St. Anthony: Pair of financial pros start anew as headhunters

Sally Mainquist soon will be back in business placing Twin Cities financial professionals in new jobs.

Mainquist, a veteran financial and operations executive and the former CEO of Certes Financial Pros for seven years, left the company last fall.

Mainquist, 58, and Kris Larson, 48, who resigned as Certes' vice president of client services at the same time, opened Veritae Group this year in St. Cloud, outside the geographic bounds of their one-year noncompete agreement. Now an 11-employee firm, it plans to expand into the Twin Cities.

Veritae places interim financial leaders and executives in businesses and nonprofits. Mainquist and Larson are former CPAs and corporate finance veterans. The Twin Cities office will open in late October at the Offices at West End in St. Louis Park.

"We have a nice foundation, and our systems are in place," said Mainquist, who pledged 5 to 10 percent of the bottom line to charity.

Certes was bought by SNI in 2007 from the late Karen Oman, who established it in 1994 as a thriving specialty shop and a celebrated place to work among employees. Mainquist said she left because "SNI had started operating a 'lighter-level' division out of Minneapolis," and she wanted to focus on the traditional business of placing higher-level financial professionals. Mainquist said it became more like Accountemps, a national temp agency for accounting services, and there were other issues.

"It's just a different culture and business philosophy," she said.

Great River says the Elk River plant contributes $25 million annually to the local economy, generates 29 megawatts of power and employs 90 full-time workers.

Each year, about 9,000 tons of steel, an amount equivalent to the Eiffel Tower, and 1,500 tons of aluminum, roughly 100 million beverage containers, are recycled and sold. Ash from the Great River facility is delivered to a disposal site in nearby Becker.

FPX, a Dallas company that makes sales-management software, is having its first national customer conference Sept. 17-18 at the Hyatt Regency on the Nicollet Mall. The reason: Most of the employees and many of the largest customers are here.

FPX started out as Firepond sales software in Mankato more than a decade ago, moved to the Twin Cities and was acquired by Dallas-based Acclaim Financial Group.

The company expects more than 200 people at the inaugural "thought leadership summit" to explore sales software and getting ahead in the Cloud. Customers and partners include Honeywell, Salesforce.com, SAP, UnitedHealth, Hitachi Data Systems, Bell Helicopter and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.

• Terri Krivosha, a partner in the Minneapolis law firm Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand, can add "author" to her résumé. The business and securities attorney just published "Founding a Startup: What You Need to Know" (Aspatore Books; 100 pages; $29.95). The book takes readers through the early stages of entrepreneurship and explains business plans, projections, branding, corporate structure, valuation and equity division between partners. The book builds on Krivosha's 30-plus years of helping small businesses.

"There was no resource out there that combined business and legal issues," said Krivosha, who teaches a class on start-ups at William Mitchell College of Law. "It helps founders determine what they can do on their own and what they need counsel for."

David Phelps

• Unclaimed Property Day at the Minnesota State Fair resulted in 7,437 fair attendees claiming $715,000 through electronic searches at the Minnesota Department of Commerce booth.

Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said in a prepared statement: "It is our priority to make sure that the companies return money back to their customers in the first place, and if not, then the Commerce Department is here to help Minnesota consumers get their missing money back."