Focus

Dr. Daniel Carlson spent a few years looking into buying an existing dental practice or at least becoming a partner. When no opportunities arose, he started planning to open his own.

Birchwood Dental in Eagan is about eight months old and business is going well. That early success, Carlson says, is largely attributable to a heavy ? and at times scary ? investment in technology when he was starting up the company.

?Take the painful hit,? he says. ?You?re going to spend a lot up front, but in the long run it?s going to pay off.?

Line Drive Sports, Lino Lakes, wants to expand into new areas of sports training ? adding basketball, weight training and hockey to its foundation of baseball and softball. To do so, President Tom Imdieke knows he?ll need to clean up his finances and take care of debt.

Midwest EAP Solutions, St. Cloud, is an employee assistance program whose founder wants to step back from the business in 2010. Douglas Adamek, CEO, has charged his management team with reaching a major financial goal first: to increase revenue by 20 percent each year for the next five years. Along the way, they want to show him they?re ready to take more responsibility.

Spray Control Systems, Blooming Prairie, makes plastic accessories for trucks and is growing at a fast rate ? so fast that President Craig Kruckeberg feels that he?s losing control. He wants to make smart decisions about adding warehoand office space, purchasing equipment, and possibly making acquisitions.

Tom Imdieke enjoys watching customers improve their baseball swings with his coaching. But what he?d really like to see is fewer strikeouts from his batting cage and sports instruction company, Line Drive Sports Corp.

?Why can?t I have this?? Lisa Bauch asked herself when she first entered a gym. ?Why can?t I do this??
But traditional boxing gyms are run by ex-fighters who work full-time jobs and volunteer spare hours in the evening, concentrating on the young boys and men there to compete and have careers.

Bauch wanted to be professionally involved, but not as a fighter. So she designed a program catering primarily to a clientele older than 20, many of them over 40, who enter the gym with no previous experience. While she respects the not-for-profit approach of her predecessors, she knew there was a demographic willing to support a for-profit endeavor.

She used her background in the nightclub and restaurant business to combine a traditional boxing gym with the atmosphere and profit potential of a health club. She began the endeavor in 1996 after a call to the local Golden Gloves directed her to a gym in Minneapolis, where she learned the basics.

It?s easier than ever for companies to encroach on your company?s brand, now that the wide-open Internet has replaced the bricks-and-mortar marketplace. Two Merchant & Gould attorneys, Chris Schulte and Andy Ehard, tell how to build good fences.

Intellectual property. The whole concept is daunting for many small-business owners who spend enough time, energy and money on marketing, staffing, budgeting, buying, selling and all the necessities.

What is intellectual property and what qualifies? Is it really important to protect it and how does one do that? How does one defend it? Supposedly the process is expensive and time-consuming, so is it really worth it?

Those are the questions that may caowners to put off or ignore their intellectual property altogether. But what many don?t know is that protecting intellectual property could mean protecting the future of the company. Even further, it could mean helping the business grow, building a reputation and even opening up new business venture opportunities.

By now the fairy-tale story that is Lisa’s Salsa Co. is well known in these parts.

A backyard garden with 12 tomato plants led to hundreds of red-ripe tomatoes overflowing in the home of Lisa Nicholson in the early 1990s. Despite every effort to can and preserve these tomatoes, she still couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. So she started experimenting and making her own salsa.

Her homemade product was a hit at family gatherings and social events. After some luck (another vendor didn’t show up) she got into the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market – and sold out all 120 jars of her salsa in three hours. Suddenly, this hobby turned into a small-business idea for the aspiring law student.

Family-owned businesses have plenty of advantages if their owners learn how to them, says Michael Sullivan Sr. He has worked with companies large and small as an attorney with Gray Plant Mooty in Minneapolis, as CEO of International Dairy Queen, and as a director at Valspar, Opus and others.

David Burley and his business partners, Stephanie and Luke Shimp, were running the Highland Grill about five years ago, thinking about opening more restaurants.

When they opened the first diner, they wrote a business plan, but it didn’t contain as detailed and specific financial information as they needed for any expansion plans.

Minnesota small-business owners see good things on the horizon for 2006, especially at their own companies, exclusive new research by Upsize Minnesota shows.

Surveyed near the end of a rough 2005 ? a year that saw hurricanes wreck the coastlands, and high energy prices ravage bottom lines ? respondents say they feel the new year will bring positive economic changes.