This year’s honorees have made a difference in their organizations and in the region. Their positive impact on employment has reinvented the Northeast Ohio landscape into one of the most up-and-coming business regions in the country.

Every entrepreneur takes a different path to achieve success, but they all share some common traits: confidence, a willingness to take risks and the ability to see a need that other people didn’t even realize existed.

Over the years, Steven J. Demetriou has spent time in a wide range of industries, but he’s always approached leadership with the same philosophy.

Edward F. Crawford was a young man working his way through school in the early 1960s when he first put his entrepreneurial skills to the test.