For FMS president Scott Koloms, profitability and purpose don’t have to be opposing forces. Scott took over FMS (janitorial company Facilities Management Services, based at 1500 Lytle Street in Portland) when his father passed away in the early 2000s, with no business background, but rather a budding academic career studying rhetoric and composition in a prestigious doctoral program at Kent State University, after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature at the University of Louisville.
Given his lack of formal training, he leaned into fundamental soft skills of listening and approaching business challenges with a positive attitude.
“If I had a business plan, it was to just be nice, and talk to people,” he said. “I was working next to people without the opportunities that I had, and I wanted them to bring everything to the table.”
He’s quick to credit the family that developed around him at FMS, which “took him in, through births, deaths, and marriages,” with keeping him in line, or, in his words, he “would’ve been chewed up and spit out.”
But 24 years later FMS is going strong, and during a leadership retreat he and his team determined that they wanted to formalize the idea that they truly cared about the people they work with and wanted to be more intentional about being mission and values driven. For example, the FMS website notes: “volunteering isn’t just giving back, it’s a part of our business model.”
“We fell in love with neighborhood,” Scott said, noting that the FMS building is on the National Register of Historic Places. “It’s one of the best moves we ever made.”
After a conference at Case Western University, Scott became familiar with the concept of the B Corp certification programs for business, which is a road map for pay equity, transportation, social impact, devised to “meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability,” according to its website. While the B Corps certification is fairly rigorous, Scott knew that they could promote a simplified but effective version for Louisville. Hence Canopy was born in 2017.
“It’s a shared strategy and path to successful business,” Scott said, including things like food, housing, and vehicle support. “The government can’t solve all these problems. We wanted to create core businesses, providing tools, education and connections.”
In November Canopy hosted its fifth annual Good Business Summit downtown, which represented an intersection of business and entrepreneurship, non-profit organizations and government, and featured appearances by Lieutenant Governor Jaqueline Coleman, Lindy Casebier, Secretary of the Kentucky Tourism, Arts and Heritage Cabinet (and former head of Louisville Visual Art), Louisville District 8 city councilman Ben Reno-Weber and longtime city civil servant Barbara Sexton Smith. Other speakers included Robert Egger, who founded the Washington, D.C. Central Kitchen, one of the largest food banks in the country, and former WWE superstar and current Ohio Valley Wrestling owner Al Snow. There was also musical entertainment, including singer/songwriter Cait Justice who was featured in our recent article on sonaBLAST! records.
