Indiana's Entrepreneurs of the Year awards.

• Author: Fredericks, Jen
• Position: Cover Story

The Indiana Entrepreneur of the Year awards celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, and appropriately, 10 Hoosier business leaders were chosen as winners by a panel that included many state business veterans.

Every year, Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year program honors visionaries in each of its 44 regions nationwide (some regions include more than one state), and every entrepreneur in the country fits into one of those regions. The Indiana Entrepreneur of the Year award winners are eligible for national honors in November (Indiana had a national winner in 1992). To receive information about next year's competition, contact the Indianapolis office of Ernst & Young at 317/681-7523.

MANUFACTURING

Norman Wolcott Nor-Cote International

Norman Wolcott's Entrepreneur of the Year award tops off a venture that started after he narrowly missed the train to instant success in the early '70s, when Coca-Cola showed interest in an ink he had developed that could be applied to glass bottles using ultraviolet rays. But before Wolcott could hop on board, Coca-Cola switched to plastic bottles, and Wolcott's then-employer wasn't interested in the revolutionary ink.

Undaunted and confident of the ink's worth, Wolcott quit his job and set up shop in his parents' basement in Illinois. His sparse start-up capital couldn't buy the UV equipment, so he began developing inks with a sun lamp. And the money that was available was difficult to manage, since Wolcott's accounting background consisted of one college-level class at the University of Illinois, where he earned a degree in ceramic engineering. "I had to learn general ledgers and accounting, which was helpful," he says. "It forced me to plan. I was immediately learning the word 'focus.'"

Experimenting with UV inks paid off. In his inks, Wolcott replaced the usual solvents, which take hours to dry, with a reactive substance that, when exposed to UV rays, solidifies in half a second. And once Wolcott figured out how to apply the inks to plastic, manufacturers and printers started to notice.

One of the first, Crawford Industries in Crawfordsville, gave the UV inks a try on camouflage notebook covers printed for the government. The new process was so successful that the company licensed the inks from Wolcott and sold them to other notebook manufacturers. Meanwhile, Wolcott attracted several other customers, including the manufacturer of the liquid soap Soft Soap, which needed an ink that would not come off in water. By the time Crawford's license ran out, Wolcott was ready to take his creation to the rest of the world.

Nor-Cote, short for "Norm's coatings," bought some of Crawford's equipment and opened a facility in Crawfordsville. Rapid growth began in the mid '80s, when the inks' far-reaching applications began appearing on shampoo products, dashboards, TVs and VCRs. Two new markets, CD covers and glass iced tea bottles, now account for 50 percent of Nor-Cote's sales, which hit $18 million last year.

International orders now make up 20 percent of Nor-Cote's sales. As a result, a manufacturing site now exists in England, and Nor-Cote has distributors in Australia, Canada and southeast Asia. A leading distributor of UV inks in most of its markets, the company has received nearly as much good ink as it has distributed. Twice Nor-Cote has made Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing companies. Wolcott has been inducted into the Academy of Screen Printing Technology, the "hall of fame" of his industry, he says.

Doing more than the competition is Nor-Cote's hallmark. "And where we're equal, we'll do it faster," Wolcott says. Nor-Cote guarantees that customers will receive color samples within 24 hours. "We solve our customers' nightmares," Wolcott continues. In fact, the company assigns a certain amount of points to each "customer nightmare," such as delivering the wrong product, or delivering it late or in a different quantity than requested - anything that constitutes a nightmare for the customer. Nor-Cote racks up points for each nightmare and resolves not to exceed 24 points for every 1,000 orders. And everyone in the company has an interest in seeing this goal met: monthly bonuses are contingent on keeping nightmare points below the limit.

"We focus on correcting our mistakes," Wolcott says. "I learned this from the Japanese. Once, we sold inks to a Japanese printer who produced 10,000 items, and had two bad ones. To an American, that would be no big deal. But the Japanese customer not only wanted to talk about correcting those two bad ones, he didn't worry about assigning blame. Americans still like to point fingers."

Nor-Cote's customers are responding to environmental urgency by striving for zero emissions in their plants, and UV inks avoid many of the hazardous effects that solvent-based inks have on the environment and humans.

Crawfordsville has proven to be an ideal location for Nor-Cote, Wolcott says. The strong presence of UPS, Federal Express and several highways ensures speedy access to other parts of the world. The world's largest printer, R.R. Donnelley, has a presence in town, and Wolcott says Crawfordsville boasts one of the most efficient post offices for a town its size.

CONSTRUCTION

Tom Rush Trinity Homes

For Tom Rush, the second time is a charm. After he was forced to liquidate his first company in 1991, his second venture, Trinity Homes, is a growing success with annual revenues topping $77 million. And after his...