Sara Boyum loves her home town of Battle Lake. After graduating from high school, she went off to college, knowing one day she would return.
And lucky for Battle Lake, she did! Simply put, the downtown might look totally different today if not for Sara’s drive to open businesses.
If not for Sara, Stella’s Restaurant wouldn’t be serving great food or The Rusty Nail’s delicious burgers would never fill you up. Neverwinter Clothing wouldn’t exist and Neverbetter Market and Wellness wouldn’t open later this summer. No doubt, these are important assets for the Battle Lake vibe.
So Sara, have you ever been called a serial entrepreneur? “Yes, more than once,” she laughs.
Where did this passion for business come from?
When Sara was nine years old, her family lived in Moorhead. She remembers grabbing her 7-year-old sister to ride the bus to the Moorhead library. Sara wasn’t looking to find the children’s section; she wanted to look at business plan books. Back then, Sara even wrote letters to her mother asking to rent the garage for a business venture; her mother still has them.
Her obsession with business building started young. Now it didn’t come from family role models; her mother was a nurse and her father worked for the railroad. “It must be inborn,” she laughs.
“I’ve been doing this (building businesses) as long as I can remember,” she says.
Sara always wanted a restaurant and that dream came true with Stella’s opening in 2007. Some years earlier, she moved back home from Minneapolis. But she didn’t find many “cool places to drink wine and sit on the patio or have food besides a cheeseburger and fries.
“I guess I wanted something more than what was here,” she continues. “I knew there was something missing, and I knew I can’t be the only one who wants something more to experience because we live in a tourist community” with people visiting from bigger cities.
After Stella’s, the Old Brick Inn tavern became available and Sara again invested in remodeling, renaming and making The Rusty Nail a place where everybody knows your name.
At that point, she took stock. “The restaurant scene here was hoppin’” she said, “but the shopping scene was stale. So I was, like, well, I’m gonna open a store.”
She opened Neverwinter, a clothing and gift shop, next to the Rusty Nail. She found a market for custom t-shirts and opened a sister store in Walker, Minn.
Then last year, she purchased an old second-hand shop. By the time you read this, Neverbetter should be open for business. Neverbetter will feature fresh salads and grain bowls, smoothies, gifts, a selection of foods not found in the area, a fitness studio with a sauna, massages and more.
What advice does Sara offer for today’s entrepreneurs? “Location to me is number one,” she says. “And beyond location, location, location, it’s what fits where you are at. What can your community handle or sustain? If this wasn’t a tourist town, I wouldn’t do some of the things I did.”
And there is risk. “I lot of people don’t like to risk anything, but I’m obviously a risk taker. It’s a big risk to do a lot of stuff, it’s a lot of money, but I never think to myself, oh geez, what if it doesn’t work. Never ever.” Confidence, she adds, comes from planning.
Were these succession businesses in a plan for Sara? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
But if you’re a serial entrepreneur, it can cure the fever!
