Author: Daniel Vance

Feature Story
Daniel Vance

Chad Surprenant – Runner-Up – 2005 Business Person of the Year

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.

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Daniel Vance

Fred C. Krahmer

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.

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Daniel Vance

Mankato Symphony Orchestra

Executive Director Jane Sletta chooses to use her own money to buy snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies for Mankato Symphony musicians during dress rehearsal breaks. She does it because the Symphony doesn’t budget for it and the four-decade-long tradition of serving cookies to the Symphony’s 70-some musicians weighs on her.

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Cover Story
Daniel Vance

Governor Tim Pawlenty

Huffing and puffing up endless white steps while carrying camera equipment under the Capitol dome shadow in St. Paul, higher and onward, Kris and I finally enter through double doors and hang a left toward the Governor’s Office. His receptionist tells us to relax, but can we? We’re nervously waiting for this person with the power to make or break Minnesota’s business climate, to make or break your business perhaps.

So this is the Governor’s Office.

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Cover Story
Daniel Vance

Wade Hensel

Columnist George Will turns to Wade Hensel and asks about Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s recent job performance and Wade is so nervous his knees start knocking Morse code. Wade offers his opinion. He is front and center in bright-lights Nashville readying to address 6,000 peers in 2003 as Chairman of $20 billion in assets Cooperative Finance Corporation (CFC), a private organization owned by 800 rural electric cooperatives. George Will, Wade’s keynote speaker, is nervous too yet later coolly delivers his spiel on world events, politics and those lovable Addison Street losers, the Chicago Cubs.

North Mankatoan Wade Hensel is acting precocious, again.

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Feature Story
Daniel Vance

Birds Eye Foods

Iowa State defensive tackle Roger Ashland crouched at the five-yard line and readied himself to hammer a Nebraska running back corkscrewing through the air toward the goal line. Roger licked his chops, but he was the one getting slobberknockered.

“He just knocked me…oh, my gosh,” Ashland was saying of a 1966 collegiate football game, “that was the hardest I’d ever been hit in my life.”

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