Energetic Enderlin

I just love to get to a town extra early for a talk so that I can take a tour of the community. I wasn’t disappointed that I flew into Enderlin, ND (population 947) late the night before my presentation so that Tamra Kriedeman, the local ED person, and Jon Morris, president of the local bank, could fill me in on the economic activity and give me a tour.

Jon told me of how he and 30 other individuals in the town each invested $10,000 to buy, demolish and rebuild their only motel in town. The 17 unit motel was an $800,000 project that wouldn’t have happened without dedicated local people working together.

We visited several entrepreneurial trucking operations, one of which has gone from hauling fly ash from the boilers at the local ADM crushing plant, to backhauling tree waste and grinding it for an alternative fuel source. Dwight Fraedrich, started the business in 2001, did 15,000 tons of wood chips last year and plans to do 40,000 tons this year. He has seven trucks, has over $1 million invested in wood grinders and plans to expand into grinding used rail road ties. He plans to double in size in 2006. He is typical of the inquisitive, innovative entrepreneurs that I always meet in my travels.

Jon helped to coordinate the financing for an $8 million terminal grain facility that is able to load unit trains of grain. It involved merging five separate grain coops together into a new LLC and is a wonderful example of working together regionally, rather than only looking at it from one individual communities standpoint. Keith Brandt, local manager, told me, “We did 17.8 million bushel last year and loaded 36 unit trains. We are now the biggest shipper on the CP’s USA lines. We’ve been able to unload as many as 230 trucks/day.”

Enderlin’s big industry is an ADM crushing plant on the outskirts of town, which employs 100 people. It was built in the early 1980s as a sunflower crushing plant and billed itself as the worlds largest. The plant burned sunflower hulls as a fuel source, which worked just fine when sunflowers were king in ND. But today sunflowers have been replaced by soybeans and the plant has been converted into a switch plant, able to crush numerous oilseed crops. They’ve added edible bean production and soymilk into a new building on the plant grounds.

Plant Manager Richard Irish explained to me why Dwight Fraedrich’s work is so important to his financial success, “At today’s fuel prices we will save $400,000/month by using wood products in our boilers versus using oil or gas.”

We toured other entrepreneurial enterprises in the morning before my talk. Jane and Sherm Syverson bought the local hardware store 8 years ago. Sherm told me, “We compete on service. We have a Mayberry mentality about things—we can do that!” Kevin Hartl is expanding his meat locker to be able to sell all over the state. Joe and Kelly DeNardo and their children Angela, Tim and Montana moved to Enderlin a year ago and opened a new restaurant downtown. They are originally from NY, but as Joe said, “we don’t miss the lack of traffic jams at all.” And Ruth McCleerey bought the local weekly newspaper in Enderlin 14 years ago.

There are a lot of pieces moving at the same time in any town, but when people work together and entrepreneurs are encouraged like I saw in Enderlin, it all comes together. Enderlin was a very impressive town for its size.