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Business View Magazine
MES
“How hard can it be?”
Hiten Shah, founder, CEO, and owner of MES in Lewis
Center, Ohio, has one simple question he asks himself ev-
ery time a customer challenges his company to go above
and beyond, or provide a product or service it has never
had or done before. And that question is: “How hard can
it be?” This entrepreneurial operating ethos had helped
propel his start-up, supply chain management and logis-
tics operation from $1 million in sales in 2010, to $65
million, today.
Shah started his career as a plastics engineer but over
time wore many different professional hats: manager,
process engineer, vice president of sales. In 1997, he
started the company known today as Marketing and
Engineering Solutions (MES, Inc.). In 2006, while doing
some research in India for a friend’s firm, he came upon
a number of suppliers who were manufacturing some
specific products his own company was providing to its
customers. “We had some companies in medical and
lighting who were looking for the specific products that I
had evaluated in India,” he says. “So, in early 2007, we
started to work in earnest, trying to sell some of the cast-
