Inspired Technologies

May 1, 2009 Daniel Vance

Inspired Technologies and Geo Mask owner fights professional and personal trials while developing opportunities for green in Le Sueur.

In the still of blackest night, Le Sueur native David Wagner early last year should have been having multihued, happy-go-lucky dreams rather than tossing and turning and worrying while awake.

He was a natural-born, one-in-a-million businessman, and nearly everything he touched turned from thin air to glittering gold. The company Wagner had co-founded, Inspired Technologies—and for that matter, most of the other companies he had co-founded over the years, including Lake Prairie Egg, Pharmacist’s Ultimate Health, and Geo Mask—had been or were widely acclaimed business success stories. He even owned the former 100,000 sq. ft. ADC facility in uptown Le Sueur, and his company, Inspired Technologies, was manufacturing the hottest-selling masking tape product in America, the green-colored FrogTape.

Yet while trying to sleep, his thoughts came down like daggers. In 2004, his one-in-a-million business acumen had begun being balanced out with one-in-a-million personal misfortune. Against all odds that year, his oldest son experienced a traumatic brain injury, broke a vertebra and virtually every bone in his face, and had a partial brain stem shear. He barely survived the automobile accident and would need rehabilitation at Sister Kenny Institute and Courage Center. Only months after that, doctors diagnosed Wagner’s six-month-old son Joel with a rare disease: Langerhan’s Cell Histiocytosis X, which affects about one person in 200,000.

Awake in February 2008, Wagner couldn’t sleep because three-year-old Joel had caught a common cold and inexplicably his physical condition was rapidly deteriorating to near death. Wagner—an energetic man who had helped lift entire businesses onto his Atlas-like shoulders—felt completely powerless. All he could do was pray.

Wagner stumbled onto the beginning of his career path through happenstance. In 1976, in the summer before his sophomore year at Le Sueur High, he hinted heavily at wanting a pickup truck and his father suggested he get a job to pay for one. So Wagner rode his bicycle to a neighboring chicken farm and would work there throughout high school. During summers, he also worked at Green Giant.

“I ended up working hard and realizing that if I wanted something I had to work for it,” said 48-year-old Wagner to Connect Business Magazine from offices in his 100,000 sq. ft. Le Sueur headquarters building. “I was very materialistic then. But I was able to buy that pickup truck a couple weeks into my senior year.”

After graduating from Le Sueur High in 1979, he planned on attending what is now South Central College to major in refrigeration engineering. However, before he could finish his first semester, Crystal Foods, which was the end user of his employer’s chicken eggs, stepped in to ask him to manage a new, major chicken facility.

“I said if I could buy in as a partner, I’d be interested,” he said. “The farm I was working at was a contract farm owned by Chuck Yahnke. While I was there, his farm became the most profitable contract farm in the Crystal Farms system. They asked why and it was because of the basics, such as our making sure the chickens had good feed, water, ventilation, and functioning equipment. Crystal Farms wanted to build a company farm with the very same attributes. After a few weeks of negotiations involving me, the Yahnkes and Crystal Foods, they let me buy in as a partner. They wanted me to manage it full-time.”

So at age 18, without a college education, he became a co-owner of Lake Prairie Egg, which began with 160,000 chickens and within three years managed more than 480,000. In 1982, it built a feed mill and began contracting out production. In 1986, when Crystal Farms became a public company, Wagner and the seven other Lake Prairie Egg owners cashed in, and soon Crystal Farms named him director of poultry operations. He was only 25.

“Then we began putting up a new building every 28 days for the next few years,” he said. “We ended up with 17.9 million chickens, in Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Colorado—with more than four million in Minnesota alone—and we had a facility in Gaylord. I spent a lot of time in Gaylord designing the egg breaking plant still there today.”

Soon, this new public company increased from five to fifty to five hundred million dollars (and would increase in 2004 to more than a billion) in sales annually, with the company bureaucracy increasing proportionately, said Wagner. A man of action, he felt muzzled having to fight his way through layers upon layers of new bureaucracy before being allowed to make any substantive decisions. Frustrated, he resigned in 1991, only to have corporate leaders bribe him back with a substantial bonus and an office built only three miles from his home.

“Unfortunately, I stayed only for the money,” he said. “The political climate didn’t change. In 1994, I resigned completely. By then I was reporting to the fifth president or vice president I’d had since 1991. It was frustrating working there, as if common sense had gone out the door.” He quit on a Friday with no idea of what to do next. That night, he claimed, he had a vivid dream in which he was working alongside the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Natural Resources, and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). Intrigued, he called MPCA on Monday.

“I had my own farm and it used to generate 400 tons of manure a day,” he said. “Through it, I was intimately involved with the EPA, DNR, and MPCA. When I called the MPCA that Monday, I told them I had just left Waldbaum’s (formerly Crystal Foods). I asked them a question: Had they ever considered hiring a liaison between farmers and businesses and them? Most people are intimidated and afraid of governmental agencies and are afraid to get them involved. I proposed me being a liaison to help them work with the farmers and businesses. They told me they’d had a meeting just the Friday before wondering how they could incentify someone to do exactly what I was proposing. That very same afternoon, I had a number of people from MPCA visit me in Le Sueur around my kitchen table. I was in business the next day in the environmental business. It was called Permits Plus.”

As an independent contractor, he was doing the State of Minnesota’s fieldwork. Farmers and businesses gladly began paying him rather than a lawyer.

It turned out to be temporary. A year later, Wagner received a telephone call from a Swedish man asking for help in starting a nutriceutical company. After blowing off the caller at first, he eventually agreed to meet. Wagner had the experience the Swede was seeking, which included his years involved learning the intricacies of feed formulations, proteins,, vitamins, and amino acids. Wagner promised—and was promised—1,000 days in which the two would become interlocked in business. He couldn’t leave, and the Swede couldn’t fire him.

Global HealthShare launched in 1995 as a multi-level marketing company with ten products, just north of the State Capitol in St. Paul. But the mere idea of having a multi-level marketing company caused Wagner and his partner unease, and they soon decided to become upscale. In 1997, along with a competent team including a physician, pharmacist, and naturopath, they changed the company name to Pharmacist’s Ultimate Health and began selling directly to pharmacies. After more than 4,000 pharmacies began buying their products, large wholesalers, such as McKesson and Bergen Brusnwick became excited. What triggered the sales avalanche was an army of in-store video machines to play videos demonstrating product benefits. The company itself didn’t manufacture anything; it was involved only in marketing and distribution.

“Then the owner came to me one day with a little sticky note with “1002” written on it,” Wagner said. “He sat it on my desk and asked me what it was. That night, he shook my hand and explained I’d been there 1,002 days. By then, I was the chief operating officer. He said he hoped I was as happy as he was in having me there. But two years later in 2000, I began sensing I wanted to leave and start something new.”

Initially, he thought the “something new” would involve the storing of nuclear waste. Then he received a telephone call from his best friend, who was selling a new product at a hardware show in Chicago. His friend’s product had become the “sweetheart” of the show, and he asked Wagner to “come on board with a million dollars” and lead the new company. The product was an applicator that could efficiently spread masking tape on a wall—and the company, Geo Mask.

“I told him I’d have to pray about that one,” laughed Wagner. “This was a few days before the Minnesota State Fair began. They came home from the hardware show and immediately went to the Minnesota State Fair board to ask for a booth. There was a waiting list for booths for many years to get in. At first, the State Fair board wasn’t receptive. So my friends pulled out the masker and went around a door with it. The product was built in St. Paul. We then learned the board had a last-minute cancellation, Two days before the State Fair opened, my best friend got in with his Minnesota-made product.”

At twenty dollars each, his friend and a partner sold about $70,000 worth of maskers in only twelve days. Before the fair ended, Wagner initially invested $100,000 in Geo Mask and became a third partner. He tried ramping up sales in a hurry and failed several times using infomercials. Placing the product in Sherwin Williams retail stores also failed. They realized then that customers had to see the product in action before buying.

Flummoxed, Wagner fell back on experience. Remembering the videos used to promote Pharmacist’s Ultimate Health, the company invested money to bring in-store videos to Menard’s and “that absolutely took the product to a completely different level,” he said.

During that Minnesota State Fair, Wagner and his partners had heard a number of people complaining about the quality of masking tape used for painting jobs. The masking tape often tore, oozed adhesive, or leaked paint around the edges, the people said, with the latter resulting in sub-par painting experiences. Again, taking a page from Pharmacist’s Ultimate Health, Geo Mask Inc. decided to develop an upscale masking tape to compliment its masking applicator line.

The solution came from Europe, where they discovered a super-absorbent polymer to place on the edges of the masking tape, acting similar to a caulk that would effectively keep paint out. The patent process began in earnest in 2000. Geo Mask eventually offered the product to 3M, but 3M failed to meet a firmly established deadline. So the company independently began the arduous process of having to manufacture, distribute, and sell.

“In my naiveté, I thought masking tape was simple to make,” he said. “I went to a top chemical company specializing in adhesives and a top paper manufacturer. I was working with people in the industry that knew the industry. Our goal was to be equal to or better than 3M or we wouldn’t launch the product. We also knew that we couldn’t sell blue-colored tape. The company doing that had made the blue tape into a commodity, and we wanted a stand-alone, branded product. And so we came up with green tape, long before being ‘green’ was popular.”

Rather than standard crepe paper, the company used a higher grade. They began testing, and have completed more than 70,000 tape tests over the last eight years. It took years and more than a million dollars to develop a tape with adhesion that would have an acceptable shelf life.

Wagner said, “After the green color was developed, we had to come up with an icon. We didn’t want to make our tape out to be a commodity. We wanted to have a name like Kleenex was to facial tissue. One day, someone brought in a picture of a tree frog of the same color of green. Another day, I was working on all sorts of names with our trademark attorney and told him our icon was going to be a frog. I told him, ‘We don’t want people coming into Lowe’s asking for green tape. We want them to ask for FrogTape.’ I was just joking around and he said it was a great name. We trademarked it and built everything around the frog.”

In short order, the company had more than 100 employees manufacturing FrogTape in Le Sueur and the product brought palpable excitement to a retail category that hadn’t seen a major new product in more than 20 years. The masking tape market in the U.S. exceeds $1.7 billion annually, claimed Wagner, and of that “blue tape” used for painting accounts for about $450 million.

Last November 15, Inspired Technologies licensed the rights to manufacture FrogTape in the U.S., Canada, and German-speaking countries to ShurTape. The company still manufactures FrogTape in Le Sueur for distribution in the rest of the world. “So we receive a percentage of their sales,” he said of ShurTape. “From them, we have money coming in now to develop new products. With this economy, cash is king. Being undercapitalized in the past has hurt us in being able to come out with new products. We now have dozens of new SKUs to launch. With this company, we went through four years of tremendous trial.”

He went through four years of personal trial, too. In 2004, just before he purchased the 100,000 sq. ft. former ADC building in Le Sueur, Wagner’s oldest son became involved in an automobile accident. He was not expected to live through the night, yet eventually miraculously walked out of the hospital and into rehabilitation at Sister Kenny Institute and Courage Center. Later, he finished college and is now an Inspired Technologies employee.

That same year, a doctor diagnosed Wagner’s youngest son Joel with Langerhan’s Cell Histiocytosis X. However, the situation wasn’t critical, but nonetheless Joel was scheduled to begin routine chemotherapy at age nine months. At his first chemotherapy, the hospital made a serious mistake and administered four times the ordered dosage and the wrong chemotherapy drug. It was nearly lethal. The disease soon mutated and attacked bone marrow and vital organs. Joel was in and out of hospitals over the next three years. The I-35 Bridge collapsed the day of his bone marrow transplant. Wagner and his wife, Tina, were feeling like permanent residents of the Ronald McDonald House. In February 2008, Joel died after catching a common cold. The emotional struggles with his sons drastically changed Wagner’s life.

“It instilled in me what I knew all along,” he said. “Everything is about people. You can chase all the material things you want, but when it comes down to it, the people around you are the ones making you a success anyway. The relationship I have with my kids—I love them. All this has drawn my wife and I closer, and closer to Jesus Christ.”

Last November, when Inspired Technologies sold licensing rights for FrogTape to ShurTape (in North Carolina), the employee count in Le Sueur fell from more than 100 to 20. (Wagner now owns 100 percent of Geo Mask and 90 percent of Inspired Technologies.) Though best in the long run because of strategically positioning the company for future growth, the decision greatly affected Wagner—and still does.

“I can say that making that decision brought tears to my eyes,” he said. “I really want to be a good employer for the city of Le Sueur. I’d like to be known in the community as a wonderful employer, where people want to work. We are family, and I treat employees like family. Every business I’ve ever had, I’ve had people that become family to me. When I travel abroad to Asia, I have such good relationships and friendships with some of the families I do business with that I stay in their homes now instead of in hotels.”

He themed up his life with a Bible verse, Romans 8:28, saying, “All things work for good for those who are in Christ Jesus and are called according to His purpose.” Rather than looking at “all the woe,” he said, “I always try looking for the good coming out of it. For instance, even though we lost Joel, nearly a million people have still drawn inspiration from his Caring Bridge website.