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Bio Sleuths
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Cherney Microbiological thrives on tracking down bacteria
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By MaryBeth Matzek
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On a hot summer day, a cheese sample arrives in an overnight mailer, with an urgent request from the cheese maker to solve a mystery: Why – after just a couple of days in the refrigerator – does the cheese develop a foul smell? Bio-detectives are soon on the case. A technician carefully carves off a few slices of cheese and places them in a solution. The solution is lightly spread on the bottom of a Petri dish, then placed in an incubator. Then begins the waiting game – to see what bacteria develops and find out why those culprit microbes are turning good cheese into bad.
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Air Time
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Leveraging the EAA Brand
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By Sean Johnson
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Harrison Ford, Chuck Yeager, Tom Poberezny: Two of these, you might say, match the part of a death-defying daredevil.
Poberezny’s soft-spoken voice and reserved manner just don’t fit the stereotype most people conjure up when they imagine a stunt pilot pushing an airplane to that fine point between breathtaking trick and deadly crash. Yet, the Experimental Aircraft Association Chairman and President did exactly that for more than 25 years, many of them as a member of the Eagles Aerobatic Team.
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Bandwidth Brothers
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Pat and Rob Riordan's cutting-edge communications firm
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By Rick Berg
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Pat calls Rob the futurist. Rob calls Pat the rock.
Nsight CEO Pat Riordan credits his younger brother for ushering the family’s small regional phone company into the high-tech communications world in the 1980s. Back then, a lot of supposedly smart people thought his idea was a pipe dream.
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Building on Brain Power
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Plexus finds success engineering and manufacturing for other companies
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By MaryBeth Matzek
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Imagine going into a restaurant and having a soft drink made just for you, a blend of your favorite flavors. Coca-Cola’s Freestyle machine – a beverage dispenser capable of blending more than a hundred different drinks – has its design, engineering and production roots at Neenah’s Plexus Corp.
Earlier this year, Plexus was tapped by the soft drink producer to build the behind-the-counter Coke machine and a self-serve version. Plexus employees helped design the new machine, which will be built at manufacturing sites in Appleton and Mexico.
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Growing panes
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Family-owned business opens a window to recent success
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By Sean Johnson
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It is an overused sports cliché that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. But in a contrast of times worthy of a Dickens tale, there is perhaps no better way to describe how Tri City Glass & Door propelled itself into its 50th year.
Like countless small businesses nationwide, Tri City faced lean times as the recession loomed in 2008, particularly when the bottom fell out of the construction industry. The family-owned business finished that year with a loss.
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Pride & Power
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Military contracts fuel growth for Oshkosh Corp. - and the impact is felt regionwide
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By Margaret LeBrun
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Bob Bohn enjoys a perk like few other CEOs of major corporations. After an intensive week – meeting clients from Asia, answering questions from top military brass, prodding his team for more innovations and promises to meet ever tighter deadlines – he can climb into a newly minted, high-tech military truck and take it for a test drive.
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Stepping Out
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WebOuts brings personal connection to Web clients nationwide
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By Sean Johnson
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“I’m not doing this. Seriously.”
That’s what John Halechko said after seeing his colleague Scott Fecteau, a fellow senior vice president at Associated Bank, strut around a set in a head-to-toe turkey suit.
As the bank’s director of sales and service, Halechko put his good sport mentality to the test for the bank’s recent associate appreciation campaign. In the spirit of celebrating their employees’ accomplishments, he climbed into a similar costume. With Fecteau, director of mortgage and consumer finance, and David L. Stein, executive vice president and director of retail banking, Halechko starred in a series of WebOuts that appeared on bank employees’ computers the first time they logged into the company intranet that week.
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Measuring up
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Margie Weiss helps companies do the right thing in all things lean, green and healthy
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By MaryBeth Matzek
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Trying to describe how Margie Weiss helps businesses is like describing how a pearl is made. In the case of a pearl, a tiny piece of sand may find its way into an oyster. The oyster’s defense system kicks in and forms a coating around it. The result is truly a gem. It’s a metaphor Weiss likes to use when you ask what she does. The one-time nurse turned school professional, chief executive officer, researcher and now owner of Weiss Health Group gets inside a business, sees what’s going on and helps the organization’s leaders craft something completely unique and new.
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Maverick on Main Street
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McKinley Reserve's Todd Thiel is back to his rural roots, but with global financial muscle
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By Rick Berg
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Sitting in his second floor office, surrounded by dark floral print wallcovering and damask drapes, dressed in a tailored business suit, Todd Thiel is a study in contrasts. Here, he looks
exactly like the Manhattan investment broker he was for the better part of a decade at Shearson Lehman Brothers and Salomon Smith Barney. Open the drapes and Thiel’s office looks out, not over Park Avenue, but over a small park at the corner of Fifth and Main in Hilbert, Wis., population 1,089. About every 15 minutes or so, a car (or more likely a pickup truck) drives by. Outside the restored 100-year-old bank building that houses his business, Thiel himself is more likely to look like the rural Hilbert farm kid he was for 18 years before heading off to college and a big-city life in high finance.
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Neatnik Diva
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Marie Krull and Pro One Janitorial aim to leave competitors in the dust
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By Sean Johnson
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Marie Krull has no problem getting her hands dirty. That’s been good for her career. A native of South London, Krull began her recent career by cleaning buildings and offices in Northeast Wisconsin, a highly competitive market for janitorial services. She has never been afraid to pick up a mop and help out. Now, she is the co-owner of Pro One Janitorial. She may be higher up the ladder, but Krull would never consider it beneath her to pull on a pair of rubber gloves and get dirty in the effort to provide quality service to a client. She once considered it beneath her to cooperate with a former competitor, but after hearing her story, you might say she “cleaned up” in that regard.
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Roll out the barrels
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For Phil Ramlet and OMNNI Associates, seeing orange means big engineering projects and jobs
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By Sean Johnson
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Ramlet could be one of the few souls in Wisconsin who loves the sight of orange construction barrels. Whenever he sees them, Ramlet knows that people are working – hopefully in one of the state’s neglected infrastructure needs. It’s also a good bet that some of the folks involved in those projects work for OMNNI Associates, the Fox Valley-based engineering firm that Ramlet guides as president and chief executive officer. For Ramlet, orange construction barrels are an opportunity, not an irritant. “I really do like the sight of those orange construction barrels,” says Ramlet, who has worked with OMNNI for more than 20 years. “I sometimes have a hard time convincing my friends that those barrels are a good sign.”
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Bug on a wire
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Steve Schneider and Bug Tussel Wireless are bringing high-speed communications to rural and remote
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By Rick Berg
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On a clear summer morning, Steve Schneider stands atop the Bellin Building in downtown Green Bay and casts his eyes northwest, to the horizon and beyond, to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. He can’t really see Alaska from here, except maybe in his mind’s eye. Behind him, mounted on a pole, is a satellite dish that can see Alaska, where about 300 people on Adak Island are counting on Schneider, the Bellin Building and Bug Tussel Wireless to provide them with wireless service.
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The Fixers
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Heartland Business Systems bucks the economic trends by solving others’ problems
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By Sean Johnson
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Peter Helander thrives when faced with a problem.
His passion for finding solutions was evident even in the early stages of his career, when he worked on the mathematical and economic computer modeling that became a cornerstone of the 1985 Farm Bill.
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Deli Dare
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How Festival elbowed into the market
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By Margaret LeBrun
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Mark Skogen was just 19, working on a business degree and playing basketball at Viterbo College in LaCrosse, when on his way home one day he saw a new shopping center under construction not far from a small grocery store his father owned. He jumped on the phone.
“He said, ‘Dad, what’s this Crossing Meadows Shopping Center all about, won’t there be a grocery store there? You’ve got to check on that,’” Dave Skogen recalls.
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Vino Vino
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Wineries a boon to tourism in Door County and Northeast Wisconsin
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By Sean Johnson
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Russell Turco’s passion for wines started early in life.
Perhaps a bit too early, as he tells it, when he and some of his teenage friends were caught up in a bit of youthful indiscretion.“When I was a kid my father caught us swiping some wine from his wine cellar,” Turco recalls in a jovial telling of the story. “I’ve been studying them for more than 40 years now.”
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A passion for people
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CitizensFirst Credit Union CEO Carla Altepeter acts locally, cares globally
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By Sean Johnson
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Failure is not a word often associated with Carla Altepeter.
Words like passionate, driven and committed are the usual superlatives used to describe the chief executive officer of CitizensFirst Credit Union.
After all, she did become a CEO by age 32, helped grow the credit union to one of the largest in the area, works tirelessly on behalf of community organizations in Oshkosh and is involved in international mission work to help improve the lives of others around the world.
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Sassy Startups
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Entrepreneurs buck economic odds to start new careers
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By Sharon Verbeten
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Just about a year ago, Chris Verbeten never would have believed that her drug peddling days would be cut short.
But when the Merck pharmaceutical rep was downsized in spring 2008, the former preschool teacher from De Pere was too young for retirement and too vibrant to sit still.
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TEC cracks the code for success
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When it’s lonely at the top, TEC offers the ultimate sounding board
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By Margaret LeBrun
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A dozen business executives gather around the table, joshing and joking as familiar friends do. The chatter dies down as Phil Hauck convenes the meeting.
“Today, we’re going to talk about your b-hag,” Hauck says. They all know that’s BHAG, short for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Among them:
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A wicked impact
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How Susan Stockton has helped turn the Fox Cities P.A.C. into a regional epicenter for the arts and
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By Rick Berg
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Appleton’s College Avenue is not quite a yellow brick road, but by the time the Broadway show Wicked completes its 25-day run at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center at the end of this month, the cash will be flowing outward from the P.A.C., along the avenue and elsewhere in the Fox Cities. In a similar engagement two years ago, The Lion King drew more than 88,000 people to the P.A.C. – many of them from far enough away to require a hotel stay and many more of whom left some dollars behind at bars, restaurants and retailers in the Fox Cities.
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