By All Means

Behind many popular drink brands—Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Celsius Energy Drinks, Pabst Blue Ribbon—is BevSource, a St. Paul based company that provides beverage development, sourcing, and production—everything from supplying the can that holds your beer to helping develop and test an entirely new drink idea. Today BevSource is one of the largest packing and ingredient distributors in North America, w...

"We call it the health care system, but really, it's the illness-burden-treatment system. There are so many things we can do to improve in health care." Tony Miller and Dave Dickey are serial health benefits entrepreneurs who've built and sold multiple companies, leading the way toward consumer-driven insurance programs. The most recent is Bind Benefits, an on-demand, zero-deductible program that...

Nora and Jay Schaper are serial entrepreneurs with a big idea: rid the world of single use plastic bottles—starting in the bathroom. Experts told them salon-quality shampoo couldn’t be produced in solid form, but that only made them more determined to come up with a winning formula. They did, and HiBar launched in 2018. The line, which has grown to include face wash and deodorant as well as solid...

Feeling homesick drove Argentinian native Belén Rodríguez into entrepreneurship. But grit and tenacity have helped this first-generation immigrant take her grandmother’s empanadas recipe from backyard parties to farmers markets to the frozen foods case of major grocery stores in just five years. By the end of 2022, St. Paul-based Quebracho Empanadas expects to be in 250 stores throughout the Midwe...

Adam Turman is one of Minnesota’s most prolific working artists today, known for capturing state icons like Paul Bunyon and the Stone Arch Bridge in vibrant illustrations. He’s also unapologetically commercial, selling his drawings on giftware, apparel, prints, and murals seen around town from Surly Brewing to his latest, and largest, yet: a 220 foot by 40 foot scene on the side of a parking ramp...

The Surly Brewing story is the stuff of entrepreneurial legend in Minnesota, but in recent years, founder Omar Ansari has had to contend with an industry wide decline of beer sales, diversification of the adult beverage market, pandemic shutdowns, and changing employee expectations. “Things have changed and we’re having to change with it,” Ansari says. Over the summer, Ansari got back to his roots...

Zoë Levin saw opportunity in the toilet paper aisle to create a high design brand committed to sustainability. Armed with a $10,000 Kickstarter fund and a whole lot of moxie, she believed she could compete against the likes of Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark. Bim Bam Boo, made of fast-growing bamboo fiber and packaged in colorful paper wraps, launched in 2018 at a direct-to-consumer brand. Lev...

From farmers market novelty to grocery store mainstay: Minnesota-made Maazah, a line of Afghan-style chutney sauces, is poised to break through through the global foods aisle to become a mainstream condiment, much like Sriracha. Founder Yasameen Sajady takes us from her mom’s kitchen, where she got the idea to bottle up the flavors of her family dinners that weren’t readily available at Western st...

Appearing on a TV remodeling show may be the quickest path to notoriety in the interior design space today, but Bria Hammel is more interested in building an enduring business. She’s leveraged social media to cultivate a following of more than 200,000, which helped to build St. Paul, Minn.-based Bria Hammel Interiors into a national design firm. In 2018, she parlayed her expertise into a retail bu...

Amin Aaser was an entrepreneur in search of a problem, and then he realized the problem that had been with him his whole life: feeling different. Embracing his faith as a Muslim while also living his best life as an American. Aaser, along with his brother, launched Noor Kids with the goal of “raising Muslims who build a better world.” Initially, that took the shape of a magazine. Then came books,...

Years before chatbots burst into the mainstream, a trio of Minneapolis-based fishing enthusiasts launched a data-driven e-commerce shopping platform for anglers that gets smarter the more people use it. Omnia Fishing, founded in 2018 is disrupting the $5 billion dollar U.S. and Canadian tackle industry by offering a shop-by-lake e-commerce experience that connects customers to the gear they need b...

"If I had listened to people around me, I wouldn't have proceeded after three months. This is a risky business and maybe it isn't going to work and I'm going to look back and say I spent $300,000 and four years of my life, but I do believe the end is in sight." David Swan is the founder of PUR Golf—that stands for Producing Unmatched Results. PUR golf is a training aid designed to help golfers imp...

Isaac Lien was a college student in California who wanted to stay in touch with his grandma in Iowa. When popular video conferencing programs proved too complicated for her, Isaac decided to develop his own simplified software tool. It worked. Issac’s father Scott Lien immediately recognized the potential. Scott was a career corporate technologist who had worked for Target, Best Buy, and Bank of A...

Frustrated that pills weren’t making her heart patients feel better, Minneapolis-based cardiologist Dr. Elizabeth Klodas went looking for other answers. She started with a simple question for her patients: “What are you eating?” and was shocked to find more than a decade ago ago that she was often the first medical professional to ask her patients that question. “All of a sudden it dawned on me: w...

"If you're someone who can express yourself, be an expert, gain the trust and be an authentic with an audience, there are unlimited outlets. Media in some ways is more interesting than ever. In other ways, it's harder than ever." Straight out of journalism school, Stephen Regenold turned his passion for outdoor adventure into a newspaper column called GearJunkie. A few years later, in 2006, he lau...

Twin brothers Rob and Ryan Weber famously started their first company, Freeze.com, out of a St. Cloud State dorm room. They had their first exit before graduating, and a decade later, sold tech startup NativeX to mobile ad platform mobVista for $25 million. All told, the Webers have been involved in more than 50 startups. Today, they're focused on funding them through their venture capital firm, G...

It took nearly a decade for Tim Murphy and his father Dennis to build Softies into a modestly profitable women’s loungewear brand, and just one mention by Oprah to catapult it into a whole new stratosphere. A career manufacturer’s rep specializing in women’s apparel, Dennis Murphy decided to start his own company in 2006. Inspired by his wife Peggy who was battling leukemia, Dennis Murphy created...

She may be the only beauty industry executive who is also a veterinarian with a Ph. D. in molecular biology. In 2009, Dr. Simone Xavier founded Sigma Beauty with her husband Renee Filho, while working as an assistant clinical professor within the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine. By day, she led a lab that developed vaccines and diagnostic tests. By night, she studied beaut...

“Art is about exploration, process, potential.” A glassblower by training, Jackson Schwartz is an entrepreneur by instinct. A graduate of the Australian National University, renowned for its glass program, Schwartz returned to the Midwest to teach, and co-founded the Hennepin Made glass lighting studio in 2012 with the goal of creating jobs for his students, and himself. Today, Hennepin Made manuf...

The decision Lisa Hannum made back in 1998 to leave the world of large communications agencies and start her own, to find balance as both a mother and professional, proved prescient as she scaled through the years. It made her agency especially adaptable when the pandemic hit. Beehive Strategic Communication had always been a hybrid workplace, where employees knew they could get a haircut in the m...

"There was no one better positioned to build a solution than the three of us," says Jazz Hampton, co-founder and CEO of TurnSignl, a tech platform that provides on demand legal advice to drivers with the goal of deescalating police interactions and ensuring that everyone "gets home safe." The app launched in 2021, a year after the murder of George Floyd at the hand of a Minneapolis Police officer....

"A white haired gentleman came in the door and said I heard about this deal at the Minneapolis Club and I want to invest. And I'm sitting there going, I don't see and women—white haired or otherwise—knocking on the door saying I heard about this deal and I want to invest."  In 1998, Cathy Connett co-founded one of the nation’s first angel investment funds. Sofia Fund invests in high-growth, women-...

Dan Mallin and Scott Litman have become synonymous with entrepreneurship in Minnesota. Together, they’ve co-founders several successful technology startups starting with Imaginet in the 1990s and moving on to Magnet 360, a marketing tech firm they sold to Mindtree in 2016 for a reported $50 million. In all, they’ve had four exits of their own, and advised countless others. Beyond their own compani...

“I didn’t start The Stable for it to be big. But it probably had to be big because we had a big idea.” Chad Hetherington is the co-founder and CEO of The Stable, a “next generation” retail rep group that was acquired by Accenture in the summer of 2022, after just seven years in business. The Stable takes an omnichannel approach to launching products and has help digitally native brands such as The...

For 8 million K-12 students and their parents, Infinite Campus is as essential to schooling as pencil and paper. The software platform serves as an administrative support tool for more than 2,000 school districts across the country—managing class schedules, tracking grades, collecting lunch money, scheduling conferences—all to minimize paperwork so that teachers can focus on teaching, and parents...