Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

As an aged capitalist and proud entrepreneur, I like to follow stories about people who run small businesses and those who try to make business ownership a little bit easier.  I recently stumbled on an article on StartupNation, a multimedia company offering “in-the-trenches, how-to content authored by subject matter experts, thought leaders, and business professionals.” Titled “Solve the Real Problem…Not The Symptom,” it caught my eye because that statement is the essence of organizational leadership. Much of the energy within organizations, by which I mean the time and talents of people trying to fulfill a mission, is wasted on dealing with symptoms, not real problems. One example is how we pay for and manage healthcare delivery. Back in the day, when I sported cufflinks and braces (the 80s), my partners and I thought providing health insurance for our people, including ourselves, was a responsibility. We started off paying monthly premiums for employees and their families. Covera...

It's funny how our sense of smell evokes powerful and nostalgic memories. The scent of a particular cologne or the aroma of a familiar dish can instantly transport us back to a specific time and place. When our son warms up his RAM before going to work in the morning, a whiff of its diesel exhaust takes me back to my teen years when I began working for a trucking company in Roseville.  My first duty every morning was to complete a trailer inventory. As a dozen or more trucks idled in the yard, the sweet rumble of well-tuned engines and the smell of diesel exhaust wafted over me as I strode along the fence, from trailer to trailer, making sure the ones that were supposed to be empty were actually empty.  As a naive suburban youth wandering the ground zero of my freight career, I was fond of the smell of diesel and wondered as I moved from trailer to trailer where all this equipment was going that day. Half a century later, I’ve done and seen almost everything in the trucking bu...

This past weekend, I had an experience that gives new meaning to the title of this column, The Long Way Home.  It all started Thursday evening while I was at the Firehall table for our board meeting. I started feeling a bit unwell, and my hands and body started shaking uncontrollably. I made a hurried exit, and after 15 minutes, the symptoms passed. I didn’t spend time worrying. There were dogs to walk and a bed to get to. Friday started as a typical day for an unemployed old man. Toast and coffee at breakfast and a writing project all morning. By lunchtime, I didn’t feel hungry, but I felt okay. Then, at the bewitching hour of 2 p.m. I started with the shake/shiver again and severe shortness of breath. I felt like I was losing it, and anxiety took over. The Bohunk convinced me to go to the ER at North Shore Health (NSH). I finally agreed but told her she should drive—no way I could keep the car in a straight line the way my hands were twitching.  In case I suddenly got well d...

Six years ago, I went under the knife at Mayo’s Saint Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. Since the prognosis for my survival wasn’t clear, I stopped at the Colvill firehall that Sunday to spend time with friends and neighbors and say goodbye. The fall weather was fine. The leaves were past peak but still enough to gaze at them in awe, unsure if I’d ever see them again as I drove the County Road 14 loop. The fine surgeons and other specialists at Mayo worked some magic. I survived. Thankfully, our son, Fernie Junior, had moved in to help with the chores of managing a house in the woods, and I could focus on healing, pacing the front porch multiple times each day to build some stamina. Since those days, I’ve been able to function pretty well in the fall. Cutting, splitting, and stacking a half-dozen cords of firewood, usually finishing just before the first snow. Procrastination could be my middle name.  Knowing that I would be employed to the end of September by the local soil and water ...

This week I’m writing about short-term vacation rentals (STR) and their impact on prices in the local housing market. It’ll take a long way home to get there, so bear with me if you can. Try as I might, I could never understand Twitter. It sucked me into a time-stealing scroll through the outrageous and the boring each day, and I never figured out how to “post” anything or gather a “following.” I'm not an influencer. So when it was taken over by one Elon Musk, a highly overrated businessman, and his villainous friends in the private equity world, I closed my account and spent that hour of Twitter each day doing something more productive. Then, another nefarious capitalist, Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta, started “Threads,” an online clone of Twitter. Once again, I struggled to figure it out. Eventually, I garnered 36 followers, quite a few more than I have with this column, yet far from the number of followers the so-called influencers have. Last week I “re-posted” a missive on Threa...