Features

The human diet ain’t what it used to be. With all the hype around non-processed, gluten-free, low-carb, vegan and lactose-free foods, a time-traveler would likely be befuddled by today’s menus and food packages. But that doesn’t seem to faze Mark Battistoni, the vice president of sales and marketing for Sahlen Packing Company, as he sits […]

Martijn Tel breaks down financial executives into three categories. First, there are what he calls blue-collar executives, who wade, elbow-to-elbow with their accounting team, into the thick of balancing the books and compiling reports. These executives are often a necessity for scrappy startups. Then, there are the white-collar CFOs—typically found at larger companies—who focus on […]

Martin Matson, Milwaukee’s Chief Financial Officer, first knew he had a knack for numbers when he found himself stationed—quite by accident—behind the cash register at an annual church fair. He had volunteered for a few summers, but at age 12, this was his first foray into handling other people’s money. “I discovered that I was […]

They can take down 5,000-pound, 20-foot-long solid concrete railings—all in one piece. And that could be on a building as high as 37 stories. “We’re the only ones on the market that can do it,” says Max Santos, founder and president of Ontario-headquartered MAXX North America Group Inc. This is because the company uses two […]

Be it for dairy or beef, raising and tending to cattle is a high-risk enterprise, with cows vulnerable to many infections, and calves especially in danger of scours (diarrhea) immediately after birth. A Portland, Maine, company that’s come up with antidotes for both seems to be giving investors good reason to be bullish about its […]

So what came first, the beer or the can? The beer, of course, but without the can it’s not going far, kegs of any size being unwieldly in the grocery store. And as far as bottles go, customers and shippers prefer cans, because chilled aluminum keeps the suds cold and they’re easier to transport. But […]

A significant number of his longtime clients being up there in years, Michael P. Murray was most gratified in July, when an organization dear to his heart, North Shore Elder Services, was promoted on billboards and social media by the Peabody Area Chamber of Commerce as part of its Chamber for Good program. For Murray, […]

It began, as so many American stories do, with risk and hard work. When John Saul arrived from Ireland in 1851, his first job involved landscaping the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, lending shape and substance to a city still in its infancy, and a nation not much older than that. Today, more than a […]

It took less than two weeks on the job as Catania Oils’ new financial controller for Mike Coutu to identify the one glaring weakness in the company’s process-efficiency efforts—other than using old plastic sight tubes to gauge Catania’s massive vats of olive and vegetable oils by eye, that is. “You could tell just by looking […]

Fresh out of the University of Alabama in 1986, business degree in hand, Mike Ross’s intent was unequivocal: He wanted to be a stockbroker. A banker? Maybe in some other life as an alternative to purgatory. On the advice of industry stalwarts imploring the young man that the experience would do him good, Ross went […]