By All Means

When Junita Flowers was at her lowest, baking cookies became an escape. She turned that feeling into a social enterprise business. “Junita’s Jar is so much more than a delicious bag of cookies,” Flowers says. “It’s a bag of hope.”

But striking a healthy balance between purpose and profit can be challenging for a mission driven startup. The initial model of selling to businesses that would bring Flowers in for “cookies and conversation” about surviving domestic violence and overcoming adversity proved difficult to scale.

The pandemic, and the social unrest that followed the death of George Floyd just blocks away from the Junita’s Jar kitchen and offices in Minneapolis gave Flowers time to recalibrate and take advantage of mentorship and grant programs like Stacy’s Rise Project. Target also took an interest, and helped Flowers gear up for a national launch of Junita’s Jar. HyVee will follow in August.

A focus on growing the business, Flowers has realized, will give her a larger platform to share her purpose. “If it’s your dream,” she says, “Chase it.”

After our conversation with Flowers, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship Associate Dean Sheneeta White who sees growing interest in social entrepreneurship. She points out that making money is not at odds with having a mission. “It’s okay to make a profit.” White says. “But never lose your story. Never lose what drives you.”

As the co-founder of Primp, a Minneapolis-based “cheap chic” boutique chain that grew to nine stores throughout the Midwest and a robust online following, Michele Henry had barely taken time off with her first two kids. When her third baby arrived, she vowed to take a true maternity leave, and that’s when she realized that an entrepreneur never really stops. Short on time for herself with three little ones at home and suddenly dealing with postpartum skin issues, Henry wished for a spa where she could run in for a quickie skin treatment—without all the trappings, or price tag, that typically go along with a “spa day.” Express facial spas were beginning to pop up on the coasts, but there wasn’t one in the Twin Cities. She went to work on a business plan for Face Foundrie, a facial bar focused on “efficient, effective, approachable” skincare. In late 2018, Henry sold her half of Primp to her founding partner and immediately signed a lease for her first Face Foundrie, which is now a fast growing franchise chain on pace to hit 100 units sold nationwide by end of year.

“If I could pinpoint what I like most about building businesses,” Henry says, “it’s really problem solving. How do I, for the least amount of money, make this feel really high end?”

This spring, Henry also launched Face Foundrie’s first aesthetics school and a product line that is rolling out to all Face Foundrie locations.

She walks us through the process of building a franchise business, and how her role has evolved from serving customers to serving franchisees, many of whom were Face Foundrie clients that left corporate careers to start locations of their own.

“I think people came out of Covid and said, ‘Life is short, nothing is guaranteed. Am I happy? Am I going to be happy doing this long term?’ A lot of franchisees at their core, want to make people feel good. Their mission is the same as ours. It’s very easy spot who will make it in this system, who we want to partner with.”

Face Foundrie is now headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minn. with 80 corporate employees. Henry expects to scale internationally within two years.

After our conversation with Henry we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Professor John McVea points out the advantages of the franchising model—beyond the economics of lowering the cost and risk of raising capital and assembling a management team.

“There’s sheer human joy in opening an opportunity to other people – empowering other women to be business owners in their own right,” McVea says. “That’s where [Henry] gets her purpose, joy, and the mission of her organization. It’s something we underestimate – the human side, the inspiration side.”

Most people demonstrate their adoration of a consumer brand by buying a bunch of its products. Tom Sega bought the company. Since becoming the owner and CEO of Duluth Pack in 2007, Sega reinvigorated the brand's positioning, greatly expanded the product line and reach, and improved efficiencies that made the American-made, handcrafted canvas and leather goods collection profitable once again. Duluth Pack celebrates its 140th anniversary this year. In 2017, he did it again, buying another Duluth brand that had fallen on hard times. Spring Creek Manufacturing makes canoe paddles, mounts and an ever-expanding array of products.

Resuscitating an historic brand while paying homage to its culture and traditions requires a delicate yet focused act of leadership. For Duluth Pack, Sega says the key is staying true to core values: Quality, premium products, made in America, lifetime guarantee for all craftsmanship and hardware. “We don’t apologize for who we are.”

Sega shares the history of one of northern Minnesota’s most beloved consumer brands, and how it took him four years to buy it. He talks about entering the purchase with “rose colored glasses,” and the hard work he’s put in since to turn sales around, including enduring a recession and a pandemic. “It doesn’t happen overnight,” he says.

Following our conversation with Sega, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business Associate Professor of Management Chad Brinsfield who encourages businesses to get clear on their values. “I’m a big fan of being explicit. A lot of companies will espouse certain values, but what they do says something different. It’s important to create consistency and cohesion.”

In the early 2000s, leading consumers to a brand on the Internet could seem like a mystery, and Nina Hale loved the challenge. After years of working in advertising and digital strategy for other companies, Hale launched her own Minneapolis-based performance marketing agency in 2005. She called it Nina Hale Inc. and specialized in search engine optimization. Clients included UnitedHealth Group, Renewal by Andersen, Land O’Lakes, and other national brands.

In 2014, with 50 employees, Nina Hale Inc. converted to an ESOP, an employee stock ownership plan. Hale then began her long goodbye, retiring in 2020 at which time the agency renamed itself Collective Measures.

Hale has become a big advocate of the ESOP model. "It's really for people who want to have some sort of legacy, and for people who want to pass wealth on to their team." Today, Hale mentors other founders on exit planning. “if you don’t have an exit plan,” she says, “You don’t have a plan.”

Hale talks about the evolution of digital marketing, and building a company that can carry on without its founder.

Following our conversation with Hale, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business to learn more about succession planning. "A lot of transitions go wrong when the CEO leaves, but can't let go," says adjunct faculty member Glen Karwoski. "You want to mentor, but not manage whomever is coming in." Karwoski also advises outbound CEOs to "avoid looking for a clone of yourself. Change is going to happen."

Spencer Johnson sketched his initial designs for Sota Clothing as part of a class project while pursuing a graphic design degree at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His clean, modern designs and signature crossed paddles caught fire, and within a few years of graduating, Sota Clothing hit $1 million in sales. Sota became a fixture at popup shopping events and the Minnesota State Fair; the apparel brand started wholesaling to more than 100 stores around the state and opened two of its own stores in the Twin Cities.

Other states got interested, which led to a second brand under the Sota umbrella, Classic State, creating designs for the other 49. Johnson is also working on designs for products that could represent all states, while maintaining the brand’s local flavor.

He talks about slow growth, social media marketing, the importance of being omnichannel, and the challenges of being a creative thrust into the role of CEO.

As Sota Clothing hits its 10-year anniversary, Johnson is actually pulling back and taking time to consider what’s working – for the business, and his life. Bigger isn’t always better, and Johnson is mindful of what inspired Sota Clothing in the first place: a love of his home state and being out in it.

In Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, Professor John McVea shares the metaphor of a “beachhead market,” defined as a small market you can capture, gaining strength and resources to expand. “It’s what we advise a lot of entrepreneurs,” McVea says. “Start simple. Own your beachhead. Pick a battle you know you can win..then go capture the big prize.”

The secondhand clothing market is growing 11 times faster than traditional retail, according to research by Global Data. Children’s clothing is the fastest growing category, which makes sense considering the typical baby churns through seven sizes in the first two years of life. Kidizen, an online resale marketplace for kids clothes, makes selling those outgrown onesies as easy as taking a smartphone photo and posting it to the site. Finally, the market has caught up with the Minneapolis tech company, which launched in 2014 and hit profitability in 2021.

“It takes way more than you think,” says CEO Dori Graff, who charts the journey she and her co-founder Mary Fallon went on from becoming moms to recognizing the opportunity to create a kid-centric marketplace. “We felt so confident in what we were doing, what we were building.” They found a devoted audience out of the gate, and its grown to nearly 1 million users as more consumers and brands prioritize sustainability. When Kidizen launched, brands worried it would cannibalize their sales, Graff says. Today, they are partnering with Kidizen to launch “Rewear” resale sites of their own.

“Brand affinity happens in resale,” Graff says. She offers lessons in entrepreneurship, e-commerce, and the importance of evolving with trends.

“Failure is just part of the process,” Graff says. “We’re not even running the business we originally ideated on.”

In our Back to the Classroom segment with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, marketing professor Gino Giovannelli points out the magic of successful ideas, like Kidizen, is in mixing data with gut instinct. Even before retail trend reports indicated a growing acceptance of an affinity for resale apparel, Graff and her partner had a gut feel. “They were mothers of young kids—they could see where the market was heading.”

Giovannelli teaches his entrepreneurial students to then evaluate their gut ideas on impact versus burden. “Not every idea should be pursued,” he says. “This is a quantifiable measure of gut feeling.” Ideas that are high impact, low burden are the gems while high impact, high burden endeavors require more thoughtful consideration. “If you’re low on both impact and burden—stay the heck away,” Giovannelli says. “Even if the burden is low, it’s just busy work.”

Chemist and professor Paul Boswell couldn’t get over how little his students knew about how computers work. He started building a three-dimensional model to teach programming and realized he could turn it into a game. Named for Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, Turing Tumble is basically a marble run that teaches people how to build computers—something no other game was doing at the time. Teachers and science nerds love it; kids of all ages will put down the screens to play with it.

But perhaps even more impressive than creating a mechanical computer both educational and entertaining, is the grassroots approach Boswell and his wife Alyssaalso a former teacher and now CEO, took to turning Turing Tumble into a $4.5 million business in just four years. No angel investors, no big branding agency, no retail partner. Just a homemade video to tell their story and a Kickstarter campaign to shore up enough money for the initial manufacturing run. They needed $40,000. They raised $400,000. And now they’ve done it again: their second Kickstarter for Spintronics, Paul’s follow-up game of mechanical circuits, raised more than $1.3 million in 2021. The Boswells, who live and run their company in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn. explain how to make a project standout on Kickstarter, starting with a compelling story, a unique offering, and a willingness to take people along for the ride.

“Quality educational toys that make things that are difficult to absorb into something tangible.” Paul Boswell says. “That’s what drives us.”

After our conversation with the Boswells, we go back to the classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business marketing professor Gino Ginovannelli, who talks about the way technology “releases the shackles” and allows entrepreneurs to create their own destiny. “It might have been easier to go the venture route and focus on getting into big box stores. But this way, they’re in control of their destiny. They’re able to grow at their own pace without having to rely on others. That takes a balance of guts and humility.”

While building a career in financial services by working with large banks and investment firms, Dionne Gumbs grew increasingly bothered by the inequities in access to capital. She left the corporate world to pursue a big idea: remove the obstacles that prevent women and people of color from accessing the financial tools they need to succeed. In 2018, she launched GenEQTY, a fintech platform that provides small business owners with tools to scale their businesses.

“Build what you can until you can’t build it anymore,” Gumbs says of working for larger financial institutions. “Ultimately, I just knew it was time.”

She turned her idea into a business plan through the Bush Institute’s Presidential Leadership Scholars Program. MasterCard’s Start Path Program has given her additional runway to scale the platform.

“It’s not just about the technology and the bank products; it’s about the voice of the people we want to serve,” Gumbs says. “Small businesses are such a big market. These are businesses focused on growing and creating great products and services for the communities they live in. Let’s listen to those voices and home in on what specifically those voices need.”

Gumbs charts her path into entrepreneurship, including a disappointing failure before GenEQTY. She talks about the way the reception to GenEQTY has changed since the murder of George Floyd and the social uprising that followed.

“If I had stopped at those moments in time when people said this is not needed, I wouldn’t be here today,” Gumbs says. “There’s something special about a Black woman charting a fintech path…there’s a belief that, she’s listening to us. She’s going to get it done.”

After our conversation with Gumbs we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship and Associate Dean Laura Dunham for a conversation about access to capital and pursuing ideas that matter.

“At St. Thomas we always tell our students that entrepreneurship is about solving problems that matter to you and creating value for others,” Dunham says.

For Gumbs, that means thinking about how to make it easier for women and people of color to obtain funds that are increasingly available for entrepreneurs, but still daunting to access. “Business ownership, along with home ownership, is one of the best paths to create wealth. She’s thinking about how to make that easier.”

The gig economy wasn’t a thing in 2002 when Amy Langer and John Folkestad launched Salo LLC, a Minneapolis-based professional services firm that got its start placing senior level finance experts on project work, and soon expanded to HR, consulting, and more. Today, Salo is a national firm with more than 900 employees. The company recently hit a major milestone: $100 million in annual revenue. Langer and Folkestad are still 50-50 owners of Salo, but they’ve stepped away from day to day management—a shift made easier by the pandemic. Now more than ever, it’s clear Langer and her partner were ahead of their time in building a business around project based work.

“It wasn’t mainstream then,” Langer says. “We just always believed if we created a place that people wanted to work, and we continually got them work that challenged them, and respected how they wanted to work, that it could be pretty great.”

Langer outlines some of the key steps that set up Salo for success:

- Hiring a coach to help the team work better together

- Creating an advisory board

- Setting a strategic plan that outlines the values of the organization and the work culture to strive for.

“My biggest realization was that I don’t have to know all the answers, but I have to ask a lot of questions,” Langer says.

Langer talks about the challenge of creating a collaborative office culture today, how to prioritize relationships over transactions, and knowing when to make the shift from leader to advisor.

After our conversation with Langer, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Chad T. Brinsfield

Is associate professor and chair of the Management Department. He expands on the importance of self-awareness in leadership, and prioritizing people over product.

“We’ve got to make well being of employees a priority,’ Brinsfield says. “We need to make caring for others a team sport. How can you have a heathy society if you don’t have healthy work?”

Robbie Harrell started an ice company before he owned a freezer or knew anything about carving. Today, Minnesota Ice is the nation’s largest producer of sculpture-grade block ice and artisan cocktail ice, manufacturing and delivering up to 50 tons of ice per day. That’s after a pandemic setback that might have put the company out of business if not for Harrell’s doggedness.

“Give me two weeks,” he told his team when Covid-19 shut down events and bars—his two biggest revenue drivers. “I will come up with a plan. I didn’t come through all of this to not make it out.”

That attitude inspired Minnesota Ice when Harrell was an undergrad, doing deliveries for another ice sculpture company. It occurred to him that automating ice carving would make the business more efficient. When his employer said no, he left to start his own company with the help of a mechanical engineering student who built their first carving contraption. Their first sculpture nearly melted before they could deliver it, and actually broke in two, but they managed to freeze the pieces back together and carry on.

Harrell takes us on the journey, from bootstrapping the ice business by starting a second business to landing on a national stage during Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis. He talks about building demand for a product that anyone can make, and why bars around the country special order his cocktail ice.

“There’s always something to improve upon,” Harrell says. “I just love figuring it out.”

After our conversation with Harrell, we go back to the classroom with one of his professors from the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. “There’s always this drumbeat around entrepreneurship that you have to be some sort of mythical creator and it’s just not true,” says Alec Johnson, an associate professor of entrepreneurship. “You’ve got to be a great problem solver. And Robbie is a great problem solver.”

Most businesses that succeed are not making something original, Johnson says, they’re improving on the competition. “Having a curiosity and a strong desire to learn are some of the more important characteristics of an entrepreneur.