Professional Services

How to Sell a Business in Minnesota

Selling a business in Minnesota takes six to nine months on average, from the day an owner signs a listing agreement to the day the deal closes. The process moves through seven distinct stages, and the two that consume the most time — buyer engagement and closing — are largely outside the seller’s control.That timeline surprises most owners. So does the amount of work that happens before a business is ever shown to a buyer.Here is what the process actually looks like, stage by stage, according...

Food + Beverage

You Came for Lunch. You're Staying for Dinner

Inside Maple Grove's Take on "Fine Fast-Casual" — Greek Style Article by Kristi Sellers | Photography by Ryan Siemers You will walk in expecting fast food. You are not going to get it, and you won't figure that out until it's too late to mind. You'll order at the counter, same as anywhere quick — menu board, register, the whole transaction over in under a minute. You'll walk toward a table already bracing for the usual: a buzzer, a number on a stand, your name called over a speaker. None of...

Food + Beverage

Twenty-Four Pineapples

That's one barrel. It takes two weeks. Article by Kristi Sellers | Photography by Ryan Siemers Photography Nobody made them do this. At nearly every point where an easier option existed, somebody at Redstone American Grill in Maple Grove looked directly at it and went the other way. The bar. Start at the bar. On the counter in front of you are the barrels: enormous glass vessels packed wall to wall with pineapple. Twenty-four pineapples fill a single barrel. Kelli Amontroy cut all of...

Life + Culture

That Would be Awkward

Nobody knows what a chamber of commerce actually does. Six hundred local businesses do. Article by Tim Doran | Photography by I-94 Chamber The new business owner who called the I-94 West Chamber of Commerce wasn't calling to join anything. She'd taken over another company's storefront and hadn't changed the signage, so customers kept walking in expecting the old business — and left furious about gift cards issued by an owner who no longer existed. By the time she dialed the Chamber, she'd...

Food + Beverage

He Walked Out of Tibet. He Built the Shelf Behind You.

A father, his brother, his son, his daughter, and a restaurant that opened before it was ready. Photography by Ryan Siemers Photography The divider next to the bar at Apa Sushi was in the room before the restaurant was. There was a planter box in that spot when the family took the space, and it took up too much room. So it came out, and something slimmer went in, narrow enough to give the tables beside it a little more air. The shelves the sake bottles sit on are handmade too. Same person...

Style + Beauty

Find Your Signature Contrast

Every closet holds a vote each morning. The unanimous ones are the ones nobody remembers. Article by Amy Seeman | Photography by Provided Steve Jobs had the black turtleneck. Fashion icons like Iris Apfel became known for oversized glasses and bold jewelry. While most of us don't want to wear the exact same outfit every day, there's something to be said for having a recognizable point of view. The secret isn't creating a uniform-it's creating a formula. One of my favorite styling tricks is...

Professional Services

The Money Was Already There

He put a sleepless couple's fears to rest — no script required. Article by Amanda Busby Codney | Photography by Ryan Siemers They had stopped sleeping. It wasn't one bad month. It was the slow kind of worry — the kind that shows up around two in the morning when you're pouring everything into building something new and, for now, more is going out than coming in. The balances were creeping the wrong way. And underneath all of it sat the bigger, quieter fear: that they'd fallen behind on the...

Wellness

Your Hair Is Telling On You

Twenty years behind a chair, and the question that sent her back to school Article by Antara Murdeshwar | Photography by Ryan Siemers Photography Weddings. Breakups. Babies. For twenty years, people told Tabitha Fredrichs everything from a styling chair. The only question she couldn't answer was the one they asked most: why is my hair doing this? Not because she didn't care. Because nobody had ever taught her the science behind what she was looking at. Then it happened to her. Her own hair...

Style + Beauty

Nobody Wakes You

Fourteen steps, ninety minutes, and brand new everything at Glo Nails & Spa. Article by Marilou Grondin | Photography by Ryan Siemers Photography Somewhere down the row at Glo Nails & Spa, someone is asleep behind a heated eye mask. There is always someone. Nobody wakes them. They've stopped watching the clock, and nobody's in a hurry to remind them what time it is. Getting a person into that condition takes fourteen steps. It's called a Japanese Head Spa, and that's four more steps than most...

Style + Beauty

Where Reindeer Stood

The Looneys spent forty years making that building matter. Then they picked Annette Hall to keep it that way. Article by Amanda Busby | Photography by Ryan Siemers Photography For twenty-eight Decembers, there was a man in that building who wasn’t a man at all — not to the kids in the line. He was Santa Claus. The same one, every year, with live reindeer on the lawn and a line that wrapped around a rustic north-woods lodge just south of Maple Grove Parkway. For twenty years, there was a Girls...