Today we’d like to introduce you to Jose and Daniel Cavero.
Jose and Daniel, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I am a Chemical Engineering graduate of San Marcos in Lima, Peru. I have many years of experience in the chemical coatings industry. One of my first jobs in Chicago was in a family business. I worked for that family manufacturing industrial coatings for more than 20 years. I didn’t see myself going elsewhere until the family sold the business off to a big corporation. It wasn’t too long before they shut down the plant here in Des Plaines, IL under the new ownership. I was stuck between moving to Tennessee to keep working for that big company or starting a business of my own in the Chicago area. With the support of my family and clients from my previous job I decided to start Cavero Coatings Company LLC in 2008. It was exciting and challenging at the same time to start a business on my own. My wife at the time was a full time nurse while my son had just been starting his senior year in high school. At the beginning I felt so much weight on my shoulders. Many long nights, negative thoughts and long days kept me awake at night. It wasn’t too long before Elder, an ex coworker from my previous job decided to join the business with me. He was a big help for me at that time especially, because he helped relieve some of the tasks that took time from doing research and development for our first project. Thankfully, we were able to successfully complete our clients’ request for the coating he wanted. It was one of the first coatings in the market with the highest temperature resistance ever produced and formulated. This successful opportunity ended up being our best till this day. Today, we have 6 employees working at our company. We sell our industrial coatings to the Americas, Europe and Asia. In the past three years we have averaged 1.1 million in sales annually. Our 10th anniversary was April 21, 2018. We are looking forward to some new projects we are working on this year. It will also be a challenging year as we continue to expand, buy new equipment and improve our production processes. Conveniently enough I had just completed the MBA program at DePaul which helped me get through a lot of the obstacles one faces when starting a business.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has certainly not been a smooth road. I think most can concur that there are many bumps along the road to most things in life. Unfortunately starting the business had many. There were many small facets of the business that I had to learn along the way. I spent many hours learning to properly book keep so I could save some money from paying a professional to do it. There were also certain filing of documents as a business owner that I had to turn in to the state of Illinois. Despite, these small challenges I think the biggest one was in developing a key formula for a product per the client’s request. That would ultimately result in being the company’s backbone that also provided stability and growth to improve the company.
Please tell us about Cavero Coatings Company.
We help shape the world in our small facility in Bensenville. What we do is research and trial and error. More specifically, in the nonstick and high temperature world of liquid and powder coatings. We are proud to be a part of many solutions that help improve the lives of people. We are most proud of our bestselling product containing zero VOC. We pride ourselves in taking care of the environment and our work environment. As a result we have eliminated more than one hundred thousand pounds of harmful solvents from the environment in the last eight years. What sets us apart from others is a combination of value for employees, environmental responsibility and our know how which allows us to combine liquid and powder coatings in a unique manner that is hard for others to do.
Do you feel like our city is a good place for businesses like yours? If someone was just starting out, would you recommend them starting out here? If not, what can our city do to improve?
I feel our city may be a bit of a challenge to start a business like ours. I would probably recommend to do more research in other locations across the US first before settling here. For one, it is hard for most people to understand what we do. I feel like having more awareness of what we do from the city may help promote more business and opportunity. In addition, the taxes here can be quite the burden especially if you don’t take advantage of certain incentives like the Research and Development Tax Credit. We did not do this early on and missed out on that. There are other incentives in Cook County like the 6b that provide tax relief on business properties in Cook County.
Contact Info:
- Address: 422 County Line Rd Bensenville, IL 60106
- Website: www.caverocoatings.com
- Phone: 630-616-2868
- Email: info@caverocoatings.com
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