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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
May 2004

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Upsize Growth Challenge: Workshop one

Upsize Growth Challenge: Workshop one

Winning formulas

Three CEOs deploy different strategies
to meet single goal: success

by Beth Ewen, Neil Orman and Elizabeth Martin   To win the Upsize Growth Challenge, the owners of three different companies wrote compellingly about the many tactics and strategies they’ve concocted to meet their goals.

One truth applies to all three winners: They have ambitious dreams for their companies and they actively pursue resources and information to help them get there.

As winners of the 2004 Upsize Growth Challenge, presented by Fredrikson & Byron, they gleaned advice from nine experts in finance, law, technology, telecom, marketing, accounting, operations and other subjects in a three-hour workshop in March. We report on the workshop, which applies to all kinds of growing companies, in the pages that follow. The winners are:

• Floorworx Distribution Services, Rosemount, a commercial floor-coating service owned by David Miller, which recovered from near collapse last year with a new national client and the potential for exclusive rights to a time-saving technology.

• GateKeeper Systems Inc., Apple Valley, which makes software to control vehicle access at airports and is headed by Lynn Richardson. He wants to apply the systems to related industries as interest in security explodes.

• P.M. Bedroom Gallery, Blaine, a bedroom furniture retailer owned by Jim Borofka and Maynard Huth, which sells from two stores, soon to be three, and fights low-priced imports with high-quality, regionally made products.

The Upsize Growth Challenge is a contest created by Upsize magazine to connect three winning small companies with hands-on advice to help them grow. Selected from dozens of entries by a panel of judges, the three winners will participate in a second workshop in May, and present their cases along with the experts’ best tips for all growing companies in a breakfast event June 16. (See announcement page 27.)

To enter next year’s contest, watch for nomination information in the December issue of Upsize magazine.

Presenting sponsor is Fredrikson & Byron law firm in Minneapolis; and sponsors are technology consulting firm Clientek in Minneapolis, business banker Crown Bank in Edina, accounting and consulting firm EideBailly of Bloomington, and telecommunications firm Eschelon Telecom Inc. of Minneapolis.

Upsize magazine thanks the sponsors’ experts who dedicated themselves to helping the winners meet their growth challenges.

— Beth Ewen