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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Andrew Tellijohn
December 2003

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Office Equipment


U of M’s ReUse Program
sells used office furniture
for rock-bottom prices

They may not be beautiful, but the desks, filing cabinets, chairs and other used office equipment selling at the University of Minnesota’s ReUse Program Warehouse are functional.

They’re also cheap, says Pete O’Keefe, who runs the warehouse, and who since February has opened it to the public every Thursday from 8 to 5:30, at 883 29th Ave. SE in Minneapolis. He says he always has a couple hundred chairs for $5 each, loads of five-foot metal desks for $25 each, and file cabinets at $10 a drawer.

Small-business owners often “get sticker shock” when they go to office equipment superstores, O’Keefe says. But from his center, “they can walk out with a lot of stuff.” O’Keefe’s job is to deal with the used equipment at the university. “There’s 250 buildings, so I get all the old stuff,” O’Keefe says. Much of it is re-allocated back to university buildings; the rest goes to the ReUse Program.

Pete O’Keefe, University of Minnesota ReUse Program Warehouse: 612.626.9152; www.reuse.umn.edu