Learn How this CEO Nurtures Emerging Entrepreneurs

ChemicoMays CEO Leon Richardson has seized various opportunities to help mentor, nurture, and develop other African American entrepreneurs.

- Jeffrey McKinney

FRESH OFF THE LAUNCH OF A NEW VENTURE that could add $50 million in the next five years to current revenues, Leon Richardson is pumped about his company’s growth prospects. As CEO of ChemicoMays L.L.C. (No. 45 on the be industrial/service companies list with $85.8 million in revenues), Richardson recently started a chemical industrial supply division that will sell items such as welding rods, greases, and gases to existing customers that it does not offer through its bread-and-butter chemical management services business.

Existing customers of ChemicoMays can now buy industrial supplies from the company instead of outside suppliers. The Southfield,  Michigan-based firm can cross-sell those goods to new and current customers. “We’re an inch wide with those customers, but now we’ll be a mile deep,” Richardson says. Of course, he knows it won’t be a cakewalk, as ChemicoMays must face some formidable players in the middle-market arena it is entering. But Richardson appears dauntless.

Before starting ChemicoMays in 1989, he learned how the global supply chain system works by overseeing Marine retail exchanges. He mastered the process of formulating, producing, and selling chemicals for an automotive supply chain company. His vision has helped ChemicoMays grow into a multinational company with 300 employees, double from five years ago.