Six area businesses were recently announced as this year’s Entrepreneurial & Business Excellence Hall of Fame (EBE HOF) honorees.
Honored for business excellence are Burkett Restaurant Equipment, based in Toledo; Clouse Construction Corp., based in New Riegel; NovaVision Inc., based in Bowling Green; and Riker Products, based in Toledo. Mel Lanzer Company, based in Napoleon, is honored for excellence in family business. Solar Spectrum LLC is honored for excellence in startup innovation.
The companies will be inducted during a ceremony at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 8 at The Pinnacle, 1772 Indian Wood Circle, in Maumee. Tickets are $85. The Davenport-Longenecker Lifetime Achievement Award for Business Advocacy will be announced at the event.
The EBE HOF, presented by the University of Toledo, recognizes entrepreneurs who have built and sustained growing businesses and created jobs in the region as well as businesses that display technological innovation, said Adam Davenport, EBE HOF chairman and president of Gorillas & Gazelles, founding sponsor of the event.
“We’re really excited,” Davenport said. “We have a few construction companies, a restaurant supplier, solar once again through the University of Toledo, an automotive supplier, a security label manufacturer. There’s just a lot of diverse industries represented this year.”
Gary Frye, president and CEO of Riker Products, said, “We feel very, very honored to receive this award.”
Riker Products, which has been in business since the late 1940s and employs about 180 people, buys and bends tubing for use in heavy-duty exhaust systems and sells its products to trucking, mining and agricultural companies worldwide. Frye has been with the company for more than 40 years, starting as a laborer while still in high school and working his way to head of the company.
Mike Messmer, vice president and general manager of NovaVision, said the company is honored.
“One person could not do what we’re doing and the fact that we can grow is because we have such an excellent team,” Messmer said.
Founded in 1994, NovaVision has about 45 employees and specializes in technologies that provide anti-counterfeiting and anti-tampering features, including hologram labels, tamper-evident stickers, security tape, security seals and more. Its products are used worldwide, including by federal and state governments, military, airlines, ski resorts and collectibles dealers, Messmer said.
More than 700 people attended last year’s ceremony, Davenport said.
“It’s just a breath of fresh air to see that so many people will come out and support an event like this that showcases some of the inspiration stories and companies around this area,” Davenport said. “One thing we’re told is it’s an inspiration to many people out there that there are a lot of great things happening around here.”
Visit www.ebehof.com for more.
Burkett Restaurant Equipment
Jameel Burkett is the youngest of the six Entrepreneurial & Business Excellence Hall of Fame award winners by decades, but he believes his youth in no way indicates a lack of experience.
After graduating from the University of Toledo in 2002, Burkett went to work for Owens Corning but left a year later when his father, Mike Burkett, founder of Burkett Restaurant Equipment, asked his son to join him and help expand the family business.
“We were just a local retail facility that sold about 80 percent used, 20 percent new equipment when I first started,” Burkett, president and CEO, said. “Since then, we have branched out and we have three separate sales divisions now: a retail center, an Internet division and a contract and project division. The retail division includes a remodeled show-room that promotes new equipment.
“I knew that in growing the business, we weren’t going to be able to grow it to the level we wanted to get to by promoting used first,” Burkett said. “If you promote new first, you’re attracting customers that want new, and then you offer used as a choice where you can save people money if they want to.”
The Internet division began with an eBay store in 2004 while Burkett built the company’s internal website, which launched in 2005.The contract and project division, which handles government contracts, new construction and chain accounts, was launched in early 2008.
And then, in October 2008, “When the market crashed, the phones just stopped ringing,” Burkett said. “Everything stopped. But then in March 2009,we landed a sizable seven-figure government contract through a joint venture partnership with another dealer that really got us back on track. That really accelerated the contract and project division.
“And then, in 2010, when the government was giving money to the school districts to spend on upgrading their kitchens as part of the stimulus package, we doubled our business between March and April of 2010.”
Burkett said he is humbled to be a recipient of the Business Excellence Award.
“The recognition is allowing people to see what we’ve actually done. And if people really want to support local and stay local, I think that they have to feel confident in their local companies. And an award like this builds the confidence of the peoplewe do business with and allows people not doing business with us to learn about us.”
Clouse Construction Corp.
After studying at Tiffin University in the early 1970s, Lenny Clouse, a New Riegel native, left college to go to work for a custom home builder.
“I always loved to do construction-type work growing up,” Clouse said. “I had some natural talent, I believe, from my mother’s family [the Kauffmans]. Many of them were in the trades —masons, carpenters, that type of construction work. I felt it was a good way to provide for a family.”
Three-and–a-half years later, in 1975, Clouse went to work for himself.
Now, 37 years and 65 employees later, Clouse and his wife Lynn operate Clouse Construction Corp., a Northwest Ohio company honored Nov. 8 with the Business Excellence Award from the EBE HOF.
Clouse, 59, said he was honored when Mike Reser, a friend from Tiffin, nominated his construction company for the award.
“I am a common-type person, a very hard worker who runs a company that keeps our word,” Clouse said. “We follow through.
“We care about the people who work for us, the customers we’re working for, and how the project ends up. We want it to be a good value for long-term service of the project. And we’re always concerned about taking care of our employees. We try to take care of them and make sure they can have the best lives available.”
Clouse said he takes pride in operating “a very diversified” company that works for religious, educational, agricultural and financial banking groups. The company also does factory maintenance work.
Clouse attributed surviving the recent downturn in the economy to that diversification.
“I could kind of feel the economy coming to a head, so we got rolling a couple of years before it did,” he said. “We’ve always tried to be ahead of the curve, and we developed all different kinds of business customers over the years.”
In 2006, Clouse started another branch of his company he called STOP — Service Team of Professionals. That branch of the company does fire restoration, mold remediation, and chemical and flooding cleanup at private homes and businesses.
“The No. 1 thing that always set us apart is that we always cared,” Clouse said. “We always cared for our customers and our employees, and we want to give back. I want to make our business, our country, our state better than what it has been in the past; a better place to live, work and worship.”
Mel Lanzer Company
Charlotte Zgela and her husband enjoyed working at her father’s business in Napoleon during their 1981 summer vacations from their teaching jobs in Mansfield so much that they gave up their careers as educators to join his team.
Thirty-one years later, on behalf of her father, mother, and brother, Zgela accepted the Excellence in Family Business Award Nov. 8 for the MelL anzer Company from the Entrepreneurial & Business Excellence Hall of Fame.
“It says a lot in how my fa-ther (Mel Lanzer) started the company,” Zgela, 57, said. “He is proud of the work he did, and he encouraged my brother (Matt Lanzer) and me just by taking us out on Sunday drives.
“That was our thing we did on Sundays growing up. We used to go to the job sites all the time. Not that we really wanted to go, but my mom (Marge Lanzer) would say, ‘Come on, I’ll get an ice cream cone afterward.’
“And that inspired us. It was that love. It was that drive my father had that inspired my brother and me to get into the business and make it what it is today. When I took over, our sales were maybe $3 million, $4 million a year. Now, we’re a $20 million a year company.
“And it all goes back to the family and the values my father instilled in us, and the compassion we have for our job. We worry about those people under us. We worry about our customers. That’s what makes us a little different — we care how our customers feel about the finished product.”
Mel Lanzer started the business building single-family homes in the early 1950s, but was forced to refocus from housing to commercial construction in 1955 when the postwar housing boom began to decline.
Zgela and Matt faced that same obstacle in October 2008 after the market crash. They have geared the construction company toward theretail industry, remodeling as a Wal-Mart certified contractor, doing school construction with Ohio Schools Facility Commission projects as well as higher education new construction like the $4.5 million NCAA-regulation track and field house for Defiance College, and construction management.
“Since we’ve been in business for such a long time, and done so many different types of construction, there’s not too many things people can throw at us that we haven’t seen before,” Matt Lanzer, 45,said. “We’re able to get a pretty good grip on almost all types of construction. It’s nice to have that much experience behind us.”
NovaVision, Inc.
After a 24-year career with Owens Corning, Mike Messmer joined forces with Al Caperna in 1998 to help commercialize Caperna’s patented hologram technology and transform NovaVision, Inc. from a small-town printing business in Bowling Green into an international company with $7.6 million in sales revenue in 2011, up 40 percent from 2010.
As partners, Messmer and Caperna have built a large and diverse group of customers, shipping product to 25 countries outside the U.S.
“What re-ally changed the business is when we began to market our products on the Internet [in 2003],” Messmer said. “Within about six months, it went from calling customers to the customers starting to call us.”
Messmer said 2011 was unique because, after acquiring a competitor from New York, the company hired 15 of its 45 employees, increasing its workforce 50 percent in just 12 months.
“And we’ll do real well this year too, more in sales because we hired the people in anticipation of growing again this year,” Messmer said. “We made the commitment last year to hire and train people knowing that the growth was coming.”
In recognition of that success, Caperna, a former Business Excellence Award winner from the Entrepreneurial & Business Excellence Hall of Fame who is no longer active in the day-to-day operation of NovaVision, nominated his partner for the 2012 honor.
“I’m honored that we were recognized,” Messmer, 62, said. “But I am just one person, and I think it’s not only a reflection on me, but it’s really an honor for the entire team.”
Messmer said product innovation, Internet savvy and enticing the customer to buy the product is the essence of what NovaVision has done exceptionally well.
Messmer also believes “we’re very good at helping ordinary people do extraordinary things. Our culture here is different. We try to make it that it’s OK to make mistakes, and it’s OK to try new things and it’s OK to treat a customer fantastic.”
Riker Products
When Walter Riker opened Riker Products “way back in the late 1940s, no one had any money,” said Gary Frye, 62, current president and chief executive officer.
“There was a main truck line going from Detroit to Toledo, and they would stop in here. They couldn’t afford to buy a muffler or an exhaust pipe, so old Walter Riker would weld up theirs, repair it. In the wintertime, he would actually load his welder up in the back of a pickup truck, reverse current, and thaw people’s pipes that froze in the wintertime.”
Frye started working for Riker in 1968 as a 17-year-old student at Libbey High School.
“I didn’t plan on staying 44 years,” Frye said. “It just worked out that way.”
Frye now operates a successful business in North Toledo with 168 employees that services Class 8 trucks, including Macks, Volvos, and Internationals.
Frye said Riker Products is still struggling to recover from the market crash about five years ago when his business fell 60 percent.
“You get lean. You get real lean,” Frye said. “You cut costs. You get as lean as you can and you just try to survive. We did it. We did very well.”
In recognition of the tenacity and business savvy that led to that survival, Jeremy Zeisloft, vice president, commercial relationship manager at Huntington Bank, nominated Frye for the Business Excellence Award from the Entrepreneurial & Business Excellence Hall of Fame, an honor Frye will receive Nov. 8.
Although he would like to grow the business, Frye said that “We’re still stagnant. We’re certainly a long way from coming out of the slump. We just need to get down and dirty, get competitive and win market share, and the best way to do that is to fine tune processes. That means don’t work harder, work smarter.”
Despite the recognition that comes with the Business Excellence Award, Frye said the public “will never know our company because it’s not a glamorous business. But it is a successful business, a well-run business that employees 168 good, good people.”
Solar Spectrum LLC
At a time when most men are enjoying their retirement years, Charles Tomita has embarked on a new adventure. Tomita, who spent his career working as an electromagnetism scientist for Northrop Grumman Corp. in El Segundo, Calif., began his second career Nov. 1 when he went to work full-time at Solar Spectrum.
The startup business manufactures the coating that will be applied to transparent solar windows at the University of Toledo Wright Center for Photovoltaics Innovation and Commercialization (UT-PVIC).
Tomita and his partner, Richard McClary, a particle physicist, started Solar Spectrum in 2005.
“Dr. McClary came running into my office,” Tomita said. “[He said] ‘I want to share this idea with you. Do you think it will work?’
“It was an idea called ‘photon trapping’ on how to drastically improve the efficiency of solar cells. We spent a year digging into it. After that year,we decided this could be real.”
Tomita, Solar Spectrum’s chief executive officer, will receive the Startup Innovation Idea Award at the Entrepreneurial & Business Excellence Hall of Fame awards ceremony.
Tomita, in his early 70s, is optimistic that Solar Spectrum will be a success because its product “is something every building needs.
“Our product coats the windows,and we should revolutionize the whole building industry of the future. We don’t have to tie into the major power grids or feed back into the grid. We generate electricity, and this is a new paradigm on the future buildings of the world, not just the U.S., but of the world.
“And I made one informal promise to the university. We are going to concentrate on U.S.-built, U.S.-made panels, U.S.-made glass in the State of Ohio. That is our pledge.”
Business profiles by John P. McCartney, Toledo Free Press staff writer.
