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The next level: when Andrew Banks' business needed a boost, a venture fund focused on minority enterprises was there.

Article Excerpt
Enamored with an entrepreneurial dream, Andrew Banks left his salaried job at Deloitte & Touche LLP one Friday in 1986.

That next Monday, before he even had secured office space, Mid-American Consulting Group (MCG)--hatched by Banks and a partner--had Deloitte & Touche as its first customer.

By 1993, the two-man company headquartered in Beachwood grew into a 12-person operation specializing in training and information system design and implementation. Accolades soon followed: among them placement on the Inc. 500 in 1996 and Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead 100 in 1997 and 1998.

MCG expanded further in 1999 with a satellite facility in California; its client list grew to include marquee names such as The Boeing Co., NASA and BP.

Then, three years ago, MCG spun off its first division--ProviderGateway Inc.--to concentrate on developing and distributing a Web-based software product by the same name. The technology is designed specifically for the systems environment of public-sector health and human service agencies and their constituents.

The technology upon which that software is based was developed when MCG was working with Boeing in the mid-1990s. They did a cost-reduction study on the C-17 aircraft that resulted in 70 recommendations almost entirely related to systems and the problems of coordinating the sourcing, scheduling and delivery of parts. This led to the creation of SupplierGATEWAY, a supply-chain management application...