only 80 miles of distance between them.
“My goal is to get together with these areas and say, ‘Let’s talk about what it means to work together,'” Erickson says. “It’s a larger geography, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do joint programs that attract people here. Because it’s not about weather when you’re losing people to Minnesota.”
Erickson grew up in Mondovi, WI, a small western Wisconsin city located roughly 100 miles from Minneapolis and 180 miles from Madison. While hanging around the family hardware store growing up, he says he learned the importance of customer service and how treating people well engenders loyalty. He recalls his dad fixing someone’s toaster for free, even though it wasn’t purchased at his store—maybe that man would buy his next toaster from the family’s store.
“Growing up in a small town, you really wanted to help each other out like that,” Erickson says.
In choosing to return to Wisconsin and work at his alma mater, Erickson says he sees that the challenges and people might be different today. “But they still want to do what I wanted to do when I came here, which is have more opportunities, maybe more choices, than my parents did. I want to help them with that.”
