Students in Jennifer Redisi’s Business in Action (BIA) course learned the importance of asking the right questions as they advised Ultrasonic Power Corporation (UPC) in spring 2022. Greg Nelson, UPC owner, engaged with BIA students to study potential manufacturing facilities and online marketing strategy. Nelson met with BIA student consulting teams multiple times during the semester to check on progress.
UPC, founded in 1972, designs and manufactures ultrasonic cleaning equipment. The
Freeport, Illinois-based company was acquired by a group led by Nelson in fall 2019. The firm has 35 employees including sales representatives, customer support and an engineering team. In addition to facility and marketing issues, UPC asked student consulting teams to recommend make versus buy strategies for specific machine components and to develop an employee recruitment strategy.
For Benjamin Bierdman, an accountancy junior from Dixon, Illinois, the key to meeting with UPC was to ask the right questions. “The important thing is to get to the heart of what the company desires and find ways to give them good solutions that help them achieve their goals,” he said. Bierdman’s team focused on finding potential manufacturing facilities.
Check-in meetings strengthen communication between the student teams and allowed Nelson, a 2008 NIU business administration alumnus, a chance to reinforce what the students were learning in their coursework. “All of the business language you guys are hearing in your classes, it 100% applies to the steps we took when acquiring the business, and all of the decisions that we made,” he said.
During the one-hour sessions, student consultants inquire about topics including UPC’s background, new UPC projects, UPC’s existing social media marketing strategy and open positions in the company.
“In BIA, I’ve been given the freedom to conduct my own research and come up with good recommendations for the client. There are no tests, simply research and problem-solving for the client, which makes it interesting. As a group, we gained an understanding of what real business decisions look like as they happen,” Bierdman said.
The meetings helped to guide each consulting team’s top priorities for their final projects, which were delivered to Nelson the week of April 25.
Bierdman’s team examined multiple sites that were potentially suitable for UPC’s relocation efforts. Locations in DeKalb, Freeport and Rochelle, Illinois as well as Beloit, Wisconsin were considered. For his part, Bierdman researched the cost/benefit analysis of each site, with special consideration for the tax incentives each local government offered to businesses. “Reviewing all the information each city provided about their incentives was a very time-consuming process,” he said. “I had to focus on which incentives were going to be the most beneficial to UPC and comparing what those incentives were across different cities.”
Ultimately, Bierdman’s team narrowed the list down to three potential sites: Two in Rockford, and a third in Beloit. They emphasized in their final presentations the high labor pool each area offered and the suitability of each building’s size for UPC’s needs
If your organization needs external perspectives, extra research horsepower, unbiased recommendations, and/or general business knowledge, engage our NIU Business in Action students. Email Business Consulting Director Jason Gorhman for details at jgorham@niu.edu.
