Author: Daniel Vance

Cover Story
Daniel Vance

David Castle

A few decades back if a corporate executive even brought up the notion at a board meeting that their $127 million company ought to buy out a $254 million foreign rival, he or she would have been laughed out of the board room. But this is the ’00s. When Fairmont’s Weigh-Tronix did it by buying out British rival Avery Berkel in late 1999 with the leverage of Berkshire, a U.S. investment group, it became the second largest scale manufacturer in the world behind Mettler Toledo. And for the record, nobody laughed at them.

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Daniel Vance

Johnson Components

Ernie Glass, 62, president of Johnson Components and survivor of five buyouts over the past thirteen years, leans across his desk to explain why his Waseca office has few furnishings. “My tradition of a bare office dates to my General Electric days,” says Glass, a hint of a smile breaking across his lips. “I moved every two years then so I never really bothered to fill my office up with things that would need to be packed and eventually unpacked. Then I came to this company where I’ve had six different office suites at three different plant sites since 1987. I carried on the tradition.”

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Daniel Vance

Paul Wilke

Paul Wilke, 38, wouldn’t want to be called the “King of Mankato Retail.” He would feel the title carried a connotation of him as the inflexible tyrant, the arrogant king of the Mankato hilltop, le roi le veut and therefore it must be so. Rather he would say – no, insist – that he’s only the humble gatekeeper who shepherds others along the retail journey so they can become retail kings themselves.

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Daniel Vance

Mark Furth

Not many CEOs can say they grew up across the street from their current office and earned their first paycheck on the site of where their office sits today, but Mark Furth, 53, a CEO from New Ulm, can say both. His boyhood home was at 410 N. Broadway and his first paycheck, at 16, came from Madsen’s Super Valu at 315 N. Broadway. Today his office suite facing North Broadway is in the same building- and on the same spot – where he used to bag groceries. What magnifies the significance of both oddities is that Furth isn’t any ordinary CEO, but one that manages what could be the second largest business headquartered in south-central Minnesota, Associated Milk Producers Incorporated (AMPI), a colossus of a co-op, with 5,000 farmer/owners and $1.1 billion in sales.

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Daniel Vance

Pat Johnson

She burst through a glass ceiling that had held back other women, as jagged shards flew everywhere, only to settle down with hardly a scratch on the uppermost floor of a Bloomington office building. Such a societal barrier could never hold back a person with this much drive. Once at the top, Patricia Johnson would begin gazing out her office window towards the frothy skylines of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where she saw only a panorama of opportunity for the business she led.

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Daniel Vance

Northwest Packaging

Artie Ayers hunted geese and duck in the swamps of Maryland’s Eastern Shore with Curty Gowdy, was a “wudderman” who owned seven crab and oyster boats on the Chesapeake Bay, ran fishing expeditions out of Ocean City, had his own national TV show called Sportsman’s Showcase, but none of it prepared him for Minnesota’s harsh winters – only the people of Minnesota did, who warmed his heart so much he left a Maryland he loved for them.

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Daniel Vance

Bob Weerts

If you’re expecting Bob Weerts to be another Rodin’s “The Thinker” or some introspective M.B.A who analyzed and plotted his way to success, think again. This guy is one big ball of bubbling electrons that won’t stay put, impulsive, a whirling dervish, a straight shooter but from the hip, who somehow worked and willed his way through a crippling childhood bout with polio to be one southern Minnesota’s most respected entrepreneurs.

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