Gutknecht tours start-up Beacon Promotions

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- First District Congressman Gil Gutknecht got his jobs tour of recent start-up Beacon Promotions Friday, but if he was planning to do a little hand-shaking with the firm's 50 employees, he was out of luck.

"We wondered about his coming today because we gave our employees both Friday and Monday off for the Fourth of July holiday," said Art Olsen, Beacon's president and one of its 11 owners.

So, he didn't get to see any of the firm's imprinting, stitching or assembling of 225 different promotions products that the firm produces in action. But he did get a guided tour of the firm's plant on Bridge Street, saw the machines that are used to produce the products and was briefed on how Beacon Promotions came to be.

Gathering first in the company's conference room, Olsen, Kevin Poirier, the firm's CFO, and Brett Olsen, its director of operations, told their first district congressman how, after being incorporated in April 2003, they established instant cash flow by buying two firms that were producing different types of promotion products.

"We should be doing around $5 million this year (their first fiscal year). We're close to cracking our overhead nut, and by the end of next fiscal year, we should be in the black," Olsen told Gutknecht.

When the purchases were made, none of the employees of either the Roseville or Pella, Iowa, firm came with the sale, Poirier said, so that simplified the transition.

"The phone and fax numbers that those firms were using remained the same so by the next Monday after the purchase, we were shipping orders. We've moved a lot of companies so we're pretty good at that sort of thing," Olsen explained.

Both Olsen and Poirier have a lot of experience in that type of business, they told Gutknecht, because they both were affiliated with Advertising Unlimited and its successor business, Norwood Promotional Products, Inc. in Sleepy Eye before starting Beacon Promotions.

Gutknecht said he was finding that the agricultural economy in Minnesota is the strongest it's been in some time. He also learned on this jobs tour the firms he visited this week are doing "very, very well."

Olsen told the congressman that "ordinarily the promotion products business is not particularly sensitive to the economy, but this time we (the industry) really got whacked." However, Beacon Promotions wasn't impacted because it is aiming at a market that most of its competitors overlook, Olson said.

"We're aiming at the large part of the target. Our specialty is the small order, the ones nobody else wants."

"We've got our equipment set up so that we've cut the set-up time on a small order from a half hour to 10 minutes. This allows us to get the order shipped the same day," Poirier said.

When asked what the firm's main concern as far as federal government is concerned, Poirier quickly replied: "The cost of benefits. We have every type of benefit here."

When Gutknecht told them other businesses he had talked with listed the awards in product liability lawsuits, Olson replied: "That's a big plus for our business. We don't have to deal with that issue because we don't sell to the public."