The Michigan West Coast Chamber has named Inontime Inc. owner Jon Lanning as the 2016 Small Business Person of the Year.
Each year, the Chamber asks its members to nominate small businesses for the award. The Small Business Person of the Year Selection Committee reviews award nominations and selects an award recipient who has been in business for at least five years and who exemplifies the best of small business in the community.
Nominees are judged based on an outstanding and growing business, innovative product or products, increasing jobs, increasing sales, overcoming adversity and community contributions.
Inontime certainly fits the criteria. The trucking and warehousing company was started in Zeeland in 1998 by Jon Lanning’s father Jack Lanning, with one employee.
Now the company has more than 300 employees with a sales growth of 240 percent in the past five years. A small warehouse that opened in 2007 is currently expanding to include more than 450,000 square feet of warehouse space.
In 2010, Inontime started operating trucks out of South Carolina at the request of a customer, and that division has grown to include a small warehouse and 10 trucks. The company operates mainly in a 250-mile radius of both Zeeland and Greer, S.C.
Inontime also considers stewardship of the community and of the Earth’s resources to be one of its core principles, contributing a percentage of their pretax profits to local nonprofits as part of their stewardship effort.
“Inontime has an amazing group of people, and I am honored to be able to tell that story,” Lanning said. “It’s humbling to think about my dad Jack starting it in 1998 and Eric, my partner, working with him early on to get it going. I am thankful for the chance to be part of it and walk with the Inontime team on this journey.”