Blaine Tanner is a serial entrepreneur and business builder whose career spans nearly four decades of hands-on work across plastics manufacturing, sustainable materials, and structured finance. He started in the plastics industry in Canada at a small company, rose to an executive leadership role, and helped guide that organization through a successful acquisition by Menasha Corporation, a major U.S.-based corporation, while retaining an ownership stake. From there, Blaine Tanner founded his own plastics manufacturing company and scaled it from $500,000 in annual revenue to a $25 million enterprise over ten years before selling it. He then structured a partnership with a technology firm to develop a sustainable materials line and later founded an investment fund focused on acquiring and enhancing long-term lease assets, packaging those assets for Wall Street through strategic credit enhancement. Now retired and based in Arizona, he brings the same discipline that earned him a third-degree black belt in Taekwondo to everything he pursues.
Blaine Tanner started this blog to put his thinking somewhere useful. His voice is shaped by the specific kind of experience that only comes from building companies from the ground up, not advising on them from the outside. He writes about entrepreneurship, real estate development, and community-focused business decisions from a perspective grounded in execution. A current focus is workforce housing near Sedona and the Verde Valley, where he's working on a 47-acre development designed to provide attainable housing for teachers, healthcare workers, and tradespeople who can no longer afford to live near where they work. That's the kind of concrete, real-world problem Blaine Tanner regularly explores here: not abstract market trends, but the gap between economic growth and the people left behind by it.
Readers can expect posts grounded in Blaine Tanner's direct experience scaling businesses, structuring financial deals, and now tackling regional development in Northern Arizona. The recurring themes are long-term thinking, disciplined execution, and building things that hold their value over time. Posts draw from decades of decisions made in manufacturing, finance, and real estate, not theory. If you're interested in entrepreneurship, community development around places like Sedona and Flagstaff, or how structured investment actually works in practice, this blog is written for you.