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The client wanted the impossible: Give a robot all the skills of a human welder.
Five years ago a custom automotive and marine supplier in Cleveland asked what was then an engineering consulting firm to help him with a labor shortage, and Path Robotics Inc. was born.
"The tolerances are incredibly tight, that you have to keep with welding," co-founder and CEO Andy Lonsberry said. "And if the gaps (between pieces of sheet metal) change from 0 to 4 millimeters, you have to be able to make adjustments on the fly, seeing what's coming, move to a weave, go up onto a lift, weld in.
"And these, again, are things that come very easily for a trained human welder. But for a robot, it's just impossible."
Except now it's possible.
Path Robotics has since moved to Columbus, and last year launched its first commercial robotics system based on the prototype built by two brothers and a fellow engineer in that factory basement, as Lonsberry told us as the latest guest in Columbus Business First's Newsmakers podcast.
We talk about how the Path team solved its impossible problem, what it's like to work in cramped quarters with your brother, and why at first Lonsberry told Drive Capital, "Go away."
The interview was recorded shortly after the company landed a $56 million venture capital round to expand sales and manufacturing of its AI-powered system. The round was led by VC firm Addition along with returning investors, Columbus-based Drive Capital LLC and California's Basis Set Ventures and Lemnos Lab.
Lonsberry founded the company with his brother, Alex Lonsberry, and fellow engineer Matt Klein. The fourth founder is Ken Lonsberry, their father, on the business side – he didn't have to work in the basement. Today Path has more than 100 employees and could top 160 by year's end.
Welding jargon like "weave" above makes sense in context, but a few terms in the interview might be unfamiliar: Tier One automotive are the very large suppliers to automakers, mass producing the same part. And in welding the "puddle" is the molten metal forming during the weld, which quickly hardens to join the parts.
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It’s almost hard to believe there was a time when good coffee just wasn’t a thing.
But it wasn’t that long ago.
Greg Ubert was working in computer software in the late 1980s, but what really captured his imagination was coffee — real, good coffee; the art and science of roasting.
And, of course, the potential for business.
“Good coffee just wasn’t widely available,” he said. “It wasn’t around. It wasn’t accessible.”
When he started Crimson Cup Coffee and Tea in 1991, local-based Stauf’s had been open just a few years, but industry giant Starbucks was still years away from stand-alone Columbus shops.
Ubert started not with a plan to seed the city, state or country with shops, but rather to be a resource — a wholesaler of beans and other supplies and consultant to those who wanted to run shops of their own.
Its customers are those who serve the end customers. That’s still the heart of the business today with hundreds of clients in 40 states plus a franchisee in Bangladesh, but Crimson Cup is gradually building up name recognition of its own with industry awards and a slow rollout of its own stores, including the newest unit at Easton Town Center.
Ubert sat down with Columbus Business First for our Newsmakers podcast. He shared not just the history of the brand and how its evolved in the past 30 years, but also the impact the Covid-19 pandemic had on the business — he shares his personal record for consecutive days wearing sweatpants to work — and his hopes for the future.
“People enjoy having a great drink,” he said. “I don’t think that’s going to change.”
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Count North Country Charcuterie among those businesses that are wiser and more efficient at this point in the pandemic.
The Columbus-based maker and processor of salami, fresh sausage and other products has used new offerings to make a better-balanced business and refigured production space to better maximize its use.
The moves create more consistent cash flow and buy them more time in their current facility before they need to consider an expansion.
In this episode of Newsmakers, Columbus Business First’s podcast with Central Ohio leaders and entrepreneurs, co-owners and brothers Duncan Forbes and James Forbes (who started the business in 2014 with mother Jane Forbes), share their company’s history, some of the ins-and-outs of meat product production and why adding products like fresh sausage is important for more reasons than just additional sales.
How long can North Country Charcuterie stay in its current facility? What new products are they developing and dreaming up? And why does production have to occur within very specific hours?
The Forbes brothers discuss that and more.
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Harley Blakeman's LinkedIn profile is one of a kind, but he's working to change that.
The founder of Columbus tech company Honest Jobs LLC lists one prior job and the book he wrote, then drops this attention grabber: "Drug dealer, January 2009 - November 2010."
"Started with $500 and grew the business to over $8,000/month in revenue," reads the description for the self-employed role. "Met and exceeded customer expectations. Successfully managed multiple suppliers. ... Closed down operations after being arrested and sentenced to prison."
The hilarious, blunt satirization of resume-speak helps explain the inspiration for his startup.
Blakeman turned his life around after his 14-month sentence in Georgia, moving to Columbus at the invitation of relatives who hooked him up with his first job. He described his journey from couch-surfing homeless teen to startup founder in the latest episode of Columbus Business First's Newsmakers podcast.
Despite earning top grades at Ohio State University, Blakeman couldn't land an internship and had trouble finding a job because of his record. He did eventually land a supervisory role at a manufacturer, but he knew the struggle was worse for many more entering the job market after incarceration – no matter their skill level.
"And I was just obsessing over it, I couldn't sleep at night, I was thinking about: This is what I should be doing with my time," he said. "This is my calling, I think, helping people overcome this problem."
Blakeman answered that calling by starting Honest Jobs, and pivoting the business from job-hunt training services to a full tech platform that matches candidates with employers.
But the best possible outcome, he said, is eventually to put himself out of business.
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Comune will reopen for business, but that was never a sure thing.
Co-owner Joe Galati said he met with his accountant in November. The accountant asked him what Galati believed his chances of going bankrupt were.
Galati said 20%.
The accountant said 90%
“That hit the hardest,” Galati said. “There’s a very good chance this is all going away. … That lights a fire. That’s not going to happen. What are we going to do?”
The situation is better today.
Galati explains why he is more optimistic now than he was a few months ago in this episode of Crisis Management, Columbus Business First’s podcast about doing business amid the coronavirus pandemic.
He took a more conservative approach to business in the past year than many peers in the industry. He always expected this to be a long event, not just a few weeks.
Though the entire restaurant industry was challenged, Comune was among the establishments facing added difficulties. It was never built to have a thriving carryout business and the dine-in space was too small to reopen in any meaningful way. It’s still closed today.
But there were bright spots. The Parable Coffee pop-up has done well. There was some success with planned dinner events.
A return to some of the restaurant’s earliest dishes like crispy rice and its walnut-mushroom Bolognese is helping drive sales now.
“You can only hunker down so much,” he said. “At some point a business has to make its numbers.”
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Business in times of struggle often talk of getting back to their roots.
Not North High Brewing.
Like many breweries and other businesses, the last year was one of big changes in the face of challenges, but the North High of today doesn’t resemble the one first dreamed up by co-founders Gavin Meyers and Tim Ward a decade ago.
They didn’t want to run any brewpub. Today they have four and could be in double digits by the end of the year.
They didn’t have aspirations beyond Columbus but soon will be in multiple states.
They only barely wanted to brew their own beer — the initial hook for the business was as a brew-your-own operation. North High’s own beers would be secondary to the experience of inviting customers in, showing them a book of recipes and letting them loose (with professional guidance) on the brewing system.
That brew-your-own option diminished over time as the founders realized being a traditional brewery made more sense.
It officially ended last year.
“That was the reason for being. That was the point of differentiation back when we thought the seventh brewery in Columbus was going to really crowd the industry,” Meyers said.
There are dozens of craft brewers around Central Ohio today and hundreds in the state.
North High is poised to rise in those ranks.
Meyers chatted with Columbus Business First for an episode of Crisis Management, a podcast about businesses operating amid the coronavirus pandemic.
He talked about the challenges of the past year — declining sales, laying off staff — but also the promise of the future. Thanks to its relationship with Columbus-based coworking space developers and operators CoHatch, North High’s reach is moving beyond its original Short North taproom.
Through that partnership, North High now has operations in Dublin, Springfield and Cincinnati, with additional units lined up in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Florida.
Meyers explains how that relationship developed, how it works and how it’s allowing North High to expand at “a fraction of the cost” they would incur if striking out on their own.
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The startup he co-founded based on his original idea was running out of money, and he'd long since left day-to-day operations, but Chris Sauerzopf couldn't let go of the growing wire fraud problem it was trying to solve.
SafeWire is back in business and growing, after investor and adviser Pete Kight – the CheckFree Corp. founder – took the assets of the former business as collateral for paying off its debts and brought back Sauerzopf as CEO. They incorporated SCSV Holdings LLC at the end of 2019 and registered SafeWire as its trade name in early 2020, targeting more than $220 million and growing annual real estate scams.
"This problem scares the crap out of me," said Sauerzopf, who also owns a title company in Westerville. "Where this problem was first on my radar was in 2016, where someone had sent me an email who had just lost his entire life savings in a wire fraud loss. A title company had sent his proceeds to the wrong place."
Sauerzopf had started the former SafeChain Financial with original CEO Tony Franco and Rob Zwink, who was CEO from Franco's departure until the startup shut down. SafeChain had won the Columbus pitch event for Steve Case's Rise of the Rest seed funding tour, and later raised $3 million. But in late 2019 expenses still outstripped growing revenue, and Kight said other investors did not want to put in more capital.
Zwink insisted that Kight and Sauerzopf start talking, the two said in an interview for Columbus Business First's Newsmakers podcast.
"(Sauerzopf) met my criteria for an entrepreneur that you want to back," Kight said via videoconference from his ranch in Colorado. "He knows this industry, I mean, to the point where you got to be careful if you’re going to go out for a beer with Chris, because you’re going to talk about real estate."
The investment also is attractive because the entire mortgage process is "messy," Kight said. SafeWire is focused on the problem of wire fraud during the mortgage closing, but eventually can take on more aspects of a burdensome paper-piling process. The startup has more than 100 customers including title companies and real estate brokerages.
Zwink is now a CTO with a Minneapolis tech company. Franco declined an interview request but said via email: “Wire fraud is a complicated problem and opportunity. I’m happy Chris and the team are pursuing the vision for a solution.”
The interview tells the story of the revival, why Kight doesn't lose sleep over being the only investor willing to give the company another shot, and how SafeWire is similar to the early days of CheckFree, which launched digital banking.
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What's a company known for providing free daily staff lunches do when everyone has been sent to work from home?
At CoverMyMeds, the culinary staff wrote a cookbook, which was mailed to employees and business contacts over the holidays. But mostly they're busy planning how to move into a new Franklinton headquarters and at least at first shift to contactless grab and go meals instead of cafeteria style.
"They have done some some amazing things for us around virtual cooking classes, and sharing weekly menus that the staff can make themselves, recipes," said Veronica Knuth, vice president of talent. "We're excited to see our culinary team again."
Knuth, who joined the Columbus health IT company shortly after McKesson Corp. acquired it three years ago, is the latest guest on Columbus Business First's Crisis Management podcast on navigating the coronavirus pandemic.
The first of two buildings in the new Franklinton headquarters will be ready on time in April – but it's far from clear when the Central Ohio staff can move in to a space designed for communing and collaborating. A lot will depend on vaccine supply.
CoverMyMeds made more than 300 hires and 350 promotions throughout the year, all while on teleconference. It now has more than 1,500 employees between Columbus, Cleveland and remote workforce.
While anticipation is running high for the new building, software maker has worked to maintain its award-winning culture in the virtual world, Knuth said.
"Our employees in the business as a whole adapted with the same agility that they did every day, and they haven't missed a beat," she said. "We are continually checking in to see how they're doing, how can we best support them and whatever they might need, either personally or professionally."
In the interview, Knuth mentions that CoverMyMeds uses the teleconference platform Bluejeans – so she's not referring to denim.
"It has been so fun to have kids and spouses; to be able to be part of people's lives in a different way has been so incredible," she said. "I look for bright spots in this in this terrible pandemic."
By the same token, when work is always in the home, she makes sure to counsel people on work-life balance – like making sure they take available paid time off.
"It's easy just to say, 'OK, I've got my laptop here, I'm in my living room, I can watch TV and I can work,'" she said. "But you need that down time."
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John Brooks knows how to throw a party.
As managing partner of BTTS Holdings, he runs some of the city's biggest events venues that you've likely visited for work or leisure including The Estate at New Albany; Brookshire, in Delaware; and WatersEdge in Hillard. But the pandemic was a buzzkill – 120 of 130 weddings and other events were cancelled or rescheduled virtually overnight.
In this episode of Crisis Management, Brooks talks about how events-oriented businesses were forced to adapt to the nearly disastrous impacts of Covid-19, and how the biggest events and celebrations will be different when people can come back together.
"Some people were not comfortable having their event, which we certainly understood," Brooks said.
But the venues survived the outbreak, and now Brooks is expanding – during the pandemic it opened a smaller venue in the Short North called the Fig Room. This year it'll open another new one, the Edison, in Italian Village.
"A lot of empathy for our clients who maybe had planned a wedding for a year and then couldn't have it," Brooks said. "People still wanted to get married, right? Our focus really became ... what can you do? How can we do it safely, instead of what can't we do."
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Covid-19 has pushed us all to work from home. So naturally, people are thinking about where they live, too.
The housing market is exploding in Central Ohio as people rush to move to larger spaces, be they homes or apartments. And that's meant a change of business for Jonathan and Jamie Wilcox, of apartment developer and manager Wilcox Communities.
In this episode of Crisis Management, they discuss how Covid-19 has led their company to adapt where people live, and the kinds of homes they're building for the long haul.
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Capital University’s interim president Dave Kaufman doesn’t have a background in higher education, but the former Encova Insurance CEO is leading the university during one of the toughest periods for colleges and universities: the Covid-19 crisis.
Kaufman, who talked with Columbus Business First for the latest edition of our Crisis Management podcast, said his nontraditional background has allowed him to take the best of the business world and translate it into leading the Central Ohio university during a challenging time.
Kaufman retired from Encova at the end of 2019, and joined Capital as interim president in June of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Capital announced last year that due to the pandemic, the school would suspend its search for a new president, unable to conduct the in-person interviews needed to do a full search. Kaufman is expected to lead the Bexley university for two years or less.
“It is no doubt with Covid and everything facing us, there’s a plateful of challenges,” Kaufman said. “But I am finding that a lot of what I’ve experienced corporately, I’ve been able to apply that here. I feel good about that, that I’ve been able to kind of help the team move a little more effectively than maybe they would have under someone without the experience I had.”
Kaufman said that in both the business world and higher education, “it really comes down to the same thing, building that trust and getting clarity on shared goals to execute (a vision).”
Kaufman said his leadership offers a new lens, “making we can take a different approach than has been considered in past.”
“That’s what they’re kind of counting on me to do,” Kaufman said.
One of his goals with Covid-19 is to “innovate through it,” he said.
For example, with the improvement in virtual learning, Kaufman said there could be a way where multiple universities could partner and offer a broader array of programs, leveraging each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and sharing costs.
“How do our programs compliment others so you can have a broader portfolio of products and services to package?” Kaufman said. “There’s opportunities to blend things that complement each other. (For instance) I’m at Capital, but I have access to courses at two other universities still being a Capital student. You’re not tied to the geographic location like you were maybe three or four years ago.”
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Can meat move from pasture grazed to lab raised?
That’s a problem Dublin-based Matrix Meats is helping companies around the world try to solve.
The Dublin-based start-up received some seed-stage backing late last year and is growing, adding staff and looking for new opportunities.
CEO Eric Jenkusky said the business’ partners already include about 25% of the companies in the nascent cultivated meat segment around the world. That includes clients on five continents.
So what is cultivated meat and how might it help address issues like world hunger and food security?
Jenkusky spoke with Columbus Business First’s Newsmakers’ podcast on those topics and more including why the problem it is solving is a materials science problem not a biological one and how Central Ohio can continue to grow to be a hub for alternative food technology.
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Even before starting construction on a $100 million facility, a biotech affiliate of Nationwide Children's Hospital had to adapt to two huge changes simultaneously: Switching into for-profit mindset and securing safety in a pandemic.
Andelyn Biosciences Inc. is building a 185,000-square-foot manufacturing facility for the genetic materials used in gene therapy research and treatments. Eventually the factory could double in size if it adds enough commercial-scale clients.
The company already has grown to 120 employees from 100 at the start of the year, most of whom transferred from the hospital's Research Institute. With more than a decade supporting research and clinical trials, the staff already was flexible, adaptable and committed to quality, CEO Mayo Pujols said.
"So as we’ve transitioned to a for-profit, geared towards commercial company, the I think the add-on for our team has been more of around a mindset of scalability, and the mindset of: It is important to think about it as a business," he said in the latest episode of Columbus Business First's Crisis Management podcast.
That means paying more attention to controlling costs while investing in processes and systems to ready for a much larger production output.
"Rather than just having quality as a mindset and you have to do quality work, we actually put the systems in place to ensure quality is engineered into everything we do.
"We kind of took it a step further and preparation for being a commercial entity, and that’s been new to the team. ... And they’ve done really well."
The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in Ohio coincided with an already planned shutdown to bring in new equipment for larger production capacity within the Research Institute, until the new facility is ready. Before reopening in September, Andelyn had to layer in safety measures such as modifying work schedules to keep employees distant if they can't work from home.
Some employees did contract Covid-19 or had to quarantine because of exposure, Pujols said.
"More recently, we are starting to now see impacts from our suppliers," he said. "And I think we’re not alone.
"We were able to do a little bit of stockpiling, but not probably enough to say we’re out of the woods."
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As of January, Nikola Labs Inc. was headed for its best year ever. By April, like many businesses shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, the startup was in "the fog of war."
In the latest episode of Crisis Management, Columbus Business First's podcast about steering a business through the pandemic, Nikola co-founder Will Zell and CEO Brian Graham discuss how Graham succeeded Zell mid-pandemic after two years as COO.
After a more than seven-year mentorship relationship, the two had essentially co-led the company with distinct yet complementary approaches.
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Simple Times Mixers’ big problem prior to 2020 was space.
Its first two years of business were spent building its brand and then trying to keep up with demand as it used rental kitchen space.
Last year it finally moved into a home of its own, not just giving it a retail storefront and space for events, but also quadrupling its production size with plenty of space to grow.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit this spring and knocked out 75% of its sales.
A year that was intended for big growth — geographic expansion, adding jobs — became one about survival.
How did Tinus and his team get Simple Times to survive the past eight months? How have consumers changed? What does the growth opportunity look like now?
Tinus talked with Columbus Business First for this episode of Crisis Management where he shares those insights and experiences and touts a big reputation win in a national poll this fall.
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Cameron Mitchell wasn’t sure he restaurant company would still be around.
The founder and CEO of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants was just as scared as anyone in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic that the event might lead to the end of the company he’s spent nearly three decades building.
Now seven months in, the self-described optimist feels more confident in his business’ survival and hopeful the worst has already occurred. But there still are key questions to be answered — five in his estimation — that businesses, restaurants especially, need answers to in order to feel better about the future.
In this episode of Crisis Management, Mitchell lays out those questions and when he expects to hear answers. He also shares a look at how his business is performing — what’s working and what isn’t — in addition to updates on several new restaurants that were in the works when the pandemic hit.
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Columbus Food Adventures thought its business was done when Ohio shut down dine-in restaurants in March.
After all its business was based on going into restaurants. In groups. That’s two things that couldn’t be done then and are still limited today months later.
“In a sense, we were starting from scratch,” said co-owner Andy Dehus. “We just had to completely re-configure everything.”
A business built around tours taking people to food turned into a delivery service bringing food to people.
Months later it’s now delivered more than 2,500 dinners for two to customers from more than 50 Central Ohio restaurants spanning 35 different country’s cuisines.
Co-owner Bethia Woolf said it wasn’t exactly how they expected to spend their 10th year in business but it’s turned into a positive. The Trust Fall delivery service and its new gift box program are expansions that have brought new customers to the business and will give it more diverse sales for when tours can resume.
“One of the real differences is in frequency,” Woolf said. “A food tour is something that you maybe do once or twice a year. ... We do get a good number of repeat customers, but it’s usually spread over a longer time period. But with Trust Fall, we have people who are now regulars who order it once a week. We’ve had some customers who will order it multiple times a week.”
Sales are actually up, though profits are down because the margin is smaller on delivery versus tours.
Dehus said it’s not a replacement for tours, but it’s proven to be a strong business of its own.
In this episode of Crisis Management, Woolf and Dehus discuss building that business in the past several months as well as what they need to see to feel comfortable restarting the tour portion of the business, beyond the taco truck tour it does still offer.
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One of the industry's most affected by the coronavirus pandemic has been healthcare, with hospitals not only serving on the front lines of the response to COVID-19, but also seeing their finances up ended by a temporary ban on elective procedures.
The pandemic has also accelerated the adoption of telehealth, which has implications for hospitals operations and their physical expansion plans.
Against this backdrop, Columbus Business First wanted to hear directly from the leaders of the region's major hospital systems. We sat down virtually with the four execs in late September to discuss the future of healthcare.
Joining the conversation where the Lorraine Lutton, CEO of Mount Carmel Health System, Steven Markovich, CEO of OhioHealth, Hal Paz, CEO of the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Tim Robinson, CEO of Nationwide Children's Hospital.
Business First health care reporter Carrie Ghose moderated. We hope you enjoyed the discussion in return for more of our quarterly forums. -
Benji Ballmer would like nothing more than to put himself out of business.
That’s how he’ll know he did a good job.
The founder of Yellowbird Foodshed started his produce and food delivery business in 2014 connecting a handful of Ohio growers with a couple hundred customers.
Today the company is working with 150 growers and food producers in the state and serving 1,500 customers, predominately in Central Ohio.
But his ultimate goal isn’t a successful business, it’s changing the food system, at least in the geography within his reach.
“I’m trying to build a system that will put us out of business,” Ballmer said. “I’m not in this for how big can the Yellowbird be. Can we save the frickin’ planet?”
Yellowbird is having its best year ever. The growth is fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic as customers sought out providers with produce and meat in stock and delivery services that allowed them to side-step the store.
Ballmer’s business hasn’t missed a beat despite that surge in sales — weekly home deliveries, for example, rose from 60 pre-pandemic to a peak of 660 over the summer.
“We were prepare for the pandemic because we were preparing for something else,” he said. “I always thought that the thing that would put us over the hump would be there would be a climate disaster in California, a drought that lasted for four or five years, and all of the stuff that’s coming from out there that’s on our shelves in our grocery stores, as organic would cease to exist. That isn’t what it took. It was a pandemic.”
Ballmer talked with Columbus Business First for the latest edition of Crisis Management. In addition to detailing how the pandemic has impacted his business, he also shared the origins of Yellowbird, how the company has evolved over the years and why he feels poised to hang on to many of the new customers gained this summer.
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Even though retailers may be struggling through the coronavirus pandemic, few of their customers are defaulting on their credit card bills.
As the crisis unfolded, Alliance Data Systems Corp. managers looked back to the 2008 recession for credit management models to follow and what to avoid, CEO Ralph Andretta said.
"During the Great Recession, I’m not sure Alliance Data had a deep enough bench when it came to the forbearance programs they offered customers," he said. "That has changed."
The company has offered some credit forbearance, such as offering plans to skip a payment, but few shoppers are taking up the most extreme 12-month program.
“What we’ve also seen is people are paying not just their minimum due, but a bit better than their minimum due on their cards,” Andretta said. “They’re keeping up with their bills; they’re spending and they’re paying. That’s that that’s exactly the type of loyalty you want.”
Andretta started in February, joining a growing list of Central Ohio leaders who took the helm right before or in the midst of the pandemic.
The latest episode of our Crisis Management podcast series represents his first interview with Columbus Business First since taking the job.
The Columbus company branded credit cards for retailers, such as fashion, beauty and home improvement stores; and a division in Texas operates loyalty programs like airline miles.
Andretta is optimistic about the future of retail and the shopping mall – maybe they'll be more showroom than point of purchase, but physical gathering places will eventually return, he said.
We discuss how the company can emerge stronger due to renewed focus and reduced expenses, both temporary and ongoing, as well as how Andretta landed the job and what it was like to be "battle tested" right after taking the reins.
Andretta previously was managing director of the U.S. credit cards business at competitor Citigroup Inc. He was named last November to succeed Melissa Miller, who had moved the HQ to Columbus from Plano, Texas.
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