A St. Paul bookkeeper bought the store he balanced the books for, plastered his family's name on it, and left it to all nine of his kids. Three generations later, they still won't sell.
Two bankers with 38 years between them walked out of a big bank in 2001, opened Venture Bank in a Bloomington office park, and spent the next 17 years signing up more than 5,000 Twin Cities companies - until Choice Financial bought the whole thing.
One of North America's largest Ys traded a geographic name for a directional one - and kept doing the unglamorous work of raising kids, teaching swimming, and holding neighborhoods together.
For more than a century, Children's Minnesota has designed care around the biology, fears and families of young patients. Its scale is large, but its strategic advantage is unusually specific: everything is built for kids.