Birol Growth Consulting
It took a defining life moment for Andy Birol to realize his future was his own hands — he had just lost his job as vice president of sales and marketing at an information services company and his daughter was ill in the hospital.
While Birol was successful in getting his company, Birol Growth Consulting, off the ground, one year later he lost a major client that represented 92 percent of his business. He realized he wasn’t doing the basic things he was telling his clients to do — selling, delivering and developing at the same time.
That led him to a different focus. He surrounded himself with experts and outsourced 100 percent of his marketing, PR, administrative and financial work, and spent the bulk of his time developing new business and providing results for existing clients.
Since then, Birol has achieved nearly 250 percent growth using that strategy, and over the past two years has been the only individual to make the Weatherhead 100 list of fastest-growing businesses in Northeast Ohio, making the “Upstarts” lists of companies with less than $1 million in annual revenue.
Cynergies Consulting
Cynergies Consulting may have been founded by Debbie Holy and Ellie Chalko on a shoestring budget, but it didn’t stop the pair from landing such prominent clients such as Agilent Technologies, Progressive Insurance and National City Bank.
After the events of 9/11 and the dot-com crash forced Holy and Chalko to change their focus, Cynergies began helping HR managers with candidate searches for full-time employees, charging a fee for their services based on a percentage of starting salary.
They also recognized the need for a wider range of offerings and developed a customized recruiting program, CynergiesSelect, which provides full or partial assistance through the recruiting process by offering unbundled services such as research, prescreening, interviewing and reference-checking on an hourly basis.
Today, Cynergies employs nearly 50 people and projects year-end revenue of more than $4 million. Holy and Chalko expect to add 10 staff members within the next 12 months.
Diversified Concepts Marketing
Sisters Tracee McAfee-Gates and Wendy McAfee founded Diversified Concepts in 1999, offering never-before-seen or unique merchandise, inventions and promotional items to major corporations for use as customer incentives and rewards.
In just two years, they built the company to $8.6 million in sales with only four employees.
But after sales plummeted in the wake of 9/11, when clients delayed marketing plans because of an uncertain U.S. economy, the pair switched gears. Instead of targeting corporations, they decided to take inventors and their products to The Home Shopping Network and QVC.
Not only did the move save Diversified Concepts, it made the company smarter and faster. Today, McAfee and McAfee-Gates are designing and manufacturing their own brands of merchandise, which appear regularly on The Home Shopping Network and QVC, as well as products from inventors and major corporations. Additionally, Diversified Concepts leverages the talents and passions of celebrities by custom-creating for them a personalized brand of unique products that they can sell on air and at retail.
Hiney Printing Co.
Andrew Kuntz is an entrepreneur with an eye for opportunity. In September 2003, he purchased the ailing Hiney Printing Co. out of bankruptcy court and put it back on track for success.
The company ran into trouble in the late 1990s when competitive pressure, operational excess and outdated technology, combined with declining industry trends, nearly put Hiney out of business.
Despite no real cash flow and poor vendor ratings, Kuntz was encouraged by what he saw in the company — a talented and loyal employee base, and an opportunity to bring the business into the 21st century.
He invested nearly $700,000 in a newly released technology that made Hiney one of only three graphic communications companies in the United States with similar capabilities. And Kuntz encouraged the 65-person team to get back to the basics of operations, installing benchmarking as a steady improvement process.
Armed with a committed staff and new high-tech capabilities, Kuntz seized the opportunity to enter new markets and solicit new business opportunities. The results were impressive — revenue climbed nearly 45 percent within the first six months of Kuntz’s acquisition, and from December 2003 to July 2004, increased another 23 percent.
InnoDesk Inc.
InnoDesk’s mission is to bring new and innovative products to the retail stationary and office products marketplace.
The company’s design concepts focus on the fact that all businesspeople have a desk where they do work, but that desk is not necessarily traditional — it often is the front seat of a car, a hotel room, dining room table, kitchen counter or airplane seat. InnoDesk’s products take location out of the equation.
Among the notable innovations the nearly three-year-old company has developed are a hand-held, battery-operated paper shredder — which is mobile and fits in a purse, briefcase or car glove compartment — and the Retrac-Tip line of retractable, capless highlighters and markers, which turns a traditionally two-handed product into a one-handed one.
Both have been well-received and are distributed in more than 8,000 retail stores nationwide, including OfficeMax, Wal-Mart, Office Depot and Rite Aid. With this market acceptance, InnoDesk has grown, as well.
When it was founded in 2002, the company employed just one person; today, it employs eight. Since shipping its initial order in 2002, sales increased 1,100 percent in 2003, and this year, the company expects sales growth of 900 percent over 2003.
Lexi-Comp Inc.
Lexi-Comp president and CEO Robert Kerscher says he’s learned several key lessons during the company’s 26 years — the importance of embracing change, of strategic planning and of working hard toward a goal. But the most important lesson is a simple one, but sometimes hard to accomplish — hiring and supporting the best people.
That focus has helped Kerscher build a successful company with 75 employees and clients in 81 countries.
Lexi-Comp is a Hudson-based medical publishing house that provides leading-edge technology solutions to health care professionals through the development, maintenance and enhancement of information products. Kerscher founded Lexi-Comp in 1978 to develop custom reference books for clinical hospital laboratories.
It has evolved into a major medical reference and custom publisher with a primary focus on health information content. Areas of coverage include pharmacology, diagnostic procedures and laboratory tests, natural products, dentistry, infectious diseases and patient education.
Malone Advertising
Reinventing itself is something Malone Advertising has done exceptionally well during its 60-plus years in business. During the 1980s, under the direction of Bain Malone, the firm earned a national reputation and built an impressive client roster based on the agency’s niche expertise in retail marketing.
By the early 1990s, however, the agency was hit by a string of client defections that culminated in the loss of its premier client. Newly appointed president Fred Bidwell enlisted the support of a core group of loyal employees and embarked on a dramatic renaissance of the business by initiating and following a highly focused retail channel marketing strategy.
Bidwell built upon the company’s reputation as a retail marketing specialist by identifying targeted specific niche needs such as customer marketing strategies and field advertising that were not core competencies of larger, national competitors.
Using this strategy, Malone’s staff actively sought out and landed business from outside the Northeast Ohio region, using its Akron location as a strong selling point — pointing out that low overhead and a centralized location provided competitive advantages over competitors in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
Since 1997, Malone has averaged 25 percent growth each year in an advertising market that continues to force small agencies to fold. Malone’s strong client base continues to add companies such as Isuzu, John Deere, Nestle, Clorox, Bayer and American Greetings. In 2003 alone, the firm added 28 clients.
And, Malone has grown from 25 employees in 1997 to more than 150 today.
Morgan Bank
During its first eight years, Morgan Bank was marginally successful, serving as a private bank catering to a small client base in Hudson. In 1998, entrepreneur and bank founder Burton Morgan realized that new ideas and energy were needed to generate profit and asset growth.
He hired William Dougherty, a career banker with a history of turnaround operations, to serve as president and CEO. Dougherty was charged with taking the bank in a new direction.
His challenge was to transform the bank’s attitude and reputation from a boutique investment bank into an aggressive retail-based community-oriented operation. To generate consumer accounts, Morgan Bank became one of the first banks to market totally-free checking accounts with interest.
Dougherty also invested in imaging, Internet banking, electronic bill payment, cash management, telephone banking and a business courier service, all of which propelled Morgan Bank to a position as the Hudson market leader in bank deposits.
In an effort to attract personal loan customers, Morgan Bank became an aggressive player in the indirect automobile loan market. As a result, 2003 net income increased 229 percent over 1999 earnings. Its stock, which paid no dividends its first seven years, has paid a quarterly dividend since 2000, with a current quarterly dividend of 7.5 cents per share, a 3.4 percent increase over last year.
By leading the bank’s expansion of new product and service areas, Dougherty helped Morgan Bank to phenomenal asset growth, bringing total assets to more than $131 million as of June 30, 2004.
