By All Means

The founder of 2 Gingers whiskey is at it again with a new Irish whiskey called Red Locks. Serial entrepreneur Kieran Folliard shares the process of launching new businesses, and why he’ll never retire.

“I don’t play golf, I wouldn’t be any good on a beach," Folliard says. "I get to do something I’m passionate about, excited about.”

He grew up in rural Ireland. He liked sports and drama. He describes himself as a daydreamer—not an entrepreneur—but from the time he was 12, Folliard worked—retail, construction, farming in Saudi Arabia. Eventually, travels in the U.S. brought him to Minnesota, and a job at a search firm where he helped startups find employees. Until one day he realized he needed to flip the script and start something of his own. He started with something near and dear: an Irish Pub called Kieran’s. From there, he built a portfolio of bars and restaurants, including the Local and the Liffey. In 2011, he exited the pub business to start 2 Gingers, which he sold to liquor giant Beam Suntory. Then in 2013, he established the Food Building in Northeast Minneapolis, an incubator of sorts for artisan food brands that aims to get back to the basics of a sustainable food ecosystem, connecting farmers, makers, purveyors and eaters. And in late 2021, he launched another whiskey brand, Red Locks, flipping the old model of starting with bars and spreading to stores due to a marketplace disrupted by Covid-19.

Folliard says his favorite part of starting businesses is “anything that has to do with people and the creative process. Team building, relationship building, partnerships in marketplace, the expansion of the story. It’s the things you learn.”

He teaches us a bit about whiskey and its resurgence, about branding, and most importantly, about exploring creativity through business.

“I don’t think I’m very good at business, and I don’t think I’m very good at art," Folliard says. "And so I take the best I have of both and put them together and then it’s like yeah…I’m an entrepreneur in the sense that I do start things.”

For some takeaways from Folliard’s career, we go Back to the Classroom with John McVea–fellow Irish immigrant, longtime friend, and associate professor at the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. He says Folliard is a “wonderful example of a career of conviction.” For him, entrepreneurship isn’t a means to an end—it is the end. “It’s the idea of entrepreneurship as the good life.”

McVea points out how Folliard builds community around entrepreneurial ideas. “It’s not about the liquid. It’s about the story he weaves around it.”

Sally Mueller got inspired to become an entrepreneur as she entered menopause. A seasoned executive who launched dozens of successful lifestyle brands, product lines, and designer partnerships for big companies including Target and Clique Brands, she was shocked to find that beauty and wellness companies weren’t addressing symptoms of menopause in a modern way and set out to fill that void with Womaness. Launched as an omnichannel brand in 2021, the Womaness product line includes vaginal moisturizer, the “Gone in a Hot Flash” cooling mist, dietary supplements and serum.

“I think a lot of women are saying, ‘finally.’” says Mueller, who has a co-founder, fellow retail veteran Michelle Jacobs. Market watchers peg women in menopause to represent an opportunity of $150 billion or more.

Mueller takes us through the process of building an omnichannel consumer brand from naming it and setting the brand pillars to raising money and navigating supply chain challenges.

"I think a lot of the innovation happens after you launch. That's when it takes true grit. What you thought in your Power Point deck was going to work doesn't always work," Mueller says. "Once you launch, how do you navigate the learnings? that's when innovation happens." 

Launching a CPG brand requires art and science, she says. “You have to think of it as a funnel. Customers coming in at the top may have seen [the brand] on tv, or in a magazine, so they come in aware, but then how do you bring them all the way through the purchase journey? How do you get them from awareness to conversion? And how do you retain them as a customer. A lot of art that goes into this; it’s not all science.”

For some perspective on becoming an entrepreneur over 50, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where Laura Dunham in associate dean. “Entrepreneurship can happen at any point in your life,” Dunham says, pointing out that the median age of new founders is 42 and the fastest growing segment of entrepreneurs are age 54 to 64.

Dunham details four essential components to entrepreneurship for founders of all ages:

1. Start with yourself. Know what you know, who you know, and what you're good at. Think: what am I noticing out there Where could things be better?

2. Get close to your customers. Talk to them—focus groups, surveys, one on one interviews. What would be a meaningful solution? Test your ideas.

3. Remember that building a brand is about learning and growing. "Your business plan is never going to work out in real life," Dunham says. "There are so many things you can’t anticipate until it’s out in the marketplace. It’s all about execution: Learning, responding, continually innovating to meet new needs."

4. It takes grit. "You need energy and a willingness to never take no for an answer. "

Emmy Award winning TV host Ian Grant is an entrepreneur driven by passion. He loves travel. He appreciates art. He is a gifted storyteller. And he’s found a way to turn those interests into his life’s work, culminating with his new PBS television series Culture Quest, in which he takes viewers around the world to experience different cultures through the lens of artists.

Getting there has taken creativity, hard work and lots of rejection.

“You have to be ready and willing to fail. Over and over again,” Grant says. “And be willing to go back in. You also have to be willing to accept criticism.”

Grant peels back the curtains on the TV business, from the lack of reality in reality TV to the cancellation of his Travel Channel series The Relic Hunter—right after winning an Emmy. After years of pitches and auditions, he landed his PBS series, only to be left on his own to fund it—which he did, through a creative partnership with Gustavus Adolphus College. Along the way, Grant also built a successful furniture business, Bjorling & Grant, which started as imports from around the world and evolved into built-to-order furniture. His inclination to understanding global cultures through objects is a constant theme throughout Grant’s career—from Thailand to East Timor.

“When you get past the exotic element and start talking to artists, there’s such commonality with people around the world," Grant says. "The nomads out in Mongolia want the same thing as the farmer in north Dakota. They want to make a living, they want their kids to do well, they want a happy future. That’s the same for every person around the world. I love that you can look at this artist in Ghana or this Aboriginal Yolngu hip hop artist and think oh wow, this is crazy, but, oh my gosh, I totally get this guy.”

Back to the Classroom

“Yes you can follow your dreams, and it can come true,” says John McVea, associate professor of entrepreneurship with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. “But it doesn’t come true by accident."

McVea shares four principles that help entrepreneurs like Grant take a practical approach to pursuing their passions.

1. Bird in the Hand Principle: “Start with what you have, and what you know. Don’t start with where this could be in 10 years.”

2. Lemonade Principle: “Fail, fail, fail. The inverse of failure is learning. Most entrepreneurs will say that their big insights came from accidents and saying, ‘what can I learn from this?’”

3. Crazy Quilt Principle: “Stop thinking you can do this all on your own. Most successful entrepreneurs hatch together a bunch of relationships. You never know when a relationship is going to be useful so treat everyone well.”

4. Affordable Loss Principle: “Instead of asking how much risk you can bear, only take on as much debt as you can afford to lose. Set up the business model so you could walk away unscathed; then you can afford to experiment.”

Around 60 million American children play an organized sport, according to the National Council of Youth Sports. If you’re the parent or coach of one of them, you likely rely on a smartphone app called SportsEngine to stay organized and on schedule. SportsEngine is the leading provider of enterprise software and mobile apps used by youth sports teams nationwide. The Minneapolis-based company is owned by NBC Sports. But it was founded in a dorm room by Justin Kaufenberg, Carson Kipfer and Greg Blasko. You might be asking yourself: what did a bunch of single guys in college have in common with busy parents and youth sports coaches? Not much. But Kaufenberg’s dad not only coached his youth hockey team in Shakopee, Minn., he coached his four boys to look for problems and invent solutions. So when Kaufenberg saw his dad drowning in the administrative details of coaching, he followed the advice he’d long heard around his family’s kitchen table: invent something to make Dad’s life easier.

“It wasn’t a small problem we were solving,” Kaufenberg says. For the folks who dedicate their evenings and weekends to supporting kids on ice, courts and fields, “It was a life changing problem.”

Kaufenberg shares his classic entrepreneurial story—from four years of “absolute failure” to building SportsEngine into a 300+ person company and the eventual sale to NBC in 2016, the terms of which remain undisclosed. Today, the platform boasts more than 35 million monthly users.

Kaufenberg stepped down as CEO in 2019. He’s now a managing director with Rally Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage business technology. He shares hard learned lessons, like why founders should launch early—when they are “so uncomfortable and totally embarrassed by the product”—to the importance of forming an advisory council before developing the product, and why, in an investor pitch, you should “be concise and use plain language.”

After our conversation with Kaufenberg, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Alec Johnson, an associate professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship, draws key lessons from the SportsEngine story, starting with “Knowing your purpose.” He also discusses the advantages of starting young and how to know when it’s time to sell.

“There’s a belief in our society that you have to have experience first to tackle career of entrepreneurship. Justin is the example that proves the case. There’s a lot of advantage to starting young.”

Du Nord Craft Spirits is known in the industry as the nation’s first Black-owned micro distillery. It’s a distinction founder Chris Montana would like to shed. “I’m sick of being the ‘Black’ distiller,” Montana says. “I want it to be irrelevant, but the only way to do that is to get more people into the industry.”

A year after the Minneapolis distiller nearly burned to the ground when protests turned violent following the murder of George Floyd, Du Nord is poised to take off nationally thanks to a partnership with Delta Airlines that puts its Foundation Vodka on all domestic flights.

Du Nord’s first Delta order required more proof gallons than the small company had produced in its entire eight-year history. “To make Delta work is a Herculean lift,” Montana said. One that required partners like Jack Daniels to help Du Nord step up its manufacturing.

“When Delta Airlines reached out…I told them we hardly have a distillery,” Montana said. “They made it clear they understood this would be a special deal…the business community has stepped up in a tremendous way.”

It’s the same approach Montana takes to hiring at Du Nord, where the entire leadership team, besides himself, is female and 44 percent of the staff is people of color. “We had to hire people who didn’t know everything already. People who didn’t have all the skills, but are good people and wanted to work hard. We are a force for diversification in the industry and I hope our model gets stolen.”

Getting to this point of being a successful business owner and role model isn’t something Montana could have imagined when he was a troubled teen experiencing homelessness. He shares his story of adoption, learning to believe in himself, becoming a lawyer, and then a business founder too stubborn to throw in the towel even when time and again, many around him thought he should. Today, in addition to growing national distribution deals, Du Nord runs a foundation to support its community and is working to create a business incubator for other founders in Minneapolis.

“Whenever we took a step toward the community,” says Montana, “good things happened.”

Following our conversation with Montana we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Associate professor Nakeisha Lewis, ambassador of diversity, equity, and inclusion, urges companies to examine inherent barriers and think about how to create a more inclusive culture. When it comes to hiring, she says, “Rather than looking for the right degree, think about what unique perspective a person could bring to the role.” Focus on purpose and passion, Lewis says. “When Du Nord leaned into serving first, then they found the profits.”

Angie Tebbe is on a mission to make vitamins cool.

“I believe that if you’re going to start something from scratch, dream big,” says Tebbe, who left the Target merchant job she thought she’d retire from on a gut instinct that she should be doing something tied to wellness.

Within 8 weeks of quitting, she hatched the idea for Rae Wellness, a brand of natural supplements that address big issues including stress, sex, skin, sleep, and digestion. The target market is women like herself in their 20s and 30s. “We’re all about the psychographic: I’m not putting myself on the priority list because I want to conquer the world.”

Tebbe identified a white space in the supplement market between very expensive products aimed at the “One percent” and lower end, sugar-laden vitamins that were not aimed at women. Her goal was to make lives better, in an easy, accessible manner, for as many women as possible.

“I have always thought of brands and companies, those that soar and succeed are mission based,” Tebbe says. “It makes them authentic. Consumers can see through things.

Target taught Tebbe to translate high-end products for mass, and so she set out to do just that with Rae Wellness. The brand launched in 2019 as direct-to-consumer and quickly found its audience, amassing more than 160,000 Tik Tok followers. “I knew it needed to be omnichannel,” Tebbe said. Soon after, Rae landed on the shelves at Target.

She takes us through the process of conceptualizing and building the brand, the importance of being omnichannel, and the challenges of raising venture capital, which she did—a $9.5 million Series A in June of 2021. Plus, her expansion into CBD products.

Following our conversation with Tebbe, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Kim Sovell is an adjunct marketing professor and specialist in omnichannel retail. The key today, she says, is giving consumers options. “How do I reach as many customers as I can as conveniently as they want it.” She expects to see the explosion of direct-to-consumer brands continue; DTC now represents a more than $1 billion market. Going direct allows brands to be flexible with pricing and experiment with special incentives and promotions. But don’t write off physical stores, she says. “You want to be available, multiple ways.”

“Is there a better way to find safer and more effective medicine?”

That’s the question Ping Yeh pondered as he fought his way back from the brink of death in 2012. Having survived a chemotherapy cocktail so intense that doctors worried it could destroy his heart, he found himself wondering: with all the technology available, why do we still use the patient as the guinea pig? Pursuing an answer led to the 2014 formation of StemoniX, a biotech company that makes microOrgans used for drug discovery. Says Yeh, “Instead of waiting 8-10 years to see how humans respond (to a new drug), let’s just do it now.”

In March 2021, StemoniX joined forces with Cancer Genetics Inc., a New Jersey-based drug discovery leader, and together the two formed Vyant Bio (VYNT on the Nasdaq). The new biotech business has offices around the world including Pennsylvania, California, Australia, and Germany, with StemoniX operating as a wholly owned subsidiary based in Maple Grove, Minn.

StemoniX microOrgans are now used to test treatments for Rett Syndrome, a rare form of autism.

“In the grand history of biology, you have a hand in creating a new way of doing things,” Yeh says.

He talks about the process of building a biotech business—out of his basement and into the Johnson & Johnson JLabs science incubator. He credits the lean startup method with helping him and his partner to create a product that was not only scientifically advanced, but a market fit. Almost as challenging as creating “mini brains” in petri dishes, “we had to figure out how to make them at scale, and ship them all over the world.”

The recent merger allowed Yeh to move away from the business side of StemoniX to focus on innovation. He shares two keys to innovative thinking:

1. Be careful of the beliefs that you have. They are these invisible bars and walls that might hold you back.

2. It’s definitely over if you choose to quit. If you don’t, and every day you wake up and say we’re going to figure it out and do our best..you’ll figure it out.

For more takeaways from Yeh’s story, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Associate professor John McVea encourages entrepreneurs to approach the problems they hope to solve from a human perspective.

“Often people start out asking: what do I have to do to become a successful entrepreneur,” McVea says. “What this story reminds us is that a much better question is: how should I be to become a successful entrepreneur.”

He points out the a fundamental tenet of lean startup: the answer is not in the room. “It’s staying in constant contact with all sorts of people…constantly networking with people who are open to new ideas and thinking about how to create something that solves something for humans. Carry yourself in a way that makes you open to entrepreneurship.”

The pandemic called into question everything that made coworking desirable: shared work areas, in-person networking. But industry pioneer Don Ball has seen work culture trends cycle more than once before. And indeed, demand for flexible workspaces is already swinging back.

“Hybrid work opens an opportunity for coworking—it’s a professional office that’s not your home, and not your [company] HQ. If you have one close to where you live, I think what we’re going to see is suburban coworking…do really well.”

The opportunity in 2021 is not unlike what inspired Ball to get into coworking more than a decade ago. A career freelancer, Ball recalls “going stir crazy” working by himself at home in the mid-1990s. He rented an office, just to get out of the house and remembers thinking: “What if I invited others to join me? It seemed like a goofy idea at the time.”

Laptop computers and high-speed internet made it more feasible. In 2010, Ball and partner Kyle Coolbroth got a good deal on a vacant space in the Lowertown area of downtown St. Paul. They resisted turning it into separate office suites—the two weren’t interested in becoming landlords; they wanted to create a community for software engineers, freelancers, and business founders to connect and share ideas. So they invested in some Ikea furniture and opened CoCo, the Twin Cities’ first modern-day coworking community. Soon after, then-Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak convinced them to open a second CoCo in the Grain Exchange Building.

“There was a hunger for people to see what happening” in the startup community, Ball says. CoCo’s expansive space in the middle of downtown Minneapolis became that symbol of innovation. “It was the first time you could walk into one space see that it’s happening here.”

But while Coco became a local success story, WeWork, which launched the same year, became an international sensation—right up until its failed IPO. Ball talks about doing business in WeWork’s shadow.

“It was fantasy fueled by funny money. That was obvious to all of us in the business from day one,” Ball says. “They were acting like [real estate] was a software platform—like they could absorb all the costs of onboarding, and it would someday make money. It created downward price pressure…coworking as a business itself is okay, but it’s not great. It’s not going to make anyone rich. We were always looking for a twist.”

In 2018, Ball and Coolbroth teamed up with Fueled Collective and set about franchising their coworking communities and turning them into modern conference centers that would keep the spaces activated beyond 9 to 5. Ball stepped away from day-to-day operations in 2019. He sits on the board of Fueled Collective, which downsized during the pandemic and now operates two Minneapolis spaces. There’s a third in Cincinnati.

Today, Ball is back to freelancing, including a project related to regenerative agriculture, which isn’t as far afield as it sounds: the concept is to create shared growing space for crops and production space for small food producers. Coworking, for the ag industry.

For more perspective on work culture, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where adjunct faculty member Rod Hagedorn teaches management.

“Instead of trying to second guess where everything is headed, we should think in terms of drivers of change," Hagedorn says. "The pandemic taught all of us about the need for agility in terms of business operations.”

And with a disruption in office work comes the opportunity to consider which activities are best done in person: “innovation, creative problem solving—two areas critical for our economy and even our national security. The best way to come up with innovative solutions is still the old-fashioned way: in the office, with colleagues. We need people around us to be able to sense what someone is feeling and see reactions that you can’t get on Zoom.”

In March of 2020, as the U.S. shut down offices and clinics to guard against Covid-19, the telehealth platform Zipnosis saw an unbelievable spike in traffic, from around 1,800 visits a week to 65,000. Founder Jon Pearce had been preaching for more than a decade that the smartphone was the medical clinic of the future, but it took a global pandemic for the industry to make significant change.

In April of 2021, Zipnosis sold to another Minnesota-based startup, Bright Health, a giant among new health insurance companies that has raised more than $1 billion since 2016. Pearce and his team joined Bright Health Group and continue to work on transforming patient and provider connections. So it may surprise people to hear that Pearce believes telehealth as we know it is dying.

“The best analogy is the difference between Blockbuster and Netflix,” Pearce says. “Remotely getting care from a doctor is the same thing as renting a movie from Blockbuster. That business model is dying—you’ve got negative unit economics. What’s coming is Amazon care, Walmart. The tech itself is commoditized and integrated into a digitally enabled business. You will have more choice. The option to get care when you want it, how you want it,

at the price you want is going to be the most radical transformation.”

Of course, it takes grand vision, tenacity and sacrifice to pursue such radical transformation, and Pearce also talks about the darker side of entrepreneurship, which he says factored into the collapse of his first marriage and struggles with mental health.

“We have unfortunately created this myth around entrepreneurship. There’s a destructive cycle that comes from unwieldy expectations of financial returns,” Pearce says. “We need to reframe role of entrepreneurship. To say, my job is to help change the world, take ideas and put them into action. To be effective, I need to set boundaries, delegate, find other people. When I go back to do the next thing, I’m going to start with the thesis that my vision is big and I’m going to build and find best people to help me do that. I’m not going to work 120 hour weeks. It’s not sustainable for me, and it’s not even good for the business.”

Pearce says he’d also be reluctant to take venture capital on his next venture, particularly early in its development. “I’ve become a lot more old school. Build a profitable business with customers who pay you.”

Following our conversation with Pearce, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Daniel McLaughlin is a senior executive fellow whose research focuses on making health care work more effectively.

“it’s an exciting time for health care—the pandemic accelerated technology rapidly,” McLaughlin says. Beyond telehealth, he sees digital therapeutics on the horizon—“devices we’ll have in our homes or wear on our bodies—personal AI systems for much better, more customized health care.”

“When you bring someone to tears by describing what you do, that seems viable.”

Michael Mader and Sam Harper started their sock business, Hippy Feet, with a mission: to support young people experiencing homelessness. Inspired by brands like TOMS and Love Your Melon, they launched in 2016 with a one-for-one model, a pair of socks donated to someone in need for every pair sold. But the business, a certified B-corp, really began to gel when they integrated the mission into making their product.

“We were going into shelters, donating socks, and we started to see familiar faces,” Harper says. “We told customers we would do this great thing by donating socks, and we did, but we were seeing the same people. People were still homeless. It felt hollow.”

Adds Mader, “[Socks] address a symptom of homelessness, but by just treating the symptom, you’re not doing anything to resolve the issue itself… We realized that simply donating a pair of socks was strong marketing, but it wasn’t a strong impact. We wanted to have a strong impact.”

In 2018, Hippy Feet piloted a Pop Up Employment program, bringing socks to shelters and paying those interested in hourly work to package product. By 2019, Hippy Feet dispensed with the one-for-one model to focus on employing homeless youths. “A job moves you along the pathway to self-sufficiency,” Mader says.

But in March of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic brought Hippy Feet’s Pop Up Employment program to a halt, along with sales. Mader says the company was within weeks of bankruptcy when a new plan came together that puts Hippy Feet in a better position for long term success.

“The pandemic caused us to solve the issue of scale around employment,” Haper says. Hippy Feet now offers short term, part time contracts to those in need of a job—just enough to get them on their feet, with confidence and connections to plan their next move. They’re working on partnerships that would lead Hippy Feet workers to future opportunities. And they’re thinking about ways to replicate the Minneapolis employment program in other cities.

As Hippy Feet hit its stride on mission, sales followed. “When we got our values dialed in, it allowed us to share our values with consumer in a way that was much more digestible,” Mader says. The company improved its digital marketing and e-commerce experience to grow direct-to-consumer sales.

What this process has taught the founders about the one-for-one model: “There are much deeper ways to give,” Harper says. He encourages brands considering this approach to ask themselves, “Are you actually meeting a real need? Many times, you’re better off giving money—empowering a community, giving agency to whomever you’re trying to help.”

“We’ve been able to bake mission into our core business,” Mader adds. “We never have to ask ourselves, do we want to donate an inferior product to save money, or delay a donation. If you’re holding a pair of Hippy Feet socks, it’s gone through the hands of young person experiencing homelessness. It’s a more authentic, deeper way of giving.”

Then we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where David Alexander is an associate marketing professor. While he appreciates the Hippy Feet mission, Alexander says the founders could have crafted their business plan more efficiently.

“Hippy Feet tried to create an opportunity. What we want, from a brand perspective, is people who buy into your commitment. Do the research to figure out who is going to support you and then change your dream to satisfy the opportunity.”