Author: Daniel Vance

Feature Story

B&D Metalworks

If not for being shaped and sharpened by challenge after challenge, Brett and Dynette Niebuhr almost certainly wouldn’t have had the background or passion to start Wells-based B&D Metal Works—let alone grow and adapt it so well—to serve the metal working needs of Upper Midwest customers.

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Cover Story

Tom Rosen

CEO of $2.5 billion Fairmont corporation ranked No. 184 on Forbes 500 listing of privately owned businesses.

A Mankatoan, upon first learning of Rosen’s Diversified and its $2.5 billion beef processing and agriculture-related corporate empire, likely would begin thinking of Chief Executive Officer Tom Rosen as the “Glen Taylor of Fairmont.”

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Cover Story

Kent & Kim Schwickert

Brothers help third-generation, 300-employee, Mankato family business expand into national entity.

Lewis and Clark, Simon and Garfunkel, Brooks and Dunn, Procter and Gamble, Currier and Ives, Gilbert and Sullivan. Each male duo noted above has at least one attribute shared with the others: each developed (or has developed) synergies from their partnership to accomplish much more than each person could have individually.

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Off-The-Cuff

Off-The-Cuff

It was one of the coolest summers on record. In one two-day stretch in mid-July, the Editor’s children had swimming lessons canceled in Winnebago because of the pool water being too cold. Let’s hope everything in business heats up for the Christmas retailing season. Buckle your seat belts and away we go….

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Feature Story

NadelKunst

Since the early ‘80s, NadelKunst has served the knitting, hardanger, embroidery, lacemaking, needlepunch, and tatting needs of hundreds of southern Minnesota and national customers. It’s the distinctive way 58-year-old Hillesheim operates that makes NadelKunst—roughly translated “needle-art cabin” in German—so interesting to its customers.

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Hot Startz!

KOSA, Office Space Design, Pheasant’s Ridge

Le Sueur: KOSA, Inc. – Sandra and Jorge Brenes have turned love into a full-time business teaching Spanish.

Mankato: Office Space Design – “I found there wasn’t really anyone competing here in office furniture and design, so I developed my own business plan.”

St. Peter: Pheasant’s Ridge Memory Care Center – “We realized there was a need for assisted living for seniors in St. Peter. From there, we opened a building with 16 assisted-living units three years ago.”

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