Hey, it has been a while! We are back to weekly posts, it was a prosperous end of 2023 for the company, it was a wonderful year for us! I am not talking about the financial performance, frankly that is given that we did good in 2023. It was a wonderful year for our impact on our team and community.

I was listening to this week to a story about how life changing a job opportunity we provide to a staff member changed their entire life, it brought tears to my eyes. I do not cry, if you know people with my last name that is not something we do. This so moved me I did not even know what to say, but this is one of the most rewarding things I have heard in a long time. It is a huge accomplishment to our team our management and culture of our organization.

Rewind a few years, we would not have had this impact, we did not have the culture of growing our people and taking care of them. We were a profit first organization, like most businesses, we focused on profits. It was always, how can this be done cheaper, grind down the vendors for lower pricing, the staff were here just to do a job, the facility was old and run-down, there was no path to a greater future for the staff, which meant there was no future for the company. The customer experience was not the best either, year over year profits or sales were in decline. We were on the road to irrelevancy.

It was the late summer of 2019 when I vividly remember sitting in a well-established local coffee shop café having lunch with my parents, Dale Grasdalen (Dad) the founder of our company, and Jane Grasdalen my mother who has held the ship together for over 30 years. (Mom you are tough.) If you know family business you know this is not for the weak, running a long-lasting business is brutal in today’s marketplace. In our conversation they were both tired, both with over 30 years in the books running the company. They had done an excellent job of getting it in a place where it was debt free and had a strong balance sheet, they wanted to be done.

We looked at selling the company, it would have been the straightforward way out. Mom and Dad would have been retired with a modest income in retirement and I would have gone back to “Corporate America.” Well, we did not sell as there was not something right about it in our collective “gut check” of how we were feeling. It was not right, there was something we did not agree with, there was more to be done with the company, though we did not discuss it.

It was a few weeks later, the last week of August and it was cold out for that time of year, I was wearing a jacket and remember sitting in the front window of that same coffee shop and saying, “I do not want to sell, lets make this into something different.” My mom started to cry and said that she did not want to either, and Dad said, “whatever you want to do I support it.” That was it. I left there and we started this journey.

Business is not about the profits, (I know you need them to be sustainable) but it is about the impact we can make on our communities we live in. Impact to help our customer and vendor partners grow, which helps their staff grow, which helps our company grow, which helps our staff. It is a big circle of self-betterment for people. If we can think as business leaders more about taking care of our people, the more success they will have, the better our companies and communities will be.

This feeling when you walk in our front door is palpable. Everyone has respect for one another, they are here to help, we are one team. The facility itself is beautiful but what goes on inside is even more, each person his helping one another and there is a positive feeling in the company. When we have guests in, they all remark on this feeling of positivity and capability that the team provides. Everyone cares and has the best interests of all in mind, we do not have the “that is not my job” mentality, everyone knows BSC is special and the privilege it is to be part of the team. This as I said, this culture did not exist a few short years ago.

Over the years, we have supported the Bemidji Career Academies and the TAAD department at Bemidji State University, and other programs such as Mi2. All of these have been wonderful and have been a baseline for our student work partnership, we believe in supporting growth and education, exposure to our industry and business has been transformative. We have hired people who have zero experience in this industry and have trained them to be the best. A life changing job for many.

In addition to helping people, we have been part of supporting small businesses. We have been a part of a few entrepreneurial endeavors and have watch success come from our partnerships. It makes me immensely proud inside to see a customer’s products improve or made possible by our support. Though most of our business comes from the established market, these entrepreneurial endeavors are what keep us innovating and not standing still.

In closing, it is not about the money. When we change lives, that is the most satisfying feeling you can have as a leader of a company, I would not trade it for anything.

It is not about the money

Resource Bemidji