Sticking together
Adhesives Industry, Mentor firm partner up
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Peter Krouse
If you’ve ever had bad breath, wallpapered a room or slapped a name tag on your lapel, chances are you’ve used a product Dick Muny helped develop.
But chances are just as good that you’ve never heard of Muny’s company, Chemsultants International Network of Mentor, because part of being a consultant is letting your client take all the glory.
“Every day you use something that was developed for a client company by us,” Muny said, “but you’ll never see our name on it.”
Chemsultants International provides product testing and development to the adhesives, sealants, and coatings industries. Last month, it moved into a new headquarters and testing lab that will consolidate all the firm’s Mentor operations into one building.
The large coating machines that can treat paper, films and foils with a variety of substances will be transferred to the new location later this year.
Chemsultants has managed to thrive in part because many firms in the industries it serves have eliminated their in-house research and development, farming out new product work to others.
It’s to the clients’ advantage, Muny said, because they don’t have to pay Chemsultants until the work is done. And when Chemsultants completes a project, any patents developed in the process are turned over to the client, which Muny said is not typical of those who conduct research under contract.
One project that Muny was able to discuss involved turning over patent rights to Imperial Wallcoverings in 1997 for a pressure sensitive wallpaper border.
His firm also helped develop the breath strips that are placed on the tongue to fight bad breath, Muny said.
Chemsultants has annual sales of $10 million to $20 million.
The company has become the go-to company for a number of firms looking to test or create new products and then manufacture them in small batches. Plus, it has a unit near Cincinnati that makes equipment for a variety of adhesives testing applications.
Muny’s son, Keith, runs that division, while Muny’s wife, Judy, and daughter, Jennifer Muny-Raj, work at the company’s Mentor headquarters.
Muny is known worldwide for his testing machines, said Glen Anderson, executive vice president of that Pressure Sensitive Tape Council.
“He’s an icon in our industry,” Anderson said.
And if all goes well, Muny may have a thriving fuel cell unit one day.
His company is sharing a $1.5 million Department of Energy grant with Michigan Molecular Institute in Midland, Mich., to develop the polymer membranes contained in fuel cells.
Another $100,000 program funded by the Edison Materials Technology Center in Dayton has Chemsultants working with a Case Western Reserve University professor to develop a separate fuel cell membrane technology and manufacturing process.
If any breakthroughs are achieved, Muny hopes to construct another building at his new site on Tyler Boulevard where fuel cell technology can be manufactured.
Much of Chemsultants’ work is with established businesses. When the U.S. Postal Service needed a label to use on forwarded mail, it turned to Chemsultants. More than just a sticky piece of paper, the label had to be engineered so that it could be removed without ripping the envelope and obscuring the old address beneath it.
But Muny has also helped several entrepreneurs get started. He spent a year trying to put together a ballet shoe using adhesives instead of tacks.
He also helped entrepreneur Carol Latham develop the production process for Thermagon Inc., a highly successful Cleveland maker of insulating materials for electronics that was later sold.
Muny started Chemsultants in 1986, four years after leaving label and adhesive maker Avery Dennison, where he had worked for 15 years, including a stint overseas. By that time Muny was an experienced entrepreneur, having purchased a coin laundry in 1980 before getting involved with two other ventures. His resignation from Avery Dennison stemmed from a conflict of priorities, he said. “My heart wasn’t in working for somebody else.”
Since Chemsultants began, it has provided a soft landing for many area professions who find themselves on the wrong side of corporate restructuring.
“What I’ve tried to do over the years is recognize which ones are going to fit into our philosophy and give them a home,” Muny said.
Guys like Mike May, 39, who lost his job at Sherwin-Williams co., but wanted to remain in Northeast Ohio, where his daughter by his first marriage lives.
After a six-month search, he landed at Chemsultants, where he does product testing in a white lab coat.
And Don Eppink, 63, who joined the company 12 years ago after working for an aerospace ceramics company. He’s now a senior chemist at Chemsultants, and among the strangest things he has put to the test, he said, was a panty liner.
Other times he has performed drop tests on blister packs, those bubble-like packages that contain various consumer products like batteries.
“We did it once with birdseed,” he said. The packages didn’t break.
Even Muny’s chief operating officer, Gary Avalon, came to Chemsultants after a restructuring at Avery Dennison.
“It would be very difficult for me to find a guy with his qualifications just by putting an ad in the paper,” Muny said.
And if the past is any guide, Muny will be hiring more from the unemployed ranks as the number of professionals at his Mentor operations could increase by nearly 50 percent over the next five years, as Muny projects.
Chemsultants International, Inc. 9079 Tyler Blvd. Mentor, OH 44060 Phone: 440.974.3080 Fax: 440.974.3081
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