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Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Ceremony Remarks
by Rob Marchalonis President Bush, Secretary Evans, Baldrige associates, and distinguished guests, Over 60 years ago, an orphan, and chemist, and entrepreneur by the name of Paul Stoner made a dream come true when he started the Stoner Ink Company in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Today, it is a great honor to accept this award on behalf of my teammates and give thanks, to Paul Stoner, his daughter and grandson (the Ecklin family), over 100,000 Stoner customers, more than 500 supplier partners, and especially my 50 Stoner teammates -- all stakeholders who have contributed to continuing Paul's dream. Our reach is large, but our size is small. In fact, we are so small, that we brought all of our team members to this ceremony! Today at Stoner, we formulate, manufacture, and market very specialized cleaners, lubricants, coatings, and car care products. Our simple mission is to help our customers save time, increase their productivity, and improve the quality of their work. Our Baldrige journey began eleven years ago when Rob Ecklin, our President and Paul Stoner's grandson, made a strategic decision to transfer his management of the company to an employee leadership team. As a member of that team, we quickly adopted the Baldrige principles, simply for our survival. By submitting Baldrige-based applications, first at the local level, we received much needed feedback, and began to make improvements. After achieving the Business Excellence Award in 1995, from our local Lancaster Chamber of Commerce, we continued our excellence journey by submitting our first Baldrige application in 1998. Each year we made improvements in three core areas: leadership, strategic planning, and processes management. Most recently, we have pioneered new and differentiated ways to optimize our business and better serve all of our stakeholders. Mere words cannot express the gratitude that I have for my teammates, their amazing commitment, effort, and spirit, and for the many dedicated individuals who support the Baldrige program and volunteer their time. As the smallest business ever to win this award, our hope is to provide support, and perhaps inspiration, to other businesses, no matter how small, to pursue excellence, and make their dreams come true. On behalf of Team Stoner, thank you all very much. created on 3/9/2004
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