Innovation + Job News

Quality Electrodynamics (QED) was one of the local recipients of Ohio Third Frontier funding for the development of an imaging system that will improve the way doctors evaluate whether a kidney is viable for donation.
 
The Cleveland-based company, working with the Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological Institute, CWRU, Toshiba Medical Systems and Canon, received $1 million for the development of specialty MRI coils for imaging donor kidneys before transplant to determine viability.
 
Currently, potentially viable kidneys are sometimes rejected for transplant, or there are complications after transplant. This technology will improve the chances of success as well as reduce the number of kidneys that are thrown away.
 
“The program will result in a turnkey system of equipment, analysis software and clinical protocols which will be marketed to transplant centers on a worldwide basis,” says John L. Patrick, chief technical marketing officer for QED.

“Recipients of kidneys from deceased donors would benefit in several ways: Higher confidence level that the transplanted kidney can be viable and better knowledge of its condition; increase of transplanted kidneys by reducing the number of viable kidneys discarded will increase the number of patients able to benefit from transplantation.”
 
Patrick says the technology should be on the market in less than two years, depending on how clinical trials go. QED expects to begin hiring additional people for development of the technology in the next few months.

“In the proposal we stated that 38 jobs would be created at QED within 3 years,” says Patrick. “In fact, we believe that number to be quite conservative.”
 
Source: John L. Patrick
Writer: Karin Connelly

This story originally appeared in sister publication Fresh Water Cleveland.

On any given day, at any given time, some 75 employees at Toledo’s Bolt Express are dispatching and tracking millions of tons of cargo being transported by truck and air freight carrier all over North America, including Canada and Mexico.

The company’s operations center is teeming with activity 24/7/365, managing shipments for its hundreds of customers in the manufacturing, retail and construction sectors.

““We track our customers’ freight from door to door, coordinating every aspect of it,” explains Guy Sanderson, the company’s chief operating officer. “We do it by satellite and provide real-time updates to customers.”

The company’s innovative technology is what makes the load tracking possible, says Sanderson. “We invest heavily in technology and have a product development team dedicated to creating new capabilities to handle all the shipments we’re in charge of.”  

One of the tracking capabilities the team developed is called “Border Advantage,” which is used for Canadian and Mexican shipments. “It simplifies the complex customs procedure for freight and enables our customers to check the status of their shipment at any time during the border-crossing process,” he explains.

Elizabeth and Ben Bauman established Bolt Express in 2001. The company, which started with four employees, has pursued an aggressive growth strategy. It built a new state-of-the-art headquarters in 2005 and expanded its services in 2007 to offer cross border and intra-Mexico shipping. Bolt Express now has 90 employees and was recently recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing privately owned companies in America.

While the company doesn’t own any trucks itself, it works with some 300 truck owner/operators and also partners with air carrier networks. To maintain quality, Bolt Express mandates that all drivers who work for its partner owner/operators complete rigorous training provided by the company.

Regardless where a shipment originates or terminates in North America, if it’s being dispatched and tracked by Bolt Express, it’s in capable hands.

Source:  Guy Sanderson, Bolt Express
Writer:  Lynne Meyer

The growth of Cleveland into a major industrial powerhouse in the late 1800s and early 1900s was fueled by the labor and entrepreneurial skills of millions of immigrants. Arriving from Slovakia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Italy, and Germany, they eagerly filled Cleveland jobs.

After nearly a decade of sliding population figures, Cleveland is now looking to recapture the momentum of those early days of robust economic growth by putting out a high-profile welcome mat to immigrants and others through the new Global Cleveland organization.

Global Cleveland focuses on regional economic development by attracting, welcoming and connecting newcomers, both economically and socially, to the many opportunities available throughout Greater Cleveland.

While the program officially launched in July, the Global Cleveland Welcome Hub will open this fall in the center of downtown Cleveland, according to Baiju Shah, chairman of the organization’s board.

“Global Cleveland will focus on all newcomers with active newcomer attraction initiatives to recruit individuals not currently residing in the Cleveland region,” he explains.

The target audience of newcomers includes immigrants, international students attending local universities and colleges, and “boomerangs”-- native Clevelanders returning to town.

The organization has four strategies: attraction, retention, connection and communication.

“We’ve discovered that many ex-Clevelanders have only limited information about both the economy and the region that was once their home,” Shah explains. “Once presented with the rich set of new opportunities here, they are pleasantly surprised and interested in learning more.”

Global Cleveland is developing a series of initiatives for attracting and retaining newcomers. Programs currently under way aim at showcasing job opportunities in health care, biomedical, IT and financial services.

“We’re also creating a resource directory to help newcomers get more quickly connected to the community,” he says.

The program has developed a host of partnerships with community organizations, agencies, universities and ethnic groups. “We will be establishing a network of welcome centers across the region,” Shah notes. “These centers will include information and resources to help newcomers get connected to both professional opportunities and to community resources throughout the region.”

Source:  Baiju Shah, Global Cleveland
Writer:  Lynne Meyer

The closing of a business incubator in Cincinnati has prompted NanoLogix, the Hubbard-based firm specializing in early detection of harmful microorganisms, to move its main R&D laboratory.

Instead of the Queen City, the lab will now be housed in the company's 4,000-square-foot headquarters building in Hubbard.

"It was an unanticipated move, but one that ultimately we're happy with," says Bret Barnhizer, NanoLogix's CEO.

For the past five years, NanoLogix's research and development was being done at the BioStart incubator in Cincinnati by a team of scientists. The company had even planned to expand that team, adding a two more scientists. That changed abruptly earlier this summer, when the site announced it would close by Sept. 30.  

According to Barnhizer, it didn't take long to come to the conclusion that consolidation was in the company's best interest.

"We looked around and there wasn't a deal with incentives like we had with BioStart. We had a phenomenal deal that gave us access to equipment and facilities we couldn't find elsewhere. But, we had this extra space in Hubbard. We happened to have just completed a clean-room production facility. And, if you needed to talk to one of our scientists, all you would have to do is walk down the hall," he says. "It turned out to be a wonderful move for us."

Now, all NanoLogix activities, from R&D to production and management, will be under one roof. The move comes at a time when the firm continues to validate their work on early detection of bacteria and other harmful microorganisms, including a 300-patient clinical trial being conducted at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and work on new a new product line that could lead to early detection of tuberculosis.

According to Barnhizer, the work will continue seamlessly.

"We'll be scaling down our operations in Cincinnati about the same time we start working in Hubbard," he explains. "The move will help us save thousands of dollars per month in rent we won't have to pay, not to mention the efficiency savings involved."

With most of their lab staff opting to remain in Cincinnati, NanoLogix will also be hiring new scientists to man the new lab. The staff additions planned for Cincinnati will bring additional staff to the Hubbard site, he says.

"I won't denigrate the work our people in Cincinnati did for us, but this is a natural move. We're excited about the opportunities it affords us as we move forward," says Barnhizer.

Source: Bret T. Barnhizer, NanoLogix
Writer: Dave Malaska

When Greg Clement was involved in real estate sales, he was, by his own admission, disorganized.

“We were a small business operating with papers and folders everywhere and lots of sticky notes,” he recalls. “Trying to keep track of all the moving parts of a real estate transaction was making us crazy. It was completely inefficient, and we wasted a lot of time trying to find stuff when we needed it.”

Clement realized that he needed a system, but discovered that the only effective way to manage things was to “cobble a bunch of different programs together and hope for the best,” he notes.

To salvage the situation, he developed a software system for small business management and hired a programmer to write it.

“It ended up being so helpful to us that we wanted to offer it to others in the real estate industry,” he explains.

He established Realeflow in 2007 to offer the software, which he named OpenRoad.

“OpenRoad is web-based software that provides a comprehensive business management system for people in real estate,” Clement says. “It helps them attract new customers, manage those customers and ensure repeat purchases by those customers.”

The software program is available in both a standard and a professional version, which provides assistance in conducting marketing campaigns, creating legal forms, generating leads, and handling rehab projects.

“As a business management system, OpenRoad pulls everything together -- email, website, social media and video -- and has morphed into one-easy-to-use marketing automation platform,” Clement explains. ”It’s like putting your business on steroids, but without the nasty side effects.”

Realeflow, based in Parma Heights, has grown from just Clement and an assistant to 32 employees.

“As we’ve become proficient at Internet marketing, we’re offering webinars on what we’ve learned,” he says. The company offers on-line courses on “Facebook Domination” and “Smart Internet Marketing Solutions.”

Clement now wants to help businesses beyond the real estate field create order out of chaos.

“We’ll be branching out in 2012 and creating organizational software products for different industries, like restaurants, mortgage companies, small retail stores and construction,” he reports.

Source: Greg Clement, Realeflow
Writer:  Lynne Meyer

For most of its history, Sharonville-based PEDCO  was content to be the "quiet company" among full-service engineering and architectural consulting firms.

No longer. Renewed attention to its future, development of a strategic plan and a new emphasis on cross-disciplinary, cross-generational interaction has led to growth in a sluggish industry, says Bill Giesler, PEDCO's president.

The company, which celebrated its 30^th birthday in August, enjoyed revenue growth of 20 percent last year, is on track for more of the same in 2011, and is hiring.

"We're bucking the trend," Giesler says.

He says the catalyst for the company's renewed energy came seven years ago.

"2004 was a lousy year," he explains. "It made us look internally at who are we, what do we want to be?"

With the help of a national consultant, began laying the groundwork in 2006. One result was an increased reliance on technically trained people in business development, Giesler says.

"Engineers and architects have no formal training in business development and marketing," he explains. The company needed an approach whereby technical people understood how to leverage relationships to build more business, he explains.

Developing a strategic plan was a key to the company's turnaround, Giesler says. In 2006 and 2007, PEDCO formulated its first roadmap, one that was renewed earlier this year. While the first plan relied on the input of senior management, the second plan included a cross-functional array of PEDCO employees and a representative from every functional area.

As the company noticed results, more attention was placed on attracting and advancing younger employees -- a critical task at a time when the number of engineering grads going into the consulting field was dropping, says Jerry Doerger, VP operations.

"Millennials want flexibility, time to be with their families. We started to recognize that. Also, Millennials were multi-taskers, sometimes working with an iPod in their ears. We needed to be able to allow multi-tasking and understand and accept Millennials for what they were."

Existing employees, too, expressed a desire to know more about how the business was run and how to contribute to its success, he says. Today, every new employee is assigned a mentor to school them in the "PEDCO Way." It's not only an opportunity to learn, but "it's an avenue for feedback and ideas."

PEDCO employees 84, mostly in Ohio (the company also has an office in Fort Wayne, Ind.), with 18 hired since October. Giesler says the company is currently looking to fill an additional seven or eight positions.

Sources: Bill Giesler and Jerry Doerger, PEDCO
Writer: Gene Monteith

The next generation of Ohio entrepreneurs is in good hands, according to a prestigious ranking of college and university entrepreneurship programs.

The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine surveyed more than 2,000 entrepreneurship programs, and ranked three Ohio universities among the top 25 undergraduate programs in the U.S. The University of Dayton's Entrepreneurial Leadership Program is ranked no. 12, followed by Miami University's Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership at no. 15, and Xavier University's Sedler Family Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at 25.

The survey covered the 2010-2011 academic year, and ranked schools based on features inside and outside of the classroom. That included academics and requirements, percentage of students enrolled in entrepreneurship programs, and percentage of graduates and faculty had run, started or bought a successful business. The survey also looked at schools' partnerships with other institutions to allow access to the entrepreneurship program, and budgets for clubs and organizations that support entrepreneurship.

The results put the universities in the company of number one-ranked University of Houston, as well as Baylor University, Syracuse University and Brigham Young University.

At the three universities, there are a total of 865 students enrolled in entrepreneurship programs, who have access to 21 entrepreneurship organizations and clubs and 14 mentor programs.

Sources: Debora Del Valle, Director for Public Relations Xavier University; and University of Dayton communications
Writer: Feoshia Henderson

The manual “tapping” of surgeons, intent on breaking through life-threatening occlusions, could soon be replaced by vibrating tip guidewires, says Stephanie Harrington, chief operating officer of VasoStar Inc. The company, a subsidiary of Frantz Medical Group in Mentor, is collaborating with Cleveland Clinic and Interplex Medical LLC of Milford, on the plaque-busting technology.

The company was formed in 2007 to “develop technology invented in Israel and brought to us through one of our clinician colleagues at Stanford University,” says Harrington. The vibrating guidewires let cardiologists open up totally blocked arteries much faster than the current manual method.

Lesions that have been there for some time, called chronic total occlusions, become calcified and very difficult to penetrate with a tiny guidewire only .014 in. diameter. Currently, the clinician is about 300 cm away from the lesion, outside of the patient’s leg, gently tapping to force the guidewire through the calcified surface.

“What we’ve done is increase the speed of the tapping and move that tapping source up near the point of the lesion,” says Harrington. The power source, a tiny electromagnetic engine, creates a high-frequency vibration. “This will allow patients with CTOs to be treated with interventional techniques versus invasive bypass surgery.”

The Ohio Third Frontier Commission, which supports the commercialization of products in the biomedical, medical imaging and sensors industries, recently awarded VasoStar $1 million to help develop the technology, which is still in the product-development stage. Harrington said clinical trials should start in about 18 months. The company employs four “fulltime equivalents” on loan from Frantz Medical and Harrington expects to add 12 to 15 positions over the next two years.  

Source: Stephanie A. S. Harrington, Frantz Medical Development Ltd.
Writer: Patrick G. Mahoney

Imagine pursuing a degree that requires you to understand caves, mines or other rugged geological formations. Now imagine trying to do your field studies in a wheelchair.

Concerns like that may be rendered moot if virtual technology being developed at Ohio State University and Georgia State University bear fruit.

The two institutions, tapping the power of the Ohio Supercomputer Center, are in the early stages of a study to show whether a virtual environment can be built that is powerful enough to give students and others with disabilities the virtual field experience they need to enter the geosciences in increased numbers.

Financed with a $202,744 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the Geosciences Program, the two universities are in the first year of a two-year project to bring such a vision to life.

“The idea is that, because of their disability, it’s difficult for them to go out into the field,” says Don Stredney, OSC senior research scientist for biomedical applications and director of the center’s interface laboratory. “We looked at how we can use simulation and virtual technologies to emulate what it would be like to go there, and whether you could teach principles that you’re trying to convey about aspects of geosciences by doing it through a virtual environment.”

The project follows a $39,980 OEDG planning grant last year to design the research. Christopher Atchison, a former graduate research assistant at OSC and now part of the team as an assistant professor of geosciences education at Georgia State, received a separate $10,480 grant to cover involvement of students with mobility impairments during the planning grant work.

The team will use structural data obtained from the Cave Research Foundation and high-precision data collected by laser remote-sensing technology and high-resolution digital photography to build a virtual environment that mimics a typical field outing.  Later in the project, students will be placed in the various environments to test their effectiveness as a field learning tool.

A successful project might open up doors not just for those with physical disabilities, but for a wide range of people studying about and working in geosciences – or other fields. The oil and gas industry might be able to benefit from virtual technologies, Stredney says, as well mining personnel who need to know the structure of a place without going there in person.

“I don’t see any limits whatsoever.”

Source: Don Stredney, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and OSC Communications
Writer: Gene Monteith

Christopher Celeste and Blake Squires have business in their blood. Over the course of their careers, each has made his way through the political world, the marketing and digital music world, and everything in between. Together they founded and fostered Solon-based Findaway World before each eventually left the company.

The two came together again when they realized they most liked forming businesses, and wanted to put their knowledge to work helping others do the same.

"I spent a lot of time in my career helping people bring ideas to market," says Celeste. "One on the things I realized I wanted to do is help other people create businesses."

So the two created Hatch Partners, which stands for Help At The Critical Hour. The company helps entrepreneurs all over Northeast Ohio bring their ideas to life, whether it's through mentoring, advising or financing.

"The idea behind Hatch is that every entrepreneur has that moment of Should I pursue this idea?" explains Celeste. "We like being at the moment if inception when an idea is really coming to life."

While Hatch occasionally provides capital to its portfolio of startups, its underlying function is to encourage other entrepreneurs. "We have no interest in becoming venture capitalists," says Celeste. "The idea is really being an advisor and coaching."

Unlike other business incubators in the area, Hatch is focused on coaching. "We're neither place-based nor institutional," says Celeste. "We've had a lot of good fortune in our lives. There were always key people who said, 'Yes you can. You can build this business.'"

Source: Christopher Celeste
Writer: Karin Connelly

This story originally appeared in sister publication Fresh Water Cleveland.

Millions of kids participate in sports every day. With the hassles of scheduling games, alerting players to rain-outs and carpooling, parents spend hours figuring out the logistics of managing or being part of sports teams. The staff at Barefoot Proximity, a Cincinnati-based global digital and eCRM agency, found a way to help parents score with a high-tech time-saving tool.

"Being a coach includes more than being just a coach," says Troy Hitch, executive creative director at Barefoot Proximity. "Besides understanding the game, you have to deal with the players, their parents, friends and everyone else involved. It can be a lot of work." That's why BFP created CoachHub, a free website that connects coaches and parents who are involved on a sports team. Coaches can click one button to contact all parents at once, making last-minute schedule changes, rainouts and cancellations a lot less hassle. They can also remind parents about snack duty and even post pictures to share.

But Coachhub acts as more than a niche social media website. Imagine you're a soccer mom driving to a game, when all of the sudden your phone beeps with more than a reminder from CoachHub that it's your week to buy snacks. It also has a mobile coupon for Gatorade attached to the reminder.

You stop at the closest gas station, pick up Gatorade and scan your mobile coupon. Just like that, you have snacks and saved money. "The redemption rate of these coupons would be incredibly high," says Hitch. "This is where we create partners with brands." Hitch and his team plan on working on partnerships with brands like Gatorade and Dick's Sporting Goods. "All of it helps the user, but it also creates meaningful intersections between the user and these brands," Hitch says.

As people use CoachHub, the program collects super-rich consumer data that BFP can leverage to gain other partners. Dick's could partner with BFP and sell one-click equipment packages to teams on CoachHub at a 10 percent discount.
"The idea is that a brand has the potential to create a self-liquidating market experience," Hitch says. "Instead of throwing money into advertisement, they can actually create an asset that creates revenue and is meaningful to the consumer."

Source: Troy Hitch, Barefoot Proximity
Writer: Evan Wallis

This story originally appeared in sister publication Soapbox.

Picture the belching smokestack of a steel mill releasing heat waste into the air. Harnessing and converting that into usable energy is becoming a reality, thanks to the new Thermafficient Waste Heat Recovery Engine developed by Akron’s Echogen Power Systems.
 
Echogen views the engine as a game changer for steel mills, power companies and other industries that require a lot of electricity.

Echogen’s first engine, which can produce 250 kilowatts of electricity from a given heat source, was built in Lebanon, Ohio, and is in final testing stage at American Electric Power’s research center in Columbus.

“We’re moving it to another facility, this time in Akron, for a long-term endurance trial in a true industrial setting,” explains Mark Terzola, Echogen’s chief operating officer.

Echogen is currently building a much stronger engine, able to produce six to eight mega watts of electricity, according to Terzola. “We’re in late-term negotiations with potential industrial partners who need this kind of engine,” he says.

Echogen recently caught the eye of the Dresser-Rand Group, Inc., of Houston, which makes rotating industrial equipment. Dresser-Rand has invested $10 million in Echogen in exchange for a 20 percent stake in the company and will provide turbines and other parts for Echogen’s future engines.

“Dresser-Rand is the exclusive licensee for our engines to the oil and gas industry,” Terzola notes. Echogen also plans to manufacture smaller engines for companies that produce less heat waste, such as ceramics companies and glass makers.

On another front, California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory also contacted Echogen. Berkeley Lab hopes to be the first in the world to produce electricity from the earth’s heat using hydrogen and to store some of it underground, where it won’t contribute to climate change. Echogen is designing a special turbine for the project, according to Terzola. The project, which will unfold over about three years, has received $5 million of underwriting from the Department of Energy. EchoGen has received additional support from JumpStart and the Ohio Third Frontier.

““We’re only at the tip of the iceberg for this technology,” Terzola explains. “We have an outstanding team of engineers we’ve recruited from world-class organizations, and the technology we’re working with has tremendous future opportunity.”

Echogen currently has 25 employees and plans to have nearly 50 by the end of 2012.

“The early capital we received through the Ohio Third Frontier enabled us to leverage it for immediate growth that provided us with a foundation for long-term success,” he notes.

Source:  Mark Terzola, Echogen Power Systems
Writer:  Lynne Meyer

Near the end of the telephone interview, Fathom CEO Scot Lowry stops in mid-sentence.

“Sorry,” he explains. “The reason I just hesitated is that we have a gong in our big training room, and every time we get a new customer, somebody rings it. Somebody just rang it.”

By all indications, that gong has been going off regularly. The Valley View online marketing firm, which traces its roots to 1997, was named the second fastest-growing company in Cleveland in 2010, based on 2009 revenues, by the Weatherhead 100.

Lowry says that growth has come because Fathom gives customers what many online marketing firms do not: a clear indication of how marketing solutions result in revenue and return on investment.

Fathom, on the other hand, tracks both and reports it to the client. At the top of Fathom’s home page is a line that keeps a running tally of how much revenue Fathom has generated for its customers. As of Sept. 7, the year-to-date total was $147,243,733.

“Most of the companies that come to us don’t know how to turn the online channel into revenue,” Lowry says. Further, he says, most online marketing companies don’t know how to translate what they do in terms of revenue to the customer.
Instead, they tend to focus on SEO (search engine optimization) or traffic to web pages -- which Lowry says is not an indication of how many deals resulted or how many sales were made.

Fathom grew from a small web development firm called Vendor Tech, which eventually merged with IT consulting firm Fathom IT in 2004. The next year, after e-mail distribution and pay-per-click management services were added, the company spun off Fathom SEO. In 2006, Fathom SEO added video production and marketing services and built a recording studio.

As a comprehensive online marketing firm, the SEO tag no longer defined the company, Lowry says.

“Today we have an incredibly powerful array of capabilities, and we dropped SEO from the company name because of that,” he says. “And we’ve been in the process of communicating to the world that SEO isn’t enough. You’ve got to look at a complete matrix approach at using all forms of online (marketing). And that isn’t based on what we have, it’s based on what the client needs.”

The flagship product is called Your Top Salesperson, described as a “complete, fully customizable online marketing service that delivers results that matter to your business.”

Employment has followed revenues. With only 20 employees five years ago, the company now has 130 -- 20 of them coming from the recent acquisition of Columbus-based Webbed Marketing, which provides complementary services and has deep expertise in social media.

Lowry says Fathom is hiring, with 12 open spots at present.

Source: Scot Lowry, Fathom
Writer: Gene Monteith

The Ohio State University Center for Automotive Research celebrates its 20th anniversary this week with a day-long seminar and celebration that will culminate in the unveiling of  blueprints for CAR’s expansion -- and the center’s roadmap for the next 20 years.

It's been a long, fruitful journey so far.

“We’ve grown from (virtually) nothing to a $7-million operation, and we expect to keep growing,” says David Emerling, industry collaboration director for the program.

CAR, an interdisciplinary research center within OSU’s College of Engineering, was founded 20 years ago with funds raised by OSU’s managing interest in the Transportation Research Center in Marysville (TRC Inc. is owned by Honda, which chartered the university to run the operation).

By the mid-90s, CAR had its own campus facility and today, its 35,000 square-foot digs house engine and vehicle dynamometers; acoustics labs, intelligent and autonomous vehicle laboratories; combustion research facilities; hybrid-electric propulsion, fuel cell and electrochemical energy storage facilities.

 “In our last ten years we’ve been very entrenched in battery research,” Emerling says. Leading the electric-race car pack since the 1990s, CAR’s engineering team set the 2010 land-speed record with the Venturi “Buckeye Bullet,”  the first fuel-cell vehicle to reach 300 mph.

The architectural studies to be unveiled at Friday’s ceremony are the initial steps in CAR’s expansion from a research center within the College of Engineering to the larger Transportation Research Institute of Ohio.
“We focus ourselves on all ground transportation, not just automotive,” says Emerling. With financial support from a $3-million Ohio Third Frontier grant and continued partnerships within the transportation industry in both Central Ohio and abroad, CAR’s progressive research encompasses everything from electric cars to heavy trucks, advanced electric propulsion to alternative fuels.

OSU CAR’s 20th anniversary begins Friday with three professional development seminars, a classic and specialty car and motorcycle sShow (during which visitors can test student-built prototype vehicles), followed by the unveiling of CAR’s future plans.

Source: David Emerling, CAR
Writer: Kitty McConnell

LeanDog has taken lean practices well beyond the manufacturing realm, where techniques like Kaizen originally made their mark. Today, the Cleveland firm, which helps organizations in virtually every industry take waste out of their IT operations, has hit its stride, growing sales more than 1000 percent since 2007 and landing at 311 on Inc.’s annual list of America’s 500 Fastest Growing Companies.

CEO and founder John Stahl says what his firm of 36 employees does is promote “culture change.”

“We teach them (clients) how to fish,” he says, “by helping them build a lean and agile culture.”

The fishing analogy seems appropriate, given that LeanDog is housed on a boat in downtown Cleveland -- right next to a mothballed WWII submarine (the U.S.S. Cod).

Stahl and co-founder Jeff Morgan learned about agile software development after years of serving a variety of IT organizations, Stahl says. Helping organizations streamline their operations has spurred happy customers to increasingly seek software development services from LeanDog, contributing to revenues that Inc. reported at $2.5 million last year, up from $214,801 in 2007.

Stahl says LeanDog’s hallmarks are “extreme transparency and a personal brand,” noting that his firm does no advertising.

Meanwhile, Stahl says the company is helping fuel the Cleveland startup scene by hosting Startup Weekend and Cleveland GiveCamp, in which IT professionals develop software for charities during a 72-hour period.

The company has plans to expand its Columbus operations in the near future -- it currently has eight employees there -- as well as possibly adding offices in Pittsburgh and Salt Lake city.

Stahl says his company is hiring, with 20 to 30 open spots currently.

Source: John Stahl, LeanDog
Writer: Gene Monteith