A career she loved. A community she wanted to serve.

Woodbury Mayor Anne Burt joins Sam McKinney for a conversation about a family decision that reshaped her life and the public responsibilities she later chose to take on.

Anne had built a high-ranking career at a Fortune 500 company in a male-dominated water industry. She loved the work and valued her advancement. Leaving full-time corporate work to be more present for her three young children was a difficult choice. She describes the adjustment, the part-time consulting she continued, and the school, coaching, and neighborhood involvement that became part of her family's life in Woodbury.

Her interest in contributing to that community grew into city commission work and, eventually, serving as mayor. Anne discusses planning how Woodbury grows, bringing her water-industry experience to infrastructure issues, and leading through COVID while crediting city staff and residents. She reflects on the responsibility of people trusting her to lead and the community giving behind Power of 100 Women, Greater Woodbury, which she cofounded with Gab Yacovella and Kelly Lindstrom.

Sam shares his own career turning point, connecting the personal choices about family and fulfillment with the practical work of contributing to the place we call home.

In this conversation

• The career Anne loved and the challenge of advancing in a male-dominated water industry.
• Her difficult decision to leave full-time corporate work and be more present for her three young children.
• How she continued consulting part time while becoming involved in schools, coaching, and neighborhood life.
• Her progression into city commissions and planning how Woodbury grows and develops.
• Her reflections on water infrastructure, residents' frustrations, and working with staff and the community through COVID.
• The trust involved in leading a city and her community work with Power of 100 Women, Greater Woodbury.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome to East Side Enterprise
01:09 The St. Croix River and finding home
07:20 A career she loved and the decision to focus on family
09:20 Sam's decision to make a change
11:44 Parenting, part-time consulting, and community involvement
16:24 Time with people who matter
19:35 Chemistry, business, and a career in water
23:25 Family background and growing up with change
26:40 Volunteering, city commissions, and public service
29:30 Planning for a city across generations
34:30 Water infrastructure and residents' frustrations
41:02 Leading through COVID and other challenges
45:45 The person behind the public role
46:33 Four schools in four years
48:48 Noticing people who feel left out
50:48 Serving beyond city duties
51:20 Power of 100 Women, Greater Woodbury
56:30 Legacy and giving back
58:33 Getting involved and voting

Links

• Anne Burt
• Power of 100 Women, Greater Woodbury
• Official Minnesota voting information
• East Side Enterprise

Kathy Hill's career started because somebody was paying attention. She was closing up at a Hardee's when a man finishing a late dinner told her he had been watching how she talked to the people she worked with, gave her his name, and said to come find him if she ever needed a job. Four months later she needed one. She knocked on his door, got hired at a concrete manufacturer, and fell for the masonry and landscape trade hard enough to stay in it for more than twenty years.

She learned it from the people doing it. "It was crusty old masons that taught me all about brick and mortar and stone. It was the landscapers that taught me about how retaining walls are built. It was excavators that taught me about soils." Today she supplies brick and stone for new builds and restorations, including the ones where the original kiln no longer exists and the match has to be found rather than ordered.

The other half of the conversation is about time. Kathy left South Africa at twenty intending to come back, met her husband ten days after arriving in the United States, and could not afford the trip home for six years. It took nine years to become a citizen. She lost her mother in 2011, her father this past May, and one of her brothers two and a half weeks after that. What she draws from it is not despair but a rule she keeps repeating: you do not know when the last hug was until it already was, so make the time now.

Also in here: why nobody punches a wall in a South African house, what face brick is and why almost every old building downtown is covered in it, the difference between asking a client what they want and showing them a wild card they did not ask for, and her case that the artists will save us.

Learn more about Jireh Brick & Stone at jirehbrickandstone.com.

Jane Stobbie Keer’s whole career has one shape to it. "One thing that brings me more joy than anything else in life is elevating people. To walk into a room, teach them, give them knowledge, and have them walk out an inch taller than when they walked in."

She came by it honestly. Her mother was a special education teacher who worked with dyslexic children. Jane got her start at Apple in the UK, took a Mac SE home when almost nobody worked from home, demoed fourteen Newton MessagePads that could not reliably read handwriting, then spent twenty years running Train with Jane, teaching PageMaker, Quark, Photoshop, and the earliest web design software to anyone who walked in.

We get into the two women who each handed her a client list when she started over from nothing, the free classes she still teaches through the library system, the genuinely excellent story behind a surname like Keer Keer, her mother Carolyn and the Wall of Hope, and complex regional pain syndrome type 2, which she has lived with for seventeen years and which is the reason she recorded this episode standing up.

Elizabeth Yang goes by The Deal Fixer. Companies call Better With Company when deals feel like they should be moving and are not, and her work sits in an unusual place: half sales process and strategy, half whatever is going on inside the person trying to sell.

She did not plan any of it. She had a comfortable consulting career until a stranger messaged her on LinkedIn, described a business that was stuck, and asked how much she charged. "I was like, I don't know. I guess I got to figure that out. I guess I got to start a business."

We get into moving from Fresno to Minnesota at twelve and becoming a linguistic chameleon, why hearing the Hmong language feels like home, the mortgage broker whose hands shook every time he picked up an application, the $50,000 price of being nice, and why you cannot turn Walmart shoppers into Nordstrom shoppers no matter how much you care about them.

My guest for Episode 5 is Mitch Bliven, founder of Genius Network Solutions, though this conversation is far more about the man than the company.

Mitch grew up wanting to be a short order cook or a stand up comedian. He went to college for business, felt completely out of place, and switched to social work, then left that to become a police officer, and left that too. By 24 he had two careers behind him and, by his own telling, felt pretty lost. Construction taught him a trade. Spreadsheets taught him he loved solving problems. And a pattern of burning out roughly every 18 months finally led him to a 10-minute assessment that, as he puts it, gave him ten years of understanding of his burnout in one sitting.

That assessment was the Working Genius, and it became the foundation of his work. Mitch now describes himself, only half joking, as a "corporate social worker," helping people and teams understand where they find joy and where they find pain, and build work around it. We get into a lot: why "where do you find joy in work" is a question almost no one gets asked, the difference between wanting and needing something, why connection beats every other source of happiness, and what it actually feels like to start a business.

In this episode:

• The line cook, the comedian, the cop, and the social worker: how a winding path led to his real work
• The 10-minute assessment that explained a decade of burnout
• Why "where do you find joy in work" is a question we almost never ask
• Wanting versus needing, and giving yourself permission to want what you want
• Why connection, not the Porsche, is what we are actually chasing
• Being kind to your younger self, and trusting that the dots connect looking backward

Learn more about Mitch's work at leadwithgns.com.

East Side Enterprise is hosted by Sam McKinney and produced locally by McKinney Creative Ventures. Know a business owner whose story should be told? Reach out and tell me who I should talk to next.

Gary Borglund wears a lot of hats. Through his nonprofit Generous Harvest he sources fresh produce and eggs from local and Amish farmers and gets them to food shelves in rural food deserts that rarely see anything fresh. Through Land and Egg Solutions he helps cities and small towns assess and revitalize aging buildings, like the old Burlington Northern railroad station in Taylor's Falls, and navigate the grant world that funds the work.

We talk about the reality of food insecurity, why small-town downtowns need an anchor to survive, the value of doing the assessment before you open a can of worms, handshake deals with Amish farmers, and why Gary chooses not to draw a salary from Generous Harvest. His closing advice comes back to Hudson's Be Kind project: give people the time to be heard.

Henry Schneider founded Open Window Productions, a video marketing agency in Oakdale, and co-owns Hangtime Board Shop, a skate shop in North St. Paul, with his partner Adam Bonin. A MCAD film grad, he got his start at Fox 9 before being poached by Channel 5, then built his own company.

We talk about learning through expensive mistakes, why a great video is about how it makes you feel and not the gear, and when authentic and unpolished beats corporate and slick, a lesson the skate community taught him fast. We also get into handling Google reviews, using AI to buy back time, and the honest challenge of balancing a growing business with a family.

Tim Voit is one of the most well-networked people in the East Metro and St. Croix Valley. He runs and facilitates a slate of networking groups (Networking With a Purpose, Center for B2B, Slice of Woodbury, a fractionals group) and is a Woodbury Chamber ambassador, all while building his LegalShield practice, where he has never missed a bonus and has ranked top ten in the country.

Tim left corporate ten years ago and had to relearn who he was. In this conversation he unpacks the Go-Giver philosophy that drives everything he does, why nobody should try to grow a business alone, how he gets people through fear to clarity, the rise of the fractional workforce after the pandemic, and the hardest Midwest lesson of all: being open to receive. He is also a contributing author, and the only man of twenty, in the bestseller What the Frak.