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.
He might talk to a sheriff’s office for a rush job on a pair of work boots. “I’m more or less filling in the holes that their contracted companies can’t fill,” he says.
Or he might take a call from an exasperated mother whose son has extra-large feet. He’ll let her know exactly how shoes fit from his 35 different vendors—up from zero when he started just five years ago.
He gets great satisfaction in helping “guys like me,” as he always puts it—boys and men with extra-large or extra-wide feet who can’t find shoes that fit.
Coulter is 30 now, and offers a glimpse into the mindset of a fresh type of entrepreneur—young, so persistent he leaves his elders in the dust, self-taught and eager to learn, connected with his customers whom he understands completely.
Coulter is a graduate of Cooper High School in the western suburbs who attended a couple semesters at Normandale Community College but never got a degree.
He did serve in the student senate, though, meeting “a lot of great people” along the way, and it’s those people skills, plus the fearlessness with which he asks questions of anyone he meets, that have given him more value than college courses.
(He does it again when we from Upsize visit his store—should he print a catalog for customers, he asks, and if so, how should he do it and what does it cost? We gladly share our experience—after all, we’re publishers for a living—and I’m impressed to see Coulter’s curious nature in action.)
He regrets not getting a degree, to a point, but “the opportunity cost of that instead of running the business and starting it from the ground up—I definitely would choose this,” he says, gesturing to the store.
No one in his family is an entrepreneur, but they’re fiercely proud of him, he says, and he’s proud, too, mostly because he’s building a business rather than working a job for somebody else, as he thought he would do.
Coulter was headed for the U.S. Navy to become an electronics technician, when he took a detour to become a salesman for pre-paid legal services—something he said few people wanted.
“I saw that money is not something you get from putting in X amount of hours of work,” he says. He sold only $1,200 worth of such services in two years of relentless door-knocking.
He then turned to selling cellphones for Verizon, and became a top producer—it’s amazing what happens when you sell something people actually want. As soon as he was vested in his 401(k) plan, he took the $8,000 and sank it into XL Feet, putting up the cash in advance to convince one vendor to sell him shoes.
The lessons are tough, yet this young entrepreneur has an original take on standard business concepts from managing your cash to following your dreams. “You think if you get the business to a certain level, then everything will be super easy.
But I’ve also found to get the revenue there are expenses,” he says, adding he’s learned the hard way about managing inventory. “There’s a big difference between thinking it will sell and actually selling it.”
The only real thing to sustain an entrepreneur is passion, he believes, because otherwise you can’t get through the down times.
“Whatever idea you have, if it’s not so exciting that you lose sleep at night thinking about it, then don’t even waste your time,” he says. We think Coulter is one entrepreneur with wisdom beyond his years.
Beth Ewen
Editor and co-founder
Upsize Minnesota
be***@*******ag.com
