Will Kinsey needed to raise money for a Habitat for Humanity trip to Guatemala last year, so he e-mailed co-workers at PartsSource. Within 48 hours, he had raised the $1,600 needed to cover airfare and expenses for the entire visit.
Kinsey, a sales account manager, was pleased, but not exactly shocked. His company, which finds and sells repair parts for medical equipment, is a for-profit business with the soul of a nonprofit.
“It’s an odd mix of high-paced business environment and good-natured people to work with,” Kinsey says.
Like many businesses, PartsSource supports blood drives and the United Way. But the Aurora-based company doesn’t stop there. PartsSource donates millions — in dollars, services and equipment — through the company and a related nonprofit foundation. Efforts help everyone from the homeless and mentally challenged in Northeast Ohio to the sick and poor in Uganda, Guatemala and India.
PartsSource requires all employees to volunteer — 40 hours a year for leadership and two days a year for everyone else. Volunteerism is rewarded with a 50 percent vacation payback policy.
“Once people start doing it, it’s an addiction,” says president and CEO A. Ray Dalton. “It feels great, and people get really jazzed about it.”
The back of all PartsSource business cards feature Dalton’s five Cs of success: confidence, credibility, communication, community and compliments. The company encourages employees to recognize good in other people.
Dalton, who was abandoned by his mother at 18 months, spent part of his childhood in poverty in East Los Angeles, Calif. He says he couldn’t have climbed the corporate ladder without help from others.
“I’m sort of paying it forward,” Dalton says.His theory is: If you feel good about what you do, you’ll be a better employee. The 94 percent employee retention rate seems to back him up.
PartsSource is supportive and flexible when it comes to outside interests, Kinsey, 31, says. In March, for example, someone pulled out of a church-organized service trip to the Dominican Republic. Kinsey asked his boss if he could fill the open slot, and four hours later, he was on a plane.
Kinsey is also team captain for Pedal to the Point, a 75-mile bicycle trip to raise money for multiple sclerosis. The company helps him promote the initiative.
In addition to supporting individual employees, PartsSource takes 10 percent of profits to support a charitable foundation, which takes on about 10 projects a year.
PartsSource hired Sandy Andrassy (pictured above) last year as a part-time director of community outreach. She also works part time for the Dalton Family Foundation.
Andrassy researches local, national and international volunteer and donation opportunities and helps promote employee initiatives. “We don’t want to be an inch deep and a mile wide,” she says. “We want to have a strategic impact.”
She was new to the job when a devastating earthquake hit Haiti. Her first project was a partnership with ShelterBox, an international organization that provides large tents and supplies designed to temporarily house at least 10 people.
PartsSource employees raised enough money, with the help of a Dalton Family Foundation match, to send eight boxes.
Andrassy is also working to arrange a trip to Guatemala this year to help with hospital construction. And she’s researching ways to deliver equipment and supplies to a hospital on the Pakistani frontier that’s now home to thousands of refugees from Afghanistan.
Closer to home, she’s arranging volunteer opportunities at homeless outreach organizations in Akron and Cleveland.
“When I first took this job, I thought, I wonder if there’s going to be enough work there to keep me busy,” Andrassy says.
That, she says, is no longer a concern.