By All Means
Making business work in Minnesota. Entrepreneurs and leaders share the stories behind their beloved brands, and the ones you’ll want to know next
Episodes
May 7, 2025 • 55 mins
Bruna Valente was a corporate marketer working in industrial manufacturing when a health scare sent her on a personal wellness journey, which led her to the rainforests of her native Brazil. There, she discovered natural botanicals that inspired her to create her own skincare products—face oils and lotion bars. She quickly realized they were good enough to sell. Minnesota-made Terrain Brazilian Botanicals is a small, but growing be...
Mark as Played
April 23, 2025 • 63 mins
Angie’s Boomchickapop–one of the most legendary homegrown Minnesota brands in recent history and the benchmark for just about every new packaged food startup hoping to make it big. As the story goes: Angie Bastian was a nurse; her husband Dan Bastian a teacher. They bought a kettle corn machine off the internet in 2002, and started selling at festivals, in hopes of making some extra money. Soon they were selling to grocery stores, ...
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April 9, 2025 • 48 mins
In our first Mentor Series pairing, Chuck Runyon, co-founder of Anytime Fitness, the world's largest fitness franchise chain, and its parent company Purpose Brands (formerly Self Esteem Brands), which includes Orangetheory Fitness, Waxing the City, and several other franchise businesses in beauty and fitness talks about transitioning out the CEO role to board chair. He offers advice to Melanie Richards, founder and CEO of goGLOW. R...
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July 31, 2024 • 54 mins
A chemical engineer turned community development organizer, Anthony Taylor shares the career journey that led him to founding Melanin in Motion, a Community Wellness Center program that connects children of color—and their families – with active pursuits like skiing, cycling, kayaking. Melanin in Motion was a Twin Cities Business 2024 Community Impact Award winner.
“I noticed my white friends, when they think about preparing thei...
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July 24, 2024 • 50 mins
Peter Mogck and Matt Frakes turned their love of Minnesota lake life, and their desire to start something of their own into Paddle North, a water gear manufacturer best known for its inflatable paddle boards. The company marks its 10th anniversary this year, now with a team of 25 employees, and a line of products that has expanded to include kayaks, utility docks, and apparel
The founders share keys to their successful partnership...
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July 17, 2024 • 42 mins
Pet Evolution is a fast-growing pet supply chain that started with one locally owned store in Woodbury, Minn. back in 2012 and has really picked up steam in the last couple of years since it started franchising. There are now seven stores in the Twin Cities and St. Cloud, and 15 nationally. By the end of the year, 24 are expected to be open, from New York to Oregon.
In the $147 billion dollar pet industry, Rian Thiele saw a space ...
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July 10, 2024 • 50 mins
Dr. Aho is a surgeon and scientist with an insatiable appetite for invention and more than 20 patents to his name. He was still in his surgical residency at Mayo Clinic when he spotted an opportunity that led him to develop a medical device now in use around the world.
Tension pneumothorax is a life-threatening emergency that occurs when air builds up between the lungs and chest wall. It’s not especially common, but it’s one of t...
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June 26, 2024 • 49 mins
It started as a fun project with his kids: creating the “best hot cocoa in the world.” After countless tries, Dean Packingham thought he had succeeded, and everyone who tried his instant cocoa mix agreed. Named for his kids, Mike & Jen’s Hot Cocoa debuted at specialty shops in their hometown of Duluth. Today, it’s sold in more than 1,300 stores nationwide including Costco, Target, and Meijer. Packingham has grown his home project t...
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June 19, 2024 • 54 mins
“People think, oh, it’s just a catchy slogan. No. If marketing does it’s job, it’s what does your brand stand for and how do you buy things. If we do that really well, we’re the number one growth driver of a business.”
Margaret Murphy is the founder and CEO of Bold Orange, a Minneapolis-based marketing agency focused on customer experience, growth, acquisition, engagement, and retention. Her company frequently shows up on “best w...
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June 12, 2024 • 60 mins
“I thought, you know what I could do? I could make games.”
Julien Sharp is a game inventor and industry executive who moved to Minnesota in 2022 to head up the U.S. division of Paris-based Asmodee Group, a global game company with a portfolio that includes Catan, Spot it!, Ticket to Ride, and Star Wars X-Wing.
An avid game player, who can solve a Rubik Cube in 45 seconds (which she says is amateur stuff), Sharp started out in ...
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June 5, 2024 • 52 mins
Lisa Lavin is on a mission to change the way the world cares for the people we care about.
“We don’t have enough resources to take care of the number of people that are aging. So how do we do that? We leverage technology.”
Lavin the founder and CEO of Ōmcare, a digital health company that pioneered the Home Health Hub, an interactive telehealth solution which monitors patients taking medication. It makes remote care possible and...
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April 24, 2024 • 59 mins
If you spend any amount of time in or around the startup community in the Twin Cities, you will no doubt hear the name Daren Cotter. Today, most people know him as an investor and advisor—his personal portfolio includes more than 100 startups—primarily software as a service and tech. But before Cotter could focus full time on investing, he had to have an exit of his own. That was InBox Dollars, the rewards-based digital advertising...
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April 10, 2024 • 51 mins
Laura Roos started Minny & Paul as a way to take the hunt out of discovering high-quality, locally made goods. She launched in 2016 with a selection of themed gift boxes that she thought would be popular with bridal parties or for housewarmings. But very quickly, businesses started requesting large orders of boxes for clients or staff. Today, 80% of Minny & Paul’s business is B2B and the company has gone beyond Minnesota to spotli...
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March 13, 2024 • 51 mins
Ashley Hawks was a successful working model, in print and on runways around the world. But when she thought about her goal of making a magazine cover, she realized, “I’ll still be promoting somebody else's brand, somebody else's lipstick, somebody else's clothing line. And it was this light switch of, I want to be on the cover because of something I did, because of something I built. I want my name next to my picture.”
For her fir...
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February 21, 2024 • 53 mins
“We’re going to be helping hundreds of thousands of patients with our device and that’s probably more than a lifetime of patients I could see as a physician.”
By the time Allisa Song started medical school at Mayo Clinic in 2018, she was already the founder of an active medical device startup company called Nanodropper. The idea came to her in 2017, when she happened to read an article titled: "Drug Companies Make Eyedrops Too Bi...
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February 14, 2024 • 58 mins
Sean Higgins knew he was spending too much time on his phone—going down a YouTube rabbit hole when he meant to go for a run, or call his mom. But rather than fighting the ever-present phone, he imagined a new way to utilize the technology that sits in the palm of our hands—a better way, if you will. BetterYou is a digital coach that uses artificial intelligence to map how we spend our time and make suggestions to fulfill the goals ...
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February 7, 2024 • 67 mins
What happens after a founder appears on Shark Tank, and walks away from a $250,000 offer? For Beth Fynbo, her Busy Baby activity mat saw six weeks worth of online sales in in three days. “And two weeks later,” she says, “no one had heard of us.”
“I thought Shark Tank was going to be life changing, and it was—just not in the way that I thought.”
Fynbo, an Army veteran and former health care account manager, was a new mom when ins...
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January 17, 2024 • 61 mins
“Where passion meets frustration creates motivation.”
Erin Pash is the co-founder and CEO of Ellie Mental Health—one of the fastest growing franchise chains you’ve probably never heard of—yet. The Mendota Heights-based company opened its first franchise clinic in July 2022. Now there are more than 200 Ellie Mental Health clinics open around the country with another 450 sold and under development.
Pash is driven by the desire to...
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January 10, 2024 • 55 mins
When your arteries are blocked, you see a cardiologist. For cancer, there’s the oncologist. But for the 13.5 million Americans dealing with a serious wound—from surgery, an injury or disease, an ostomy bag, or old age—there’s often no one coordinating care until the problem becomes a crisis. Nima Ahmadi saw the white space, and co-founded The Wound Company in 2022 with the intention of creating a coordinated, cost effective solutio...
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January 3, 2024 • 55 mins
Kristen Denzer is the founder and CEO of Tierra Encantada, a Spanish immersion daycare that is on its way to becoming a national brand. Currently there are 11 locations in four states—two of them are franchise centers, and an additional 20 franchise units have been sold. It’s already a $22 million business, and Denzer is just getting started.
Tierra Encantada is actually her third startup; Denzer started her career in nonprofits,...
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