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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 Beth Ewen
December 2016-January 2017

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Leadership, Part 1

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Letter from the Editor

I still remember when Lisa Bollin, CEO of Cowgirl Tuff Co. in Cokato, strutted into Winthrop & Weinstine’s conference room in downtown Minneapolis wearing glitzy jeans of her own design and a fabulous jacket bejeweled with turquoise.

She blew away the assembled group with her fearless attitude and was the unanimous choice for Upsize Business Builder of the Year for 2012.

She grew up barrel-racing, and the inspiration for her line of apparel was the sport itself, along with the fact she could never find jeans that fit right and looked great. Why did she love it?

“It’s an adrenaline rush, and working something so hard and your teammate is an animal with its own brain and its own thoughts. It’s challenging,” she said.

“You tip a barrel and you’re out. They put up three cans, and they’re approximately 60 to 80 feet apart, and you have to make a cloverleaf pattern around them, as fast as you can without tipping them over. And you could be up against 80 other girls that want to win the same thing.”

The slogan for her company was equally competitive.

“Even though you’ve been bucked, kicked, bit and stomped, never give up,” she declared.

Not every Upsize Business Builder award winner is brash like Bollin.

In fact, Tom Salonek, CEO of software development and training firm Intertech and this year’s recipient, is thoughtful and strategic, with systems such as an eight-step hiring process that he says has done away with those hires in the company’s early years that embarrassed the heck out of him—like the time his client called and said the technician Intertech had sent to the firm was crying because she didn’t have a window in the room where she was working.

He is glad his “gunslinging” days are behind him, and his holistic views are on display in the interview in this issue, and even in a lovely ad he took out in Upsize to thank his clients and employees for all of Intertech’s success. He included words thanking me and Upsize for years of covering entrepreneurial businesses in Minnesota, and his kind message touched and surprised me.

It’s the kind of small example that reveals how a person conducts himself in business and in life, and we’re proud to recognize such an impressive CEO for a 25-year run building his business.

There have been many other types to receive this recognition, presented each year by Winthrop & Weinstine.

Like Jamin Arvig, founder of WaterFilters.net, who took a brainiac’s approach to doubling revenue each year for the decade before he was named. He crafts “pillars of excellence” and describes several elaborate elements that guide his and his employees’ actions. “We judge our leaders on how well they help others succeed,” Arvig told Upsize in 2014.

There’s the humble, too, like Jeff Taxdahl’s Thread Logic, who ran his embroidered logo apparel business while gazing out at a cornfield. He started the company after a career shock, when the CEO who had hired him as corporate communications manager was fired on the first day Taxdahl started. Forty days later, Taxdahl was out, too, and thus began his entrepreneurial journey.

He sounded like Warren Buffett when he explained his business philosophy to me, in 2011.

“This is an incredibly unsexy industry and it’s been around for a long time and it’s very stable but I’ve been able to come in and pull some market share in my direction,” he said. “You don’t always have to look for the new and greatest thing. You can get into established industries and create a good business for yourself.”

Upsize salutes the bold, the thoughtful, the cerebral and the humble, and all other types of business owners pulling market share in their direction.