Small Business Saturday was this past weekend, and I’ve been thinking about something I don’t mention enough: the people who took a chance on us.
Mindset is a small business. We started 15 years ago in Minneapolis with an idea that SAP could be better if you actually designed it for the people using it. What we didn’t have was customers.
Target changed that.
Their procurement team didn’t have to work with us. We were unproven and small. But they believed in entrepreneurs, and they helped a guy who grew up in Minnesota and went to the U of M turn an idea into a company. And more than that, they coached us on what it meant to work with an enterprise at their scale. That mentorship made all the difference.
I’m eternally grateful.
From Minneapolis to Nationwide
Fifteen years later, we’ve grown to over 300 people with offices across the U.S. and India. We’re an SAP Gold Partner, the first U.S.-based AppHaus Network Partner, and a leader in SAP BTP and Business Data Cloud. We’ve won SAP Innovation Awards. Our work gets featured at SAP TechEd and Sapphire. It’s crazy to type that!
But none of it happens without people willing to bet on a smaller firm.
Minnesota companies were especially good at this early on. We’ve now worked with nearly every Fortune 500 SAP customer in the state—Target, Cargill, Medtronic, CHS, 3M, General Mills, Xcel Energy—and that opened doors nationally. Today we work with enterprises across the country, from utilities to manufacturing to retail. They saw past our size and focused on what we brought: speed, quality, and people who actually pick up the phone.
That’s what small businesses offer. We can’t rest on our name, we have to bring quality and results every single day.
It’s Not Always Easy
I won’t pretend it’s been simple. Plenty of companies default to the big consultancies—even after repeated problems—because the brand feels safe. Large procurement orgs are built for billion-dollar vendors. Ninety-day payment terms are standard for them; for a small business, that’s the difference between making payroll or not. It means a lot of great talent never gets a shot.
But here’s what I’ve seen over 15 years: companies that diversify their partner base get better outcomes. Small firms bring urgency. We push each other. Everyone performs better.
Thank You
So on this Small Business Saturday, thank you. To Target, for believing first. To every company that gave us a shot. To the individual believers inside those organizations—the procurement leads, the IT directors—who advocated for working with a smaller partner when it would’ve been easier not to.
You took a chance. I hope we’ve made it worth it.
Happy Small Business Saturday.
— Gavin
