Better Together

Talk about a win-win. The Little Falls-based Initiative Foundation, which aims to foster thriving economies and communities in the 14 counties it serves, is a long-time ally of Enterprise Minnesota, consistently partnering with us to advance our mission of helping small and medium-sized manufacturers grow profitably.

Our organizations recently teamed up to offer another boost to manufacturers in central Minnesota. Last month we hosted several Lean 101-style sessions for central Minnesota manufacturers with fewer than 150 employees. More than 75 participants attended the free-of-charge sessions and learned immediately actionable steps to take back to their companies.

“Small and mid-size manufacturers can use support for this lean work so that they are working smarter and not harder. We want to help them improve their bottom line through efficiency,” says Donniel Robinson, entrepreneurship programs director at the Initiative Foundation. “Small manufacturers are very core in our region, and they help with economic stability and provide good-paying jobs.”

Robinson teamed up with Andrew Busta, a business development consultant at Enterprise Minnesota, to design the workshop. “Our goal is to help them lower their waste, improve profitability, and start from the ground-level up with lean thinking,” Busta says. “We want to get it into the bones of the organization if it’s not already thinking lean.”

While many companies turn to continuous improvement and lean manufacturing to operate as efficiently as possible, small and medium manufacturers often lack that expertise in-house—losing potential for operational gains or a cushion to carry them through rough times. With the Initiative Foundation’s support, we were able to offer smaller manufacturers the expert guidance they need to implement important lean principles.

Among the participants were Josh “Willy” Willenbring and Nicole Seybert of Create a Legacy, a 128-year-old Little Falls company that makes memorials for individuals, cemeteries, and monuments. They attended a morning workshop, and by that afternoon, they were meeting with co-workers to discuss ways to incorporate some of the practices they learned.

“The workshop honestly was mind-blowing,” says Willenbring, company president, who heard about the opportunity at a meeting of his Enterprise Minnesota Peer Council. “We both had a pile of takeaways. It was a big eye opener for me.”

Their key insight was the importance of getting employees involved in any continuous improvement initiative that touches their work, Willenbring says. Thanks to the workshop, he saw that engaging employees in a lean project and getting their ideas is more effective and helps ensure that the changes last.

Willenbring’s experience, multiplied by the large number of participants, was exactly the goal of the sessions

The success of the workshop, and the value to its participants like Willenbring highlight the importance of partnerships with those who support manufacturing. When we leverage those connections, we magnify the number of manufacturers we can help to grow profitably.

For more details on the workshop, check out the next issue of Enterprise Minnesota® magazine, set for publication in late August,

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