photos by georgene bergstrom, photo top right by jonathan hankin
Upsize Business Builder of the Year
"It's been a long journey," says Jeff Backlund, top
and right photo, foreground, whose remodeling
and construction business failed after the
housing market collapse. Now he's inventing
tools including the HydrantBuddy that fill
workers' needs through a collaborative approach.
tunity in Northfield, where a city employee had been injured turning a fire hydrant
on the street. "I took a look. We didn't have
a tool for him," Backlund recalls, so he decided to invent one.
He worked for a year on a prototype that
didn't work at first, but he tweaked it and
tested it until it did. "We worked with 30
cities with the HydrantBuddy," as the tool
is called, "and we redesigned it to work on
all the hydrants across the United States,"
he says.
That operating mode is vintage Backlund, who seeks out sources of information
and pieces together resources to pursue his
goals. In his nomination form he describes
his methods this way: "We managed to put
the pieces in place to design and build a
newly patented, award-winning product.
"Being a small company we have to
draw resources from the existing business
community and local organizations such as
SCORE, American Durable, a government
contract manufacturer, several Minnesota
cities to field test and use the product and
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other companies to help market the products."
Now that tool has a patent, and then
he invented an add-on, "another tool that
does a job in 10 minutes what it used to
take two people half a day to do," he says.
He believes the future for his company lies
in those inventions.
The HydrantBuddy weighs 26 pounds
and sells for $4,500; it costs $2,000 to produce, and he knows he has a long way to go
before the company truly takes off.
But he'll keep educating himself and
others in his quest to build an invention to
fill a need.
upsize december 2013 • january 2014
Backlund was gracious enough to say he
was inspired by participating in the Upsize
Business Builder project, and honored to be
a finalist. "It was a pleasure to be part of it"
and the competition "has given me inspiration to buckle down even harder to achieve
the goals I have for my business," he says.
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