Patricia “Trisha” Rooney Alden, 1991
B.A., Denison University
Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer
R4 Services, LLC.
Chicago
Citation awarded June, 2012
Ms. Trisha Rooney Alden is an enterprising and experienced entrepreneur and civic leader with a deep understanding of both the business and community environments essential to commercial success.
As a young professional, she spent two years post-college in the public relations industry where she worked on high profile accounts including President Clinton’s campaign, yet felt drawn to run her own company, realizing that she was an entrepreneur at heart.
In 1993 she recognized a real estate investment opportunity that she felt offered her an opportunity to build a business. It was a well worn warehouse in Chicago’s South Loop, being rented to a number of clients including by a law firm to store records. She approached the tenant, offering pick-up and delivery services of their files and boxes and they became customer number one. Focused on a highly personalized service concept she developed this embryonic service proposition into a thriving, multi-faceted business she named R4 – to stand for her company’s principals: Reliable, Resourceful, Responsive and Reasonable.
Over the next two decades, she developed a strong service oriented team that has continued to evolve her needs-based customer-focused business. R4 Services has grown into a multi-million dollar business offering a full range of information management services including storage, vault, scanning, indexing and secure document destruction. Today, R4 Services has over 500 clients in legal, financial services, healthcare, government and corporate industries from three record facilities in the city of Chicago, with a combined one million cubic feet of storage capacity. The company serves clients nationally as a founding member and shareholder of the National Record Center. It is recognized as a leader in the fast-paced information management services field, poised for continued growth.
While building her business, Ms. Rooney Alden realized that a key to R4’s success would be to become involved in, and help to foster, her headquarters-location community. Her growth as a Chicago civic and cultural leader and fund raiser has paralleled her company’s success, and is based upon her reputation as a strategic thinker and team builder who can also execute for bottom-line results.
She serves as a member of the University of Chicago Hospital’s Board of Trustees, as a Director of the Chicago Public Library Foundation, on the Board of Directors of the DePaul University Theatre School and is a founding member of A Better Chicago, a venture philanthropy fund. She is also a member of the Economic Club of Chicago and The Chicago Club; and serves on the women’s boards of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Boys and Girls Club of Chicago and the Field Museum.
