Photo by Jeremy Petrick
Jasmine Sonmor in her new 35,000-square-foot facility in Fergus Falls.
ENTREPRENEURS
Wunderkind Manufacturer Jasmine Sonmor finds success way beyond her years
I
f you’re impressed that Jasmine Sonmor, at 26, is the owner of a metal fabricating business that just built a 35,000-squarefoot facility where she expects this year to employ 50 people and earn $12 million, you should have met her at 13. As a kid, Sonmor liked to spend summers hanging around White Oak Metals, her father’s metal fabrication business in
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Dalton. She’d take on odd jobs like mowing the lawn or cleaning up and organizing her dad’s office. At 13, she started writing manuals. “I’ve kind of always been an overachiever, so he gave me free rein to just kind of take it and go,” she remembers. “He would always be there as a mentor to help me along because of course I didn’t know
anything at that time.” “I’m kind of an odd person in the sense that I’m mathematically inclined, but I actually excel in English, as well, which is not my dad’s strong suit,” she says. Her overhaul of White Oak’s quality manual got the company certified by the American Institute of Steel Construction. From there, having written the manual, she started conducting the company’s quality audits. “It helped me learn from the inside out because I had to conduct interviews and verify that things were getting done, and if they weren’t getting done, how could we improve things? It really helped me learn the business thoroughly from a young age.” When health ailments forced her father to retire three years ago, 23-yearold Sonmor founded Aura Fabricators,