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.
Her South Dakota town had only a few hundred people in it, so each and every one had to come together and contribute if anything was going to happen.
She says she uses the same idea—get every stakeholder to the table and create a winning situation for all—when she develops new business ideas, whether those were at Best Buy, her former corporate home, WOLF Means Business, her consulting firm she spun out from her Best Buy days, or her latest venture, PreciouStatus, which is a young software platform to allow people to keep track of their loved ones in school, daycare or nursing homes.
My parents and their friends ran the hospital board, the church, their farm, the sugar cooperative, the state college, the fund-raisers and anything else that went on.
My siblings and I and our friends were on the debate team, the school plays, the basketball team, the band, choir, glee club, 4-H and on and on, because if we weren’t there weren’t enough people to play.
My kids go to big city schools, and the overall quality of everything that happens is much higher there, but the demand to specialize starts younger and younger. To me something gets lost—that experience of having to contribute to everything or it won’t exist; the opportunity to try so many activities as a young person without having to be an expert; the imperative to be a leader, because somebody has to do it.
If you’ve met her, you already know what one of her investors in PreciouStatus told me: How can you say no to Julie?
Her passion for whatever she’s promoting at the time—and PreciouStatus is about No. 7 on that list, including ventures she’s formed inside corporations as well—hits her listeners like the force of nature she is.
PreciouStatus has a long way to go. Gilbert Newrai has raised more than $1.5 million to develop the application and start selling it, and is busy collecting accolades—like from the Alabama daycare whose students had to stay put there overnight recently during a snowstorm.
The center’s ability to communicate with parents via PreciouStatus software was a lifesaver.
She’s excited to have just received endorsement from the Minnesota School Board Association, which called PreciouStatus a “game-changer” in education.
Meanwhile her top price is $149 a year for the service, which seems paltry, and competition is springing up. Plus her markets are all over the place—child care and public schools and nursing homes and hospitals and even pet care, meaning wildly diverse markets with greatly different needs to attack as well.
Then again, she’s Gilbert Newrai, with backing from former Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson, Al Lenzmeier, former vice chairman of Best Buy, board members of the Mayo Clinic, and a number of other venture capital folks who are betting on her big time.
She was inspired to start PreciouStatus when her husband, Sohrab Newrai, suffered a stroke just as their son was born, and she felt the agony as she worried about each of them in care. “And I said, you know what? I’m going to change this,” she told Upsize, and we’re watching eagerly as she tries to do exactly that.
With Sohrab now recovered, even he has been convinced by his wife to join the business and contribute his technology expertise. Count him as just one more person who can’t say no to Julie.
