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.
by Beth Ewen
Barnett Helzberg, of the famous Helzberg diamond family, is walking by the Plaza Hotel in New York City when he hears a lady calling hello to Warren Buffett.
“So I say, ‘Come on, you big entrepreneur. Here’s your chance.’ So I go up to him,” Helzberg said, and asks Buffett his interest in acquiring the Helzberg retail store chain. “He says, ‘Send me the info.’ Being a very big dummy, I go home and do nothing.”
That’s the inauspicious start to Helzberg’s ultimately successful attempt to sell the company that his grandfather started with a 15-foot store in 1915 in Kansas City, Kansas. He told that tale and many others to the monthly meeting of ME!, otherwise known as Minnesota Entrepreneurs, to promote his new book.
The building of Helzberg’s retail empire is a long and juicy story. Rather than pay an excess profits tax during the Depression, his father put every penny he could into radio advertising. “We had a pattern. You go to every downtown. Downtown was king then. He’d always get the best corner,” Helzberg said.
When Helzberg got out of school in 1956, his father sent him to the factories in New York to teach him about diamonds and buying. At the time, the company was struggling. His father said, “You’re really lucky, because when things are going poorly you learn the most,” Helzberg said.
They had signed a lease in the 11th covered mall in the country, but pulled out after real estate delays. “We pulled out because we didn’t understand covered-mall shopping,” Helzberg said. “It’s one thing to make a wrong decision. Then you compound the felony.”
Helzberg, of course, eventually became the king of the retail mall, and stores generated $2 billion in revenue each when he left day-to-day operations.
Enter Buffett, in 1994. Helzberg went to talk to him about buying the company, and Buffett said it could be the fastest deal in history. Helzberg went on: “I had learned these big words at Morgan Stanley, so I said, ‘Don’t you want to do due diligence?’ Buffett said, ‘I can smell these things and this one smells good.’ I said, ‘At least you want a non-compete.’ He said, ‘You’d never do anything to hurt this company.’
“So I went up to this meeting to close the deal, and I learned a great negotiating tactic,” Helzberg said. “Buffett said, ‘I want you to think of this price, and I’ll give you this many shares.’
“And I did this,” Helzberg said, nodding his head really big, and his audience roared. “So that’s how you negotiate with Warren Buffett.”
Try to make it to: ME! meets the second Tuesday evening of every month at The Venue in St. Paul, for an educational speaker followed by an inspirational speaker. It costs $120 annually to be a member: www.mn-entrepreneurs.org
Managers brush up on their people skills every month at the BearPath Country Club in Eden Prairie, courtesy of Predictable-Performance Systems of Minneapolis.
The lunch-time workshop is “a quick introduction to the concept of improving the performance of their people; or, some people say, getting greater return on investment of their human capital,” said the firm’s Roger Hokanson. “A lot of companies waste an awful lot of their human capital through poor people processes.”
Every work group has about 15 percent of people who don’t have “job match, those people who are struggling in the job and are well aware of it,” Hokanson said. They also have about 20 percent of the people who are stars. Hokanson said managers should focus on “their greatest point of leverage,” which are the people that fall between 50 and 80 on a 100-point measurement scale.
“If the manager focuses the right kind of time and attention on development, those people that have that potential, the high-average performers, can greatly improve their performance,” Hokanson said.
Of course, his company provides Web-enabled assessment tools and structured feedback to deliver performance-improvement information. (There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all.)
A confession: Upsize Informer did not actually attend this event due to a scheduling problem; instead, Hokanson told about it over the phone.
Try to make it to: The next workshop, which is free, is Sept. 18, noon to 1:45 p.m. Contact Roger Hokanson, 612.728.0550; ro***@*********************ce.com; www.predictable-performance.com
Business owners get customers one at a time, said a marketing expert at a WomenVenture conference June 10 called Profit and Purpose. “I often forget I have to focus on that one customer as if that’s the only customer that exists,” said George Watson of Implex.
Watson had the style of a preacher, and the lively audience of mostly women shouted back affirmations after his key points: “Are you with me? Am I making sense?” Watson would say. He got the crowd going.
“In a small business, you don’t have a legal department. Oops, you are,” Watson said.
“You don’t have an accounting department. Oops, you are.
“You don’t have a marketing department. Oops, you are.
“None of those hats fit if you don’t have a customer.
“Small-business people, what you bring to the table, you bring emotion, passion and love. No one else loves your business like you do,” Watson said.
Try to make it to: the eighth annual WomenVenture Conference: A Legacy of Success for Women, celebrating WomenVenture’s 25th anniversary. Oct. 31 at the Minneapolis Convention Center: Contact Kathy at 763.541.9363; ka***@*********mm.com; www.womenventure.org
Creative strategic planning may be an oxymoron, as the University of St. Thomas’s monthly entre-Today seminar called it. But Dennis Leslie of Phoenix Consulting gave tips on how to strategize the right way.
He advocates a simple planning process called the Four Ds: Gather data, qualitative and quantitative, from as many sources as possible, through focus groups, interviews, research projects.
Then you’re ready to discuss. “When you hit this stage you’re ready to rock and roll,” Leslie said. Don’t kill any ideas, but rather for each one say why it will work and what’s the benefit. “Force yourselves to do this,” Leslie said. “You give that idea time to gestate and be added to and grow before you kill it.”
Then decide, and this phase becomes easy because you can sort through those strategies, he said.
Finally, do.
Try to make it to: entre-Today meets the fourth Friday morning of almost every month at the John M. Morrison Center for Entrepreneurship: 651.962.4400; en****@******as.edu; www.stthomas.edu/entrep
