Adam Quenneville
Age 37: Owner, Adam Quenneville Roofing and Siding
Adam Quenneville has June 18, the date of this year’s 40 Under Gala, circled on his calendar. Problem is — and it’s not really a problem — there’s a bigger, bolder circle around June 19.
That’s the day his wife, Rebecca, is due to deliver a baby boy. “I’m hoping he arrives a little early,” joked Quenneville. “If he does, we might just bring him with us to the party.”
If the newest member of the Quenneville member is present, he’ll witness his father being honored for a combination of entrepreneurial spirit — Quenneville first went into business for himself at age 10, selling nightcrawlers — and community involvement, including work with several area chambers of commerce and the Chicopee Rotary Club.
At 25, he was working in Quenneville’s Sons Roofing, the business started by his father, when he decided to work for himself. He started with a truck given to him by his father, a few critical leads, and a good amount of entrepreneurial pluck. Over the past 12 years, he’s grown and diversified the company, which now boasts 50 employees, a siding division, and a relatively new gutter-protection component with a colorful mascot, ‘Bucky.’ Meanwhile, Quenneville, who started with residential work and still specializes in that area, is also making strong inroads in the commercial-roofing sector.
And while the company is expanding, it’s also taking the lead in ‘going green,’ with a shingle-recycling effort that has given the company another edge in a highly competitive field.
Over the years, Quenneville has been helped by a catchy jingle in his radio commercial and an easy-to-remember phone number that is part of that tune — 1-800-NEW-ROOF — but his success has come mostly from his own vision and drive to succeed.
Hopefully, he’ll be in attendance on June 18 at the Basketball Hall of Fame, but if not, it’s because he has more important things to attend to.
—George O’Brien
“I decided this was nuts,” said Demers, who proceeded to start what amounted to his own landscaping business. Later, after getting a job as a DJ at 13 years old, he took some seed money from his father and started another business spinning records, and did that for a dozen years before a series of events put him at the helm of a mobile-phone franchise that he has since expanded into the 11-store chain known as Family Wireless.
It’s a mission for his father, Mychael Connelly Sr., who had long had entrepreneurial urges, and experienced the sweet smell of success one day when his older son, Mychael Connelly Jr., walked into the room and announced, “I did stinkies.”
He started early by coaching. When he was only 18, Collins and his father organized a traveling AAU basketball team for youths, coordinating games throughout the states. “Sports can motivate young people to want success,” he told BusinessWest. “I know — it had that impact on me.” 
Ciriello, who was named after her grandmother, gets a similar satisfaction from helping others. “I guess it’s in my genes or something,” she told BusinessWest. “It’s what makes me feel connected to others and gives me a sense of satisfaction in my work.”
s a patent attorney, Chadwell works with and for people who come to her with vague ideas, sophisticated plans, and everything in between.
She’s been to India and the Far East, all around Italy, to several cities in the U.S., and, last summer, to Iceland. It was a great trip, but frustrating in one respect. A budding photographer, Calvanese wanted a nice shot of an Icelandic sunset. The problem was, she went there in the middle of summer, when the sun was out 24 hours a day.
“Information is power, and I have valuable information to give people about the political world,” she said. “I know how to move things forward and know where the levers and push points are in the political world.”
“In law school, I started to gear myself toward elder law and estate planning because I’ve always been someone who wants to champion the underdog, and protect individuals who often — not always, but often — need a strong advocate on their side,” she said.
But he had other goals in mind, and in 2001 he came to the U.S. and settled in Ludlow, where he has family, to open a school.
The owner of two Northampton stores, Glynn’s mission is to reduce risk in every arena a child enters, and coax parents back to natural practices such as breastfeeding. The graduate of Smith College spent seven summers and about 18 months working with New York preschoolers with emotional and behavioral special needs before settling in Western Mass.
“I thought, if I could do this for myself, I could do it for others, and help other people change,” he said.
He’s exaggerating of course, but not to any great degree. “Just when you think you have a Saturday night off, something comes up — something always comes up,” he told BusinessWest.
The Wayfarers, as the band was called, played in venues all over Springfield, with frequent appearances at the downtown club Theodore’s. Bessette, who earned a degree in Business Administration at UMass Amherst, managed and promoted the band, while his brother, a graphic artist, designed the outfit’s eye-catching posters, which became the envy of all the other bands in town.
As it turned out, Ludlow-based Studio99Creative — which assists businesses with not only Web design but also total branding efforts — helped this client open up new opportunities in corporate and industrial photography. “So she came back to me to build a Web site for that side of the business, too.”
“I was standing on my couch screaming,” he said while describing his viewing experience of the championship game against Miami of Ohio, during which BU, his alma matter, stormed back from two goals down late and went on to win in overtime. “Coach [Jack] Parker pulled the goalie with three minutes left. There was a lot of time left to be doing that, but the strategy paid off — they came back and tied it.”
He should know, having spent four years in active service and another five in reserve duty. Earning the rank of major, Murphy knows something about leadership — a trait he employs as president of First American Insurance Agency in Chicopee, a job he grew into.
The fuzzy friends are part of a program called Second Step, which Moore, a guidance counselor, uses to coach young children on how to deal with frustrating emotions that can occur in certain situations, such as two kids wanting to play with the same toy at once.
What happened next was sort of a happy accident in moonlighting.
To support his literary efforts, Maroulis took a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I started off as a security guard and wound up working in the Operations department as an exhibitions assistant,” he said. The job fueled a passion for art and introduced him to the woman he would later marry. The couple settled down in Pelham, where Maroulis continued to work on his novel while staying home to raise their first child (they now have two).
Indeed, as a young man, MacKenzie wasn’t sure whether he wanted to get boxed into the family business. After graduating from high school, he was itching to get out of Western Mass. He envisioned lights, cameras, and himself on stage, so he headed to California to take acting classes. 
When Leutz arrived in Northampton fresh out of college, he pictured himself working for a nonprofit organization. “It turned out, I wasn’t qualified because the only positions available were administrative,” he said. “When I got to an office, I really didn’t know how to run a fax machine or the copier.” 
Through the Florence-based company she created called Raising Change, LeMay says she builds bridges between philanthropists of all kinds and nonprofit agencies that can benefit from their generosity. She’s become quite accomplished at this bridge-building, raising more than $100 million in the fields of women’s human rights, hunger, and poverty relief, and also directing another $100 million in philanthropic dollars to organizations working to make a difference. Meanwhile, she just completed her first book, The Generosity Plan, which contains the stories of several dozen people, most of them non-millionaires, and their acts of charity.
