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These are big times for the College of Business. It has an MBA program that's gained national recognition. Its programs are expanding and it's establishing new centers of study and practice. And after decades of using Armstrong and Morris Halls, the College is preparing to build its own state-of-the-art building.

Among those looking on are a few alumni who are in the process of reinventing themselves after upheavals in their area of business. After major changes, they're in new and better places that reflect their own interests and personalities. They speak with an energy and enthusiasm that can only come from a successful round or two with the unknown.

The Great Ape

Jay Adams is talking about a sales job he had several years back when he lets out a giggle. It isn't the typical sound someone makes upon looking back at a job they lost, but it's what the co-founder of Crankyape.com does.

Ten years after his 1991 graduation from Minnesota State Mankato, the Woodbury native found himself working as a regional salesman for a firm that manufactured bar code printers.

"I sold the printers that generate those bar codes," Adams says. Out comes the giggle. "Real exciting stuff."

There are similarly scintillating jobs on his early resume, such as selling cash register receipt tape and business forms. Granted, these were major, national accounts and good jobs. But the work didn't exactly get him confused with Indiana Jones.

"It paid the bills but it was still one of those things where I'd get up in the morning and go 'Oh my God, I do not want to do this,'" Adams says. "It's a classic story. The pain was enough finally that I said I'm going to try this thing and I'm going to go with it."

That "thing" was an idea hatched at a Minnesota Wild game. In 2001, Adams had reunited with an old childhood friend, Brian Livingston, who also had an idea for a business. The premise was this: sell motorcycles, campers, snowmobiles and other such toys that had been severely damaged in accidents, and do it on behalf of the insurance companies (for a motorcycle that's been totaled, for example, the insurance company covering it pays for a replacement or 100 percent of the cycle's cost).

The idea had an everybody-wins aspect: Insurance companies got money back from the vehicles that would otherwise remain in junkyards, and customers looking for used motorcycles and the like would find decent bargains.

"He threw out the idea of what is now Crankyape.com, and it was just one of those click moments," Adams says. The two set up shop in their basements, and a year later moved operations to Hastings and eventually to Cannon Falls. Their first year yielded $130,000 in sales. Soon after, they expanded to include providing the same service on behalf of banks that were repossessing vehicles.

Today, Crankyape.com is an online auction center for recreational vehicles that have either gone through repossession or need repair. "It's taken some time, but it's been good to us," Adams says.

In 2007, the company reported gross sales of $35 million, which Adams says is expected to double this year. Headquartered on 4.5 acres in Cannon Falls, the company has 40 employees nationwide with warehouses in Arizona, California, Washington, Indiana, Michigan and Texas.

"I didn't set out to be a serial entrepreneur," he says. "I was just sick of doing what I was doing, working for the man. Now, instead of selling business forms, I'm selling something I'm interested in."

His business courses at Minnesota State Mankato were along the lines of marketing and sales, which, together with early jobs during college, prepared him well for what he considers the dues-paying portion of his career. "I don't think I could have started the company three years prior to when I did," Adams says. "I don't think I had enough experience. The paying of dues is what kind of led my partner and I to where we are now."

Adams says he's excited to see the College of Business taking on an entrepreneurial component to its mission. In particular, he's impressed with the Center for Global Entrepreneurship, launched just recently.

"I'm so glad somebody took that concept and ran with it. We have to prepare these future business owners for how to start their own thing," he says.

The student-run Center offers help and guidance for those interested in striking out on their own in the business world. Adams helps out as a consultant for the group and as an occasional guest speaker in business classes.

"I just see the students out there, they're so interested to hear the little things you don't see in the text book, financing options and all that. That's why I'm encouraged Mankato's going that route."

Mother of Re-Invention

Heather Ludwig and corporate America parted ways after a long relationship. Both are doing well.

Ludwig saw the split coming, however, and took it as a sign to get serious about the track she's on now-becoming a life coach. Even before being downsized from her human resources job at GMAC, she began pursuing certification for life coaching.

What, exactly, is a life coach? It's what it sounds like - somebody who gets you moving in the professional and personal direction you want to go.

"It's someone who's a catalyst," Ludwig says from her Apple Valley home office, "who brings motivation and energy to an individual who's not achieving all they might want to. A life coach can come in and help them see...what's really important to them."

The focus is on self-discovery in work and life, but she doesn't offer specific advice. "I might help them realize, 'oh, engineering's really not what I like to do. I'd really rather go build parks for kids in the community.' So I may help them come to that realization all by themselves, then hold them accountable for setting those goals and achieving those goals."

Providing this sort of personal/professional alignment is something for which Ludwig developed a taste in her years working in various areas of human resources. She's worked for Dow Chemical, General Electric, Health Partners and, most recently, ResCap, a residential real estate arm of GMAC.

Over the years, she became adept at managing groups in areas of professional development. And when the mortgage industry needed to downsize, the time came to manage her own future. In the fall of 2007, she was notified of the pending layoffs. "When the world says, 'hey, now's the time, you have to move on,' you kind of make that choice to do it," Ludwig laughs.

Now a few months into her new vocation, Ludwig has just established a name for her business: Key to Renew, LLC. A marketing plan is on the way, as is a Web site. In the meantime, she's finding clients in a rather low-tech way - networking with friends and letting it be known she's out there.

While she doesn't foresee a typical client, she anticipates working with young managers who want to make the best impression possible as well as veterans who are worried about losing touch. She would particularly like to work with people who want to develop a path toward becoming a CEO. She also wants to help people balance their lives, she says, so their energy is focused on what's most important to them.

At this early stage of her transformation, she still has mixed feelings.

"On one hand, I'm so excited I think about it twenty-four hours a day. I wake up in the middle of the night and go 'Wow, what if I could do this and reach this group of people,' or, 'I haven't networked with this person in a long time, I need to go over and see them.' It's just consuming my energy to go make it happen.

"On the other hand, there's this fear of failure. Totally a fear of 'you've never done this before; you've pretty much had your career inside corporate America. How's this going to go on the outside?'"

She has some plans to remedy the fears - focusing on getting the credentials for life coaching, networking hard and fast with everyone she can think of, taking community education classes on the basics of starting one's own business and even offering free, thirty-minute sessions to give people an idea of what she does.

Another remedy is to recall her experience at Minnesota State Mankato, where her predilection for leadership was well on display. Ludwig was president of the student human resources organization (at the time Personnel Administration Student Club). She was also president of a board of presidents - the College of Business Board of Clubs, made up of presidents from all student clubs.

"Working on that student board helped me foster the skills that I need today," she says. "My days of actually doing student leadership are now kind of paying off. They were skills that I learned early on, carried through corporate America, and I realize in myself that I'm doing very similar things: Building the network around me, building my plan and knowing who you need to talk to."

No Strings - or Wires - Attached

Just as Dennis Miller was starting his first year post-MSU, a new telephone technology called cellular was being developed on the East Coast. It was a promising enough idea, and the federal government took steps to insure against a monopoly by divvying the country into various markets, allowing two licenses each.

It was a technology on which Miller would capitalize, ultimately serving as founder and CEO of Midwest Wireless, the Mankato-based cellular company that at the time of its sale in February 2007 had $350 million in revenue and 700 employees.

"You know the old saying - luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity," Miller says. "But you have to know when you're in that spot. MSU did a good job of that for me."

After graduating in 1982, Miller worked in southern Minnesota for Motorola, and later for a Wisconsin telephone company. His career plans weren't based around telecommunications, but he did find himself increasingly intrigued with two-way radios, pagers and the like.

So when rural service areas were established in Minnesota for cellular licensing, he moved back to Mankato to help create Cellular 2000, a wireless telephone network of which he and several small area telephone companies would become shareholders.

The company's original products were bulky and expensive. The phones had to be mounted in cars at a cost of about $900, and using them cost fifty cents per minute. Even then, Cellular 2000 amassed about 50,000 subscribers in four years. But once the products went from expensive and expansive to fitting in customers' pockets, the company exploded.

"Nobody knew it would be successful, but we had an idea," Miller says. "We live in pockets of dense population with highways in between. We knew if we could provide a service that was affordable to the consumer that worked with where they lived, worked and played, we'd be successful."

From 1994 to 2000 the company went from 50,000 subscribers to 200,000, and in 1995 changed its name to Midwest Wireless. Miller and company built a sharp, 80,000-square-foot headquarters on the edge of town. In 1997 it bought the naming rights to the city's new civic center for $2 million.

In 2005, Miller's Mankato-based business began talks with Alltel for a sale of the business, and it appeared to be the best thing he could do on behalf of the company's seventy-two shareholders.

"The industry was changing at a breakneck pace," Miller says. "Consolidation was happening, and there really wasn't any middle any longer. There was the very large companies, and then small companies." Even with $350 million in revenues and nearly half a million customers, Midwest Wireless was a small company in the industry. The business could continue and remain viable, Miller said, but risks would be higher. The sale price was just over $1 billion.

"So we said it was time to become part of a larger corporation. We didn't exit because things were going poorly. Actually, they were going so well that we timed the high side of the market with a very, very attractive business."

It's been more than a year since the day Miller handed over his security badge to staff at the Alltel headquarters on Highway 14.

"I've had the year that everybody ought to," he says over coffee. His new business card has no logo, no job title. Just his name, address and phone number. Today, Miller spends his time working on a number of boards in the Mankato area, where he still lives. He's also active in keeping ties with the College of Business and marveling at its direction.

"I think it's dead-on. I really like President Davenport's vision, I like the way he's laid it out to where all the folks associated with the university understand and realize where he's trying to take it," Miller says.

When Miller attended business school, the focus wasn't so much on starting businesses but understanding them.

"We were trying to figure out how to become a cog in the machine, yet change the machine through things like the application of technology," Miller says.

"Here we are about to build a brand-new building that's going to change how we deliver a business education to these students," he adds. "And I think it's also going to expand the kind of student that's attracted to come here. Success breeds success."

Joe Tougas is a writer and editor in Woodbury, Minnesota.