Cover Story

Green light

Dave Roeser owned an empty warehouse and he wanted to find a way to use it. That simple need led him to create Garden Fresh Farms, an indoor agriculture system that uses much less electricity and water than similar models. He’s opened a second facility, near St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, with the original in Maplewood. […] Continue reading →

Letter From the Editor

[a sponge]

Loren O’Brien is a 2010 winner of the Upsize Growth Challenge—our annual contest to help business owners reach an ambitious growth goal, with nominations open now—and he’s the kind of entrepreneur for whom the contest, our how-to workshops and the magazine itself is tailor-made. The CEO of B&F Fastener Supply, he drew up a several-year […] Continue reading →

Focus

Upsize primer: Mergers & acquisitions

Selling a business involves both personal and business concerns, and a panel of experts hashed out both at an M&A workshop presented by Upsize and Club E. Plus, acquisitive members of the audience asked about the flip side of the coin: how to buy a business. Here are excerpts from their advice. Rick Brimacomb, Brimacomb […] Continue reading →

Business Builders

Leadership.

The Pacific Crest Trail is a long-distance hiking trail that runs 2,658 miles from the Mexican border to the Canadian border through California, Oregon and Washington. In 2009 I quit my job and set off from the Mexican border. Five months and six pairs of shoes later I arrived at the Canadian border an exhausted, […] Continue reading →

Forecasts

Would you confidently share your sales department forecast with your banker? Most business leaders view the idea of a “bankable forecast” as the epitome of an oxymoron. Projected sales forecast data is almost always discounted before sharing it with anyone outside the company. Informal executive surveys indicate 50 percent is a commonly used discount factor. […] Continue reading →

Collaboration File-sharing services have come a long way, to benefit of users

If you’ve collaborated on documents with co-workers in the last few years, you know that file-sharing has come a long way.  Forget e-mailing documents back and forth. Today’s top cloud file-sharing platforms—Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive—allow users to access and make changes to their work from anywhere in the world. While the platforms may all […] Continue reading →