Connect Business Magazine

The Fallenstein family turns their obsession with Halloween from a hobby into a business. The scene opens with mom, a seamstress named Jenice, sewing costumes and her three daughters, Julie, Lisa and Heather, renting them out from the family garage. Then the youngest sibling, Tom, starts getting involved with the business called Costumes Galore. It is a huge seasonal success in the region. Tom coming of age just as a somewhat futuristic tool known as the world wide web starts to emerge.

David Schooff grew up in a small-business environment, learning from those around him at an early age. That fostered a drive in him to pursue his own ventures. He leveraged that early foundation in his numerous business and real estate investments in hospitality, commercial property and workforce housing.

Business Person of the Year 2017
There is a well-worn path between MTU Onsite Energy CEO Todd Riemann’s big, windowed office to the production floor on the other side of the building. “Todd is a very humble leader and remembers where he started,” says John Haack, a former colleague who nominated Riemann for Business Person of the Year.

Today, he leads a team of surgeons, physician assistants, nurses and therapists at The Orthopaedic and Fracture Clinic, but Andy Meyers spent a good chunk of his early career in the jail. Don’t be alarmed, that is usually where law enforcement officers start out, paying their dues, working their way up to patrol, which is what Meyers did as a Deputy Sheriff/Paramedic with the Linn County, Iowa Sheriff’s Department.

For the owners of Friesen’s Family Bakery and Bistro in Old Town Mankato, their business model is not just a part of their business strategy, it is the very heart of it. A business model based not on how money will be made, but how it will be spent.

Locally.

As Steve Kibble looks back over the last 27 years, he’s still not sure just exactly what happened. When he graduated with a business marketing and management degree from MSU Mankato he had no intention of getting involved in the family business, Mankato Implement. His dad had owned the local John Deere dealership since 1973, so Steve grew up watching his father navigate the highs and lows of the business.