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.
HealthSource Solutions provides wellness services to corporate clients, but it was the company’s own health that needed attention a year ago.
Strapped for cash and with morale in the dumps, CEO Mary Kruse bought out her business partner, tapped her retirement savings to make payroll, and learned the business side of her business.
Upsize: Describe your company as it stands today.
Mary Kruse (pronounced KROO-zee): HealthSource Solutions is a provider of worksite wellness services. We work with companies in their health management strategies.
Upsize: How did you get interested in the field?
Kruse: I was an athlete growing up, volleyball and track. I played volleyball at George Williams College with a physical education degree, then a master’s at the University of Illinois-Chicago. I was passionate about being an athletic trainer, but back in that day there was not a degree, so I went to grad school.
Upsize: And when you graduated?
Kruse: My first job was 1988, a power plant in Utah. They wanted me to start a fitness/wellness program because part of the agreement for building in that town was 60 percent of the hires had to be local.
Their healthcare costs skyrocketed, because they hired farmers in the area and now they for the first time became employees of a company, with benefits.
Upsize: How did you figure out the needs of those employees?
Kruse: I started an injury prevention program, to help people recover from back and shoulder pain. There’s a lot of physical movement in a power plant.
I worked very closely with a physical therapist in town. We’d set up the protocols and make sure they were doing them.
Upsize: What kind of results did you get?
Kruse: I was at the forefront. Because I was making it up people weren’t focused on outcomes and data. I loved what I did. I liked helping them take steps to manage their health.
Upsize: It’s interesting that you were a pioneer of sorts.
Kruse: I’ve grown up with this new field. I was in the forefront. I went to Ford Motor Co., the plant in St. Paul. I was there to manage their fitness center. I tried to get them to adopt the idea of an industrial athlete.
Upsize: How did you gain trust from that workforce?
Kruse: You have to belly up to the bar with them. I would watch guys lift up a 35-pound pickup truck hood and lay it on a conveyor belt. They did it 30 times an hour. I said you have to strengthen the back.
Upsize: Or they would get injuries?
Kruse: It was helping them re-focus. The biggest thing to this day to make programs successful, is to build trust. We’re not here to “get you.” So many people think if my blood pressure isn’t where it should be, my insurance will go up.
Upsize: How do you go about building trust?
Kruse: You have to listen. In the sales process we ask questions and listen, and then try to apply our knowledge. We might say, “It sounds like you have a lot of young moms.
Stress must be an issue here.” With the companies we try to take wellness from flavor of the month and turn it into a strategic plan for three to five years out.
Upsize: Give me an example of how you adapt to each workplace.
Kruse: We worked with hospital systems, which have a higher percentage of females. They are the ultimate caregivers, but they don’t always take care of themselves. It takes leadership and buy-in.
I call the culture of the organization its personality. So for example with these nurses, we ask what are the sticking points. And they say all the documentation they have to do. We take that to leadership.
Upsize: And what recommendations would you make in a workplace like that?
Kruse: We say, when you’re overwhelmed, can you take a 10-minute walk. We might recommend a mindful meditation, just take your five senses and notice what you see, or smell, or hear. It’s a way to ground yourself. It doesn’t take a lot of time and it doesn’t take a lot of training. We want to look at each company and develop a plan that meets the needs of the people.
Upsize: How different is your field now from when you started a couple of decades ago?
Kruse: The difference now is we have data to show this works. In the beginning it was viewed as fluff. Back then blood pressure and cholesterol, people didn’t talk about it. Fast forward 30 years, and we’re looking at—there’s a whole lot more to people’s health than physical. You can’t segregate it.
Upsize: A more holistic approach?
Kruse: How can we talk to a single mom with three kids and say eat healthier, if she can’t afford the fresh produce. And 30 years ago, we didn’t see the fast-food restaurants like today. In 30 years, I’ve watched the pendulum swing one way and then the other.
Upsize: You are planning to expand to Memphis, and you have said the South is perhaps 10 years behind where we are on the topic of workplace wellness.
Kruse: That’s partly why I want to grow in a market where we have staff. We want to stay high touch because that’s why we’re different. The South is further behind, and we know that there’s no reason why we have to walk through all 10 years. We can get there faster.
Upsize: You parted ways with your former business partner, buying him out last year. Describe why you did that?
Kruse: Philosophically the partner and we didn’t see eye to eye with the goals and objectives. There were a lot of interpersonal issues. I was watching the business fail. I was watching the culture erode.
I want to empower people to make decisions, not make decisions for them. That’s how I’m going to build the next generation of HealthSource.
Upsize: How do you find staff members like that?
Kruse: The best for us is an internship program. It’s the longest interview of their life, a semester long. It’s a great way for us to mentor and see people. It’s a good building block for us.
Upsize: When you bought out your partner, you then took over the business side of the business, too. What was that like?
Kruse: We were in a tight spot—our largest cost is payroll. I brought on an accounting firm, and she helped us get our arms around our cash flow crisis. I had a steep learning curve. I had to cut back on things we couldn’t afford. We focused our salesperson further out, the next two quarters. We went short-staffed for a while to right the ship. We’re on way better grounds than before.
Upsize: What’s a turning point for your business, when things began to go much better than before?
Kruse: When we shifted away from two owners, the mental and emotional lift was phenomenal. When that shift happened, people felt the weight off their shoulders. I am so blessed the people here have a passion for what we do. They would do whatever it took. I knew that before but now I lived it.
Upsize: And the flip side, the worst day at your company?
Kruse: We couldn’t make payroll and my spouse and I had to do some fancy footwork to make payroll. It was a huge commitment.
Upsize: What did you learn from that experience?
Kruse: I learned that I was surrounded by professionals—my accountant, my banker—that were more than willing to work with us. I believed in myself, and I found resources.
Upsize: What’s one lesson you’ve learned about operating a growing company, to pass to other owners?
Kruse: The power of networking, learning from others about how to run a business. You don’t always have to get something out of networking. It could be a year later, and it’s an amazing gift to learn from others.
Upsize: What’s one thing you wish ‘they’ would have told you, about being an entrepreneur?
Kruse: Being passionate in an area is not going to help you run a business. I was passionate about health and wellness, but it taught me nothing about how to run a business or how to think bigger.
[contact]
Mary Kruse is CEO of HealthSource Solutions, one of two winners of this year’s Upsize Growth Challenge: 763.287.0749; ma*******@********************ns.com; www.healthsource-solutions.com.
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.’”
