Business Person of the Year 2010 – Winner
Tourists enjoying kitschy oddities often travel to Minnesota’s Lac qui Parle County and its 1,200-population county seat, Madison, known as the “Lutefisk Capital of the United States.”
Fairmont resident Wes Clerc (pronounced Clair) serves up more than French fries and Angus Deluxe burgers.
Yes, he and son Rick own and operate five thriving McDonald’s franchises in Fairmont, Blue Earth, St. James, Windom, and Marshall. And yes, 60-year-old Clerc over the last 44 years has been thoroughly batter-dipped and deep-fried in McDonald’s elbow grease, having worked his way up Ronald McDonald’s corporate ladder from being a 16-year-old crew worker to senior business consultant to franchisee.
Forget nine, Curt Fisher has nine hundred lives.
He has badly wrecked a BSA motorcycle, lost altitude and crashed a power parachute onto a Blue Earth County park pavilion, navigated the dangerously rocky Blue Earth River perhaps hundreds of times on a jet ski, sailed across the rough Atlantic Ocean in a sailboat, and barely survived his antique steam engine flipping over before a North Mankato parade. And we’re just getting started.
Our present-day world seems to have more change than a Vegas casino. President Obama and Rep. Pelosi press for paradigm-shifting change, Eyjafjallakökull coughs up clouds of it, Detroit’s mayor agonizes over change, nuclear Ahmadinejad desires more, Osama bin Laden fights for it, globalization causes it, Wall Street experiences chaos in it, and Apple enables it.
54-year-old Buscher nurtures and cherishes businesses. In fact, a person could call him a “business connoisseur.” He searches the world over for just the right companies to pluck from the vine—a weighty 28 at last count, including several that have pressed out new industries and been positioned for exponential growth.
He was on the precipice. It was December 2004. The antagonistic managers of his ten bus companies had just attempted a bloodless coup d’etat. Their set of demands included having Floyd Palmer relinquish control over the day-to-day management of the school bus company he had owned and managed since 1974.
MN Business News