Kim Plahn

Board Member

Kim Plahn is a strategic leader with creativity, strong foresight and a reputation for leading and driving transformational opportunities across all areas of the organization. With deep knowledge in hospitality and consumer products and services, she has held C suite roles as CEO/President, Chief Financial Officer, Vice President of Finance and Chief Operating Officer in public, private and startup companies. Kim has driven organizations through periods of growth and change, risk and crisis management, strategy, capital raises and deployments, acquisitions, leadership development and succession planning, system implementations and corporate governance. She is known to align stakeholders while delivering on results and innovation.

For the past seventeen years, Kim led the franchising organization at Dunn Brothers Coffee Franchising, Inc. In June of 2022, she spearheaded the sale of Dunn Brothers to a private investment group. While at Dunn Brothers, Kim led the conversion to a cloud-based enterprise point of sale (POS) with an integrated loyalty and online ordering platform. Kim headed the initiative for a fresh food platform that drove 30% of their sales. Further enhancements leveraged the food and beverage offerings with integrations to third party delivery partners and a catering program. Under her leadership, Dunn Brothers provided the franchisees one of the strongest product margins of any coffee franchisor. In 2023, Dunn Brothers was named the 10th best coffee chain in America offering the number one cold brew.

In her prior operating career, she spent nine years at Damark International, Inc. during which time the privately held direct marketing company transcended from $26 million in net revenue to a publicly held company with net revenues of $600 million. During her tenure, she rose to Vice President of Finance and led through exponential growth (48% CAGR) in which she was known for building talented teams and strong infrastructure. She guided several financial and operating system upgrades including: credit card (CC) processing, installment plans, private label and co-branded CC offerings that supported over a $500 million credit sales. She was member of the executive leadership team that completed the acquisition and integration of the C.O.M.B. Companies. Kim’s team was responsible for all disciplines of accounting including credit card processing, fraud prevention and facilities.

In two start up organizations, Kim led the capital raises and the preparation of the private placement memorandums in addition to her finance and operational leadership. Kim began her career with RSM US LLP and Securian Financial.

Committed to making a community impact, Kim has served as a Board Member for Reading and Math Inc. dba as Ampact for the past eight years. She served as Treasurer, Audit Committee Chair, Strategic Planning Chair and as a member of the Governance Committee. Ampact is a 501 C (3) (Nonprofit) specializing in managing and scaling AmeriCorps programs with revenues of $110 million and over 2,000 AmeriCorps team members. Prior to Ampact, Kim served two terms at Vision Loss Resources, a 501 C (3) (Nonprofit). For the past nineteen years, she has been an Executive Board Director for two of the Companies that she led. Kim is viewed by her colleagues as a curious and active listener that is able to synthesize information and ask critical questions while collaborating to drive change.

Kim holds a Bachelor of Accounting from the University of Minnesota – Duluth and is a CPA (inactive). She was awarded the Real Power 50 in 2015, nominated by other business leaders in Minneapolis as one of the top 50 business leaders. She was a 2016 Women in Business recipient, an acknowledgement for her professional achievement, leadership and contribution to the community by the Minneapolis - St. Paul Business Journal.