Chip Hautala

The phone can ring at two in the morning. On the other end is a customer whose pump has been obsoleted and who needs a replacement. For Chip Hautala, Founder and CEO of MotionSource International, that call is not an interruption to the business. It is the business. At the end of the day, he says, the purpose is simple: "we keep your equipment running."

MotionSource, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Solon, Ohio, supplies lubrication systems, hydraulics, pneumatics, automation and fluid power equipment to industries including food and beverage, paper and packaging, and steel. Hautala is quick to say that the catalogue is not the point. "We're not just a distributor of lubrication, hydraulics, and pneumatic equipment," he told Xraised. He sees the company first and foremost as a problem solver, and he means it literally: "We like it when people come to us with problems and we help them resolve it."

In practice that covers a wide spread of work. It can mean engineering a lubrication system to a customer's needs. It can mean taking a part from stock and driving it to a customer whose machine is down. "We do everything from pieces, parts to installations," he says, along with industrial engineering design. The questions underneath all of it stay the same: "How can we eliminate your downtime and how can we make your business run smoother?"

He has a clear view of the people he serves. Maintenance teams, as he describes them, are generally overworked, and downtime is very expensive. So MotionSource combines predictive and preventative maintenance with work alongside customers' own teams, acting as an extension of their engineering and maintenance departments. A large parts catalogue, in his view, means little without the knowledge behind it, which is why the company invests in well-educated staff and an engineering department that can assemble complicated systems.

Ask Hautala what MotionSource brings beyond the product and he does not hesitate. "I think what we bring more than anything is trust," he says. Not every call is a sales opportunity, and customers know it. Often, he explains, the honest answer is that you don't need to buy anything at all; what you need is the right advice. "It doesn't always equate to a sale for us, but that's okay," he says. The industry has many young people in their first or second year on the job, and when they call, the aim is to give them the answers that make them look good at their own companies. The company motto, as he puts it, is that nobody wins unless everybody wins: customers, the team and suppliers alike.

The same instinct runs through the way he thinks about giving back. "MotionSource has always given back," he says, and the company has supported different charities over the years, with employees given time off to volunteer. His reasoning is plain. "I feel that if you're a successful business, you owe it to the community." You owe it to your employees too, he adds, and to society. Then came a further question: "Why don't we give back to the environment?"

The answer was a partnership with Evertreen. With every order a customer places, MotionSource plants a tree, and the size of the order makes no difference. "We want to be known as a business with heart," Hautala says. For him the commitment shows that there is more to business than making money: it is about taking care of your own people, taking care of other people, and "taking care of the planet that we live in."

Part of the appeal, he says, is how little it asks of customers. They do not fill out a form or make a donation; they buy the things they would have bought anyway. New customers receive an email telling them their order has just planted a tree, and regular customers get a running tally, along the lines of "you actually accounted for 250 trees this year." "It allows people to feel a part of it without having to put themselves out," he says. The reaction, he reports, has been very positive.

His team has taken to it as well. Employees get excited, he says, because they feel they are making a difference, and he is careful to hand the credit back to customers. "I always tell our customers this, you know what, it wouldn't be possible without you," he says. "So you're really the reason behind this."

Looking ahead, Hautala wants the commitment to grow with the company: more orders, more trees. He also hopes the example will travel, prompting other companies in the United States and beyond to ask why they could not do the same. He is realistic about scale. "We're never going to change the world by ourselves, but one small thing can change a lot." His long-term goal is an impact that outlasts any single order, and MotionSource itself: the trees will still be growing long after both.