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.
BEST PRACTICES: PEOPLE & WORKPLACE
culture hounds
Employees? needs take center stage for five finalists
FINALIST RUNDOWN
Aeritae Consulting Group Ltd., IT consulting: conducted a stakeholder audit to define its ?organizational DNA,? with a goal to convert values and culture into tangible assets.
Nick Hernandez is CEO: 651.229.0300; nh********@*****ae.com; www.aeritae.com
BPK&Z, accounting firm: accelerates professional development and succession planning with a Leaders in Training program, in which accountants volunteer to participate for two years.
John Edson is shareholder: 763.546.6211; jed***@**kz.com; www.bpkz.com
College Nannies & Tutors Franchising, tutoring and nanny service franchisor: chose ?green? practices for its new corporate headquarters, driven by interests of its key employee group.
Peter Lytle is chairman: 952.476.0613; www.collegenannies.com
Next Level Cafe Inc., IT consulting: revamped recruiting and hiring process, including formalized ?Week 1? training curriculum and ?team chat,? to improve retention.
Rich Anderson is CEO: 952.883.0602; ri***@****fe.com; www.nlcafe.com
Trissential LLC, IT management consulting: created the role of Chief Culture Officer, charged with monitoring the company?s ?cultural pulse.?
Michael Vinje is principal: 952.595.7970; mv****@*********al.com; www.trissential.com
by Andrew Tellijohn
PEOPLE IN TECHNOLOGY and financial services fields are sometimes stereotyped as not being the best communicators. But many of these firms realize that creating rewarding workplaces is still one way to attract and keep the best people.
Four of the five finalists come from those fields with the fifth being a nanny and tutor service franchising company. They?ve all mastered the art of finding out what is important to their people and trying to use that knowledge to their advantage.
Connecting consultants
Nick Hernandez lives by an axiom espoused by former Intel chairman Andy Grove: Culture eats strategy for lunch every day.
As his firm, St. Paul-based IT infrastructure consulting firm Aeritae Consulting, expanded, it had 55 employees spread out across 50 projects and 20 different clients at a time. This created an issue: How do you create and maintain a corporate culture when most of your employees ? highly sought-after 10- to 25-year industry veterans ? aren?t in the office?
?They were experiencing feelings of isolation,? says Hernandez, CEO. ?Some of them were going native into the client culture. Some were joining clients. We?ve had pheno
As the name suggests, Owatonna-based Kamp Automation looks for customers with a process they’d like to automate. It could be a small, inconvenient, tiny part that people can’t assemble. It could be a high-volume product so needed that the customer can’t find enough labor to produce it in the necessary quantities. “We’ll work anywhere from medical device companies to the seed industry for corn and soybeans,” says Kent Patterson, co-founder, president and CEO. “We just jump all over wherever there is custom automation.” The company started in his garage. Patterson and his partners built a machine. The company started to grow to the point where now it has 48 employees — and had a bunch of people and stuff in different locations. “We went from a garage to a shop to a shop and just kept moving to new places and signing leases,” he says. “We got to a point where it’s like, OK, this is getting big enough and sustainable — we felt that we wanted to look for our own space.’”
