By All Means

Think about the loss in productivity that happens when a valued employee leaves the company. The loss of institutional knowledge. Or the complete knowledge transfer required when a company changes hands. xBlock is a software tool that uses AI to capture and organize a company’s data—without any extra effort on the employees' part. Co-founder Dena Neek is an AI engineer with an MBA and a background in organizational psychology. She started out developing tech for the hospitality industry and realized her tool was a fit for mergers and acquisitions. Janet Johanson didn’t have anything like xBlock when she brought private equity partners into her company, Bev Source—now one of the larger beverage packing and ingredient distributors in North America—nor when she decided to step down as CEO. She offers Neek advice on scaling, marketing, leading, and exiting. In Office Hours, College of Saint Benedict and St. John’s University tech specialist Adam Konczewski dispels some fears around AI and offers advice for in

Social media for good. That’s how Luke Wendlandt describes Cadre, an app that’s being marketed primarily to businesses as a stigma-free community for employees to address mental health concerns. More than 140 vetted professionals and peer experts hvae created content on Cadre, on any number of issues from anxiety to grief. Currently the app has about 5,000 users. Wendlandt has a big vision for Cadre to become an employee service as common as a 401k. He’s got a ways to go, but he does expect 2025 to be the year when mission meets margin, and Cadre reaches profitability. We introduce Wendlandt to an entrepreneur who believes the key to a building a successful business is surrounding yourself with people willing to take a critical look at your big idea. It’s Charlie Kratsch, the founder of Infinite Campus, an ed-tech platform used by 10 million K-12 students and their parents around the country for everything from seeing a student's grades to paying athletic fees. You can hear the full story of Infinite Campus

DeLonn Crosby is using technology to get kids off screens. His startup, SayKid, is a voice technology company that has developed a screenless, play-based learning platform in the form of a plush robot called the ToyBot. Equipped with Amazon Alexa voice technology, the ToyBot can play games, do magic tricks, and promote active learning by getting kids to think and move. A former corporate social responsibility officer for Target, Crosby’s career has straddled tech, marketing, and education. He founded SayKid in 2019 and in 2024, launched the current version of ToyBot direct to consumer. Now Crosby is thinking about scaling up and was eager to connect with another Minnesota entrepreneur who has built a business around engaging kids: Maia Haag, the founder and president of I See Me!, personalized books and gifts. Haag started her company before the iPad existed, and her first book, “My Very Own Name,” which uses animals to spell a child’s name in rhyme, quickly became a popular baby gift—and still is. Today, I

Bruna Valente was a corporate marketer working in industrial manufacturing when a health scare sent her on a personal wellness journey, which led her to the rainforests of her native Brazil. There, she discovered natural botanicals that inspired her to create her own skincare products—face oils and lotion bars. She quickly realized they were good enough to sell. Minnesota-made Terrain Brazilian Botanicals is a small, but growing beauty brand now sold in luxury spas, hotels, boutiques, and online. Valente faces many decisions ahead: Does she set her sights on Sephora? How does she grow the audience, and the team? Does she raise money for the brand, which has been bootstrapped thus far? When beauty founders are mulling such questions, the person who is often on their wish list to meet is Sue Remes, a beauty consultant who worked with many of the biggest brands around the globe in her 30-plus year career, including Kiehl’s and Kevin Murphy. (You can hear her career story on Episode 22 of By All Means.) Remes

Angie’s Boomchickapop–one of the most legendary homegrown Minnesota brands in recent history and the benchmark for just about every new packaged food startup hoping to make it big. As the story goes: Angie Bastian was a nurse; her husband Dan Bastian a teacher. They bought a kettle corn machine off the internet in 2002, and started selling at festivals, in hopes of making some extra money. Soon they were selling to grocery stores, building their own manufacturing center, and becoming the first truly national ready-to-eat popcorn brand. In 2017, the company was acquired by Conagra for an estimated $250 million. Today, another Minnesota-made popped snack is slowly gaining shelf space at stores around the country: Yoga Pops, made of popped water lily seeds—a snack as popular in India as popcorn is in America. Currently sold in 350 stores across the country, co-founders Nalini Mehta and Anita Balakrishnan want to make Yoga Pops a household name. They get advice from the Bastians on manufacturing, marketing, cultu

In our first Mentor Series pairing, Chuck Runyon, co-founder of Anytime Fitness, the world's largest fitness franchise chain, and its parent company Purpose Brands (formerly Self Esteem Brands), which includes Orangetheory Fitness, Waxing the City, and several other franchise businesses in beauty and fitness talks about transitioning out the CEO role to board chair. He offers advice to Melanie Richards, founder and CEO of goGLOW. Richards started her spray tan business in 2011 and with seven corporate stores open, she started franchising in 2024. Now with 78 units sold across the country, Richards is navigating the change from scrappy founder to leader of a national brand. Plus: Office Hours wtih the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University. Economics professor Louis Johnston offers advice to founders on knowing what you're best at, what to hire out, and the importance of telling the story of your business.

A chemical engineer turned community development organizer, Anthony Taylor shares the career journey that led him to founding Melanin in Motion, a Community Wellness Center program that connects children of color—and their families – with active pursuits like skiing, cycling, kayaking. Melanin in Motion was a Twin Cities Business 2024 Community Impact Award winner. “I noticed my white friends, when they think about preparing their kids for law school, they’re putting them in the woods. That’s the secret for making more lawyers,” Taylor says. “I want all communities to realize the benefits of municipal, state, federal investment in natural places that can show up in children being resilient, confident, and collaborative.” Taylor talks about how working for successful Minnesota wellness companies, Life Time and Aveda, helped him become a well rounded leader, and what he learned from his own startups, Spa One and Simply Organic Beauty, that led him to shift course and work for the Loppet Foundation and as pr

Peter Mogck and Matt Frakes turned their love of Minnesota lake life, and their desire to start something of their own into Paddle North, a water gear manufacturer best known for its inflatable paddle boards. The company marks its 10th anniversary this year, now with a team of 25 employees, and a line of products that has expanded to include kayaks, utility docks, and apparel The founders share keys to their successful partnership—Frakes is a mechanical engineer; Mogck runs marketing and branding, and both say they have “short memories” when disagreements occur, keeping in mind that they always know they both want the same thing: to continue scaling this company. They each put in $15,000 to start it, and have grown without outside investors, utilizing pre-orders to pay for manufacturing, outsourcing some production to keep their overhead low, and through grassroots marketing, from popup shops to social media. Even on the most challenging, demanding days, Frakes says the two never lose site of how lucky th

Pet Evolution is a fast-growing pet supply chain that started with one locally owned store in Woodbury, Minn. back in 2012 and has really picked up steam in the last couple of years since it started franchising. There are now seven stores in the Twin Cities and St. Cloud, and 15 nationally. By the end of the year, 24 are expected to be open, from New York to Oregon. In the $147 billion dollar pet industry, Rian Thiele saw a space between big box stores and mom and pop shops to create a chain focused on premium food and services. What’s perhaps most interesting about Thiele as an entrepreneur, is that he didn’t grow up thinking about business. He always dreamed of being a police officer, and worked for the Carver County sheriff’s department. He talks about the decision to leave his dream job to pursue a passion project and why he believes Pet Evolution can scale to 500 locations. Following our conversation with Thiele we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business w

Dr. Aho is a surgeon and scientist with an insatiable appetite for invention and more than 20 patents to his name. He was still in his surgical residency at Mayo Clinic when he spotted an opportunity that led him to develop a medical device now in use around the world. Tension pneumothorax is a life-threatening emergency that occurs when air builds up between the lungs and chest wall. It’s not especially common, but it’s one of those medical situations that TV medical dramas often act out because the way to treat it is to jam a large needle into the chest and wait to hear a gush of air. It occurred to Aho: there had to be a better way. He developed the Capnospot, a device that provides visual confirmation that treatment of tension pneumothorax has been successful. The Capnospot is now standard equipment on ambulances and in emergency rooms everywhere, from Minnesota to Poland. It's the first product to be released by Aho’s parent company, Pneumeric. But it took five years to get here, and challenges persi

It started as a fun project with his kids: creating the “best hot cocoa in the world.” After countless tries, Dean Packingham thought he had succeeded, and everyone who tried his instant cocoa mix agreed. Named for his kids, Mike & Jen’s Hot Cocoa debuted at specialty shops in their hometown of Duluth. Today, it’s sold in more than 1,300 stores nationwide including Costco, Target, and Meijer. Packingham has grown his home project to a regional brand with just one partner and no outside investors. “It’s a little bit of a sleeper category, hot cocoa—there wasn’t much in the premium part of the category to compete with,” Packingham says. It may have started as a hobby, but Packingham went all in: selling his house, living in a trailer, leaving a 27-year career in meteorology, and even buying a fitness franchise to fund the hot cocoa business. He talks about scaling, from finding a co-packer to planning for a seasonal product to being disciplined about not adding other products too quickly. Mike & Jen’s has al

“People think, oh, it’s just a catchy slogan. No. If marketing does it’s job, it’s what does your brand stand for and how do you buy things. If we do that really well, we’re the number one growth driver of a business.” Margaret Murphy is the founder and CEO of Bold Orange, a Minneapolis-based marketing agency focused on customer experience, growth, acquisition, engagement, and retention. Her company frequently shows up on “best workplaces” lists and she herself has won numerous accolades for leadership. She learned the ropes at Carlson Marketing Group, and co-founded Denali Marketing, which was acquired by Olson. At Olson, she served as president and chief operating officer. Following an “adult gap year,” Murphy started Bold Orange in 2018. Today, she leads a team of more than 120 serving clients such as Target, eBay, and CitiBank. Murphy offers advice on mentorship, marketing, leadership and work culture. “Action changes everything,” Murphy says. “If you have good ideas or a good thing the market needs

“I thought, you know what I could do? I could make games.” Julien Sharp is a game inventor and industry executive who moved to Minnesota in 2022 to head up the U.S. division of Paris-based Asmodee Group, a global game company with a portfolio that includes Catan, Spot it!, Ticket to Ride, and Star Wars X-Wing. An avid game player, who can solve a Rubik Cube in 45 seconds (which she says is amateur stuff), Sharp started out in the industry as the inventor of several games including Disruptus and Juxtabo. She sold her company, Funnybone Toys, to FoxMind Toys & Games, and went on to work for popular names including What Do You Meme? And Spin Master toys. Sharp takes us inside the fast-growing $13 billion global industry, from the challenge of creating a game that endures to the power of play—for both kids and adults. Sharp says games are played every day in the Asmodee office in Lino Lakes, Minn. But her work is not all fun and games. “Budgets, logistics, sell-throughs—there’s all the aspects of busines

Lisa Lavin is on a mission to change the way the world cares for the people we care about. “We don’t have enough resources to take care of the number of people that are aging. So how do we do that? We leverage technology.” Lavin the founder and CEO of Ōmcare, a digital health company that pioneered the Home Health Hub, an interactive telehealth solution which monitors patients taking medication. It makes remote care possible and more efficient for health care professionals and those caring for an aging relative. Ōmcare is now available direct to consumer and through some health care systems. But it’s taken Lavin more than a decade to get here. She charts the course, from the patent that inspired the idea to a testing phase with pets to raising more than $12 million in venture funding and releasing the product this year. “We have big visions on how we can actually change the way the world cares,” Lavin says. “And it is beyond what we’re doing today.” Following our conversation with Lavin, we go Back t

If you spend any amount of time in or around the startup community in the Twin Cities, you will no doubt hear the name Daren Cotter. Today, most people know him as an investor and advisor—his personal portfolio includes more than 100 startups—primarily software as a service and tech. But before Cotter could focus full time on investing, he had to have an exit of his own. That was InBox Dollars, the rewards-based digital advertising platform he built in his college dorm room, scaled to a peak of $25 million in annual revenue, and sold, some 15 years later in May 2019, to a leading market research and insights firm, Prodege. Cotter shares his entrepreneurial journey, from concept to acquisition, as well as his investment philosophy and advice for founders—including not raising funds prematurely. "My personal viewpoint is a founder is often much better served by building the product, finding a few customers, proving that they're solving a real problem that the customer is willing to pay for, and then they think

Laura Roos started Minny & Paul as a way to take the hunt out of discovering high-quality, locally made goods. She launched in 2016 with a selection of themed gift boxes that she thought would be popular with bridal parties or for housewarmings. But very quickly, businesses started requesting large orders of boxes for clients or staff. Today, 80% of Minny & Paul’s business is B2B and the company has gone beyond Minnesota to spotlight makers nationwide and offer curated gift boxes as well as ready-to-order options. The creative side drew her in, but Roos talks about the logistics and leadership that have made Minny & Paul a success. A request for a customized Minny & Paul box filled with CBD products inspired Roos’ next startup, the new Mary & Jane, which sells microdose cannabis products. “I love a challenge,” Roos says. “I think the most important thing to keep in mind as you're building any business is problems are going to come up all the time and it's really just about how you react to them and you

Ashley Hawks was a successful working model, in print and on runways around the world. But when she thought about her goal of making a magazine cover, she realized, “I’ll still be promoting somebody else's brand, somebody else's lipstick, somebody else's clothing line. And it was this light switch of, I want to be on the cover because of something I did, because of something I built. I want my name next to my picture.” For her first startup, Hawks built on what she knew. Style & Grace offered training for models and pageant queens. She made money, but realized the business wasn’t scalable—all of the students wanted to work with her directly. Her next venture took her back to her childhood, working in her mom’s bridal boutique. Hawks launched Forever Bride in 2012 as a tool to support the local wedding industry online. She created a network of small businesses and built a national following for her online platform and boutique market experiences. Halted by the pandemic, she took a shot and reached out to t

“We’re going to be helping hundreds of thousands of patients with our device and that’s probably more than a lifetime of patients I could see as a physician.” By the time Allisa Song started medical school at Mayo Clinic in 2018, she was already the founder of an active medical device startup company called Nanodropper. The idea came to her in 2017, when she happened to read an article titled: "Drug Companies Make Eyedrops Too Big, and You Pay for the Waste.” “It really felt like we were letting people down,” Song says. “We have these great medications that are vision saving, and we’re dangling it in front of people, saying that you have to pay this amount if you want to keep your vision.” The cost, the structure of benefits—it all felt “unfair,” Song says. But rather than go for the big industry-wide fix, she approached the wasted eye medicine problem with a harm reductionist mentality. “I was just trying to think about how can we develop a solution that we could put directly into the hands of patients.”

Sean Higgins knew he was spending too much time on his phone—going down a YouTube rabbit hole when he meant to go for a run, or call his mom. But rather than fighting the ever-present phone, he imagined a new way to utilize the technology that sits in the palm of our hands—a better way, if you will. BetterYou is a digital coach that uses artificial intelligence to map how we spend our time and make suggestions to fulfill the goals we set for ourselves, like more exercise, more sleep, or calling mom every week. Higgins started BetterYou with partners in 2018, using seed money from his first start up, ilos, a video platform that was acquired by Paylocity and became VidGrid. He quickly realized the real opportunity for an app designed to “harmonize technology with wellbeing” was B2B. The first organizations to sign on were schools, which offered BetterYou as a service for students. BetterYou ended 2023 with a $6 million Series A funding raise. It’s still early days, but this app is showing traction with use

What happens after a founder appears on Shark Tank, and walks away from a $250,000 offer? For Beth Fynbo, her Busy Baby activity mat saw six weeks worth of online sales in in three days. “And two weeks later,” she says, “no one had heard of us.” “I thought Shark Tank was going to be life changing, and it was—just not in the way that I thought.” Fynbo, an Army veteran and former health care account manager, was a new mom when inspiration struck. Kids were constantly dropping toys off their high chairs. Her Busy Baby silicone suction placemat keeps toys, teethers, and utensils secured in place. In 2023, two years after her Shark Tank appearance, Busy Baby logged $5 million in sales and introduced new add ons to its core product. Now with two years of growth and perspective since her national television debut, Fynbo talks about what it’s really like to go on Shark Tank and what it’s really like to build a business from the ground up, including raising money, creating an advisory board, navigating the waves o