You may not know Deb Hopp, but you know her work: She helped build and lead the Twin Cities Reader, Mpls.St.Paul magazine, Delta Sky, as well as TCB. She used that media background to build a content agency, MSPC, which has served the likes of General Mills, Delta Air Lines, and UnitedHealth Group. Finally, her legacy of board service is almost too voluminous to catalogue.

Business was a constant presence in Hopp’s Cloquet home. Her father sold insurance. “I watched him collect premiums door-to-door,” Hopp recalls. “My mom was an entrepreneur. I started working for her at 11. I never really stopped.”

Those who know Hopp best describe her as the prototypical unsung hero, in business and beyond.

“I’m staring at an issue of Harvard Business Review on effective leadership,” explains Lynn Casey, who built the global communications agency Padilla. “You’re going to see Deb on every page.”

Hopp studied journalism at the University of Minnesota, so it’s no surprise she made her career in media. The early days were idiosyncratic. Her late husband Mark Hopp founded what became the Twin Cities Reader in 1975. Deb joined during the 1980 Star and Tribune strike, when the Reader published daily to fill the void left by the newspaper. After the strike, it reverted to weekly publication but had gained a foothold in the market with advertisers. She eventually was named editor.

It was a different time.

“There was a pitcher of beer on the table at lunch before the water arrived,” Hopp recalls. “But the talent we had was incredible.”

Mark Hopp spent the 1980s building a national network of business publications, while Deb moved into the publisher’s job at the Reader. Mark lost control of the company to its VC funders during the 1990 recession. He died of cancer in 1993 and Deb, with daughters who were five and two, was left to pick up the pieces.

“Work steadied me during periods of loss,” she says. “Relationships from work sustained me.” She looks back on board service as “a safe social space” for a single mom in the 1990s. (Her second husband, entrepreneur Christopher “Kit” Dahl, died in 2022.)

MSP Communications, publisher of Mpls.St.Paul, had been recruiting Hopp since she left the Reader in 1990. She initially resisted but finally came on board in 1993 to help found Twin Cities Business, a title positioned against Corporate Report Minnesota, which was perceived by some as hostile to the business community (and happened to be owned by the venture capitalists who now owned the Reader). “I was very eager to take them down. It was an exciting time,” Hopp recalls, “a lot of committed people with a startup mentality.”

She later transitioned to the publisher role at Mpls.St.Paul. “We were completely aligned with our audience,” she notes. “If you understand your audience, you will reach them.”

“She’s always been there ensuring our civic fabric stayed intact.”

—Kathy Schmidlkofer, president and CEO, University of Minnesota Foundation

That also was a different era, when brands looked for trusted relationships with media rather than a metrics-driven optimization. “You were selling an opportunity to be showcased. It’s just branding,” she notes. “But on that day I do need a shirt or a car, I’m going to think of you.”

In 2013 she went back into startup mode. MSP had long created custom magazines for clients but decided to dive deeper by leveraging the company’s journalistic pedigree to create digital content for businesses.

The MSPC agency business was unfamiliar to Hopp, like the alternative weekly business was in 1980, but she dove in: “That’s what I’ve always done.”

And that J-school training served her yet again. “Because we were grounded in journalism, we had the rigor and quality control that firms rooted in public relations and copywriting did not.”

She retired as president of MSPC earlier this year.

That’s all a legacy in itself, yet Hopp is known best among those who have worked for her as an indefatigable mentor, an advocate for women in the workplace, and a true connector.

“I took great joy in identifying talent and making sure it was recognized and nurtured,” she says. “It’s gratifying to be able to connect someone. Everyone needs an advocate; women leaders understand that.”

“Nobody is a better mentor,” says Kathy Schmidlkofer, president and CEO of the University of Minnesota Foundation, whom Hopp recruited to her role in 2013. “She’s a great sounding board, helps you anticipate challenges. And I’m one of many who feel that way.

“And that she did it all as a single parent is truly amazing,” continues Schmidlkofer. “The women who worked for her are so loyal because she understood what it took.”

But that’s still only part of the story. An enormous part of Deb Hopp’s work and after-hours time has been devoted to boards, mostly in the service of nonprofits. She calculates it as a third of her working life and contextualizes those efforts pragmatically. “Most every board I served on became a client in some way. Strategically it was great for business.

“To be able to solve a business’ problems is the best professional development you could have,” she continues. “To sit alongside people who lead companies to see how they solve and motivate was the greatest education I could ever have.”

She is perhaps selling herself short, though. “Deb is unassuming, builds trust, always has the best interests of an organization at heart,” says Casey. “She perfected the balance of inquisitive and decisive.”

A memorable highlight was the Skyway Committee’s organizing effort for the 1992 Super Bowl. “That was seminal,” she says. “I look at our member list and they all became C-suiters.”

That work culminated in 2023 when Hopp received the U’s Regents Award, the highest honor the university has for a nonacademic pursuit. (Hopp and her husband, Kit Dahl, led the $182 million College of Liberal Arts’ “Driven” fundraising campaign, the most successful in the U’s history.)

“Deb’s commitment extended beyond the four walls of her work,” says Schmidlkofer. “She said, ‘I’m going to take all I have to offer and give it to Bachman’s, HealthPartners, the U.’ She’s always been there ensuring our civic fabric stayed intact.”

See the other 2025 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame inductees.