This Rural Town Is a True Business Destination

Richard Oleksak was talking about Southampton’s small but resilient business community and the town’s strong rural character, and joked that it was all the result of the sewer system.
Or, to be more accurate, the lack of one.
“You don’t have a great number of businesses in town,” he explained, “and the main reason is that most of the town is on a septic system — almost everything except for Route 10 coming out of Easthampton, down to the car wash. That’s on Easthampton’s sewerage.”
But this, said Oleksak, the town’s building commissioner, is a key to keeping the town’s rural nature. “The Select Board, and many people in town, feel that, if you go with a sewer system, it would change the entire town,” he said. “We’re a bedroom community, and we want to stay that way.”
Apparently, the town is on to something.
“In the toughest economy anyone can remember, you’re seeing nice houses continue to be built here,” said Oleksak. “Over the past couple years, there were four $1 million houses built. We must be doing something right. If some people consider this to be antiquated, well, it seems to be working.”
And while it is true that Southampton’s business community is small by the region’s standards, what commerce does exist also wouldn’t want to be anywhere other than this town of just under 6,000 residents.
At the northern edge of that commercial hub, in the Red Rock Shops, the two owners of Northeast IT Solutions said that Southampton is an ideal location to be connected to their clientele.
“When I started out at this address,” Joel Mollison, co-owner with Brian Sullivan, told BusinessWest, “there was a lot of foot traffic that helped grow my business immediately.”
And speaking of that, another business venture that started out small but needed room to grow found the perfect spot just a few doors down in the same plaza. Ethan Holmes’ bustling e-commerce in hydroponic supplies outgrew his home office, and the storefront was the right place at the right time.
The owner of New England Hydroponics, a specialty high-tech gardening-supply shop, has had a brick-and-mortar presence in town since 2007. While his Internet trade ships around the world, Holmes said that people will come to Southampton from all over the Northeast to see the setups and benefit from hands-on advice.
It’s that destination style of business that allows Southampton to maintain viablilty in the marketplace, and often the supplies are quite in demand.
Bob Cayo is the general manager of Harley-Davidson of Southampton. After a few other dealers in Western Mass. ran out of gas over the past 10 years, he said, his already-popular shop became the Harley stop of note for the region.
But competition isn’t what his store focuses on.
“We don’t pay much attention to it,” he said. “The economic indicator that we have, the only one we have, is the next customer walking in the door. We don’t watch the day-to-day fluctuations in the economy, nor will we, and it will never be something talked about at our monthly sales or department meetings. It’s just not going to be. You can’t. I want to control what I can control.”

Growing Businesses
What started out as Joel Mollison Computer Services eight years ago recently became a new business, with a new name and partner.
The storefront in the Red Rocks Shops had been a good place to cater to both his residential clients and the increasing corporate side of the operation, but in order to grow that latter category, he sought out the help of a trusted former employee.
“It was getting to the point where I had difficulty keeping up with just myself, and I had already hired another full-time employee,” Mollison said. “Brian had worked for me a few years back and then went on to bigger and better things. I called him up and asked him if he wanted to come back. We discussed it for a while and decided to form a partnership.”
Sullivan had gone on to work in IT support for large companies. “The same as we’re doing now,” he said, “but with the largest medical and insurance firms.”
And it’s that market that the newly rebranded company has in its sights. “With both of our expertise, it means we can do major projects,” Mollison explained. “We’re both bringing the same skills to the table.”
What Northeast IT Solutions does is everything from the smallest computer consultations on up to custom-created IT networks. It’s those specialized jobs, Sullivan said, that sets the firm apart from any competition.
“We design custom technology solutions for companies,” he explained, “whether you’re just starting up and need to be connected, or for existing systems to be revamped, and planned upgrades for the future. We make sure each business gets its own system, rather than some generic attempt at a solution that doesn’t end up working for everyone.”
Every business needs IT in place if they don’t already, Mollison added. “Technology is an integral part of every business, and you can’t avoid it. If you don’t have a computer, you’re not really doing business right now. And it’s even moreso for a larger business. If you’re not working at your optimum capacity, you’re not making as much money as you could.”
Both men agreed that their fair and honest assessments of their clients’ needs have earned them a following and good word-of-mouth recommendations. “People will say, go talk to Brian and Joel,” Mollison said.
Sullivan agreed, adding, “there’s a whole residential component to our business, and while it is separate from these larger applications, we want to keep it. People can walk in off the street anytime during business hours, and we’ll take care of their computer needs. We also will go to people’s houses, set up their systems, data migration, troubleshooting, virus removal, all the IT stuff.”
Good word of mouth also helped in the creation of Holmes’ brick-and-mortar store. But in addition, he’s received positive feedback from all over the world.
He listed countries as far afield as Australia and China, where he has a dedicated customer base for his hydroponic gardening supplies, and as the inventor of a specialized LED lighting system called the Bloom Boss, his international marketplace isn’t expected to wither away anytime soon.
Holmes is that classic entrepreneur who saw the underserved segment of an industry and developed a means to cater to it. He went to school for IT management, but he realized that the high-tech hobbyist gardener didn’t have a good outlet for supplies.
“When I started in 2002, primarily as an online business on eBay, I got into this as a hobby, an offshoot of gardening,” he said. “I was really the only one selling hydroponic supplies on eBay when I started out. Now there are thousands. It’s pretty competitive.”
Growing plants, flowers, and food all year long is one of the major reasons that people invest in hydroponic systems, he explained. And while it is commonly thought of as an expensive hobby, there are ways to offer budget setups for the indoor green thumb.
Southampton’s proximity to the major highways allows his customers easy access to the shop, Holmes said. And while he does offer free shipping within New England for orders of more than $100, he finds that people will routinely make the trip. His history in the business gives him an edge over those newcomers to the market. “There’s some brick-and-mortar competition, but we have a pretty good presence on the Internet; we’re the experts, basically,” he said.

Get Your Motor Running
“You don’t walk in the door and buy a Harley-Davidson,” said Cayo. “You walk in the door and change your whole lifestyle.”
If your impression of the epitome of American motorcycles is born from the celluloid screen, you should probably know that the only thing Easy Rider about Harley-Davidson of Southampton is how easily these friendly and knowledgeable salespeople will get you on the seat of a bike.
Talking with BusinessWest, Cayo spoke of the sales philosophy of the bike shop, one that started when owner Aaron Patrick took over the store on Route 10 in March 2007. Harley-Davidson is the adventure of a lifetime for many people, Cayo said, adding, “we have a motto here, which is that we don’t have the right to take away a great experience for a customer, and we don’t. I would contend that no business has that right.
“We have customers walk in this door who have been saving for 25 years to buy, in cash, that Harley-Davidson that they have wanted all their life,” he continued. “We don’t have the right to take away that experience from that customer, and to date, we have not. In fact, we’re going in the other direction, proving to more and more customers how we stand behind that.”
Cayo explained the sales system at the store, which has an order to how customers are respectfully treated from the moment they walk in the door.
“The first wave is a concierge of a sort,” he explained. “Their job is to greet the customer, show them what they want to look at, get an idea as to what they’re in the market for, what their needs are. When the customer is happy and they’ve found the bike they want, they turn them over to a team leader, a floor manager. That person will determine that this is indeed the bike the customer wants, it’s the right color, has all the parts and equipment that the customer wants, and then we move forward with putting together the deal for that customer.
“It’s a very confined process,” he continued, “and it’s an easier process to manage and supervise, because you’re down to one specific thing for one person for a specific period of time. This is much different than how car sales are transacted.”
The shop is truly a destination for customers all over New England, he said. And upon walking in the front door of the showroom, with gleaming machines as far as the eye can see, you can get a sense why.
While one would imagine that motorcycle sales might begin to downshift in the months ahead, Cayo disagreed. “Matter of fact,” he said, “I’m adding staff to the sales department. If there’s one thing we don’t ever want to do, it’s to have a customer walk in and out of the door without someone greeting them, without someone asking to show them around, or help them in any way, or thank them for coming in. We don’t ever want that to happen.
“Some might think it would be easy to cut down to three people, and maybe every once in a while sell a bike,” he said. “That’s not the way it’s going to work. The more people you have on the floor, the more time you can spend with a customer, the more bikes you’re going to sell — but also the more times you can call them to come down for a hamburger at our customer-appreciation events, once a month, all year long. In the middle of winter, we’ll have the grill out front.”
Harley-Davidsons are machines that have, throughout the recession, maintained strong sales and high retention rates for value, said Cayo, adding that his method of maintaining a well-regarded destination business is simple. “Treat your customer with respect, tell them that you respect their business, and then show them how. That’s it.”