Bum Knees to Serial Entrepreneur

Rick Cole was a construction worker until his knees gave out on him in the mid 80s when he was in his early 30s. It was time for a career change. Since he lived in Cincinnati he contemplated going to work at Kroger in their distribution center, but instead decided to uproot his young family moving north to Urbana, Ohio where he ran a small, five person box plant.

Rick told me, “It was a big cut in pay for me. We were home schooling our kids and the entrepreneur who owned the box company let me do the interior partitions for the boxes. We weren’t on the clock at home. We were only trying to survive.”

Four years later he decided to do the partitions full time, but still at home. In the next four years he and his wife Debbie grew the business from their garage into a chicken coop and finally into a dilapidated building in town. By 1995 they had enough business that they built a new 12,000 sf manufacturing plant, which has grown to 64,000 sf today.

Three of their four children work with them today. Rick told me, “They really were co-entrepreneurs with Debbie and me. At 8 years of age they started putting these partitions together by hand, but they caught the vision right from the beginning. Today they are our biggest asset as a company.”

And the Coles are seeding other companies in Urbana today. Their daughter-in-law has started a home healthcare business that employs 35, one son has set up a company to do specialized partitions and plans are in the works for a new downtown coffee shop in Urbana. The coffee shop is an offshoot of missionary work to help poor coffee farmers in Kenya, Costa Rica and Nicaragua get a better price for their crop. The Coles set up Hemisphere’s Coffee Roasters to assist in this effort.

Rick’s parting words to me were on point, “We came up here to go to work for an entrepreneur. We spun off and have helped to spin off other entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs breed entrepreneurs.”

Great vision! Big supporter of his adopted hometown! Their web site is www.colepak.com.