Hall of Famers

You will be introduced in this issue to this year’s inductees into the Minnesota Business Hall of Fame, five of Minnesota’s most accomplished business leaders of all time.

Although each has achieved success in a distinctive way, Ray Barton, Don Helgeson, Don Kotula, William Marvin, and M. A. Mortenson, Jr., have all led at least one competitively superior business organization while making substantial contributions to their communities outside of business. They join a group of 41 outstanding Hall of Fame members inducted since 1999, when my predecessor, Tom Mason, initiated the Hall of Fame and choose of its first class of five inductees.

One member of that group, Earl B. Olson, died last December in his home in Willmar at age 91. He was the founder of Jennie-O Turkey Store, Inc., the world’s largest grower and processor of turkeys and an innovative developer of turkey products, including turkey bologna and turkey ham. I first met him in 1974, the year I married his daughter. For the next 32 years, he was a friend, an occasional advisor, and an example of how to live a life of achievement and service.

His achievements have been thoroughly reported. After several years of growing ever-larger flocks of turkeys, he became a processor in 1949, when Minnesota held a less-than-significant role in the turkey industry. By the time he sold his company to Hormel in 1986, it had developed hundreds of new products—turkey rolls, loaves, hot dogs, pastrami—and entered dozens of non-U.S. markets. After the sale, he joined the Hormel board, remained Jennie-O’s chairman, and went to his office nearly every day. On his 90th birthday, he danced at the party and took pride in describing Jennie-O as a company with more than $1 billion in revenues, 7,000 employees, and 1,300 products.

He shared several traits with other successful entrepreneurs, especially an ability to discern opportunities unnoticed by others—in his case, opportunities to sell turkey parts and processed meats, not just whole birds. He focused on long-term goals and long-term business relationships; he eschewed transactions that would cause another party to hesitate to do business with him again. Faced with a dilemma, he would focus on it for days at a time, approaching it from one angle after another.

He could be impatient, however. On a Thanksgiving vacation, Tom Mason and I planned to golf with my son Nicholas, who was not quite 10 years old. Mason suggested that Nicholas drive the cart. “I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve never done that, have you, Nick?” “No,” he answered, “but I’ve driven Grandpa’s Cadillac.”

When was that? “Last summer, in New London. We stayed off the busy streets.” It wasn’t long before my wife asked her father if he thought a nine-year-old was mature enough to drive. “I’m getting old,” he answered. “I didn’t know if I could wait for him to turn 16.”

Olson’s philanthropic activities and volunteer work were extensive. Buildings at Concordia College in Moorhead and Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul are named after him; so are a street in Willmar, a YMCA building, and a Moorhead skyway. He received many awards, including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and the Stiehl Prize for Excellence in Agriculture. His obituary noted that he was a member of the Minnesota Business Hall of Fame.

In alphabetical order, the other 40 are:

Al Annexstad joined Federated Insurance of Owatonna as a sales representative. In the next 17 years, he opened offices in five states and doubled the number of Federated clients in the South. From the time he became CEO in 1999 until his Hall of Fame induction in 2006, he built Federated into a company with $4.5 billion in assets, annual premiums of $1.4 billion, and a surplus of nearly $1.5 billion.

Elmer L. Andersen, newspaper owner, one-time governor, and longtime chairman of H. B. Fuller. Anderson, who died at age 95 in November 2004, was known for setting and achieving ambitious goals at Fuller, although his favorite newspaper task was writing editorials.

Bill Austin, founder of Star-key Laboratories, the largest hearing aid company based in the United States. As CEO, he guided the company’s growth to more than $420 million in revenues and 3,700 employees. His Starkey Hearing Foundation has fitted 100,000 needy children with hearing devices.

Dale Bachman, who in 1992 became a fourth-generation president of his family’s floral and nursery company, expanding its product lines into plant-care products, tools, and home décor items. The company employs approximately 1,100 individuals throughout the year and 1,600 in peak seasons.

Earl Bakken, inventor of the modern battery-powered heart pacemaker and cofounder of one of the world’s leading medical technology companies, Medtronic, where he was CEO from 1957 to 1976 and senior chairman until 1989.