To build revenue,
get friendly with
analysts, Snow says
jschneck@cybersnow.com; www.cybersnow.com
NAWBO awards
honor long slate
of women owners
OWLL Financial saw a “huge uptick” in business as the year turned, according to Stephanie Laitala-Welch, whose company provides outsourced accounting departments for businesses with sales of $1 million to $20 million.
She attributes the gain in part to a full year plan of multi-tiered marketing. Started in 2002, OWLL regularly sends Post-it Notes, preserves (to get clients out of a “jam”) and other fun stuff to prospective clients. Laitala-Welch stopped by the Upsize booth at the 27th annual awards gala of the National Association of Women Business Owners, and later picked up her award as a “woman on the way.”
She joined more than two dozen women business owners and corporate “women of achievement” in NAWBO’s annual spring awards fest.
Kathy Zurek, CEO of Diversified Adjustment Services Inc., took the top award as owner of the year. She’s run her consumer and commercial collection agency since 1981, which today has 135 employees. She emphasizes that the sometimes hardscrabble business of collections be done in a “professional and ethical manner,” so that clients’ goodwill and her firm’s integrity are maintained.
Maia Haag, owner of I See Me! Inc., was named emerging business owner of the year. With sales of $1.5 million last year, Haig self-published a personalized children’s book called “My Very Own Name,” in which animals bring letters one by one to spell the first and last names of the child in rhyme. She’s sold more than 125,000 copies.
Ann Jackson, CEO of Rockler Cos., received the lifetime achievement award for building Woodworkers’ Journal, one of the top three national consumer woodworking magazines, which in turn fuels her company’s retail growth.
Try to make it to: NAWBO members who have owned their businesses for 10-plus years are invited to an Executive Connections Luncheon Aug. 25, featuring Amy Klobuchar, Hennepin County Attorney: 952.929.7921; info@nawbo-mn.org; www.nawbo-mn.org
Foodies top list
of NDC’s annual
entrepreneur’s fete
Restaurant or grocery store owners captured all three top awards at the Neighborhood Development Center’s annual spring entrepreneur recognition fest.
Salama Halal Meats Inc. captured the growth award. Located in the East African marketplace at 912 East 24th Street in Minneapolis, the store provides meat to the Muslim community as well as grocery delivery.
Owner Adbulahi Musse posted $69,000 in revenue in his first three months of business in 2002. Sales soared to $660,000 in 2003. When judges in March selected his store for the award, business was booming due to the transit strike.
Sharon Richards-Noel won the overall award for West Indies Soul, her popular Caribbean food restaurant at 625 University Avenue in St. Paul. (Read more about her in the opening pages of this month’s Informer.)
Mereadito Mi Axochiapan, owned by Jenny Navarro, won for community impact. The grocery and meat market in Minneapolis specializes in Mexican and Latin American products, at 3847 Cedar Avenue South.
Bonus: Manny’s Torta’s, last year’s overall winner, provided his famous sandwiches to the judges. At the event, some of the many restaurant owners who are alumni of the Neighborhood Development Center provided assorted ethnic desserts.
Try to make it to: The Neighborhood Development Center in St. Paul is a non-profit agency offering training, loans and technical assistance to help inner-city entrepreneurs. Check out their numerous offerings with Kathy Moriarty: 651.291.2480; windndc@windndc.org; www.windndc.org
Fresh crop of
business journalists
get training at ‘U’
They’re corrupting, I mean educating, a new batch of business journalists at the University of Minnesota’s venerable Murphy Hall. For the second time, the university offered last spring a course on business journalism for non-business journalists.
Sven Wehrwein, a local financial guru who writes a business column and serves on the boards of Zamba and Vital Images, and Kevin Maler, a former business editor and reporter at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and The Business Journal, led the group. They learned about accounting basics, annual reports, SEC filings, private placements, CEO interviewing, and other staples.
Students wrote articles on the financial side of the Guthrie’s new location on the Mississippi River, and on Vital Images’ quest to compete with huge players in the market for conducting a virtual colonoscopy.
Yours truly spoke to the class about tricks for prying information out of small-business owners, generally a tight-lipped bunch prone to exaggeration. (Just kidding. I said you’re all softies who will tell all if asked nicely.)
Try to make it to: The Minnesota Journalism Center at the U offers regular seminars on financial topics for non-financial people. Contact Kathleen Hansen, director: 612.625.3480; k-hans@umn.edu; mnjrnctr@umn.edu
