Innovative Offspring: How Three Family-Owned Businesses Charted Paths to New Growth

1. Tech Electronics Grows One Midwestern City at a Time

Fifty years after Jim Canova, along with two partners, started up a St. Louis electronics distribution firm known as Tech Electronics, the middle-market company’s Midwestern roots now appear to run as wide as they do deep.

“I think that businesses that last over time are able to change with the times. And — for us — this has really been about finding a new identity as a company,” explains Kurt Canova, Tech Electronics president and one of three Canova offspring who today populate the $45 million firm’s management.

“Eight years ago, we realized that in order to fuel the growth we wanted, we would have to expand outside of St. Louis,” explains Canova, who says that the firm at that point in time drew up an M&A strategy that led to multiple acquisitions that added offices in Indianapolis; Bloomington, IL; Chicago; and Springfield. MORE

2. The Box Maker’s Fortune: A Corrugated Tale of Family, Talent, and Innovation

Back in the 1950s, Harry Eisen foresaw that corrugated cardboard would soon upend his business of manufacturing wood and wirebound boxes. His timely and swift response was to acquire the Advanced Corrugated Box Company. Fifty years later, Harry’s grandsons, Scott and Yale Eisen, had similar visions of unwelcome gatecrashers, as many of their paper suppliers aggressively built up their own competitive corrugated offerings.

“These are integrated companies that own forests, cut down trees, pulp them, and then turn them into corrugated materials, and we saw that we were just not going to be able to compete in what had increasingly become a commodity business,” explains Scott Eisen, who believes that the recent acquisition of a number of corrugated rivals by International Paper and Rock-Tenn Companyonly further validates the transformation path the two brothers began charting nearly a decade ago.

It’s a path that has had little to do with boxes and everything to do with talent. In the middle of the last decade, the Chicago company then known as Ideal Box laid out plans to enter the retail-merchandising arena with a roster of cardboard display advertising and design offerings. MORE

3. When It Came Time for Ripon Printers to Expand, There Was No Place Like Home

On December 31 last year, Sells Printing Company of Berlin, Wisconsin, ceased operations after nearly 100 years in the printing business. Eight months earlier, the one-time $30 million firm sold off its presses and certain other assets to Ripon Printers of Ripon, Wisconsin, as it scheduled plans to lay off its workers before closing its doors at year-end.

This is a story that no doubt reveals something of the challenging times that printers have faced in the digital economy, but at the same time, it sheds light on how a certain class of lean-and-mean competitor is continuing to grow, as others falter.

Andy Lyke, CEO of Ripon, would likely tell customers that the “lean and mean” label is only half right when it comes to Ripon.

“Last year, we had two people out of 300 leave the firm—and it may sound rather trite, but our story is really our people,” explains Lyke. Yet Ripon’s CEO doesn’t conceal the fact that over a period of years, the $45 million firm’s management has devoured bushels of Lean-enterprise best practices. MORE