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Minong, Wisconsin, is the kind of place most people pass through without noticing. With a population of fewer than 1,000, there’s a car dealership, a dollar store, and a couple thousand cattle, surrounded by forests and lakes in the state’s northwestern corner.
But perhaps improbably, it also has the headquarters of a $4 billion multinational meat-snack empire.
For the past 40 years, Minong has been the home base of Jack Link’s, the company behind one of America’s most recognizable beef jerky brands. What began as an effort by namesake founder Jack Link to turn his great-grandfather’s jerky recipe into a livelihood has grown into a global business selling products in more than 55 countries.
Along the way, the company has navigated shifting generational tastes, supply-chain headaches, and pandemic economic upheaval. Now, as a protein boom—fueled in part by GLP-1 weight-loss drugs—drives renewed demand for meat snacks, Jack Link’s finds itself riding a broader surge in the category. In 2025, U.S. sales reached $5.5 billion, roughly double what they were a decade ago.
But for Troy Link, who took over the company’s day-to-day operations from his father in 2013, the philosophy behind success was shaped long before he became CEO.
Growing up around his family’s dairy farm and meat-processing operation in rural Wisconsin, mornings started before most people were awake. Being at work by 6 a.m. wasn’t aspirational—it was expected. His father, Jack Link, kept the same rhythm, and decades later, so does the son who now leads the company.
“It all goes back to history,” Troy Link said. “Whether it was the dairy farm or the meat processing facility, it was always early morning starts.”
Today, the 54-year-old still wakes up between 4 and 5 a.m., often without an alarm. Before bed, he writes out the next day’s to-do list, a ritual he credits with keeping him focused amid the demands of overseeing a multinational company.
“I never start my day without a to-do list,” he said. “…At least when I have a to-do list, I’m going to get that list done every single day.”
The early hours, he said, are reserved for the “heavy lifting”: strategy sessions, decisions on innovation, bets on new technology, and discussions about how artificial intelligence can shape the business years down the road. By noon, much of his most important work is already done.
That rigor reflects lessons Link said he inherited from his father, who built the business around a handful of principles: efficiency, discipline, and staying grounded in the customer. Even as Jack Link’s has expanded into more than 200,000 stores at nearly every major retailer in the U.S., its headquarters remain in tiny Minong—a choice Link believes keeps leadership close to the realities of everyday consumers.
“If you want to know what’s going on in the economy—how food inflation or how gas prices are affecting people—go to small town America,” Link said. “They’ll tell you, because that’s all that they’re talking about.”
Success comes down to grit, according to the CEO of Jack Link’s
That mindset carries into how Link views the modern workplace. Building a career, he argued, still requires showing up, putting in the hours, and developing expertise over time—even when it’s inconvenient. It can be simplified to three questions:
“Can you do it? Do you want to do it? And do you have the grit to do it?” he told Fortune.
It’s a philosophy that can feel especially relevant today, when uncertainty around the future of work can make career paths more complicated than ever. But in his view, success comes down to discipline and a willingness to prioritize hard work.
Chasing workplace flexibility, particularly among Gen Z, comes at a cost to the discipline that real career-building requires. For the young people that would rather not report into an office or work on Fridays, Link’s message is simple: “I just think you’re foolish to say that.”
“I have three little kids, so I try to get home on weekends, but it doesn’t work all the time. It just doesn’t,” he added.
While obligations inevitably arise, whether that means picking up a child from daycare or making it to baseball practice, career ambition still requires flexibility in the other direction, too.
“You can’t say, ‘Hey, listen, I’m not going to go attend that really important business thing because I need more balance,’” he said.
For those willing to put in the work, Link pointed out that there are now more tools than ever to be successful. “So commit, and then stick to it, and be really good at it.”
MrBeast taught Troy Link to ‘think bigger’
Not every young person is struggling to find their footing in business. For Link, one standout example is Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast.
The 28-year-old has leveraged his status as the world’s most subscribed YouTuber into a sprawling entertainment and consumer-products empire, spanning an Amazon Prime series, a chocolate bar line, and even financial services.
Last year, Beast Industries expanded into the meat snacks category through a partnership with Jack Link’s, bringing co-branded products to Gen Alpha, Gen Z, and their parents.
“I’ve been eating Jack Link’s since I can remember, so teaming up is a no-brainer,” Donaldson said at the time.
For Link, the experience offered a glimpse into how one of the world’s most influential young entrepreneurs operates.
“He is a beast in his motivation, his curiosity. I’ve never met anybody as curious as him, as passionate as him, and the willingness to do whatever it takes to win,” Link told Fortune.
He saw this first hand during one of their initial interactions. A chat that was scheduled to last for just one hour turned into a 10-hour event, in which they ended up at a retail location after discussing the partnership from top to bottom.
Overall, despite the age differences of both themselves and their companies, Link said working with Donaldson challenged his own thinking.
“I learned that I probably don’t think big enough. He’s a really big thinker, he’s a really long-range goal setter,” Link said.
“We have a lot of the same synergies. He’s just younger and more creative than I am.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
