Connect Business Magazine

Since its 1981 genesis, $3 million Kenway Engineering in large measure has made its profits Ken Detloff’s way—by applying old-fashioned elbow grease and adapting well to changing market conditions in the U.S. off-road vehicle, air conditioning/heating unit industry. Detloff was raised on a central Minnesota turkey farm and had to fix whatever his older brothers broke doing fieldwork. It was on that farm where he learned a solid work ethic and developed a sixth sense for adapting to change.

Late one evening in 1975, 28-year-old Jerry Clark had his moneybag in hand and was last to leave his business near Ceylon, Minn., C’s Gay Paree Ballroom. Two men wearing ski masks suddenly approached him in the dimly lit parking lot.

“Give me your money!” the taller one shouted, elbowing forward, a barrel-like bulge protruding from his coat pocket.

Fred C. Krahmer wins the award for “most diverse background,” which he has earned in life by experiencing a hodge-podge and mishmash of this and that, an imbroglio that became the solid foundation for an equally diverse business career.

His well-rounded resume includes teenage summers working at an amusement park and befriending a band of Gypsies, feeling the sting of military discipline at Faribault’s Shattuck School, socializing there alongside students from all over America, and learning how to “think” from his University of Minnesota Law School professors. In addition, don’t forget the political smarts he has acquired working alongside son and business partner Fred W. Krahmer, a.k.a. Martin County DFL chair.

Pat Beemer drilled his first well 40 years ago, boring 217 feet through glacial drift to strike water for a farmer southwest of Lakota, Iowa.

Beemer drilled that well in the summer of 1965, when he was 12, and his face shines with delight at the memory. “My dad helped me set up the drilling rig but it was great, running it all by myself.”

Five years ago, Dr. Corey Welchlin faced an uncertain future as the only orthopedic surgeon in Fairmont.

He loved orthopedics and wanted to keep practicing in the town where he was born. But he suspected that the Mayo Health System planned to eventually import its own orthopedic specialists after buying the Fairmont Medical Clinic in 1996 and acquiring the Fairmont Community Hospital in 2000.

Historian Steven J. Keillor* writes in his book Cooperative Commonwealth that the cooperative was a widely used form of business organization in rural Minnesota through World War II because “business was distant” then. Rural residents and farmers organized cooperatives, such as the creamery, to provide goods and services to areas off the beaten track from big-city suppliers. Ownership in a co-op also gave these rural denizens a measure of local control over their economies.