Three Journeys

Combs spent his career working for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). There, he deployed the FAA weather camera program across Alaska, Hawai’i, and the Lower 48. There are currently about 200 federally owned Automated Weather Observing System (AWOS) systems installed at airports around the United States, and more than 500 non-federally owned systems.

But there are drawbacks to the FAA system. Combs says the AWOS setup costs up to $2 million to install and, when a system goes offline, it might remain that way for weeks or months.

By contrast, Montis’ setup can be installed for around $25,000, allows users to pan, tilt, and zoom the camera, and it offers up-to-date weather monitoring on the same screen as the camera. Users pay a small yearly maintenance fee. If a system goes offline, Combs says his staff receives a notification and often can remotely fix the system before the user is aware it’s offline. If it can’t be fixed remotely, a new MWOS can be shipped and, upon arrival, installed in half an hour.

The other big difference, Combs says, is that a buyer can put the MWOS wherever they want. For example, although there’s already an FAA AWOS station at Barter Island, near Kaktovik, that system is notorious for being frequently offline. North Slope Borough bought an MWOS, giving Montis a side-by-side comparison tool. As of this writing, the Barter Island FAA site was offline, but the Montis MWOS showed it was a blustery day in Kaktovik with wind gusts of up to 58 knots and low visibility.

Alaska has around 400 public use airports. Not all of them have been equipped with the FAA AWOS system, as in the case of Rampart. Montis allows communities or users to install a system on their own, without having to wait for the federal investment.

Combs built the first few units in his garage in 2023, tapping into the knowledge base of friends and family. The first two units were installed at Merrill Field Airport, where they’re still up and working, and a third went to Rampart. In 2024, he set a goal to build twenty systems over the year and treat them as prototypes. They’re now part of the FlightVis system, working in locations around the state and Outside.

Last year, Combs rented a shop with office space upstairs to grow his manufacturing lab. His company made its public debut at the 2025 Alaska Airmen’s Association‘s Great Alaska Aviation Gathering in Palmer. Combs expects to be busy attending trade conventions this year, bringing the company—and its staff that now numbers seven—more fully into the manufacturing phase, provided he can find funding to assist that growth.

“We have proven that, yes indeed, this is a very viable product, a viable company. Now we’re looking for seed funding to bridge between now and our first hundred systems,” he says. “We want to build them in networks. On the North Slope, we have five of them there, and we want to build out the rest of the North Slope so all the communities can enjoy this combined service with the FAA. Our next target this year is Western Alaska; there’s a lot of airports and communities that have very poor service or no service there. We really intend to become the leader in transportation observation systems, providing observations and security services nationwide.”

Steady as She Goes

Not every entrepreneur wants a rapid upward growth trajectory. For some, it’s about finding the sweet spot and holding steady with incremental growth.

Dale Banks, owner of Loopy Lupine, makes custom-printed, compostable coffee cups. It’s a business that grew organically over time, not unlike the flower that grows prolifically along the Homer Spit Trail, for which his business is named.

Banks started his business in 1997, selling office supplies and other items made from recycled materials. “I had restaurant owners and coffee shop owners and others coming in, asking me for things like napkins and containers for takeout that were compostable,” he says. “I transitioned into that niche business, and I kept growing… and ended up expanding into Kenai and Soldotna.”

His customers asked about custom-printed cups, but everywhere Banks searched, the custom cup orders were too large for Alaska-sized restaurants and coffee shops. So Banks started looking into the cost of printing and making the cups himself.

“It wasn’t the best planning, I guess. I had built a warehouse a couple years prior to that, with the intention of just wholesale distribution. The next thing I know, I filled up my space with just the manufacturing equipment,” Banks says. That was about fifteen years ago.

Making coffee cups takes up more space than one might expect. Banks starts with a large roll of heavy paper and runs it through a roll printer for custom prints. Then the cup shape is punched out of the paper and run through a cup forming machine. Another machine checks the quality of the cups, picking out any that have blemishes or are improperly formed. One last machine sleeves the cups so they can be packed into boxes, ready for customers. Many of those boxes stay on the shelf until needed, Banks says—most customers don’t have adequate storage space to store thousands of cups, so Loopy Lupine stores the formed cups for customers, ready to be shipped when the customer needs them.

“We’ve come a long way from where we started, just incrementally,” Banks says. He still sells other environmentally friendly products as well, from compostable takeout containers to environmentally friendly paper towels and cleaning products.

Banks and his four employees keep busy. He handles machine repairs and does most of the printing but relies on others to operate the machines. He also finds ways to optimize the equipment, such as upgrading the machines to run faster.

The decision to stay right-sized is clearer in the face of economic uncertainty. Tariffs enacted in the last year have had a significant effect on his bottom line. Sourcing the paper Banks needs to make compostable cups is a challenge—in large part because Loopy Lupine is a small operator.

“In the US, it’s very hard to find someone who will sell to us. We’re considered fairly small potatoes up here; I haven’t had much luck with a domestic source,” he says.

Prior to the new tariffs, his paper came from China. He’d visited the mills, had a business relationship with the operators, and could trust the product.

“That was destroyed due to this administration. We’re not pleased with that, obviously,” Banks says. Finding a new paper source has been challenging. One paper order resulted in bad side and bottom seals—leaky cups—and that spelled waste and also a damaged reputation. “We ran out of paper for a while because I thought that was going to be a reliable source,” he says.

He’s since found a potential supplier in South Korea, with lower tariffs than China, and is testing out four rolls. He’s hopeful it will work. But those losses, and the added costs due to the tariffs, are costs he’s eating, not passing along to customers.

“We’re not the cheapest cup. We’re already using compostable paper, and we have the custom printed labels,” he says, noting that if he raises the price, it might turn customers away.

Growing the business might seem like an attractive idea, but there’s a point at which stepping up requires a significant amount of investment—and that money might not pay off. Banks says he sold through a distributor for a while, but the margins between additional sales and the percentage being paid out for distribution was thin.

Now, scaling up is further off the table. A focused expansion effort would require investment in machines with a faster output—and those machines aren’t manufactured in the United States, so the investment cost might be more than doubled when tariffs are added.

For the time being, Loopy Lupine is content to use the equipment it has, focus on incremental growth to maximize production capacity, and handle its own distribution on the Kenai Peninsula. Companies elsewhere in Alaska use the cups too; his customer list stretches from Nome to Gustavus—and Banks says he relies on UPS to ship those orders, keeping a direct line from Loopy Lupine to his customers.

“I feel like going direct to the end customer and dealing with them… is sort of our specialty,” Banks says.

The Sky’s the Limit

For other entrepreneurs, the journey starts out as a slow climb and keeps climbing and climbing, with no indication of leveling off.

Watching Food Network’s Cupcake Wars at slow moments while working in her father’s office led Kastle Sorensen to try her hand at uniquely flavored cupcakes, which she brought into the office to share. That led to coworkers requesting a dozen here and there.

“More and more people kept calling me and I was like, ‘Huh, maybe this is something,’” Sorensen says. She tested sales at local farmers markets—Eagle River, Palmer, Anchorage—and consistently sold out. On her first try, she sold 100 cupcakes in 30 minutes. Clearly, this was something.

Sorensen had a food truck built and went on the road. The cupcake truck business took off, and Sorensen competed on Cupcake Wars, winning Season 9 in 2013.

But it didn’t take long for her to realize the food truck wasn’t an ideal bakery. The steam from ovens inside plus cold temperatures outside wasn’t a great mix. “I was getting locked inside my truck because my doors were freezing shut,” she says.

So she built a garage on her grandfather’s Eagle River property, large enough to house the truck and a bakery. A single mom with two young children, she’d spend days with her kids, then drop them off with their grandmother and work in the bakery all night. “It was the only time I could work uninterrupted,” she says.

She expanded her dessert repertoire to include chocolate-covered strawberries, cookies, peanut butter pie, and cheesecake sandwiches. She made a peanut butter pie and dropped it off at several restaurants, hoping to strike up a deal as a wholesale supplier. Matanuska Brewing Company agreed to sell her desserts, and soon others followed. Today, Kastle’s Kreations desserts are selling in about twenty-five restaurants around the state.

In 2021, Sorensen’s distributor reached out with a possible partial contract with the Alaska Railroad, supplying desserts for train travelers for the last portion of the summer season. Her team finished the season with the Alaska Railroad and prepared for 2022, an order for 50,000 desserts. Kastle’s Kreations supplied those and more.

“At the end of the season, they asked for 1,000 mini cheesecakes and would say they’re good for a week, then the next day they’d be out,” Sorensen says.

With proof she could mass-produce tasty desserts, Sorensen went back to a restaurant she’d sought a deal with earlier: 49th State Brewing. She got that contract but ended her distributorship contract as well as the contract with the Alaska Railroad, changes that opened the door for a new direction: grocery store sales.

Three Bears Alaska was the first grocery store to carry Kastle’s Kreations treats on their shelves, starting in January 2025 after roughly two months of meetings. For a while, Sorensen and her crew were self-delivering to Three Bears, a process that took four to five hours in the cupcake truck.

“When I started talking with other companies like Fred Meyer, Greatland Distributing reached out. They made a great offer,” Sorensen says. She started working with Greatland in September. “I didn’t lose any money going with them. I got the same amount [of income] through Three Bears, plus I get more through new clients. It’s been a really good partnership with them.”

Kastle’s Kreations has weathered some turbulence along the way. For some would-be buyers, packaging was an issue. Clear tops that showcase the dessert don’t hold up well in the walk-in freezers where they’re stored. When workers would transfer them from truck to store or truck to train, the brittle plastic might break, resulting in a dessert that could no longer be sold.

“We’ve had so many clients that want our product but say, ‘Unless you change packaging, we won’t buy the product.’ In Alaska, it’s hard to find packaging,” Sorensen says.

The Montis Weather Observation System consists of a single unit containing both weather equipment and a 360-degree camera. The units are made in Palmer, along with a tilt-down pole for easy maintenance and repairs.

She has spent nearly six months trying to find new packaging. A trade show in Las Vegas last year turned up some possibilities, but not the perfect option. Finally, Sorensen resorted to scouring Amazon, where she found a container that looks like it might work. But at $0.26 per container, they’re double the price of her previous containers.

“I only make $0.75 per cheesecake, but it’s a matter of getting these contracts or not getting these contracts, so I have to sacrifice the $0.13 cents to make that,” she says.

In January her team was at a stopping point until the new packaging was ready for use. But downtime isn’t really a thing for Sorensen. While things in the bakery slowed, she was busy in the office. She met with representatives from Target, Safeway, Costco, and local military base commissaries, looking for a way into those stores.

Working with the large chains is a whole different process, Sorensen says. She reached out to Fred Meyer about two years ago but got no response. After she taped an episode of Inside Success TV’s Legacy Makers in March 2025, in which she describes her journey as an entrepreneur, she heard back from Fred Meyer executives interested in starting the discussion to carry her desserts. She brought samples in, talked with a district manager and corporate staff, and sent more samples overnight to the corporate offices.

New products often start out with a pay-per-scan arrangement, in which the business owner provides the products and gets paid each time a product is scanned for purchase. Once the grocer has proof customers like the product, the business can switch to invoicing, in which the grocer purchases wholesale inventory and pays upfront.

There are a lot of small obstacles and bureaucratic bungles that inevitably happen along the way, from getting the invoicing and purchase order systems set up to agreeing on a fair in-store price. It was enough to cause Sorenson to doubt if it’s all worth it, but she persisted and was ready for the launch date.

Sorensen, who has a solid following on social media, had told her customers to expect to see her cheesecakes in stores on a certain date. But everything was delayed by a day, and Sorensen spent the day fielding calls from customers who said they’d been to several locations but hadn’t found her desserts. It was ahead of Thanksgiving, she says, and people wanted the desserts on their holiday table.

“I had people coming to the bakery and Pink Cadillac [the country bar and dance hall she operates] because they really wanted cheesecakes,” Sorensen says. “When we finally launched, we sold out of 1,500 cheesecakes in 24 hours.”

Every store she’s dealt with so far has been different. While her mini cheesecakes seem like a good option for the grocery stores, she says Costco wasn’t so interested in those. But the wholesaler does seem interested in a new product she developed: cookie dough protein balls.

“It’s something that’s really popular right now. If I just get a couple big influencers in the fitness world, they’re going to go viral,” Sorensen says.

She says if she can convince the wholesaler to carry them, “that’s going to be a huge process. That’s part of it, when you get into the big corporate world, it’s a different ball game.”

But Sorensen, who started making cupcakes as a hobby and has piloted the business as it’s soared ever higher, isn’t daunted. She misses being in the bakery, and having close oversight of every dessert made, but the growth has been rewarding.

“I still enjoy it—it’s just a different side of it,” Sorensen says. “I get joy out of seeing all these big things happen. Here’s something I created out of nothing.”