In the main hallway at no-nonsense Kahler Automation, the 53-employee business 67-year-old Wayne Kahler founded in 1989, employees over the years have thumbed in hundreds of color-coded stickpins to mark customer sites. If the company had an international map, additional stickpins would grace South Africa, Argentina, Ukraine, and Canada.
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Mike and Cathy are partners in every sense. They co-own Brennan Companies, which includes Brennan Construction and Brennan Properties, with the former completing such high-profile projects over the years as AgStar headquarters, The Marigold, USBank (2012), Landkamer Building, and Bolton & Menk headquarters. Besides the Landkamer Building, Brennan Properties owns and manages Old Town Center and two other commercial buildings, and has been developing the former Ember’s site that could become home for the Children’s Museum of Southern Minnesota.
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Entrepreneurs Kevin and Kathy Finstad of New Ulm engage and encapture business opportunity, not unlike the way their River View Sanitation trucks engage and encapture residential New Ulm garbage. They came, they saw, and they conquer—opportunity.
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Seasoned Mankato marketing and communications professional shares wealth of wisdom from radio, franchise restaurant, telecommunications, and healthcare industries.
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One summer about 30 years ago, he sang Hank Williams and other country artists’ songs and played guitar for polyester-clad Russian tourists in an Adriatic island hotel. In the Peace Corps, he imbedded himself in a sweltering Philippines revolutionary war zone and 25 years later with a group of artists worked there alongside impoverished basket weavers.
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The years 1987-88 weren’t particularly rosy for Newt Gingrich look-alike Paul A. DeBriyn, then chief executive officer at the rural cooperative that would become AgStar Financial Services. Nationally in those years, many rural financial institutions like his—and many family farms—were becoming unhinged as a barn door kicked in by petulant cows.
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Dan and Angie Bastian of Angie’s Artisan Treats—the parent company of Angie’s Kettle Corn—are pop artists. They have turned ordinary, slightly sweet and salty kettle corn into an artistic subject, a 180-employee North Mankato manufacturing facility into a painter’s palette, and grocery store shelves into a consumer canvas. And a ravenous public devours this pop art.
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Through the 1970 song “Stage Fright,” ‘60s-’70s country rockers The Band publicly admitted having a performance phobia. Playing that song, singer/bassist Rick Danko would repeatedly confess, “See the man with the stage fright, just standin’ up there to give it all his might. And he got caught in the spotlight. But when we get to the end, he wants to start all over again.”
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Each workday, Brad Radichel is continually reminded of the family business his great-grandfather D.W. Radichel started in 1888 as North Star Concrete. It jabs like a sharp elbow to the ribs. That’s because down the hall from his office, a boardroom brimming with nearly 125 years of company memorabilia was preserved as a reminder to him and other family members.
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