A simple sandwich launched Najwa Massad’s career.
She operates Najwa’s Catering in Mankato, providing everything from box lunches to sit-down dinners, serving as few as five and as many as 2,500. She caters weddings, funerals, anniversaries and company events ranging from in-office lunches to picnics and parties. Massad has been the exclusive caterer for all events at the Midwest Wireless Civic Center since it opened in 1995.
Read MoreCapstone Press keeps exploding, Mankato may someday be known as the “Book Publishing” Capital of the Upper Midwest.”
You’re excused if you’ve never heard of Capstone Press. New owners coaxed it out of financially troubled obscurity in 1990, re-starting it with two employees and a vision.
Read MoreHELP WANTED: Immediate opening for marketing professional to spread word about neat stuff made by inventor/artisan/craftsman. Must make up for 30 years of lost sales. Call 507-278-4302.
Arnie Lillo never placed that ad. He’s more interested in conceptualizing and creating than in selling his creations. He holds three patents and passed up several others. But not one of his ideas put him on a road to fame and fortune, for a variety of reasons.
Read MoreBob Freyberg comes from a long, strong line of petroleum salesmen.
He doesn’t touch the stuff himself anymore, except when fueling his auto, but he leans on his ancestral experience, traditions and values nonetheless.
Read MoreHaul a well-bred, 700-pound boar to a “genetic transfer station,” put him to work artificially inseminating hundreds of sows, and he’s worth $5,000.
Haul that same high-priced boar to market and he’ll bring $105 to $140 at the slaughterhouse, a humiliating 15 to 20 cents per pound.
Read MoreEven a dirt-poor farm kid, mocked by classmates for his ragged clothes and brown-bag lunches, can make a million in America. That may be the paramount lesson of Floyd Palmer’s life, a life no longer endured in rural squalor because Palmer followed his instincts. “I didn’t want to live poor. I wanted to own my own business.”
Read MoreShade permits ferns and moss to flourish, but squelches the colorful blooms many gardeners covet as backyard-brighteners.
In all its dappled degrees, shade confounded Clayton Oslund for years. A canopy formed by mature oaks around his Waseca home prevented sunlight and moisture from nourishing much of anything beneath them, forcing him to search for species that could survive or thrive in this semidarkness.
Read MoreDuane Leach comes across as a plain-spoken, soft-spoken, uncomplicated sort of guy.
He doesn’t rely on rhetoric, doesn’t use $20 words, thinks before he speaks and shrinks the Business Facts of Life to simple terms unblemished by qualifying adjectives.
Read MoreFor a businessman trapped in a shrinking market, Gary Andersen remains remarkably optimistic.
Andersen is publisher of the Sentinel, a daily newspaper that’s been serving Fairmont and its surrounding trade area in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa since 1874. Fairmont, long regarded as one of Minnesota’s most attractive little cities, lost some of its shine in recent years. In many ways the booming ’90s skipped most rural areas, where population shriveled, retail stores closed and farm families left the land.
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