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Success has come as an unintended side effect for Trevor Stansbury, Thunderbird’s 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year and a 1992 graduate of the business school in Glendale, Ariz.
The president of Supply Dynamics in Loveland, Ohio, has put his primary focus on his customers and company since launching the enterprise in 2003. The result has been engaged employees and satisfied customers, including industry leaders such as Honeywell, Cessna, General Electric, Westinghouse and hundreds of their respective suppliers.
The ability of Supply Dynamics to create sustainable value for others also attracted the attention of O’Neal Steel, which acquired Supply Dynamics in 2006.
“In my opinion, you shouldn’t aim for success or happiness,” Stansbury said. “It must ensue as an unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself.” This is an idea that came to Stansbury after reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.
“That idea, a good education, the scriptures and some great mentors have helped me understand how to run a successful business and keep my priorities straight,” he said. “The way you treat others — the way you help them succeed — is absolutely imperative if you want to be successful over the long-term.”
His company has pioneered an innovation in supply chain management that allows original equipment manufacturers and their suppliers to save money and improve efficiency by consolidating the purchase of raw materials and synchronizing supply and demand signals to eliminate costly speculation.
Supply Dynamics uses a proprietary Web-based application to “connect the dots” between all the parties in an extended raw material supply chain. “Companies no longer compete against companies,” Stansbury said. “Supply chains compete against supply chains.”
Over the past 20 years, many manufacturers have outsourced the majority of parts that go into their finished products. This has resulted in a variety of unintended consequences — including the fact that sub-tier suppliers often independently buy the same raw materials in sub-optimized quantities from multiple sources at premium prices.
Supply Dynamics helps manufacturers regain visibility into the raw materials that go into their parts so they can influence cost and service levels.
“It’s about visibility and control,” Stansbury said. “We give our customers visibility into something many of them can’t see, and we then help them use that information to control things they never have been able to control.”
As the son of a foreign service officer, Stansbury lived with his parents and siblings in Taiwan, the Philippines and Germany before graduating from high school in La Paz, Bolivia. After he earned an undergraduate degree from Lynchburg College in Virginia, his father recommended Thunderbird.
“It was just a great decision,” he said. “I can trace so many wonderful things that have happened in my life to that fateful decision to enroll at Thunderbird.”
Nominate the next Entrepreneur of the Year
Know an entrepreneur doing great things? Nominate that person as Thunderbird’s 2010 Entrepreneur of the Year. Nomination forms will be posted on the Walker Center for Global Entrepreneurship Web site in January 2010, and the winner will be announced in March. Judges will include Walker Center faculty and advisory board members. For more information, call 602-978-7173 or send e-mail to katherine.hutton@thunderbird.edu.
This story first appeared in the April 2009 issue of the Walker Center for Global Entrepreneurship Newsletter, a quarterly publication of the Thunderbird center in Glendale, Ariz.
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