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.
For years my friends have encouraged me to take my family to Camp du Nord, the YMCA family camp on the edge of the Boundary Waters, where people go on hikes, play cards and perform skits.
Each time I shake my head. “Being in the middle of nowhere and making your own fun?” I respond. “That’s not a vacation. That’s my childhood!” Then I book us to New York City.
In any typical gathering I’m the person least likely to be romantic about life on the farm, for an obvious reason: I grew up on one, 3,500 acres of sugar beets and wheat operated by my parents, now farmed by my brother and given over to soybeans and corn. For the first time in more than 20 years he’s actually enjoying a great year, after years of mediocre or worse and always hard, tedious toil.
A city slicker mentions the organic baby carrots they just purchased at The Wedge for a gazillion cents per pound. I think hour after boring hour every summer spent driving trucks, hauling wheat from the combines that traveled up and down the field, over and over again, for a few dollars a bushel.
A city slicker mentions a wood-burning stove in their cabin up North, where they’re inviting my family for a bucolic weekend. I think, that place won’t break 50 degrees until Sunday, and stay home and turn up the thermostat—and hit that trendy new restaurant instead.
So when Tim Blanski first e-mailed me about his business, The Granary Woodshops in southeastern Minnesota, I was more immune than your average city dweller to the allure of life on the farm. Still, his vision for a sustainable operation that can support him and his family well into their golden years has its appeal, to this and any other baby boomer.
To Blanski, the son and brother of entrepreneurs and a former tech executive in St. Paul, a frigid recent day in January was simply a nice excuse not to go to work, since his workshop is heated by—you guessed it—a woodstove, and that day’s forecast was too cold to cut it.
He signs his e-mails “Don’t work too hard,” and describes how he could hire people and start mass-producing his most successful product, a 13-foot harvest table loved by city folks from Minneapolis to Manhattan to Miami. He just can’t figure out why he would bother to ramp up production, when he gains enjoyment from making one beautiful piece, each with its own story, one at a time.
Juxtaposed against every day’s stressful headlines, from the fiscal cliff to the sequester to the tax on business services to the euro and beyond, his story begins to sound less like a romance and more like an antidote to the typical way of doing business.
What if more isn’t more? What if growth isn’t always good? What if adding employees and customers and revenue, relentlessly, isn’t the path for every business owner?
What if there’s value to being in the middle of nowhere, at least long enough to ponder the alternatives? This month’s cover story is an opportunity to think it through, with an eye less jaded than mine.
