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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
October – November 2012

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Speak out

Paul Blom is gay, and he used to keep it quiet at work. The owner of a Right at Home franchise in Bloomington, he worried that saying his business partner, Bob White, is also his life partner would turn away the elderly clients his company serves with home personal care and companionship.

When old ladies teased him, asking him when a good-looking young man like him was going to find a nice gal to marry, he’d laugh and say nothing. “When I first started my business I was paranoid about that,” Blom said.

But he gradually gained confidence. “I thought, you know what?  Why am I pussyfooting around on this?” Blom said. So now he replies, “I would be married if it were legal.” Rather than rejection, he says that response leads to interesting conversations. And rather than keeping quiet, he now speaks out.

“Vote No. Don’t Limit the Freedom to Marry,” urge the bright-orange signs in Blom’s office. Although large corporations including General Mills and Cargill have come out against the state’s contentious constitutional amendment that defines marriage as only between one man and one woman, Blom is the rare small-business owner who will take a stand on a controversial social issue at company headquarters.

“At this point in my evolution, it’s all about being authentic,” Blom says. “That means I work very hard at being the same person in every setting.”

It’s a wonderful thing to behold, when business owners find their voice. I’ve watched it firsthand this summer as our two Upsize Growth Challenge winners transformed themselves in four short months.

Sandy Hansen, president of AgVenture Feed & Seed, was literally wringing her hands at workshop one in May, worrying that everything she’d gone through hell to build would slip away if she decided to aggressively grow. By workshop two, in September, she sounded like a new CEO. She was ready to “rock and roll,” as she describes in this issue.

Nathan Smith and Chad Nyberg, co-owners of PCS Residential, talked in vague terms about values and meaning in workshop one, but seemed at a loss as to how to get the gritty realities of growing a company even close to the lofty sentiments found in business books.

By workshop two they had held two successful all-company meetings for the first time, had gleaned good ideas from their top managers to tweak their expansion strategy, and could begin to see their company entering into a more mature phase.

Find your voice, business owners. Be who you are. Strive to be authentic. Those may be slogans found on inspirational posters, but these three cases also show the power behind the words.