Celebrating Entrepreneurship
Editorial
Thirty years ago this month, BusinessWest launched a new recognition program.
We called it Top Entrepreneur, and from the beginning, this award has been about paying homage to this region’s long history of entrepreneurship — more than 300 years of it — and recognizing those who continue that tradition today.
And for 30 years, we’ve enjoyed telling the stories of people who follow in the footsteps of Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, Milton Bradley, Everett Barney, inventor of the ice skate, the Picknelly family, William Skinner, and so many others. Entrepreneurship played a huge role in the development of this region and communities like Springfield, Holyoke, Westfield, Lee, and North Adams, and it continues to shape our region today, in ways large and small.
As the list on page 9 reveals, this award has been given to individuals, families, and institutions across the broad spectrum of business — from car dealers (the Balise family) to hardware (the Falcone family) to technology, healthcare, energy, education, and the nonprofit realm.
This year, there is a new twist, sort of. We’ve chosen to recognize Dan Dziuban and Frank Langone, founders and owners of Theory Skate Shop. It’s a different kind of story, but one with many of the same threads as the ones we’ve told starting in 1996.
Only this one lends itself to some poetic analogies between business and the sports of skateboarding and snowboarding — the twists and turns, ups and downs, thrills and spills, and the need to keep getting right back up when you’ve fallen.
Dziuban and Langone, like all entrepreneurs, have experienced all of this on a journey that will soon mark 30 years itself. They started with a small shop in West Springfield and gradually set up headquarters in the Holyoke Mall, with a second location in Northampton and a large presence at the Big E. They sell a broad range of items and have created their own line of clothing.
But they’re being honored not just because of their success in the challenging, ever-changing, ever-fickle world of retail, but also because of the way they have changed the landscape in the region — literally, by helping several area communities create skateboard parks — and also changed the lives of countless young people by introducing them to a new sport, and, in some cases, providing them with a new passion.
They’ve done this through the skateparks, summer skate camps, and through countless other efforts to promote a sport they discovered themselves in the late ’80s.
As for being entrepreneurs, like skateboarding, it’s something you get better at over time, and they’ve done that, applying lessons they’ve learned over nearly three decades to continue on their growth trajectory and grab some air, as they say in the skateboarding world.
We started this program to recognize the very important role entrepreneurship has played in this region, and how it continues to not only provide jobs and fill spaces on Main Street and in industrial parks, but shape our cities and towns.
Dziuban and Langone continue that proud tradition, and they are quite worthy of the title Top Entrepreneurs.
