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Todd Snell grew up inside Rivieras and Electras.

Similar to being a military child, he moved from town to town along with his mother and two brothers whenever his dad received marching orders from General Motors headquarters. The Snells followed their father to Minneapolis, Billings, Duluth, and Chicago, all before Todd started the sixth grade.

The orange tuxedo—complete with top hat, cane and shiny shoes—is a dead ringer for the one Jim Carrey wore in the movie Dumb and Dumber. But when Tom Fallenstein puts it on to conduct a tour of Costumes Galore, his 9,000-square-foot business in downtown Mankato, the suit is the only similarity to Carrey’s ridiculously stupid character.

At 25, Fallenstein is president and CEO of a company doing more than $2 million in sales in 2006, including $1 million in October alone. Almost 99 percent of that business was conducted online, not out of the storefront he and his family operate on the south end of Mankato’s Front Street. And therein lies Fallenstein’s genius: He’s figured out how to work the Web.

Last fall, some friends in Bob Coughlan’s ballroom dancing class mentioned they were taking a weekend trip to Philadelphia for a teacher’s conference. Coughlan, the great-grandson of T.R. Coughlan, who founded Mankato Kasota Stone in 1885, immediately offered his input on the couple’s itinerary while in the city of brotherly love.

“If you’re going to Philly, you have to go see the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” he told the couple. “My grandfather supplied the stone for that building.”

Say cheese, Dennis.

It’s easy getting Dennis Miller to smile. On November 18, 2005, $10 billion Alltel of Little Rock, Arkansas, announced it would buy Mankato-based Midwest Wireless for a bit more than $1 billion.

Happy days are here again.

In the mid-’70s, young Chad Surprenant’s chin is barely above the kitchen table and almost every evening at dinner he’s engaged in conversational repartee with his parents and three older siblings. They discuss and debate politics, current events, and aspects of their family business. Quite an introduction to the world of ideas. Chad grows up being heard and treated as an equal at home though he’s the baby, eight years younger than his closest sibling. In other words, he is being nurtured by a rock-solid phalanx of maturity.

Today, Surprenant is trying to recreate at I&S Engineers & Architects this same “kitchen table” atmosphere. To a great extent he’s succeeding.