Cover Story
1999 SCOPE Awards
Six Stark County businesses are honored for the way they do business.
By Kevin Brosien
Smart Business Akron/Canton | May 1999
On April 29 at the Brookside Country Club, the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce honored this year’s winners of the sixth annual SCOPE awards, recognizing Stark County’s Outstanding Private Enterprises.
Businesses are judged on staying power, company and employee growth, service and product innovation, response to adversity and community involvement.
This year, the chamber cut the number of winners from 11 to six, making the awards more exclusive. After dissecting close to 70 nominations, these are the businesses that stand a cut above the rest. We at SBN would like to congratulate all the winners and wish them continued success.
The Amish Door Restaurant and Village Inc
A country inn, gift shops and a restaurant serving traditional Amish style food
Founded 1977
Employs 250
Philosophy to success: Keep an eye on your competition, but blaze your own trail.
In 1977, Milo Miller, president of Amish Door Inc., bought a restaurant in Wilmot because his previous job, as a mason, was killing his back.
Little did he dream that his 48-seat restaurant serving home cooked Amish style food would blossom into a whole village.
The restaurant, where all the food is made from scratch, now seats 450 and is accompanied by a 500-seat banquet facility, 50-room country inn, a bed and breakfast and six retail stores selling antiques, gifts and baked goods.
What the Amish Door Village has done is create a destination place.
“When I first got here, it was always, ‘What’s the competition doing?’” says Eric Gerber, vice president of Amish Door Inc. “We got to the point where we said, ‘Wait a second. Why are we always worried about what the competition is doing? Let’s take some chances ourselves.’”
By becoming involved with travel associations and attending bus company trade shows, the Amish Door has boosted its number of visitors and its revenue.
As the Amish Door grew, the one item that was the base of its success remained constant — the food. Gerber says the company could cut out some labor costs if it used some prepackaged foods, but it refuses to compromise the quality of the food.
“You can have a nice place. You can have a clean place. If the food isn’t good or the waitresses aren’t friendly and the waitresses don’t take care of you, you’re not going to have people coming back,” Gerber says. “Have we perfected that? No, but that’s our goal.”
Beaver Excavating Co.
Heavy construction company specializing in earthwork, site preparation, concrete foundations, underground utilities, roadwork, golf courses, landfills and maintenance to the industrial sector
Founded 1953
Employs 500
Philosophy to success: Provide excellent service and quality work at a fair price.
Founder Don Sterling started Beaver Excavating with a $4,000 loan, a dump truck and a back hoe. Initially, the company dug basements and sewer systems for home builders. Now it utilizes more than 300 pieces of equipment for major projects from construction to destruction in Ohio and bordering states.
W. Mark Sterling, president of Beaver Excavating, says the company “kind of grew in spurts.”
The first and largest division is Earthwork, specializing in moving earth for projects from site preparation for houses to building dams.
The company later formed an underground utilities division in response to customer demands. This division has installed sewer systems and pump stations for entire cities.
In 1982, working on a project for the Timken Company, Beaver prepared more than three million cubic yards of earth, laid more than 10 miles of underground utilities and started its concrete division by pouring a 26,000-cubic-yard foundation.
“We basically do everything but build buildings,” Sterling says.
Ernie’s Bicycle Shop
Providing new bicycles and repair service in Massillon, North Canton, New Philadelphia, Wooster and Canal Fulton. Ernie’s also sells fitness equipment and other wheeled recreational vehicles, such as wagons and skateboards.
Founded 1978
Employs 35
Philosophy to success: Find your customers, then give them what they want, even if that requires opening another store.
Ernie Lehman, owner of Ernie’s Bicycle Shop, says he got into the bike business by mistake. One day, while an employee at Brewster Dairy, he was looking through Mother Jones Magazine and saw an ad for a bike shop for sale in Bolivar. Thinking it might be a fun side business, he bought it, and after a month, moved it to Navarre, where it stayed for seven years. He worked the shop alone, part-time, while working at the dairy.
“We didn’t look into growing too much,” says Lehman, but slowly the bike shop took up more and more of his time and he eventually decided to dedicate himself to it full time. The majority of his customers were coming from Massillon, so Lehman moved his shop.
Once in Massillon, he noticed he was drawing a large clientele from the Canton area, so following the flow of demand, he opened a shop in North Canton.
“Once we opened the second one, we got a taste of running a shop you aren’t at,” he says. Ernie’s Bicycle Shops have since opened in New Philadelphia, Wooster and Canal Fulton, all following the flow of his customer base.
Lehman attributes his success to the fact that he loves the sport that is his business, as do his employees. For the betterment of the sport, the company has donated more than $10,000 to development of local trails. Lehman is a member of the Ohio and Erie Canal Corridor Coalition and the Ohio and Erie Canal Association and last year received a corporate award for support of the trail. Ernie’s was named a Top 50 Trek bicycle dealer in 1998 out of 3,000 dealers nationwide.
Meter Devices Co., Inc.
Designer and manufacturer of electricity metering products and equipment
Founded 1918
Employs 85
Philosophy to success: Have a vision to be number one and seek to achieve that vision in all aspects of your business.
Meter Devices Co. is a world leader in electricity metering products and equipment, serving customers in North America, South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, Taiwan and the Philippines.
“We’re known as the market share leader in the product lines we sell,” says John Shincovich, group vice president. “So the utilities (companies) have a lot of confidence in what we’re doing — our quality level, our pricing, the whole nine yards.”
The deregulation of the utility industry has created more of a demand for metering products, and Meter Devices has accommodated the industry with short lead times and innovative quality products. The company has posted four consecutive record growth years, doubling in size every three years for the past nine.
To accommodate growth, this October the company plans to move into its new 70,000-square-foot facility in Canton Township, where new product lines will be opened, creating more employment opportunities.
Shincovich stresses that embracing technology in all aspects of the business has helped it achieve number one market status.
Meter Devices supports The Canton Rotary and The Pro Football Hall of Fame Festival. Earlier this year, the company donated $3,000 to Dueber Elementary School in Canton as part of its Corporate Adopt-A-School Program for the advancement of education at the primary level.
Navarre Industries Inc.
Manufacturer of fuel dispensing nozzles and components in use worldwide
Founded 1991
Employs 40
Philosophy to success: Keep the company simple and let your people be people. Provide for your customers exactly what they want exactly when they want it.
By paying close attention to their customers needs, Paul and Greg Miller, brothers and owners of Navarre Industries Inc., have devised a method of manufacturing in which they produce to an inventory instead of producing to fill an order. This way, when an order is received, it can be shipped out that day. This keeps their customers happy and turns into repeat business.
The simplicity of this system stems from the simplicity of the company itself. The Miller brothers started by doing all the work themselves. Currently, the company utilizes an administrative staff of four and the rest of the 40 employees are in production.
Ten percent of the production workers are in quality control, which translates into perfection of product and shipments. The company has not missed a shipment in four years, and shipping 100,000 pieces per month, it has had no rejected parts in three years.
For Navarre Industries, the trickle down theory of a company’s success has become more of a pour down theory. Last year, the company gave all employees a $1.50 per hour raise.
“We felt we were getting the right revenues per person that we were able to do that,” Paul Miller says. “As long as we can continue to pay them more money, we’re going to pay them more money.”
The company has never laid off one person.
Flexibility is the name of the game for Navarre Industries as federal standards continually force it to make adjustments to product designs. Its customers also come to it regularly with changes in design specifications.
But by far the biggest adjustment the owners had to make came a year into the company’s existence when the building was struck by lightning. A hydraulic press blew up and a fire broke out, but the Miller’s went ahead with business as usual, not missing any shipments.
“Our customers never knew it until we told them,” Miller says.
Miller knows his company would not have overcome this pitfall or grown to its existing status without his employees.
“One of the things we’ve learned over the years is you can’t do anything as far as being successful unless you have people out there really willing to do the job and do a good job for you,” he says.
Navarre Industries will add 15 employees this month with the introduction of two new production lines.
“That’s our focus right now, to make it the very best place to work in this county, so that we have a line of people, even in these employment conditions, dying to get in here because it pays well, because the conditions are good and because we’re fair minded people.”
Shearer’s Foods, Inc.
Family owned manufacturer of Grandma Shearer’s Snacks and manufacturer of private label products for select customers in the snack food industry
Founded 1974
Employ 235
Philosophy to success: Get the best employees, make the best product and have the best service.
What started out with Jack Shearer’s urge to make his own potato chips out of a kettle in Canton has grown into a $24 million operation in a state-of-the-art, multimillion dollar production facility in the one crossroad town of Brewster.
“First and foremost, what sets us out from our competition is the quality of our products,” says Jeff Vaughn, vice president of finance. He attributes that quality to the Shearer’s “obsession with perfection.”
Tom Shearer, vice president of the company, says it’s the little things the company does that keeps it ahead of the competition.
“In today’s competitive market, people still want a quality product, not necessarily the cheapest,” Shearer says.
The cooking oils, salts and spices are checked hourly in the plant, and with the recent additions to Shearer’s production facility, every stage of the process, down to grinding corn, is handled and monitored in the factory.
In addition, the plant is thoroughly cleaned and the cooking oils filtered daily, in an industry in which the average for cleaning is three times a week and for filtering, once a week. The result is that after 15 hours of cooking, the facility is still cleaner than most people’s homes.
The plant is regularly inspected by a rabbi so that all Shearer products may be kosher certified.
This commitment to quality has paid off as Shearer’s products continually win Gold Medal Awards from the American Taste Institute and top awards in virtually every other snack food competition.
Bob Shearer, president of the company, says that overall he is proudest of “The acceptance of the product we make by our customers and the double digit growth that we show and the expansion that we just completed.”
