Accel focuses efforts on demand side of diversity equation
Business Courier of Cincinnati - by Lucy May Senior Staff Reporter
Hightower has worked with the Minority Business Accelerator to make connections at some of the city's major corporations. He praised several of them -- Cinergy Corp., Procter & Gamble Co., Toyota Motor Manufacturing and Messer Construction Co. -- as really "getting it" when it comes to supplier diversity.
While his company was doing business with Cinergy Corp. before connecting with the MBA, working with the program "hasn't hurt" that relationship, he said.
Fred Newton, Cinergy's chief administrative officer, said the company has been pleased with the work Hightower has done. Hightower hopes that relationship will grow even stronger with the merger of Cinergy and Duke Energy.
For him, the goal is to keep growing Hightowers Petroleum and turn the company -- which is a $5 million- to $10 million-a-year enterprise -- into a $50 million- to $100 million-a-year business.
Fortress building big clients with slow, steady push
As an executive with Merrill Lynch, Will Scott noticed the firm wrote lots of big checks to companies that stored records and data.
He decided to visit one of the records companies and liked what he saw.
"The boxes show up for work on time," Scott said wryly. "And they don't talk back much."
After further research, Scott wanted to become part of what he describes as a "gigantic but very quiet" industry. An attorney friend introduced him to Mike Connely, an executive with experience at Procter & Gamble Co. and Valvoline, and the two launched The Fortress Inc.
Scott describes The Fortress as the only African American-owned records business in the United States but said that distinction was not a primary reason for forming the firm.
Mostly, he and Connely figured that after the terror attacks of Sept. 11 and the more stringent requirements of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, there would be plenty of demand for a business like The Fortress. They focused on technology that would help them track boxes and retrieve data better than their competitors, Scott said. And they contacted the Minority Business Accelerator.
The MBA decided to work with The Fortress because the startup had the capacity to do business with the region's largest corporations right away, said MBA Director Calvin Buford.
"You have a high-potential business that launches from day one with the platform and capability to service very large corporate customers on a very large scale," Buford said.
But winning those clients has taken longer than Scott expected.
"We thought it would take 30 days to 90 days," he said. "It takes 90 days to 270 days."
That's because the clients that Scott and Connely are pursuing often make decisions about records storage at the board level, Scott said. Often, the companies have had relationships with vendors for years or decades, and persuading them to make a change can be difficult.
But the MBA has helped The Fortress make the right connections.
"They get us a brief audience with someone who is a decision-maker," he said. "Then you sink or swim."
Luxottica Retail certainly was pleased. After an introduction by the MBA, the parent company of Pearle Vision and LensCrafters used The Fortress to destroy some documents in Dallas, said Kevin Muth, Luxottica's director of purchasing.
"The price was great, and the job was done very efficiently," Muth said. "The folks in Dallas said if we have anything else down here, we will certainly contact him."
The Fortress Inc. is not profitable yet. Scott said it will be by the end of this year.
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