Connect Business Magazine

Gaylord: Oak Terrace Healthcare Center – Partners Dennis Hood and Mick Montag purchased 56-bed Gaylord Lakeview Home and 11-bed Heritage House (a memory loss facility) from the City of Gaylord in December 2007.
Gaylord: Blimpie Subs and Salads – On or around May 20, Blimpie Subs and Salads opens where State Highways 22, 5, and 19 meet in downtown Gaylord. Owner Jerry Hahn also owns Jerry’s Home Quality Foods in Gaylord and Arlington.
St. Peter: St. Peter Martial Arts – Bill Hough opened St. Peter Martial Arts last December on the second floor of 101 West Broadway. Trained in hand-to-hand combat as a U.S. Army infantry soldier, Hough, as a sergeant, eventually became a local Army recruiter.

It’s not that there’s anything particularly unusual about Brad Hermel. It’s just a lot of little things. For instance, there’s the tan 1973 VW Beetle he drives up and down the two-and-a-half-mile hill between his home and business, Hermie’s Bait, Bar & Grill.

Bill Soderlund was sitting with more than 120 other pharmacy students in a lecture hall at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, when the professor posed a question: How many of you, he asked, are planning to own and operate your own pharmacies when you finish your degree.

Soderlund’s hand shot up.

Bad news often unravels lives.

Yet it caused this passionate bunch and their co-workers to dream dreams together and plunge headfirst into business ownership. Ultimately, their bad news would precipitate great good and through it hundreds of southern Minnesotans would experience healing from life’s hurts.

It’s 5 a.m.

Pam and Roger Barnlund are up and ready for the first walk of the day. They wake the dogs—today there are only 12, but there could be up to 30—and start out with one on each of their arms. It takes an hour to give all of them a brisk morning romp.

Pat Johnson and Peggy Grey, two vivacious sisters who own a pair of southern Minnesota’s oldest family businesses, are day-brighteners.

If your mood’s been slightly skewed by corporate and stock market scandals, a snail’s pace economic recovery, pink slips, job outsourcing, bickering politicians, a couple of nasty wars and color-coded terrorism alerts, an hour with Johnson and Grey is an upbeat, uplifting 60 minutes. Two hours is even better.