By All Means

You might not know the name Sue Remes, but you’ve no doubt come in contact with her work for Kiehl’s, Frederic Fekkai, Lancome, Murad, Bumble and Bumble, Kevin Murphy, and others. She started her career behind the makeup counter for Clinique and worked her way up to Regional Training Manager before moving to Aveda Corp. where she was National Sales Manager and learned from industry visionary Horst Rechelbacher. The experience informed her entire career, but it was the last time Remes worked on staff. She went on to found Sue Remes Resources and become one of the most sought-after experts in the beauty business. Remes talks about the art and science of being a consultant and maintaining an outside perspective even while working on a brand for five to seven years. “I serve my clients better by being independent. I’m always thinking or looking at whatever they’re not thinking or looking at. What’s the thing right in front of you that no one else is seeing? That’s what I learned from Horst.” For those who go

Nancy Lyons is the founder and CEO of Clockwork, a Minneapolis-based experience design and technology agency that works with clients across industries. She’s a leader with a personal mission to “think strategically, act thoughtfully, be a good human.” As such, she spends much of her time speaking, writing, and thinking about the intersection of leadership, entrepreneurship, technology and people. “I don’t love tech,” Lyons says. “I love people and how tech supports and empowers people.” In this episode, Lyons walks us through her path into the tech industry—back when the Internet was in its infancy. She talks about learning how to code, learning project management, getting to a place where she feels comfortable being herself at work and speaking her truth. “What Clockwork is doing that I’m proud of is creating the space for uncomfortable conversations that ultimately lead to change,” Lyons says. “We have this idea that success looks a certain way—especially for women. We need opportunities to see ourselv

Brandon Sampson almost lost his hand in a farming accident when he was 8 years old. Nine surgeries and months of physical therapy sparked his interest in orthopedic medicine and rehabilitation. He was pre-med at Luther College, until a mentor introduced him to the field of prosthetics and orthotics. “When I saw people building a functional tool that never existed before for people missing limbs, I thought, this is what I want to do.” What he didn’t fully realize, as he started his career working for an artificial limb maker, was the power of his own entrepreneurial spirit. “I didn’t care if I succeeded or failed. I just wanted to feel like it was my doing.” After 15 years of working for another prosthetist, and many failed attempts to show his employer how to innovate and reinvent, he left to start a different kind of artificial limb company—one that focuses on function over form. Limb Labs opened near Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. in 2014. It looks more like a design lab than a medical office, with the fa

When Maia Haag told her boss at General Mills that she was leaving to start a personalized children’s book company, he told her to call him when she wanted her job back. “That just made me want to prove him wrong,” Haag says. That’s just what she did. Her Minneapolis-based company, I See Me! is now the largest publisher of personalized books in the U.S. With more than 50 titles and many other personalized products, I See Me! has sold millions of books for kids as well as pets, dads, and grandparents. Haag walks us through how she set herself up for success, from taking time to write the business plan to working for other Internet startups to learn what to do, and what not to do. Launched in 2000, I See Me! found its audience without the aid of social media. Haag reflects on her earliest days in e-commerce and how direct-to-consumer retail has evolved—for better or worse. In addition to e-commerce, I See Me! sells through retailers and has strategic partnerships with Shutterfly and other brands. In 2014,

Wiping out on Rollerblades and cracking his iPhone prompted Benjamin VandenWymelenberg to make his first phone case out of wood scraps. An architecture student who had grown up on a farm, he liked the idea of bridging technology and nature. Friends asked him to make phone cases for them, and that was the beginning of Woodchuck USA. In a matter of months, Woodchuck was selling through Best Buy and Target. Now seven years old, the Minneapolis-based manufacturer of wood products counts Google, US Bank, Ecolab, and Aveda among its custom clients, and sells in gift stores across the country. Woodchuck plants a tree for every item sold, which has resulted in millions of trees planted on six continents. From the start, Woodchuck’s mission was far broader than its product collection: “Nature back to people. Jobs back to America. Quality back to products.” Says VandenWymelenberg, “We might give up on the product, but we’re not going to give up on the mission.” While the core company continues to grow, Woodchuck al

Claire Powell is CEO of J.W. Hulme, the century-old leather goods brand based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She didn’t start it; she was brought in to resuscitate it. J.W. Hulme road the wave of the heritage movement—enjoying national media buzz around its history of U.S. manufacturing, but that hype didn’t add up to profits. Unable to succeed as a vertically integrated manufacturer that relies primarily on catalog and online sales, Powell found herself in the challenging position of having to change the business model. “We ended up having to make a really difficult decision,” Powell says. “Are we a manufacturer? Are we a retailer? Are we a brand? Who are we? Ultimately, a business has to sustain itself. It was really a fork in the road moment.” In 2018, J.W. Hulme, which is owned by a private equity firm, stopped manufacturing and outsourced production. Around 30 employees were laid off, and only a small marketing and sales team remain. “I’ve had a lot of difficult conversations over last year,” Powell says. “I’

Joe Keeley’s story is the stuff of business school legends—particularly at the University of St. Thomas where he was a student when he got the summer babysitting gig that sparked the idea for College Nannies, Sitters + Tutors, which he grew into the nation’s largest employer of nannies, sitters and tutors. Today, the company, which Keeley sold in 2016 to Bright Horizons, operates close to 200 franchises and has provided more than 2 million hours of child care. In 2000, Keeley answered an ad from parents who were looking for a college hockey player to nanny their two boys for the summer. Other parents started asking if he could help them find them a college student to watch their kids, and Keeley quickly realized the market was ripe for a professional placement service that would vet childcare providers and treat them as “role models” for kids. It made for a great news story, too, which is how Keeley built an early buzz without a marketing budget. But even as College Nannies, Sitters + Tutors was gaining m

About every five minutes, someone, somewhere in the world, creates a CaringBridge page. The Minneapolis-based social network makes it easy for people to communicate with loved ones during a health crisis by creating a centralized, private place to share updates and ask for help. Sona Mehring created CaringBridge in 1997. It started with a simple website designed to help friends share news about their premature daughter, Brighid. The power of that instant connection—at a time before Facebook and Twitter—prompted Mehring to build CaringBridge, a platform that was available, for free, to the public. From the newborn intensive care unit at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics in St. Paul, CaringBridge has grown into a global nonprofit with users in 235 countries. Mehring, a tech entrepreneur who was early to the Internet—launching her own web page design firm in the 1990s—talks about her decision to turn CaringBridge into a nonprofit, and leave her day job to run it. “I have a nonprofit heart with a for-profit mind

Kate Arends’ eye for design and instinct for connection helped her build an audience of more than 3.3 million for Wit & Delight, her blog turned social media platform. How to leverage that devoted following and capitalize on the opportunities that come with being a lifestyle brand continues to be a work in progress. Today, Wit & Delight operates its own rentable studio space in Minneapolis, creates products, content, and consults with major brands including Nike, Amazon, Fossil, and Sleep Number.  But Wit & Deight didn’t start with a business plan. It started as a creative outlet for Arends, and it grew organically for five years before Target came calling and offered her a limited edition design collaboration she couldn’t refuse. “It wasn’t until the opportunity became so apparent that I thought, if I don’t seize this, I’m going to regret it.” Even now, with a team of six and national sponsorships, Arends is constantly reevaluating her influence and opportunities. She’s thinking about how to scale a busin

Clarence Bethea does not fit the typical venture capitalist’s profile of a promising founder. He grew up in a broken home, got into trouble with the law, dropped out of college. But when he started working in a group home with vulnerable adults, something clicked. Through a series of jobs and mentorships, he realized what he was meant to do: start something. “My heart and soul is built to build something big.” In 2015, he launched Upsie, a warranty app designed to make it easier and more affordable for consumers to protect their purchases. Very quickly, Bethea pitched Upsie for the Techstars business incubator program and since then, it has grown 300 percent every year, with customers in all 50 states. Bethea has raised $8.5 million for Upsie, despite odds stacked against him. “People invest in people who look like them. Venture capitalists are mostly white guys. I definitely don’t look like them.” Bethea talks about the challenges of raising money and the vast inequities that exist in the VC space. “if I

Kristin Shane is the founder and CEO of Fly Feet Running, a group fitness workout with two studios in the Twin Cities and hopes of going national. Launched in Minneapolis in 2016, Fly Feet is thriving in an increasingly crowded field, and Shane says she’s proud to be among the 2 percent of women-owned businesses to make it over the $1 million mark in annual revenue. But she still has big hurdles to clear to achieve the goals she’s set for Fly Feet, and getting this far did not happen by chance. Shane charts the experiences that led to starting her own business—from consulting for Accenture, to a stint in the Peace Corps, and an 11 year climb at Target, where she eventually landed as a vice president in the beauty division. Shane was part of the team that led Target’s disastrous expansion into Canada. She talks about what she learned from that failure, and how it set her up to become an entrepreneur. “All the ingredients are here for a personal disaster,” she recalls of her time in Canada. “And I’m not wil

Rhoda Olsen didn’t grow up thinking she’d one day run a $1.5 billion company. She didn’t have any female role models in business. But she found the way to lead with heart, and data, and in the process, she helped Great Clips become the world's largest salon brand. Olsen is vice chair of the board of Great Clips, a Minneapolis-based franchise salon chain with 4,400 locations and more than 40,000 stylists nationwide. She stepped down as CEO in 2018. But she continues to work closely with leadership, and franchisees. She’s considered the heart and soul of the company, and a major factor in its epic growth over the past 30 years.  Olsen went to college at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing careers in math, so despite her natural talent with numbers, she focused on social work and started her business career in human relations. It took her brother Ray Barton’s encouragement for her to not only come to work with him at Great Clips in the 1980s, but to buy stock in the company at a time when she and

Michael Fanuele is a brand strategist who has worked at JWT, Havas, Fallon, and most recently served as chief creative officer at General Mills. There, he tried to inspire a big food company to be a good food company, and in the process, helped Cheerios and Nature Valley grow for the first time in a decade. Currently, he’s the founder and CEO of Talk Like Music, a consultancy that helps people, places, and brands become more inspiring. His new book is called Stop Making Sense: The Art of Inspiring Anybody. Fanuele became interested in the topic of inspiration when he found himself caught up in the theatrics of U2, a band he despised. He wondered what it was about Bono that had the power to move even the most reluctant fan. And he started thinking about how that same feeling could apply to other aspects of life and work. “The inspiration equation is pretty simple: passion minus reason is inspiration,” Fanuele says. "You’ve got to find a way to make things odd enough, strange enough—music-like enough that sp

Dave Kapell founded Magnetic Poetry, a first-of-its-kind novelty item that brought poetry into the kitchens and onto the refrigerators of millions of people around the world in the mid-‘90s. An accidental entrepreneur, he came up with the idea of putting words on magnets while writing song lyrics, and when friends wanted magnetic poetry kits of their own, he turned it into a business. “I went viral before there was going viral,” he says. To date, Magnetic Poetry has produced more than one billion world tiles in more than a half dozen languages and sold more than 3 million kits worldwide. Kapell still runs the Minneapolis-based company, and has never taken a dime of outside funding. His unlikely path to entrepreneurship includes a garage band, writer’s block, arts and crafts, Davanni’s magnets, a house party, student loan debt, and a very memorable sneeze. On this episode of By All Means, Kapell shares his entertaining founder’s story and what he's learned about running a business along the way. After ou

New episodes of By All Means are on the way! We talk to entrepreneurs, CEOs, authors and visionaries. Leaders who make business work in Minnesota. Coming up this season: the founders of CaringBridge, College Nannies & Tutors, Woodchuck USA, Flyfeet Running, Upsie and many others. Plus tips and tactics that may apply to your next venture. Get ready to be inspired.

Ann Kim is the James Beard Award-winning owner and executive chef of Young Joni, Pizzeria Lola and Hello Pizza in Minneapolis. She and her husband and business partner Conrad Leifur created parent company Vestalia Hospitality and, without any outside investors, formed a team that is now working on its fourth restaurant concept slated to open in 2019 in Uptown Minneapolis. Kim did not follow a traditional path to the restaurant industry. She pursued an acting career after graduating from New York’s Columbia University with a degree in English. Burnt out after eight years of theater and commercial work, she and Leifur decided to open the neighborhood restaurant of their Minneapolis dreams and New York memories. That was Pizzeria Lola. Kim didn’t attend culinary school; a Korean immigrant, she grew up watching her mother and grandmother make kimchi from scratch out of necessity—no restaurants in Minneapolis had it on the menu. “It wasn’t unusual for me growing up as a kid to have a dinner table that had a buc

Liz Giorgi founded Mighteor, one of the first video production companies focused on creating content for the Internet. With clients including Facebook and the NFL, Mighteor has helped businesses achieve more than 500 million organic views and receive international attention. Now, the Emmy award winning Giorgi is launching a second business called Soona—a same-day photo and video production studio. “It came from years of listening to our customers—whether it’s Facebook or a small liquor store, they all had this problem: they can’t scale content affordably or quickly…We took every idea we had about production turned it on its head and said it’s not impossible to do this in a day.” Described as the Kinko's of content, Soona recently opened in Denver and Minneapolis. Giorgi wants to take it global. “We can completely change the game for how content is made; make it accessible to any brand at any time.” But Giorgi didn’t intend to be an entrepreneur. When she couldn’t find a newsroom job after graduating from jou

How do you define success when your family names are Dayton and Rockefeller? Andrew Dayton is the son of former Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton and philanthropist Alida Rockefeller Messinger, daughter of John D. Rockefeller III. His grandfather, Bruce Dayton, was CEO of Dayton Hudson Corp. and a devoted trustee of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts who was once described in the New York Times as the “Dean of American corporate arts philanthropy.” “My grandfather had a lot of sayings…’the only thing worse than a bum is a rich bum. It wasn’t that you’re expected to follow in retail or philanthropy or politics, but you’ve got to contribute something. You have a responsibility to pay it forward,” Andrew says. Andrew and his brother Eric Dayton are co-founders and co-owners of North Corp., the parent company to the Bachelor Farmer restaurant and cafe, Marvel Bar, and retail store Askov Finlayson, all located in the North Loop of Minneapolis. Andrew’s passion for public policy led him to serve as the Deputy Leg

Jacquie Berglund is co-founder and CEO of Finnegans Brew Co., the first beer company in the world to donate 100 percent of profits to charity. Finnegans turns beer into food by purchasing produce from local farmers and donating it to food banks in every state where the beer is sold. In 2018, Finnegans opened its own brewery and tap room in downtown Minneapolis and launched the new Finnovation Lab for co-working and incubating socially minded startups. “I think I’m hardwired this way,” Berglund says. “I always wanted to make a difference.” On this episode of By All Means, Berglund talks about how she came up with the idea to launch a beer company that “does well and does good,” and how she structured her for-profit company to benefit Finnegans' non-profit arm. She addresses the challenges of growing a benefit corporation, and how, with guidance from Newman’s Own Foundation, she changed her model to bring on investors and fund expansion. “If you want to go dood, you’ve got to figure out how to fund it.” Ber

Erin Newkirk is an award-winning innovator, tech entrepreneur, brand builder, and champion of problem solvers. After working her way up the ranks to senior marketing manager at General Mills, she left to start Red Stamp, a modern correspondence company, which she built into a mobile app that made it possible to send personalized cards and invitations on your phone with a couple of clicks. With 10 million cards sent, Red Stamp was acquired in 2013 by Taylor Corp., one of the largest privately held companies in the U.S. Newkirk continued on as CEO of Red Stamp within Taylor until 2016 when she left and quickly became chief marketing officer of one of the hottest Minneapolis-based insurance ventures, Bright Health, which made Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list for 2017. Then last year, she joined another Twin Cities startup, this time in the food industry. Newkirk is now chief marketing officer of Local Crate, a meal kit company on a mission to source locally, from farm to chef to kitchen. How does she co