By All Means

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 where Erica Diehn is an associate professor of management and faculty director for the undergraduate program. She talks about the growing frequency of career transitions, especially among younger professionals, and offers advice for managers whose employees are more likely than ever before to leave for a passion project.

“Understand what motivates that employee, what kinds of opportunities for learning and growth and challenges at work could keep them really excited.”

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 persist, from manufacturing to marketing. Aho walks us through the long, expensive process of earning FDA approval for a medical device. “I would have raised more money, earlier,” he says. “Everything takes twice as long, and costs twice as much as you expect.” He’s raised $2.2 million to date.

Aho says venture capital for medical devices tends to go to the really big ideas, rather than “little innovations,” like the Capnospot, that improve on everyday treatments. We discuss the opportunities, and the challenges, of being both practicing surgeon and entrepreneur.

“Being a doctor, you get to help people,” Aho says. “Doing a medical device, I get to help people on a system wide, national and international scale.”

Following our conversation with Aho, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Dan McLaughlin is a senior executive fellow who teaches health care management. He explains why Aho's path to successful medtech developer is unique; most medtech innovation comes out of big companies that employ teams of scientists. He points out the value of basic business training in helping entrepreneurial thinkers turn their ideas into business.

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 already attracted some interest from larger companies, but Packingham says he’s in no rush to be acquired.

“As long as we’re having fun, we’re happy to keep doing this.”

Following our conversation with Packingham, we go back to the classroom with Jay Ebben, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Ebben talks about the challenges of scaling a consumer products goods business without raising money. “It forces you to figure out what the selling equation is and how to get it done,” Ebben says. “Raising money… might take away some of the financial stress, but at the same time, right now, they’ve got the freedom to grow as they like, operate as they like, and not feel some of the pressure that comes along with having investors on board.”

“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, don’t keep talking about it. Make something happen. That’s entrepreneurial.”

Following our conversation with Murphy, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Gino Giovanelli is a marketing professor. “I think grit is so undervalued,” he says. “That’s the biggest differentiator between people being successful and not.” Grit is tough to teach, but Giovanelli shares lessons in successful leadership approaches, which leads to quality work in marketing, or any other field. “It’s investing in the relationships.”

“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 business,” she says. “But if you’re going to do all that, why not do it in games?”

Following our conversation with Sharp, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, where Tera Galloway is an associate professor in the Department of Management—and an avid game player who is working to incorporate games into her business classes. “The idea of gamification in learning is huge. There’s the collaborative component, which is good for mental health and it increases [feelings of] belonging.” Galloway is currently working on teaching methods that use board games to teach leadership, cultural change and strategic thinking.

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 to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Mike Porter is a senior clinical faculty member in the marketing department. He calls out a few of Lavin’s smart moves:

- Thinking ahead—working on patents while still trying to get the first product off the ground

- Conducting a low-stakes test drive of the product with pets

- Making telehealth easy and approachable

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 about raising capital."

Takeaways

Following our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Professor John McVea who talks about the entrepreneurial mindset.

"It's a stance you take towards problem solving and getting things done that is distinctly different."

Key traits, McVea says, include, "A comfort, a joy in ambiguity, in dealing with problems, being drawn to messy situations that are hard to solve...and the relentless ability to pivot from those learnings and to take a different direction."

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 your creative problem solving that's going to fix them.”

Following the conversation with Roos, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Seth Ketron is an assistant professor of marketing and has studied the subscription box market. His advice to those thinking of starting one is ask yourself: “What's your product? What are you trying to do?" If you're working with something that people…know they're going to use every month, a subscription could be functional. But if it’s just for the sake of a gimmick, you probably want to think that through.”

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 the CEO of David’s Bridal, who not only responded, he became a trusted ally and eventually acquired Forever Bride in 2022. (They renamed it Pearl.) Hawks went to work for the national wedding retailer, but after a year, realized her entrepreneurial spirit didn’t mesh well with a corporate setting. Her latest venture is Soar Leadership Groups, creating forums, events, and adventures for business leaders.

Following our conversation with Hawks, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Erica Diehn is an associate professor of management. She wasn’t surprised that Hawks didn't stay long at David’s Bridal. “It’s really tough to find entrepreneurial experiences in larger organizations.”

“We call that person-organization fit,” Diehn says. “Not only does the job fit your skills and abilities, but the broader context of the way work is done, the culture of that organization, their mission and purpose. If that’s not a strong fit with you as an individual, that’s a hard one to overcome.”

“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.”

That, for Song, was an eye drop bottle adapter with a smaller opening for less waste. The product, which sells for $19.99, is now available direct to consumer online and through thousands of medical clinics nationwide.

Song talks about leveraging student startup competitions to fund the business, and juggling entrepreneurship with medical school. “Taking that first step in bringing your idea to life is a really powerful feeling.”

Following our conversation with Song we go Back to the Classroom with Dan McLaughlin, senior executive fellow at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, with a focus on health innovation. “One of the things I teach in my operations management class is how do you improve processes?” Often the best way to make a big impact is by addressing something small or seemingly mundane. Look for the opportunities, McLaughlin advises, in your daily routine.