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.
Recalls Angie Bastian, founder of Boom Chicka Pop, formerly known as Angie’s Kettle Corn until a re-branding campaign transformed the Mankato-based firm. “There is no imaginable narration that I could think of that would have brought me here.”
Yet there she was, keynote speaker at a WomenVenture event late last year, sharing an inspirational story about humble beginnings that has stayed with me.
She and her husband, Dan, had an idea years ago to start a business, “because we didn’t have a college fund yet for the kids. We didn’t have any money, but what we did have was a zero percent-interest credit card solicitation for $10,000. This was in 2001.”
(Remember those days? I received dozens of those credit card offers back then, too, and used them to loan money to Upsize when we were starting. This is not a good idea.)
The business was selling popcorn at fairs and farmers’ markets, and they’d put their three kids under the table with books and blankets. “Well, that lasted about a weekend,” she says, before others had to step in to watch the kids.
Then one day, the Vikings training camp came to Mankato, as they do every year. “So Dan called someone, and had 120 bags delivered to the headquarters” while the players watched film, and the popcorn was a huge hit.
“The Vikings trainer said, ‘How would you like to be the official kettle corn of the Vikings?’ And Dan said, ‘Sure, as long as there are tickets.’ ”
(That, and a way to cover the $8,000 it would take to ramp up their operation. It’s the classic tale that success breeds a cash crunch, as our panelists describe in this month’s “Managing Rapid Growth” coverage.)
Next came a meeting with a Lunds and Byerly’s buyer, who sampled their product and liked it, but told them they couldn’t keep popping outside in their garage.
She kept her nursing job to support the family, working during the day, and then popping and demonstrating their product in a couple of co-ops and three Lunds and Byerly’s stores.
“There were times when I would take care of patients, and I would change clothes and run to pop popcorn for an amateur baseball game, and there would be the same patient. I said, ‘You can be more than one thing.’ ”
Then one day Martha Stewart called, and asked them to be on her show. “Things got crazy and it started taking over our life,” Bastian recalls. “People ask me if I have work/life balance. I say, well, probably over my whole life I will.”
Today, Boom Chicka Pop employs 250 people, with plans to add another 160 over the next couple of years, and they’re opening a second plant. A few years ago they partnered with Target and the agency FRWD Co. in Minneapolis to develop new branding and a dynamic ad campaign.
Those Boom Chicka Pop packages were found to sell two to three times faster than the old, and so the company is on a faster track.
Bastian tells her story with a classic Minnesota accent yet plenty of wonder that things have gone so well. She is proud her company employs so many people, and prouder still of the charitable efforts the company sponsors. “The lesson is—everyone can do this.
I’m an ordinary person,” Bastian declares, and then ends with a flourish. “Everybody starts somewhere.”
What about you? Where are you starting?
