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Health & Fitness

An Udderly Fabulous Idea

Sometimes a great business idea can be right in the palm of your hand.

Not so long ago, Cheryl Mohn was milking cows on her family’s dairy farm in rural Lakeville, MN, when something dawned on her. There had to be a cleaner, more efficient way to transport the towels she used to sanitize a cow’s udders before attaching the milking machine.

She started noodling on the problem and soon enough the Towel Tote™ went from idea to reality and Mohn became the president of a new company, Udder Tech, Inc.

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Shortly after going to market with the Towel Tote™, a competitor approached Mohn to purchase Udder Tech or to manufacture the product for her in China. She turned to Dick Enrooth, a consultant with the Minnesota Small Business Development Centers network, for advice.

Enrooth helped her to quickly research the competitor and the overseas production opportunities. He urged her to aggressively go to market with an ad campaign, and find her own manufacturing in China.

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Together, they developed a strategic plan to strengthen the company to be in a position to deal with any new competition entering the marketplace, and tightened up her accounting system to get a better handle on her costs. As a result, Mohn remains firmly in control and has branched out with many more products.

Today, Udder Tech designs and markets a wide variety of innovative, quality solutions for clean, efficient dairying worldwide.

“A mentor from the business world is just what a young business needs. Just having someone else to talk with and to get suggestions from is so beneficial,” says Mohn, pointing out that the services of the SBDC were essential to her success. ”Where would you find someone like this without paying an arm and a leg?”

Enrooth predicts that managing growth will be the company’s next big hurdle. “With Cheryl’s continued growth and expansion, I keep asking how big she wants to get,” he says. “At the rate she is growing she may need to consider more space, larger inventory and more employees. We have sidestepped this issue several times, but it will be our next discussion item this spring.”

It’s a nice problem to have, though. Aspiring entrepreneurs can learn a lot from Mohn’s example. She built on her deep, practical knowledge of the dairy industry - experience gained from three decades of work - that led her to new innovations and a new business.

She leveraged her knowledge, played to her strengths, and when she saw an opportunity, she grabbed a hold and started milking it for all it was worth.

Read the rest of this post on our blog: http://mnbusiness101.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/an-udderly-fabulous-idea/

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