Letter From the Editor

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...

Four months after we first met Charlie Lehmann, the young man tapped to run AutoData Systems when he was studying for the bar, and he was acting more like a CEO than an aspiring attorney fresh out of law school. I call that the Upsize Growth Challenge effect, which I...

I’ve seen a Giant Eyeball, or actually an advertised Giant Eyeball behind a closed door, vaporize a psychologist after he confessed to killing puppies as a hobby. I’ve seen a woman in a cowboy outfit, face down on the floor and tangled in a rope, regain her will to...

I’ve been stirring the pot over education recently, in an op-ed piece I wrote for the Star Tribune. I confessed I don’t use the “parent portal,” that web-based tool the school systems tout as an illuminating window into our children’s world—but that I think leads to a...

I heard from Steve McFarland the other day, just about a year after I talked with him last. At that time he had sold the company he founded, Orbit Systems, to mindSHIFT Technologies, and detailed what he said he learned in the transaction process—equivalent to an MBA....

For years my friends have encouraged me to take my family to Camp du Nord, the YMCA family camp on the edge of the Boundary Waters, where people go on hikes, play cards and perform skits. Each time I shake my head. “Being in the middle of nowhere and making your own...

Paul Blom is gay, and he used to keep it quiet at work. The owner of a Right at Home franchise in Bloomington, he worried that saying his business partner, Bob White, is also his life partner would turn away the elderly clients his company serves with home personal...

I’m learning to row this summer, with seven other beginning students and a newby coxswain, the person who sits in the back, er, stern of the boat and calls out commands. Did you see the U.S. women’s team rowing for gold at the Olympics? They moved as one: tight,...

Courage. Sacrifice. Pain. Those were among the topics explored at the first Upsize Growth Challenge workshop last month, where our winning business owners reminded me why I love the entrepreneurs who talk with us.

Upsize magazine is excited to roll out the Upsize Growth Challenge 2012, presented by Winthrop & Weinstine, in which two winning business owners receive advice from experts about reaching their business goals, and coverage of their efforts in two editions of the magazine.