Cover Story - Connect Business Magazine

January 1, 2001 Daniel Vance

William J. Bresnan

Madison Lake-native William J. Bresnan, as much as any other American, made the cable TV industry into what it is today. During cable’s adolescent growth spurt, 1965-1984, he was a top executive, usually a CEO, at either the nation’s No. 1 or No. 2 cable TV company. From 1984 on he would raise up his own sizeable cable TV enterprise, Bresnan Communications – and also spearhead ventures that would thread cable TV throughout Poland and Chile. He never was as flashy as Ted Turner or Jack Kent Cooke, his former boss, but his contributions to the cable industry have been just as substantial.

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November 1, 2000 Daniel Vance

Jeanne Votca-Carpenter

The lady next to the Trix rabbit ears who has been wringing stories about a kid burping the alphabet on Jay Leno will do almost anything to let the whole world know about her employer and her industry. She’s Jeanne Votca Carpenter, 49, Senior VP of Marketing & Business Development at the 230-employee Bloomington office of Shandwick International, the world’s No. 3 public relations firm.Though usually she doesn’t spend time inside this particular Shandwick brainstorming room (see above), she still must sell and market the creative juices flowing inside it. In a way, she is the top public relations person for a top public relations firm.

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September 1, 2000 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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July 1, 2000 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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May 1, 2000 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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March 1, 2000 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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January 1, 2000 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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November 1, 1999 Daniel Vance

Stafford Harder

The man wearing a leather Harley-Davidson jacket and responsible for 2,100 paychecks scoots into his parking spot off Tower Boulevard riding a steely gray BMW K1200 LT touring motorcycle. His photogenic smile brightens up the receptionist while he waves at her on his way up the spiral staircase at Carlson Craft headquarters in North Mankato. Another day begins for Stafford Harder, 48, Glen Taylor’s flagship field general, as he then strides towards an office embellished with miniature toy Harleys and classic Chevys, a wall-hung photo of a laguna blue convertible, and Bible verses engraved on wall plaques. A quick call later, and at his desk, he has confirmed next year’s reservation at Sturgis.

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September 1, 1999 Daniel Vance

Tom Rosen

Tom Rosen, 51, stands tall in a tasseled cornfield. He’s a great big mountain of a man, 6’5″, 250-plus, who towers over a crowded room both physically and professionally. Success didn’t stunt his growth. The family business he guides, Rosen’s Diversified, Inc. (RDI), grossed $550 million in 1998, which makes it Minnesota’s sixteenth-largest privately held business. Of businesses headquartered in south-central Minnesota only AMPI ($1.1 billion) and Taylor Corp. ($950 million) are larger.