All great sports executives
know the dangers of
spending too much time celebrating victories.
Unless the victory in question
is the Super Bowl, the final
game of the World Series or the
last game of the NBA Finals,
any celebration is short-lived so
that the team’s focus shifts back
to the next game and they don’t
become complacent.
This month, through Cascade
Capital Corp.’s Business Growth
Awards, we honor 48 organizations from the greater Akron
region for their ability to maintain sustained business growth
during a five-year period that’s
widely been considered a challenging — if not dismal — economic time.
By itself, this would be a good reason to spend
more than a fleeting
moment reflecting
on how impressive
the accomplishments
really are, but there’s
more to it than that.
One of the keys to
business success is
the ability to understand where your
organization is at any given
moment, develop a cohesive
strategy that maps out a plan to
move it forward and then to
have the wherewithal to lead the
organization to that goal. That
leadership trait, call it “entrepreneurial spirit,” is exactly what
the leaders of the organizations
being honored this year embody.
Take for example this year’s
FirstMerit Legacy Award winner.
Ellis Yan, founder
and CEO of Technical
Consumer Products
Inc., has nearly
tripled his employee
base and more than
quadrupled TCP’s
revenue over the
past five years. At
the same time, he’s
built an organization
that today controls more than 70
percent of the U.S. CFL market.
Or consider Bargmann
Management. Lisa Bargmann,
the company’s founder, was its
sole employee five years ago.
Today, the medical billing and
collection service firm employs
more than 70 people and
expects that number to reach
100 by year’s end.
Finally, there’s William Fink, president of Area Wide Protective
Inc. In 1992, Fink bought a small
contract security guard company but nearly lost it to bankruptcy three years later. But instead
of giving up, Fink remade the
company into a temporary traffic control service firm and supplied workers to a new market,
the public utility industry. Now,
AWP operates in 12 states and
employs more than 650 people.
AWP achieved this milestone
through Fink’s vision and leadership, and that’s one reason
why, this year, we established
the Entrepreneurial Spirit award
and named him our inaugural
honoree.
Contact Editor Dustin Klein at
[email protected]
