Middle-Market CEO Interview: Mary Miller of JANCOA, Cincinnati, Ohio

By on August 22, 2013 in In The Middle, Midwest

  Cincinnati, OH — When Mary Miller joined her husband Tony’s janitorial services company 20 years ago, the firm’s employee turnover rate was 360 percent. By accepting the notion that no one wants to be a janitor forever, Miller says, she and her husband began to consider how their firm, JANCOA, could motivate its employees [...]

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Middle-Market CEO Interview: Kurt Canova of Tech Electronics, St Louis, MO

By on August 15, 2013 in In The Middle, Midwest

  St Louis, MO - Fifty years after Kurt Canova’s father started up a St. Louis electronics distribution firm, along with two partners, the firm known as Tech Electronics employs nearly 250 employees across a network of Midwestern regional offices. Canova, now president of the firm, spoke to Middle Market Executive about the company’s recent [...]

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At Confluence, M&A Becomes Preferred Path to Growth

By on August 13, 2013 in In The Middle, Northeast

  Pittsburgh, PA — When it comes to building firms, there is frequently a critical juncture where a stubbornly adolescent company arrives at a bold and inescapable conclusion: It’s time to change lunch tables. And so it is with Confluence, a 200-employee firm that for most of its entire 22 years dined with the buttoned-up [...]

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Middle-Market CEO Interview: Randy Thompson of ThompsonGas

By on August 9, 2013 in In The Middle, Northeast

  Boonsboro, MD — When Randy Thompson joined the family business a little more than 15 years ago, ThompsonGas had just one store, three delivery trucks, and eight employees serving three states. Today, the firm has more than 51 branch locations and 350 employees serving 10 states. In this Middle-Market Executive interview, Thompson tells us [...]

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For Wajam, Hiring Remains Growth’s Greatest Blessing and Burden

By on August 8, 2013 in In The Middle, Northeast

  Montreal — With 45 employees populating its Montreal, Quebec, headquarters, Wajam can safely weigh in as a middle-market firm — one seemingly a world apart from the 10-member start-up it was only a year ago. A lot has happened inside Wajam over the past year. As an up-and-coming player in the social search space, [...]

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CKO Kickboxing Finds Path to Growth Advances Fitness, Not Fighting

By on July 9, 2013 in In The Middle, Northeast

  Hoboken, New Jersey — When Lloyd Dobler, lead character of the 1989 movie Say Anything, proclaimed “Kickboxing — Sport of the Future,” he may not have had a gym franchising model in mind. Nevertheless, Joseph Andreula, CEO and founder of CKO Kickboxing, has clearly embraced Dobler’s proclamation as his network of franchised kickboxing gyms [...]

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Merger-Minded Business Leaders in Short Supply Despite Growing Middle-Market Optimism

By on June 27, 2013 in First Person

  As we advance into the second half of 2013, there are growing indications that business sentiment is improving despite nagging unemployment numbers and a shortage of merger-minded CEOs. Cindy Crotty, middle-market business watcher and head of KeyBank’s commercial banking segment, once more shared with Middle-Market Executive the findings of a KeyBank’s middle-market business sentiment survey, which [...]

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Middle-Market Firm’s Right-Brain Thinking Attracts Well-Heeled Start-Ups

By on June 5, 2013 in In The Middle, Northeast

  New York, NY - Listen to Greg Slamowitz talk about his new book Flip the Pyramid, and you might imagine that he’s a leadership guru — that rarefied breed of business thinker tasked with articulating the type of transformational insight that boutique advisory firms often use as hood ornaments. Certainly, his high-minded organizational [...]

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