His plaques and trophies are highly prized

John Zieska started his business with a paltry $15,000 in savings and what he called "a Pollyanna-ish business plan that had no basis in reality."

The result: The $15,000 quickly disappeared, which meant that when the company finally began to click after two years, "we almost grew ourselves out of business" for lack of capital when costs rose for material, inventory and payroll.

Zieska, 42, is founder of Apogee Commemoratives Inc., a Golden Valley designer and manufacturer of customized plaques, trophies and other corporate recognition products. The company also has a commercial framing service for poster art that clients sell via home decor catalogs.

It all adds up to sales that topped $2.1 million in 2007 and are on track to reach $2.8 million this year. That works out to a compound annual growth rate of 60 percent since Apogee's first full year, in 2003, despite an economic slowdown that has nipped the growth rate down to a mere 40 percent in 2007 and a projected 33 percent in 2008.

The key is what Zieska calls "creative art solutions," a fancy way to describe a product that is custom-designed without additional cost for an imposing lineup of clients ranging from General Mills, Boeing and John Deere to Honda, Toyota and Microsoft.

OK, but what does it really mean? Well, for a research achievement trophy for Dow AgroSciences, for example, it's an aluminum helix wrapped around a glass spire to evoke the shape of a molecule.

Or for a "superstar award" for another client, it's a colorful plaque featuring an electric guitar on a surrealistic background. And for plumbing products supplier Moen Inc., it's an impressionist rosewood plaque dominated by a stainless steel arc that evokes the image of a faucet, the company's key product.

But to smaller clients such as Deborah Morse-Kahn, director of a Minneapolis company that consults on historic preservation issues, customer service is just as important as inventive design. Morse-Kahn came to that conclusion recently when she was helping a client, the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District, acquire plaques to be awarded as part of its 40th anniversary observance.

"Not only was the quality of [Apogee's] awards spectacular, but the service was fantastic," she said. "We were little fish to them, but they treated us like big sharks."

Zieska said he'd always wanted to run his own business, a notion reinforced by jobs he took with a publishing company and a manufacturer of recognition awards who is now a competitor. But he concedes he was a tad naive about what it takes to succeed.

"They made it look easy," said Zieska, who quickly figured out that, as he put it, "everything looks better on paper than it does in the rear-view mirror."

So he labored without a salary for nearly two years, awarded himself less than $500 a week when he did start taking a paycheck and scrambled to stay in business when the orders began piling up in 2004.

"He was a very intelligent, hardworking guy with a rapidly growing business and good control of his costs," said Moritz, now president of a branch of the Landmark Community Bank in Isanti, Minn. Aside from being strapped for cash, the big problem that Moritz saw was that "he was underpricing his product."

With that flaw corrected, the ride has become less bumpy for Zieska. Indeed, random good fortune seems to have attached itself to the business. Consider, for example, the visit a few years back from the representative of a small Twin Cities printing company that was looking for someone to frame personalized world maps it had developed as a piece of wall decor.

"When she came in, I figured it was a waste of time -- it would never sell," Zieska said. "But it took off like a rocket." Today, Apogee's framing business generates about a third of the company's sales, a total of about $700,000 in 2007."

The payoff: "It balanced our cyclical business," Zieska said, explaining that commemorative sales peak in the first and second quarters as companies name award recipients for the previous year's performance.

While Apogee's stock in trade is customized products, rather than the more common off-the-shelf items, five years of work has yielded enough nonspecific designs to fill a 20-page catalog.