full-time hires — has been on the rise for years. That accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. John Arms, co-founder of Voyageur U, helped establish the organization to help educate free agents on what it takes to make it as a fractional executive. He’s now put that knowledge into print, recently releasing the book “Consult Your Way to a Full-Time Job.” Arms joined Upsize Minnesota Editor Andrew Tellijohn to talk about how the book can help potential fractional executives carve their new paths.
Branding expert Kate DiLeo wrote a book about how branding agencies need to do less storytelling and more listening to better meet their clients’ needs.
