[believe]
EDITOR
Beth Ewen
bewen@upsizemag.com
DESIGN DIRECTOR
Jonathan Hankin
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Georgene Bergstrom
gbergstrom@upsizemag.com
ADVERTISING SALES
Wes Bergstrom
wbergstrom@upsizemag.com
Brenda Armstrong
barmstrong@upsizemag.com
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© 2013 Upsize Minnesota Inc.
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4
upsize december 2013 • january 2014
"I don't think it was highly profitable," he
says with a laugh about one venture, when
he received a bowling set as a gift and set up
a bowling alley for the use of paying clientele. "But it was fun to come up with things
that customers could enjoy and provide a
value."
Arvig is the Upsize Business Builder of
the Year, selected by our judges for strong
revenue growth at WaterFilters.net, to be
sure, but also so much more. He's a young
man who can make selling a water filter—or
to be precise, $37 million worth of water
filters a year—sound like the key to world
harmony.
Based on the growing numbers of people
signing on to help him reach his goals, we at
Upsize are believers, too.
Beth Ewen
Editor and co-founder
Upsize Minnesota
bewen@upsizemag.com
photo by Jonathan Hankin
PUBLISHER
Wes Bergstrom
wbergstrom@upsizemag.com
It's Grill Day at WaterFilters.net,
a monthly event, and 60 employees are
packed into a warehouse in Zumbrota
wolfing down home-baked ham, roasted
turkey and lots of pie. They're asked to raise
their hands if they've been there one year,
and most hands shoot up. Two years? Most
hands go down, and by six years only one
hand remains in the air.
That's because in 2008, "we had one person here," says Jamin (pronounced JAY-min)
Arvig, who started the company in his tiny
apartment while attending law school at the
University of Minnesota. It was a way to get
into the e-commerce business and generate
some cash—$1 million in revenue by that
year, selling water filters—and also the year
he decided to fully commit.
Since then the growth has been relentless,
doubling in revenue each year, he says, and
last year hitting $37 million. After the grub,
he and other leaders outline more ambitious goals for 2016—tripling revenue and
doubling the number of employees. He'll
need all the "core values" and "weekly pulse
metrics" and "merchandising accountability charts" and "culture ambassadors"—all
presented in great detail to the assembled
staffers—he can muster to get there.
Arvig seems intent to leave his startup
days behind and instead embrace the trappings of much larger corporations. In addition to the items mentioned above, he has a
formal board of directors, for example, and
he's hired consultants to help the company
identify opportunities and grapple with
growth. He's pushing his team to not be the
amazon.com of the water filter business, but
rather to go higher level.
"It's a pain in the neck to find this stuff,"
he says about water filters and air filters and
other "healthy living products," as he encourages his employees to think about their
offerings, when the big-box stores may carry
them but then quit. "We've made a way to
make it easy."
This isn't the first venture for Arvig. That
would be the mini-golf course he started
in his backyard in Plymouth when in grade
school. "I figured it was a waste of space
to have all that grass there," he says. "I was
selling things literally before kindergarten.
Through elementary school I had all kinds
of little businesses, and through junior high.
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