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Nuance News
Nuance Solutions Donates Cleaning Supplies to the City of Tuscaloosa for Tornado Relief Letter from Mayor Walter Maddox and video of the local news story below.
Nuance Solutions Wins Award Nuance Solutions is pleased to announce that we recently received the 2010-2011 Outstanding Vendor for Service & Support by Ship-Pac of Kalamazoo MI. Ship-Pac is expert in solving customer needs in custom packaging, janitorial, safety, and food packaging supplies. Nuance Solutions received the Elite Supplier rating based on the following criteria and was voted the award for partnership out of all Elite qualifiers: • On Time Delivery Over the past year some specific examples of partnership included: • Initiating a new bar coding system to simplify receipt and stocking
Nuance Solutions will Exhibit at the ISSA Orlando Show
Focus on Small Business: Nuance Solutions Cleans Up Act! written by Ann Meyer -Reporter for Chicago Tribune-"Business" Click on link to read the full article.
Getting to the Starting Line written by Gretchen Roufs -Reporter for Sanitary Maintenance-"Freetime" http://www.cleanlink.com/sm/article/Getting-To-The-Starting-Line--11662
When Jim Flanagan was 25 years old, he received some inspiring, yet blunt, advice from his now late uncle who was also his doctor. He simply said, "You're getting fat and if you don't do something about it now you'll end up just like me." It wasn't exactly subtle, but it worked. Jim, president of Nuance Solutions, a Chicago-based chemical manufacturing company, has been running now for 30 years. Two years ago, at age 53, he ran his first marathon. "I occasionally ran a 10-kilometer race, but I never tried to run a marathon because I didn't think I could do the training that a marathon requires," says Jim. "But, in January of 2007, I literally woke up and decided to do it. I put myself into the mind set that if I had to quit in the middle of training, at least I would have gotten in better shape." To train for his first marathon — the 2007 Chicago Marathon — Jim signed up for the Chicago Runners Association marathon-training program. Pre-marathon training lasted for 30 weeks, four days each week. "Getting into the heavy marathon training was the best thing that happened to me," says Jim. "I would run long runs at seven o'clock on Saturday mornings with my pace leader and 150 other runners. Our leader was just a regular guy, but before every long run he would give us an inspirational speech that would bring some people to tears before they ran." A runner's goal for a first marathon is not getting to the finish line, but to the starting line. There's a lot of anticipation during the training, along with some big lifestyle changes. Runners commit to a significant amount of training time (for instance, an 18-mile run on a Saturday takes longer than three hours). But training does have its upsides, for example, the "guilt-free eating" for the rest of the weekend after completing a long Saturday run. Jim still recalls the excitement of that first marathon, especially the thrill of standing at the starting line with 40,000 other people. Though the race was cancelled in the middle of the event due to unseasonably hot temperatures, Jim was still able to finish. "It was 97 degrees when I finished the race, which took me five hours and 40 minutes, about an hour longer than I trained for," he says. Jim ran the Memphis Marathon two months later and improved, finishing in four hours and 54 minutes. Since then he has completed four other marathons: the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati in 2008, the Chicago Marathon again in 2008, Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minn. in 2009, and the New York Marathon in 2009. At this last marathon Jim achieved his best time: four hours and 49 minutes. He ran in honor of six family members and friends who were fighting cancer, giving him a special motivation. He even made T-shirts that said "Faith, Hope and Courage" on the front and their names on the back. "It's a selfish thing to run in honor of other people, because they give me encouragement as I think of them while I'm running," says Jim. "It keeps my mind off of my own pain. They are the true marathoners."
Nuance Makes the Cover of Crain's Chicago Business written by Christina Le Beau -Reporter for Crain's Chicago Business http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/mag/article.pl?articleId=32652 RECESSION IS THE MOTHER OF REINVENTION,The "new normal" is forcing entrepreneurs to rethink — and in some cases completely reinvent — their businesses. The need to diversify, dump duds from the product line, tweak pricing, get into new markets or find new uses for old technologies has become keenly relevant as shell-shocked business owners grasp the reality that they're facing a structural — rather than cyclical — shift in the economy. "Last year and into this year, a lot of people were more reactionary and impulsive. Now they're thinking more strategically," says Raman Chadha, executive director of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at DePaul University. "Once everybody realized this is how it's going to be, they had to find a way to adapt." Clare Hefferren found her new niche by repositioning Callosum Creative Ltd., her 4-year-old solo graphic design firm, as a corporate image consultancy. After realizing last fall that ad agency layoffs were flooding the market with freelance competition, Ms. Hefferren, 40, hired a strategic adviser to help her determine a new revenue stream that drew on her background in fashion as well as marketing. They came up with a service called People-First Branding, which offers coaching in communication, business etiquette, appearance and other aspects of "personal branding." Wanting to focus on the repositioning, Ms. Hefferren stopped seeking new business in the first half of the year. "Clearly this affected our goals, numbers and my personal finances," she says. This year, she brought in only $20,000. But the upshot is that her new personal-branding business is on track to bring in 70% of her projected revenue in 2010. Another successful repositioning: Two years ago, retailer Stephanie Sack sensed that consumers' discretionary spending was about to shrink considerably. So she switched Vive La Femme, her plus-size boutique in Bucktown, from high-end price points (up to $525) to a "cheap-and-chic" model with prices from $35 to $175. REVENUE IMPROVES Ms. Sack, 35, who opened the store in 2002, says revenue since the price change has been the best ever. This year she expects to take in $400,000, up from $360,000 last year and $240,000 in 2007. "I had a spidey sense that my decision to reprice the store would play well," she says. "And it did. It completely saved the business." Ms. Sack and Ms. Hefferren were quick to take action in seeking out a reinvention, but that isn't always the norm."Recessions have occurred routinely throughout American history, but they've been minor by standards of recent memory, so there's an entire cadre of executives who've never seen anything like this," says Steven Michael, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and co-author of a 2005 study on recession-fueled business failures. "Executives and entrepreneurs are naturally optimists. They want to focus on what they're good at," says Mr. Michael, whose report states that about 500,000 businesses fail in each recession. "It's a second order of consideration to think about the risk (of continuing to do the same thing)." In September, New York-based ThomasNet, which connects sellers and buyers in an online industrial marketplace, released the results of a survey that asked 800 executives and professionals how they were handling the recession. About 70% were looking for business in new industries, increasing their marketing, and exploring new sales channels as a way to increase cash flow and dilute risk. And 38% were developing new products. All good signs. But another study released the same month by New York-based credit card issuer American Express Co. found that 68% of 763 small-business owners and managers were stressed out, and 41% focused mainly on retaining current revenue sources (rather than seeking new ones). Only 26% said they were looking to grow this business. In which case Jim Flanagan's case is instructive. GOING GREEN Mr. Flanagan, 55, is president of Nuance Solutions Inc., a 37-year-old Chicago company that develops and produces cleaning chemicals for private-label and branded clients. Nuance Solutions was strictly a commercial and industrial manufacturer until 1999, when it began dabbling in retail cleaners. But it was still using mostly conventional chemicals. Then, in 2002, Mr. Flanagan was referred to a job for Seventh Generation Inc., the huge cleaning products company based in Burlington, Vt. "We'd always prided ourselves on using greener raw materials, but there was no advantage to marketing that because people weren't buying green just to be green," Mr. Flanagan says. After Nuance got the Seventh Generation referral, things changed. 'IN CONTROL OF OUR DESTINY' "We had to look hard at our company and where to go, and all arrows pointed toward us developing more markets for green products," he says. "That was a significant difference." And, in hindsight, a prescient move. Sales at the 70-employee company have been rising steadily ever since. Today, 75% of Nuance Solutions' $25 million in revenue comes from green cleaners, commercial as well as retail. And it's the reason, Mr. Flanagan says, that the company has grown even during the worst recession in his lifetime. "We were ahead of the curve, so we felt we were in control of our destiny and had better seize the opportunity to go out and grow the company before (green manufacturing) gets more crowded," he says. "It's a scary time right now, so I feel pretty fortunate." The results of this year’s show in Chicago exceeded all of our expectations, and are possibly the best in company history. The success can be traced to two key factors: preparation and focus. The sales force concentrated their efforts in the months leading up to the show to qualifying prospects and arranging for set appointment times with a specific agenda. The result was that we had 45 set appointments and were able to meet with 18 brand-new prospects. With such a busy agenda, we needed to have very focused meetings. Each meeting had an agenda, and we concentrated our efforts in three specific arenas where our brands offer clear advantages: Actiblend Superconcentrates, featuring the new DfE-approved Fusion degreasers for customers interested in growing their Industrial business, the Enviro-Solutions product line for customers who want to offer the most authentic and comprehensive green cleaning program on the market, and to support the sales of both those programs, The Winning Edge Sales training program. Less than one week later, we have already received orders for these offerings from new and existing distributor partners and look forward to growing them significantly in the next year. Thanks to all those distributors who came by and helped make this year’s show a great starting point for growing mutual success. Each evening of the show, the company hosted a “happy hour” in our suite, and it provided a relaxed and intimate setting for continued discussion and a chance to relax and relate. Looking forward to seeing you in 2010 in Orlando!
900 E. 103rd Street, Suite D, Chicago, Il 60628 1-800-621-8553 |
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