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The Class of 2014

By BusinessWest Staff February 25, 2014

The Difference Makers Will Be Celebrated on March 20 at the Log Cabin

Sponsored By:
Baystate Medical Practices • First American Insurance • Health New England • Meyers Brothers Kalicka, P.C. • Northwestern Mutual • Royal LLP • Sarat Ford Lincoln • 6 Pt. Creative Works

When BusinessWest launched its Difference Makers program in 2009, it did so with the knowledge that there are, indeed, many different ways in which a group or individual can make a difference and impact quality of life in this region.

Each class has emphatically driven that point home, with honorees ranging from a Holyoke police chief to the founder of the Rays of Hope fund-raiser to battle breast cancer; from the president of Holyoke Community College to the director of the Regional Employment Board; from the man who kept hockey alive in Springfield for the past 30 years to some law-enforcement officials implementing counterintelligence tactics to confront gangs in Springfield’s North End.

This year’s class of Difference Makers is no exception, and it adds several new wrinkles to the contention that there is no shortage of ways that people can change others’ lives — and for the better.

Let’s start with Paula Moore. A schoolteacher — in fact, a substitute teacher at the time — she started a program to help keep young people off the streets and out of trouble. She would eventually call it the Youth Social Educational Training (YSET) program, and when the church that originally hosted these after-school sessions told Moore she would have to move it elsewhere, she used her own money and credit to acquire a dilapidated former school and renovate it into what is now known as YSET Academy.

She wasn’t going to take that drastic step, but felt compelled to by overwhelming need in the community and an unrelenting desire to do something about it.

And these were the same sentiments that drove five members of the Sisters of St. Joseph and a partnering layperson to scrape together $500 and prevail at the public auction of a long-vacant, seriously rundown gray Victorian on Sheldon Street in Springfield’s North End in 1982.

Two years later, the Gray House opened its doors, and ever since it has been providing food, clothing, adult-education programs, and its Kids Club to a ever-widening group of constituents.

Improving quality of life for low-income individuals has also been the mission of a nonprofit called Rebuilding Together, which provides assistance to help people stay in their homes when, because of illness, old age, or simply a lack of resources, they cannot undertake needed repairs and upkeep.

In its early years, the Springfield chapter of this agency provided support one day in April, and only to a few homeowners. Under the guidance of its first executive director, Colleen Loveless, the Springfield office has expanded its reach in every way imaginable, and has put in place an ambitious 10-year strategic plan that will change the face, and the fortunes, of a large section of the city’s Old Hill Neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Michael Moriarty has committed much of his time and energy to taking on another societal challenge — early literacy.
An attorney and now director of Olde Holyoke Development Corp., he has taken the lead in Holyoke’s Third Grade Literacy Initiative, helping to put in place an infrastructure and a battle plan to dramatically increase the number of young people able to read by the fourth grade — the time when people stop learning to read and begin reading to learn.
And then, there’s the Melha Shriners. The first fraternal organization named as a Difference Maker, it’s changing lives in many ways, but especially through its efforts to help fund the many Shriners Children’s Hospitals across the country — and now Mexico and Canada — and, perhaps more importantly, raise awareness of the incredible work being done at those facilities.

The Class of 2014 will be honored at the annual Difference Makers Gala on March 20 at the Log Cabin Banquet & Meeting House in Holyoke. The event will feature butlered hors d’oeuvres, lavish food stations, introductions of the Difference Makers, and remarks from the honorees. Tickets are $60 per person, with tables of 10 available.
For more information, or to order tickets, call (413) 781-8600, ext. 100.

Study in Diversity

By BusinessWest Staff January 28, 2014

Cover Story

Amherst’s ‘Biddy’ Martin Puts the Focus on Inclusion

It’s called the ‘Committee of Six.’
That’s the name attached to an elected — and quite powerful — group of professors at Amherst College, who continue a tradition that is said to be as old (193 years) as the institution itself.
Tasked primarily with making recommendations on tenure and promotions, this group, an executive committee of the faculty whose influence is said to extend to all manner of administrative matters, meets with the president of the college and other administrators every Monday morning, often for three hours or more.
For Carolyn “Biddy” Martin, who took the helm at Amherst in late 2011, these sessions, which take place at a round table in the front of her spacious office in Converse Memorial Library, have constituted a learning experience on a number of levels, and comprise just one of many reasons why she summoned the word intense to describe both the college and the task of leading it.
“Those meetings are always interesting,” she said, noting that, while this panel is not entirely unique, it is unusual. “There are other places where there are tenure and promotion committees, but I don’t know of another place that has a committee of this sort that meets as regularly and at such length with the president, the provost, and the dean of the faculty of the institution. It was a godsend when I first came, because the extent of the contact, and the intensity of it, allows a new administrator to learn a lot about the college in a very short period of time.”
When asked what she’s learned, Martin — who came to Amherst after stints as provost at Cornell and then chancellor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison — paused for a moment as if to indicate this would be a lengthy answer. And it was, one that focused primarily on the faculty and its commitment to teaching, research, service to the community, and, in general, meeting or exceeding very high standards.
“The students are extraordinary, and the faculty is stronger than I could have even imagined it to be,” she told BusinessWest, “because of the way they combine high expectations for research with the incredible amount of intellectual capital they invest in teaching.
“And after working at research universities for most of my career, that investment in the art of teaching is a boon,” she went on. “I love seeing it, I love supporting it; I believe it’s essential.”
Among her many current initiatives, Martin told BusinessWest, is the drafting of a new strategic plan for the institution. While she generally used broad terms to discuss what will likely go in that plan, she said the school will continue to accelerate current work to create greater diversity on campus by aggressively recruiting and then supporting lower-income individuals and those with what would be considered non-traditional backgrounds.
This strategic initiative, launched more than 15 years ago, saw Amherst become the first college in the nation to eliminate loans for low-income students and one of the first to replace all loans with scholarships in financial-aid packages and extend need-blind admission to international students.
“This is a place that has put its money where its values are,” said Martin, adding quickly that the next challenge, and it’s a sizable one, is achieving progress in what she called “the really hard work, and maybe the hardest work.”
By this, she meant efforts to not merely bring such individuals onto the campus, but create cultural changes to ensure what Martin called “genuine inclusion.”
“We want an environment where no students feel as though they’ve been added on to a culture that has its core, its center, somewhere else,” she explained. “I can’t think of a more worthy project, but it’s not an easy project to change culture. But I love doing it.
“I admired what was accomplished here, and wanted to work at a place where, on a daily basis, or even an hourly basis, it’s possible to see the enlivening difference it makes to have people from so many different backgrounds learning together,” she continued. “I thought it would be an extraordinary challenge to see how that can be made into the educational advantage that it ought to be.”
For this issue and its focus on education, BusinessWest talked with Martin, the school’s first woman president and first openly gay president, about everything from these efforts to promote inclusion to the sometimes-difficult career transition from teaching to administration, and the different kinds of rewards in each realm.

Teaching Moments
Among the many items occupying space in a large bookshelf in one corner of Martin’s office is a white football helmet with a large red ‘W’ that instantly identifies it as being from the University of Wisconsin.
It was a gift from colleagues at the school where she served as chancellor for three years and became well-known for, among other things, her support of the sports teams (a pattern that has continued at Amherst) and her controversial and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to essentially separate the Madison campus from the rest of the University of Wisconsin system (more on that later).
It was in Madison where she earned a Ph.D. in German literature, with a dissertation titled The Death of God, the Crisis of Liberal Man, and the Meanings of Woman: A Study of the Works of Lou Andreas-Salome, and then an embark on a career that would take her from teaching into administration.
This was a path that would have seemed highly unlikely a decade earlier.
Indeed, Martin, who grew up in Northern Virginia, told BusinessWest that she can easily relate to many of those students at Amherst who fall into that non-traditional category, or who didn’t expect to ever be part of that school’s culture.
“My parents didn’t believe that girls should — or needed to — attend college,” she explained, adding that it was only because of the intervention of some teachers and advisors that she wound up attending the public school William & Mary in the early ’70s.
There, she earned a degree in English Literature and, during her junior year, studied abroad at Exeter University in England, where she met a number of German students and became fascinated by the divide between East and West Germany and how it had affected literature and culture.
When she returned to William & Mary for her senior year, she studied German extensively, and went to Germany to earn her master’s degree. One intriguing career stop while there came at a nursing home, where she served as a nurse’s aide.
“It was one of the most interesting — and hardest — jobs I ever had,” she explained, adding that she needed the work to support her studies, but also desired to learn German from people who were not academics. “It was a fascinating experience. This was a nursing home for women; most of them were in their 80s and 90s, so they had lived through both world wars. I learned a lot.”
Fast-forwarding a little, Martin said she began a career in teaching (both German and Women’s Studies) at Cornell, and eventually shifted into administration, a path she says she probably couldn’t have imagined even a few years earlier.
“But I’ve enjoyed it, and I find it conceptually and intellectually challenging,” she said, adding that she finds administration as rewarding as teaching, but obviously in different ways. “There’s almost nothing as rewarding as teaching, but administration also involves teaching — it’s just of a different sort and with different people. I think the biggest reward, obviously, comes from facilitating the success of students and faculty.”
At Madison, that process became more difficult due to budget cutbacks that forced reductions in faculty that brought about larger class sizes and other consequences, she told BusinessWest, adding that, eventually, she led an effort, which came to be known as the New Badger Partnership, to put in place a new business model for the school. Specifically, the plan would gain for the university status as a public authority reporting to its own board of trustees, a distinction already held by the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics.
Martin eventually struck a deal with Gov. Scott Walker to separate UW-Madison from the rest of the system in this fashion, but the proposal met with staunch opposition from the University of Wisconsin regents and, later, from state legislators, many of whom feared the measure was the next step in making the school private. The Legislature would later pass a series of administrative and fiscal reforms that would apply to the entire system.

Course of Action
Choosing her words carefully, Martin said she didn’t necessarily feel compelled to leave the Madison campus, but understood it would be rather difficult to be impactful in that environment.
“I was worried, given the controversy about the initiative we’d tried, that I might be not be able to push as hard at Wisconsin as I needed,” she explained. “And I feel the reward from these jobs comes when you feel you can make a difference. And while I feel I made a difference while I was there, there would have been a limit to how much more I could have done, given the boldness of our initiative.”
She said she wasn’t necessarily looking for a job when she was approached about succeeding Anthony Marx as president of Amherst, but soon became intrigued by the prospect of leading one of the nation’s premier private schools — and again being in a position to make a difference.
In essence, she traded the financial woes and political turmoil at Madison for the scrutiny, internal politics, and, yes, the Committee of Six at Amherst. And she’s found it to be a good swap.
In a February 2012 piece about her transition to Amherst that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Martin referenced an unnamed former president of Dartmouth who had some thoughts on her new post. “Being president of Williams is fun,” he’s alleged to have said. “Being president of Dartmouth is a hard job. Being president of Amherst is an impossible job.”
Martin said it’s far from impossible, but it is challenging and — here’s that word again — intense.
And with that, she returned to her discussion about the faculty, and those high standards she mentioned.
“In ordered to get tenured here, you have to be doing cutting-edge work in your field, and you have to have been productive at the level of publication,” she explained. “But if your teaching isn’t also outstanding, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get tenure.
“Unfortunately, that’s not true at all research universities, where research has priority,” she went on, adding that she and others consider Amherst a ‘research college,’ a phrase that the faculty, and students, have readily adopted. “And this signals that the expectations for scholarship and scientific research at Amherst exceed those you might expect at a liberal-arts college both in terms of productivity and the visibility and impact of the work.
“It’s an intense place,” she continued. “It’s intellectually very intense, because people don’t let themselves off the hook in teaching or in their participation in the governance of place just because they’re expected to do research.”
And while Amherst is, indeed, intense, the word that is being used increasingly to define it is diverse, a development that brings, as Martin said, both great promise and extreme challenge as she endeavors to build on the progress achieved by her predecessors and others at the school.
“The past few presidents and the faculty have done an incredible job of assembling a very diverse student body,” she told BusinessWest. “Given my own background, the fact that Amherst has done what it’s done to attract low-income students and support them is remarkable and quite inspiring.
“Tony Marx made it his highest priority that Amherst was aggressively recruiting and supporting low-income students and students from what would be considered non-traditional backgrounds,” she went on, adding that initiatives have included everything from community-college transfers to the recruitment of students from high schools. “And while the amount of financial aid is a key, so too are the very innovative and aggressive strategies that our admissions office has used to attract students who might otherwise think that Amherst is unaffordable, inaccessible, or not a place where they could succeed.”
At a recent White House summit devoted to improving access and success for low-income students nationally, Martin today announced four new initiatives aimed at providing low-income students access to college and fostering their success in higher education at Amherst and beyond. She said they will:
• Boost the number of Native Americans who go to college;
• Help low-income and disadvantaged students in Western Mass. get into college;
• Increase the proportion of low-income Amherst students who major in science and math fields; and
• Close the college experience gap between low-income students and the student body as a whole.
The retention and graduation rates for low-income students are as high as they are for students overall, she continued, adding that the challenge moving forward is to be even more aggressive with this tack and, as she said, to move boldly on the bigger challenge — true inclusion.
“We have created a critical mass of diversity,” she went on. “But we have a lot of work to do before we get to a place where every student on this campus would say, ‘I feel as much at the center of the culture of the place as anyone else.’ We’re not there yet, at least in my opinion, but we’re going to work hard to get there.”

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Entrepreneurial Energy

By BusinessWest Staff January 14, 2014

Cover Story Sections Top Entrepreneur

Tim Van Epps Fuels Growth at Sandri

Mike Behn was in Boston, “on a mission.”
His assignment in that spring of 2005 was to essentially finish the work started by his boss, Bill (W.A.) Sandri, the previous Christmas to recruit Sandri’s son-in-law, Tim Van Epps, to be the next leader of the Greenfield-based Sandri family of companies. At the time, the enterprise was known for its gas stations stretched across Western Mass., New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, but was also dabbling in everything from golf courses to real estate.
Behn, who was then running the motor-fuels division for the company and is now COO, didn’t believe this would necessarily be a hard sell, but he understood that he had some work to do to bring Van Epps west. After all, the then-29-year-old had a highly lucrative job managing a portfolio for Mellon Financial, and was clearly enjoying life in New England’s largest city.
“I was out in Boston finding my way, and I think I was doing pretty well,” Van Epps recalled. “My wife and I just bought our first condo right in the Back Bay — we were right where we wanted to be. And I had the best job in the world; I was probably putting in a total of 30 hours a week, and I had things on autopilot. Everything was going great.”
But Van Epps was admittedly getting bored with this life, and this mindset dovetailed nicely with the two things Behn said he had to sell to his recruit: lifestyle — meaning both quality of life and the rewards that would eventually come to the president of such a company — and, especially, opportunities.
Elaborating, he said the latter came in the form of waking up a company that he called a “sleeping giant.”
Indeed, while Sandri was, by most accounts, doing well, with more than 100 gas stations in its portfolio and an exclusive agreement with Sunoco that covered New York and New England, it was not growing, said Behn, adding quickly that, in this business, that means it was going backward.
“We were in a corporate coma,” he told BusinessWest. “I told Tim there were so many things we could do to make more money for this company and make it bigger and better than it was; it had been sleeping for years. I think that kind of talk definitely had an impact.”
So much so that Van Epps took his father-in-law’s offer, which amounted to a 60% pay cut — “I thought my wife was going to kill me at the time” — and came to Sandri as executive vice president.
To say that he woke up the company — and that he was certainly not bored as he did so — would be huge understatements.
He grew Sandri from an oil company into a $250 million, full-service energy firm, dealing in everything from wood pellets to photovoltaics. He has also expanded the main businesses, gas stations, through imaginative initiatives that have produced a 60% increase in the total number of gallons sold (the main measuring stick in this industry) to more than 70 million, with plans to get to 100 million in the near future.
One of his latest endeavors has been a push into the highly competitive convenience-store market. The Sandri name is now on five such facilities, and the ambitious goal is to increase that number to 25 or 30 over the next five years.

Movement into the convenience-store market, including this location in Orange, is one of the many new business ventures launched by Tim Van Epps since he joined Sandri nearly a decade ago.

Not everything has worked according to the script, though. For example, a foray into car washes was scuttled when Sandri officials came to the conclusion that those facilities, while profitable, were ultimately less valuable to the company than the parking spaces they took up. Meanwhile, another investment in tire-pressure valves that would light up when the pressure was low produced only boxes of unwanted inventory and was quickly halted.
And there has been some divestiture in recent years, most notably selling off Fox Hollow, the company’s golf course in Tampa, Fla. — “it just didn’t fit into the portfolio anymore,” said Van Epps — as well as its lubricants business and some underperforming real estate, with the proceeds from those sales funneled into other ventures, or “redeployed,” as he put it.
But overall, Van Epps has brought needed energy, of a different kind, to this company, and for his efforts he has been chosen as BusinessWest’s Top Entrepreneur for 2013, thus joining an eclectic mix of business leaders and organizations that have received the award since it was launched in 1996.
“Like those honored before him, Tim personifies the entrepreneurial spirit that has defined this region for more than 200 years,” said BusinessWest’s publisher, John Gormally. “He has fueled the imagination of the Sandri company and positioned it for continued growth.”

Entrepreneurial Drive
Van Epps said his grandfather-in-law, Acilio Remo (A.R.) Sandri, was a colorful character with a keen mind for business, a healthy appetite for real estate, and a way with words.
“One of the things he used to say to me was, ‘we don’t sell dirt, son,’” recalled Van Epps, adding that A.R.’s M.O. was to buy property — he acquired a lot of it on or near Route 91 in the ’60s and ’70s, for example — and hold onto it, on the theory that someday it would prove itself worthy of the investment.
Well, Van Epps does sell dirt — he’s unloaded a number of parcels in recent years, on the theory that the proceeds from unused or underutilized property, on which the company had been paying taxes, could help Sandri grow some of its other ventures.
And that’s just one of the ways he’s distinguished himself from previous generations of company leadership. Van Epps said that, when he arrived, he had little appetite for standing pat — which is essentially what the company had been doing for several years — and went about his business with what he called a “day trader’s mentality.”
Before getting into what he meant by that, it’s necessary to set the stage for his arrival and chronicle the first 78 years of the company.
Our story starts with A.R. Sandri, who was born in Barre, Vt., but grew up in Greenfield. Soon after graduating from high school, he took a job working as a clerk for the Pan-Am Oil Co., and in 1930, he was offered a lease on a gas station at 155 Main St. in Greenfield, and subsequently started the A.R. Sandri Co. Recently renovated, that station is still in the company’s portfolio, and a landmark of sorts in a service area created and then greatly expanded by A.R. and W.A. that came to be known within the corporation simply as ‘Sandri Land.’
Its borders were broadened greatly in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, as A.R. began buying up real estate along what would become the I-91 corridor. At the same time he was bulking up his portfolio, A.R. was expanding the company into a fuel distributor and seller of heating oil, lube oil, and other related products. In 1964, he inked a deal with Sunoco to fly that company’s flag exclusively over the stations he was acquiring, and by 1969, he had 50 stations, as well as 2,200 heating-oil customers and 230 commercial and farm gasoline accounts.
In 1973, W.A. took the reins of the company, and within a few years he would launch initiatives that would achieve explosive growth. The most significant of these came in 1976, with the buyout of all Sunoco’s stations in Vermont and Southern New Hampshire, as well as New York, making Sandri, then with about 140 stations, the largest distributor of Sunoco gasoline, fuels, and lubes in the country.
Under W.A., the company bought a number of home-heating-oil companies, while also growing the lubricants business and developing some related ventures. And in 1987, he took Sandri in a completely new direction — golf.

While the company has sold its golf course in Florida, it remains an aggressive player in the golf business and plans more improvements to Bernardston’s Crumpin-Fox, seen here.

He purchased the Crumpin-Fox Club in Bernardston from a friend when it was still a nine-hole layout, built a second nine, and then eventually added more layouts to what became known as the Fox family of courses within the company. Fox Hollow was opened in 1993, and in 2001, Fox Hopyard, in East Haddam, Conn., was added to the portfolio.
A few years into the new millennium, W.A., who passed away just over a year ago, started to get serious about succession planning and transitioning the company to the next generation of ownership, whomever that might be. Behn said there was no one in the Sandri family ready or willing to take over, and as a result there was actually talk of selling the enterprise. But eventually, W.A. set his sights on his son-in-law.
Van Epps remembers Christmas 2007 and, in particular, a discussion with W.A. over a single-malt scotch.
“We were sitting by the fire, and he said, ‘it’s becoming very common for in-laws to join family businesses,” he recalled. “He asked me if I would be interested in having a chat about the Sandri family of companies. And then he dropped it. A few weeks later, I was out skiing at Tahoe, and he called and asked if I wanted to come to Florida and meet his team.
“I liked what they were doing — I was curious about it,” he went on, adding that this curiosity turned into hard interest. “Then Mike came out, and we talked brass tacks.”

Burning Desires
Van Epps said the ensuing transition in leadership was a somewhat difficult time for both him and the company. “Stressful” was a word he used more than a few times to describe it, and “culture shock” was a phrase he borrowed to sum up what both he and most of his employees were going through.
He said the company was pretty set in its ways by the time he arrived, which meant, in his estimation, that it had lost a good bit of its entrepreneurial zeal.
He didn’t waste any time trying to find it again, and admits that this abrupt shifting of gears didn’t sit well with everyone. Meanwhile, Van Epps wanted to create his own team, rather than inherit one, and this resulted in some additional stress.
“You had people who were used to working for the former COO, and they were used to doing things their way,” he said. “I came in, and I wanted to change pretty much everything in the company, and when you have new blood that comes in and you have change, it’s stressful.
“From 2005 to 2008, it was pretty stressful to work at Sandri with all the changes that were happening,” he continued. “We lost some employees — I wanted some new blood in here, and I knew, when I came in here as an in-law, that I was going to have to operate this company as if it was my own money, and that’s exactly what I did.
“I had the mentality of a day trader — I guess I wanted instant gratification,” he went on. “And then you come to a company that’s been around for 80 years, and that’s not how it works.”
Moving quickly amid this culture shock, Van Epps put most of his focus on transitioning Sandri into a diversified energy company, a move that might seem to run counter to logic if one of the main products it sold was heating oil, but Van Epps believed it made perfect sense.
And he cited the move into the wood-pellets business — the company is now the largest marketer of bulk and bagged wood pellets in the country — as one example.
“In 2009, when the price of fuel oil went to $5 a gallon, we saw a runoff of our gallons of about 20%,” he recalled. “We wanted to know where those folks were going, and we soon discovered they were going to wood pellets, so we decided to get into that business.”
In March 2010, the company was awarded a $3.2 million grant from the Mass. Department of Energy Resources, which has been used for a variety of purposes, including the purchase of a small fleet of wood-pellet delivery trucks and the installation of several institutional, commercial, and residential renewable-energy systems, including facilities at Greenfield Community College, the Greenfield fire station, and other locations.
The company has made similar forays into solar and geothermal systems, and has met Van Epps’s goal of becoming what he called a “one-stop shop and energy company of the future.”

Getting Pumped
Beyond this diversity, though, Van Epps and his team have also fueled growth of the company’s core business — gasoline and gas stations — and recorded that aforementioned surge in the number of gallons sold.
That jump has come through some imaginative initiatives, including a partnership with the grocery store chain Price Chopper, which is a major player in New York and has a few stores in Massachusetts and other New England states.
Price Chopper teamed with Sunoco in one of the early rewards programs that have become prevalent in recent years, said Behn, adding that the lure of becoming one of the redemption stations for the program has prompted a number of formerly competing distributors to become Sandri partners.
“People could get 10 cents a gallon off for every $50 in groceries they purchased, with no limit on how much this could accumulate,” he explained. “We did a test in Keene, N.H., and the results were phenomenal. At that point, Tim and I went to Sunoco and said, ‘can we expand this program throughout our marketing area?’”
Sunoco agreed, and the program expanded first into New York state and then other regions, including Western Mass.
“We said, ‘we’ll give you coverage wherever you have a Price Chopper store; if we don’t have a Sunoco station, we’ll find one,’” Behn went on. “Tim and I hit the road, and in 2008, we convinced a number of distributors that are similar in structure to Sandri to take down their existing brand sign and put up a Sunoco sign, because they saw the power of the Price Chopper program.
“We’d go in with a PowerPoint and say, ‘here’s the program … you’re our first choice, and if you don’t want it, we’ll go to our second choice,’” he continued. “We didn’t miss on one, and now we have several distributors that used to be competitors that we’ve made into partners; it’s been a win-win for both of us.”
Another contributor to that surge in volume for the company has been its ability to convince independent station owners to take down rival fuel company flags and convert to Sunoco, said Behn, adding that, while the Price Chopper program is certainly a factor in the company’s success with conversions, Sandri’s quality of service and the fact that station owners can get the president of the company on the phone also play a big part in what is an ongoing source of growth.
Meanwhile, the company has been changing the nature of its portfolio in some respects, said Van Epps, as he returned to A.R.’s quote about dirt — and how he doesn’t agree with that sentiment.
Over the past several years, Sandri has sold many of its gas stations, redeployed that capital into other pursuits, and gained new wholesale customers in the process. In so doing, the company that once owned 140 stations now owns roughly 80 and supplies another 80, said Van Epps, adding that this shift toward becoming more of a wholesale company creates greater balance of fixed and variable margins.

A Matter of Convenience
Looking ahead, Van Epps said he still has that day-trader mentality, and is looking at ways to both geographically expand Sandri Land and, especially, make it more densely populated with business opportunities.
One of those ventures is the push into the highly competitive world of convenience stores, he said, adding that the company began to explore options in this realm roughly two years ago.
The initial thought was to embrace what Van Epps called the “urban model” of convenience stores, with the company leasing out its locations to a regional or national operator.
“We had meetings with some of these people, but at the 23rd hour, I decided that we could do this ourselves, and do it better ourselves,” he explained, adding that the Sandri name first went on such a facility early last year, and the current business plan calls for investing $25 to $30 million in what might eventually be 35 to 45 more stores.
“We’re calling these our ‘convenience stores of the future,’” said Van Epps, with four now operational — in Orange, Lee, Greenfield, and West Lebanon, N.H. — and more in the pipeline, with both new construction and rehabbing of existing facilities planned.
The challenge moving forward is to differentiate these stores in a very crowded market, said Behn, adding that Sandri intends to do that with such amenities and programs as free ATMs, 99-cent coffee, and customer-service representatives that reflect the company’s values.
And while the company sold its Florida golf course, it is by no means getting out of the golf business, said Van Epps, adding that it is essentially regrouping at a time of growing competition and challenge in this industry.
Elaborating, he said that when Crumpin-Fox was launched, there was very little competition in the high-end side of the business, both in this region and across the state, and as a result, golfers from around New England found remote Bernardston and made at least once-a-year pilgrimages.
But over the next two decades, the landscape changed considerably, with new courses such as the Ranch in Southwick and clusters of layouts — in Plymouth, for example — that gave the golfing public more options, which they have exercised.
This new environment has prompted Sandri to invest more than $1 million in the course, said Van Epps, adding that the immediate goal is to prompt golfers to “rediscover Crumpin-Fox.” Meanwhile, the company will look to sell more of that aforementioned dirt — some of the 600 acres the course sits on — for housing developments.
Looking back, and also ahead, Van Epps believes he and his team have the company positioned for stability and steady growth.
“Did we do everything right in the beginning? Absolutely not, but we’re at the point where I think we’re on the right track,” he told BusinessWest. “There’s no question that this company, which is operating in Franklin County, is going to be a lot bigger and a lot more successful than it’s ever been.
“We’re able to do some things now that we weren’t able to do in the past,” he went on. “We have a lot of pretty neat things going on here.”

Pedal to the Metal
Returning to that mission he went on in Boston to both recruit and “vet” Van Epps, Behn remembers meeting him at a Back Bay restaurant for lunch.
“This was his turf — it was a really exciting restaurant with a lot of young executives going in and out,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘I don’t think he’s going to want to leave this.’”
To make a long story short, he did. And the rest, you might say, is history very much still in the making.
Indeed, this is a story where some of the chapters have been written, but many are still in Van Epps’s imagination, waiting for the day trader to bring them to fruition.
“Bill and A.R. both wanted to see this company go on for five or six generations, probably more,” he said. “Five years from now, this company may not look like it does today, and that excites me; it gets me out of bed every morning and keeps me coming in here — the ability to go in any direction that we see fit to create growth and vibrancy.”
In other words, the sleeping giant is now wide awake.

Previous Top Entrepreneurs

• 2012: Rick Crews and Jim Brennan, franchisees of Doctors Express
• 2011: Heriberto Flores, director of the New England Farm Workers’ Council and Partners for Community
• 2010: Bob Bolduc, founder and CEO of Pride
• 2009: Holyoke Gas & Electric
• 2008: Arlene Kelly and Kim Sanborn, founders of Human Resource Solutions and Convergent Solutions Inc.
• 2007: John Maybury, president of Maybury Material Handling
• 2006: Rocco, Jim, and Jayson Falcone, principals of Rocky’s Hardware Stores and Falcone Retail Properties
• 2005: James (Jeb) Balise, president of Balise Motor Sales
• 2004: Craig Melin, president and CEO of Cooley Dickinson Hospital
• 2003: Tony Dolphin, president of Springboard Technologies
• 2002: Timm Tobin, then-president of Tobin Systems Inc.
• 2001: Dan Kelley, then-president of Equal Access Partners
• 2000: Jim Ross, Doug Brown, and Richard DiGeronimo, then-principals of Concourse Communications
• 1999: Andrew Scibelli, then-president of Springfield Technical Community College
• 1998: Eric Suher, president of E.S. Sports in Holyoke
• 1997: Peter Rosskothen and Larry Perreault, then-co-owners of the Log Cabin Banquet and Meeting House
• 1996: David Epstein, president and co-founder of JavaNet and the JavaNet Café

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

The Lights Fantastic

By BusinessWest Staff December 31, 2013

Cover Story

LED Technology Could Be a Game Changer for Zasco Productions

Mike Zaskey says LED (light-emitting diode) technology has been on his radar screen for more than a decade now.
He understood its vast potential to open new doors for the company he founded, Chicopee-based Zasco Productions, by enabling it to contend for projects — and there are many of them — that could benefit from the technology’s ability to produce a sharp, bright, high-quality video display image, even in direct sunlight, a considerable improvement over projection technology.
But he also understood its high price tag and how difficult — especially years ago, when this technology was considerably more expensive — it would likely be to recover it. “Virtually unattainable” was the phrase he used to describe the product for most of that decade.
Indeed, he and Barry Gadbois, manager of Operations and Business Development and also video director for the company, would spend countless hours at a whiteboard in Gadbois’ office crunching numbers and trying to get them to work.
Finally, last spring, they were confident that they could.
So Zasco proceeded with the purchase of Oracle LED Systems’ Black Widow HD9 indoor/outdoor display modules — 80 2-by-2-foot tiles, to be exact, which can be joined to create two 10-by-16-foot screens or a host of other configurations. The company’s marketing piece to prospective customers calls it “New England’s premier visual display system,” and then goes into much more detail, with bullet points such as these:
• “True 9mm resolution, 3-in-1 SMD LEDs for superb clarity”;
• “7,000 nits of brightness so that every image leaps off the screen, even in direct sunlight”;
• “Weather-resistant to shine through the toughest conditions!”;
• “Ability to create curved surfaces, plus an innovative frameless flex kit, and other features, make virtually any scenic application possible”; and
• “A network of nationwide cross-rental partners means that we can build nearly any size or number of displays!”

Barry Gadbois says the LED display used at the Rays of Hope event last fall is a good example of how the technology allows groups to make “eye contact” with large audiences.

Slicing through all those numbers, letters, exclamation points, and technical terms (a nit, by the way, is a unit of visible light intensity, and ‘9mm resolution’ means the dots, or pixels, are just 9 millimeters apart, creating very high resolution), Zaskey said this roughly $300,000 acquisition has the vast potential to be a “game changer” for Zasco, which started nearly 25 years ago as a wedding-video operation and has morphed into a multi-faceted event-production company that has handled everything from college commencement ceremonies to annual meetings for major corporations, to BusinessWest’s 40 Under Forty gala.
“This technology puts us on a different playing field,” he said, noting that the technology was used for concerts at this year’s Big E, the 20th annual Rays of Hope walk in October, and other events. “It’s a door opener for us.”
Gadbois agreed.
“There’s a certain level of client that requires service on a large scale that was inaccessible to us because we couldn’t meet the largest part of their needs, which was display technology like this,” he explained. “Now, we can go to clients who were inaccessible before and tell them, ‘not only can we cover your display needs, we can do it with the best stuff on the market, and we’re also a turn-key provider for all the other services you need.
“It’s a game changer for us,” he went on, “because it gives us a chance to introduce ourselves, and our core services, to customers who may have passed us over before because we didn’t have these displays.”
Zasco said the Black Widow system also gives Zasco an opportunity to fill out its calendar and provide a more level revenue stream, an important consideration for any business. He noted that the company is most busy in the late spring and early summer, with college commencements, corporate meetings, and other events, “but in July, we’re often sitting here waiting for the phone to ring. This will hopefully make it ring more often.”
For this issue, BusinessWest takes an indepth look at the Zasco company, its latest investment in technology, and how it has taken Zaskey and Gadbois from their work at that whiteboard to a new assignment — aggressively rewriting the business plan to reflect new opportunities.

Nit Withstanding
As he talked about the Black Widow, and LED technology in general, Zaskey drew a number of comparisons to HD televisions.
They’ve been around for years, he noted, and the technology has greatly improved while the price has come down considerably. In other words, the first person on the block to get one paid considerably more than someone who waited a few years. Meanwhile, that first one in has a set that today isn’t exactly obsolete, but it’s not as good as the newer editions.
“Like everything else that’s technology-driven, the quality increases and the price comes way down,” he explained, referring to LED systems. “And that gives us a competitive advantage, especially over some companies in the eastern part of the state that invested in this technology in the late ’90s and are possibly still trying to recoup those very large investments. It’s older technology, and they have to charge a premium for it.”
This phenomenon essentially explains what all the work with that whiteboard was all about, said Zaskey, adding that, while an investment in this kind of technology is always somewhat of a gamble, especially for a company of this small size, he and Gadbois were researching and waiting for something that they could consider a relatively safe bet.
And they believe they’ve made one, with the purchase of a system that is versatile, affordable (or at least much more so than what was on the market years ago), and won’t be obsolete before the end of next year, or this decade.
“We bought a product that’s very mature — this is as high a resolution value as we’ve seen in an outdoor display, and it’s probably as high a resolution value as anyone is going to bother to make,” said Gadbois. “The expense of developing something better than we have is probably prohibitive.”
The LED technology ushers in a new chapter in the life of an intriguing local company, one that got its start when Zaskey was in middle school learning how to handle a video camera.
What started as a hobby — videotaping weddings for family and friends of the family — eventually became a business, thanks to startup financing from his father. By the time he graduated from high school, Zaskey was starting to diversify into corporate work, such as training videos.
Eventually, companies that hired him started asking about how to display those videos at events. He saw an opportunity and invested in projection, lighting, and audio equipment, and essentially changed the course of what by then had become Zasco Productions.
Over the past 20 years, growth has been consistent, averaging about 10% annually, he said, and while most of the company’s work is in this region, it has been involved in projects in Las Vegas and other major cities, mostly east of the Mississippi.
Fast-forwarding to when LED technology came onto his radar screen, Zaskey said that, business-wise, the need for such an investment was growing because large-screen displays were now commonplace at corporate events and gatherings such as commencements, and projection technology has its limitations.
“The challenge has always been displaying video outside, in direct sunlight, or where ambient lighting conditions cannot be controlled. LED technology makes that possible. Projection outside is simply not an option — there’s just no projection that can compete with sunlight.”

Barry Gadbois says consumers are becoming more demanding when it comes to video presentations, and LED technology is now an expectation.

Meanwhile, a discerning public, now quite used to HD television and 150-foot-wide LED scoreboards in sports stadiums, has come to increasingly expect — and, more importantly, demand — such high-quality visual displays.
“People have become accustomed to a very high level of technology, especially when it comes to video and audio,” Gadbois explained. “No one would now consider it acceptable to go to a major-league baseball game and see a scoreboard with little white lights. We’ve come to expect a very immersive, very technically advanced experience, and the natural extension of this is that it’s trickling down; it’s not just major-league ballparks or the biggest concerts or the biggest events. People have high expectations for their experience.”
As an example, he pointed to the Big E, which had essentially gotten by with projection technology at its concerts for years, but had, with its vendor, KMJ Video (a Zasco client), reached the conclusion that the target audience wanted, and deserved, something better.
“They [KMJ] were ready to make a move and enhance the experience for their customer,” said Zaskey, “and the timing was perfect, because we had just acquired this new technology.”
That aforementioned trickle-down effect has now reached college commencements — “parents want to see their son or daughter on a big screen in a sharp, high-definition image,” said Gadbois — as well as corporate gatherings and many other kinds of events, and this phenomenon was one of the factors that led the company to invest in LED technology, and to believe it will prove to be a very fruitful investment.

Shedding Light on the Subject
Now that Zasco has made this leap forward, said Zaskey and Gadbois, the obvious challenge becames making the most of the opportunity it presents.
“Equipment like this has to be in use,” said Zaskey, underscoring the assignment that faces any business that makes a large capital investment aimed at driving new business.
Elaborating, he said the work now facing the company involves everything from aggressive marketing to educating potential customers about how LED technology can add value, as well as quality, to their events, to expanding their horizons geographically.
And when it comes to the marketing and educational components of this assignment, there are inherent challenges, said Gadbois, adding that people need to see and experience the technology to understand what it can do.
“This isn’t a product you can put in your briefcase, bring to a client, and show it to them on their conference table,” he explained. “You can’t always build a 16-foot-wide wall for people. But if they can see it … there hasn’t been anyone, including us, who hasn’t looked at this for the first time and said, ‘wow, this really looks incredible.’
“Once we realized that we had a product that showed itself so well,” he went on, “we quickly understood that we had to get this in front of people.”
Zasco had a huge display of the LED technology at the Western Mass. Business Expo in November, and has marketed the technology in many other ways as well, said Zaskey, adding that perhaps the most effective promotional vehicles have been the recent events that have put the Black Widow system to the test.
Most of the 20,000-plus participants in this year’s Rays of Hope event were able to see for themselves, said Gadbois, adding that the LED technology (one 10-by-16 screen positioned near the starting line) gave organizers an opportunity to connect with the walkers and runners more effectively than in years past, when they had only a microphone with which to communicate.
“We changed their audience experience,” he explained. “Previously, they had a stage and sound. They have a crowd of thousands of people stretched over a large area. This technology enabled people to see and also hear, which is important.
“If you’re attending this event and not visually engaged — maybe you hear parts of what’s going on, but you’re talking to people around you because you’re distracted — that’s a completely different audience experience than if you can literally make eye contact and create a little bit of a relationship with a speaking subject typically talking about something that’s powerful and designed to motivate the audience,” Gadbois went on. “When you can make eye contact with 20,000 people, that’s a pretty neat experience, and we try to help our clients understand and leverage the value of that kind of power.”
And value can come in ways beyond this eye contact, said Zaskey, adding that nonprofits can use an LED display to provide creative and highly visible exposure to sponsors, a reality that could enable the technology to essentially pay for itself in such instances.
Looking ahead, he said the company’s investment should provide opportunities on a number of levels. As he said earlier, it will open doors that had previously been closed, and, once those doors are open, enable Zasco to present its full roster of services to those clients.
It could also make the company a bigger player in the Boston area and other large municipal markets where competitors may have older LED technology and, very possibly, a higher price tag for their services.
Meanwhile, because of the growing demand for high-quality video displays, Zasco could become a vendor, or partner, with competitors who don’t have LED technology but need it to satisfy increasingly demanding clients. Zaskey called such opportunities “good consolation prizes,” meaning Zasco didn’t get the contract but did get a chance to rent out its equipment, and said these could become a new and possibly lucrative revenue source.
“If you’re not going to win the whole pie, it’s always nice to have a piece of the pie,” he explained. “And this technology will give us many more opportunities to do that.”

A Bright Future
Zaskey told BusinessWest that the term LED has gone well beyond buzzword status in recent years. It has become, in many respects, a standard and an expectation for an increasingly demanding public.
“Anything LED sparks an emotion in people,” he said. “You have LED uplighting, LED lighting in your home that’s more energy-efficient. So when people say they have LED visual displays at their event, that elicits a response from their audience and gets people excited.”
The hope at Zasco is that this emotion grows stronger in the years to come. If it does, then this investment will certainly bring a return for a company that is now, more than ever, focused on the big picture.

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Picking Up Steam?

By BusinessWest Staff December 17, 2013

Cover Story Economic Outlook Sections

Economy Gains Momentum, but There Are Still Some Hills to Climb

As the director of Economic and Public Policy Research for the Donohue Institute at UMass, Dan Hodge has been involved in a number of initiatives in — and involving — Springfield.
He had a role in the post-tornado initiative called Rebuild Springfield, for example, and has been both a close observer and color commentator of sorts with regard to the many different types of development that have emerged over the past several years.
Summing up the mood, or attitude, he believes is taking shape in the City of Homes, he said, “people are asking, ‘when are things going to happen here?’”
The answer, he went on, is now, or very soon.
Indeed, 2014 could be a watershed year, especially for Springfield, but also for the surrounding region, he said, noting such initiatives as the long-awaited redevelopment of Union Station and the recent announcement that UMass Amherst will proceed aggressively with establishment of a so-called satellite center at Tower Square, a $25 million undertaking.
And then, there’s that casino project that MGM Resorts International wants to build in the city’s South End. It is, at the moment, the only bidder for the coveted Western Mass. casino license still on the table. If MGM’s plan wins the favor of the Mass. Gaming Commission, and if the entire gaming initiative isn’t delayed — or waylaid — by a statewide referendum question now picking up speed (two big ‘ifs’), then cranes could start appearing on Main Street by next fall.

Dan Hodge says 2014 could be a year when things start to pick up, not only in Springfield, where many projects are expected to get underway, but with the economy in general.

“I think we could move from hearing people say, ‘it’s never going to happen,’ to ‘I think it’s going to happen,’ to ‘hey, it’s really happening,’” he noted, referring specifically to long-discussed projects like Union Station, but also to the city’s recovery in general.
And in some ways, the same can be said for the economy itself, said Hodge, noting that after four and a half years of tepid — at best — recovery, this region, and the state as a whole, is poised for something more substantial.
In fact, things started to improve late this year, said Alan Clayton-Matthews, senior contributing editor for MassBenchmarks and an associate professor of Economics and Public Policy at Northeastern University.
Massachusetts gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annual rate of 3.5% in the third quarter of 2013, nearly a percentage point higher than the country as a whole, he noted, adding that this improvement (the state grew at only 1.7% in the second quarter) was due to slow but better job growth, rising wages and salary incomes, and a higher rate of spending on items subject to sales taxes. A recovering housing market and more robust consumer and business spending are driving economic growth and providing much-needed relief from what he called “considerable fiscal drag” in the form of mandated sequestration spending cuts and higher payroll taxes than last year.
Fourth-quarter numbers won’t be out for a few weeks, but Clayton-Matthews expects those trends to continue into next year, for which he projects further improvement to the employment picture, which is the real driver of additional spending.
“There are positive signs that private demand is picking up, and there is some backlog in demand that is now being felt in the market because of improving employment and household incomes, and improving wealth in households thanks to rising home prices and rising stock markets,” he said. “The net effect is that the economy is growing, and that will probably continue.”
However, discussion of the state and national economy and projections for brightening skies have come with a host of caveats in recent years, and 2014 will be no exception, said Michael Goodman, co-editor of MassBenchmarks and associate professor of Public Policy and chair of the Department of Public Policy at UMass Dartmouth.
Such caveats include the global economy, which continues to be weak, with several European countries still struggling with massive debt issues, and especially that aforementioned ‘drag,’ which has the potential to become significant and slow the pace of progress, he said, before using some terms more suited for driving to effectively get his points across.

Michael Goodman says the ecomic skies seem to be brightening, but several forces — some of them well out of the state’s control — could impede progress.

“When it comes to monetary policy, we have the pedal to the metal,” he told BusinessWest, referring to Federal Reserve policies intended to fuel confidence, bolster the markets, and generate growth. “But with fiscal policy, we have the emergency brake on.”
Indeed, while a year that gave us the dreaded fiscal cliff, sequestration, and a government shutdown is drawing to a close, he noted, the turmoil, partisan politics, and what he called “brinksmanship” on Capitol Hill remain, and there will be more recovery-threatening decisions to be made in the weeks and months to come.
“So how far is that car going to go?” he asked, returning to his analogy. “Given the recent track record, which isn’t incredibly encouraging, I think more of the same is the most sensible outlook.”
For this issue, BusinessWest takes its annual year-end look at the economy and the prospects for the future. The consensus is that, while this region appears to be picking up steam, there are still some big hills to climb.

On-the-money Analysis
As he talked with BusinessWest about the economy, the ongoing but limited recovery, and the forces that will shape the foreseeable future, Goodman summoned that old Chinese proverb (some would call it a curse): ‘may you live in interesting times.’
Some would use a different adjective to describe this period, but that term works, he said, adding that this has certainly been an intriguing time in which to watch the economy, discuss developments in the classroom, and attempt to make projections about what will happen next.
Clayton-Matthews agreed, and set the tone for his analysis by saying, “this has been a nightmare of a recession.”
And by that, he meant both the actual downturn, the so-called Great Recession, which officially ended toward the middle of 2009, and the often-painfully slow recovery that followed.
In many respects, it has been like the recession of the late ’80s and early ’90s — noted in Massachusetts for the loss of an entire industry (minicomputers), multiple bank failures, a 12% reduction in GDP, and an equally long and slow recovery period — but in some ways, especially the force of the turbulence confronting progress, it’s been worse.
But is the nightmare over?
That’s the $64,000 question, said Clayton-Matthews, adding that there are definitely signs that it might be.
These include three consecutive months of payroll growth registered in August, September, and October, he said, adding that, while the gains were outwardly not significant (perhaps 1.5%), they are made more impressive by the “significant headwinds coming from the federal government,” as he called them, referring to everything from sequestration to the shutdown.
“Considering all that, it’s nice that we’re having any payroll growth,” he said. “This is much faster growth than I was expecting.”
Clayton-Matthews said the payroll figures contradict, to some extent, household-survey results, which indicate that that there are fewer Massachusetts residents working now than at this time last year, but overall, he considers the payroll numbers more reliable, and he believes they translate into improving confidence and increased spending.
“It appears that both the national and state economies have been growing — not at a rapid rate, but they’ve been growing,” he said. “And that has been resulting in higher levels of employment and, therefore, household income, and the ability to spend and the willingness to spend.”
Cliff Noreen, president of Babson Capital, which has more than $188 billion in assets under management, agreed, offering this broad summation: “the U.S. economy continues to heal, but is not yet healthy.”
Elaborating, he said he has a host of numbers he can summon that would seem to justify optimism about the economy and where it’s heading, but also give credence to his belief that the healing process is far from over.

Cliff Noreen says the economy is healing, but is not yet healthy, although it is likely to get healthier in 2014.

Start with those concerning corporate profits, which have reached record levels — $1.83 trillion — and are outperforming a stock market that is up more than 25% for the year, although this growth is attributable far more to cost-cutting and other efficiencies rather than climbing revenues.
Meanwhile, government debt, which exceeded more than $1 trillion a year ago, is now down to $650 billion, he noted, adding that, while this number is still historically high, the drop is encouraging. Meanwhile, there was more good news in the November jobs report, which revealed that the economy is up 2.1 million jobs this year and unemployment fell to 7% for the first time in five years.
“It does seem like the economy is finally getting stronger,” he told BusinessWest. Every year, we sit here and we hear that the economy will be stronger next year, and it doesn’t get stronger. But this year, it appears the economy is actually strengthening, and we should be into a better economic environment in 2014.”
Looking ahead, based on data in the New England Economic Partnership forecast for Massachusetts, Clayton-Matthews expects employment growth to continue and accelerate through 2014 into 2015, largely because of those rising numbers for employment and income and the resulting trickle-down effect, and expectations that the drag from the federal government, while still a factor, will be less impactful.
By 2015, payroll growth in the Bay State is expected to hit 2%, he went on, adding that the growth will come across many sectors of the economy, but especially construction (especially as the housing market improves), professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, education, healthcare, and the ‘information,’ or technology, sector.
After 2015, payroll growth is expected to taper off, due mostly to the escalating number of retiring Baby Boomers (a phenomenon that presents another challenge for the Commonwealth and its employers), but the immediate future is looking more promising.

Work in Progress
But while the economic skies would seem to be brightening, there are many forces that could impede progress, said Goodman, adding quickly that many of these forces originate outside the borders of this state, and the country, for that matter.
And with that, he returned to what he called “ongoing political shenanigans” on Capitol Hill, and his analogy to hitting the gas at the same time the emergency brake is on.
“The Fed is doing everything in its power to encourage growth,” he said. “It’s keeping interest rates low, it’s making it more attractive to borrow, it’s increasing the monetary supply through quantitative easing … the Fed is just trying to snap us out of this by encouraging investment and sparking economic growth.
“But at the same time, we’ve been engaging in these austerity-related budget policies,” he went on. “We have sequestration, the inability of the federal government to even pass a budget, moving from continuing resolution to continuing resolution, which injects all kinds of uncertainty into important parts of the economy, and the periodic brinksmanship, which has had such a demonstrably negative impact on economic activity in the periods leading up to those moments of truth.”
Although the Senate eventually passed a budget last week, other challenges loom. In another eight to 10 weeks, the latest continuing resolution that allows the federal government to continue operating will come to an end, said Goodman, adding that the debt ceiling is also nearing its limit. Which means there are more moments of truth to come, and they make it extremely difficult to project what will happen nationally and regionally.
Meanwhile, the same is true for what’s happening — or not happening — overseas, he said, adding that the international economy remains weak, and its overall health is certainly something well beyond the control of state and national leaders.
But it bears watching because of the Bay State’s strong export economy and its vulnerability to adverse conditions in Asia and especially Europe, where more than 40% of the state’s exports wind up.
“That’s been a growth driver for the entire state, and it has allowed us to do, until quite recently, a bit better that the country as a whole,” he said, referring to what’s generally referred to as the ‘innovation economy.’ “We’ve grown a bit faster until very recently, and we’ve had quite a difficult time with employment, housing, and other areas, even though we’ve certainly had challenges.
“All of that is driven by businesses and consumer markets around the world purchasing our products and services,” he continued, listing everything from healthcare to computer technology. “All of these things have been driven by demand from around the world, and we don’t know what’s going to happen with that demand.”
Compounding this vulnerability is the general uncertainty, not to mention actual cutbacks, in federal spending resulting from sequestration and other austerity measures, he went on.
“The fuel for the innovation economy has been not just that international and national private demand, but also federal funds in the form of research dollars, government contracts, and government expenditures,” Goodman explained. “When we think about the Pioneer Valley and its precision-manufacturing base and its reliance on government funding, the changes that are taking place, with many of them resulting from government policy choices, are putting some downward pressure on demand and creating a lot of uncertainty.”
At the same time, there are some other forces at play with regard to the economy, he went on, noting, for example, that many of those aforementioned products and services being exported but also sold in this country are enabling businesses to effectively do more with less, meaning fewer employees, which is certainly contributing to tepid gains in employment.
Also, noted Hodge, Massachusetts is facing the difficult challenge of creating employment opportunities for those without a college education, who increasingly face the prospect of being left behind in this innovation economy.
Elaborating, he said the state’s unemployment rate is at essentially the same level as the rest of the country — 7%. But because this state has a higher percentage of people with college degrees than other states, its unemployment numbers are skewed toward those who are less educated.
“This is a big challenge for the state,” he said, adding that there are several initiatives being undertaken, and a workforce study involving the Donahue Institute and the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission has been launched in an effort to identify strategies for enabling more members of this demographic to enter the workforce and stay in it. “One of the things we keep hearing is that there are some good programs out there, but they’re just not reaching enough people.
“The unemployment rate in Springfield is still over 10%, and it’s the same in Holyoke,” Hodge went on. “And the longer people are detached from the workforce, the less they see a future, and the harder it’s going to be for them. This is a big segment of the population, and it’s a largely untapped resource.”

The Bottom Line
When asked if it’s difficult to make a projection for the future of the regional and state economies, Clayton-Matthews laughed.
“It’s not difficult to make a projection,” he said, responding to the specific wording of the question. “But it is difficult to make an accurate projection.”
That’s because, while many arrows are pointing up, there are those headwinds to consider, as has been the case since the recession officially ended and the recovery, such as it is, began.
If all goes well — or at least better than it has — then that emergency brake Goodman mentioned may finally be taken off, and if it does, then the economy might actually be able to pick up some speed.

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Creating a Community

By BusinessWest Staff November 19, 2013

Cover Story

Honors College is Changing the Landscape at UMass Amherst

UMass senior and honors student Renee Barouxis

Dan Gordon says UMass Amherst has had an honors program since the early ’60s, and an honors college since 1999. What it didn’t have — at least to the degree that he and others would like — is what he called “an honors community.”
But now, it may have one of the best in the country.
The Commonwealth Honors College Residential Community (CHCRC), a $192 million, 517,637-square-foot complex across Commonwealth Avenue from the Mullins Center, opened its doors in August, and it’s already turning heads with a number of constituencies.
Indeed, the gleaming, seven-building campus within a campus is gaining the attention of other students at the university, high-school juniors and seniors weighing their options about where to pursue their undergraduate degrees, and other institutions looking to build an honors community of their own.
“I feel like a professional tour guide — that’s what I do,” said Gordon, interim dean of the Common Honors College, or the CHC, as it’s called, and a history professor, who told BusinessWest that he’s probably leading four or five visits a week.
There is plenty to show those who take the excursion — from the air-conditioned dorms to state-of-the-art classrooms; from the Roots Café, complete with a brick pizza oven, which is open 24/7, to the 200-seat, multi-function event hall. There’s even an art gallery, currently displaying photos from throughout the school’s 150-year history.
What’s much harder to show people, but is really the essence of the CHC, said Gordon, is that concept of community he mentioned. Tours don’t capture the honors students discussing leaders and intellectual innovators in a course called “Ideas that Changed the World.” Nor do they show the interaction between students and the two professors in residence at the CHCRC, or underclassmen pushing each other to reach higher.

Dan Gordon says the CHCRC is a “game changer” for the reputation of the honors college and UMass Amherst as a whole.

“We used to be an honors college with a list of academic requirements, but we really aspired to be an honors community, a living-and-learning community,” he explained. “We wanted a place where we can integrate what goes on in the student’s residence hall with their academic experience, where students could stay up late at night debating big ideas based on their readings in classes.
“It’s a dream come true,” he continued, “and a game changer for the reputation of the honors college and UMass Amherst as a whole.”
Indeed, it is this sense of community — as well as the amenities — that are making the Amherst campus more a “part of the mix,” or “part of the discussion,” when it comes to where top students will choose to pursue their degrees, said Wilmore Webley, an associate professor of Microbiology.
He said the CHCRC, as well as a number of other additions in recent years — from new sciences buildings to an integrated arts complex to a new academic facility taking shape in the center of the campus — have taken UMass from being a ‘safe’ or ‘fall-back’ school for students with other aspirations (something it was considered years ago) to being a school of choice.
Rebecca Spencer, an associate professor of Psychology in the school’s Neuroscience & Behavior Program, agreed, and said that at the same time, the new residential component is creating what she called “positive peer pressure among honors students.”
“You can already see it — people getting engaged in research early, getting engaged in the additional opportunities they have … and it becomes much more a lifestyle to be that high-achieving student here.”
The CHCRC, or at least its residential component, came a few years too late for Renee Barouxis, a political science major from Westfield who will graduate in May. But she said she can sense the feeling of community in this new campus, and believes it will be a tremendous asset for the university moving forward.
For this issue and its focus on education, BusinessWest joined the list of those taking a tour of the CHCRC. Those we talked with spoke enthusiastically about what’s been created on what used to be a parking lot and several tennis courts, and what it means for the school.

Grade Expectations
UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy said creation of the CHCRC is a reflection of an ongoing trend at large public universities to create honors residential communities.
There are facilities at the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and especially Arizona State University that helped inspire the campus at UMass and serve as models for what would eventually take shape here.
And by getting into the game comparatively late, he went on, the university benefited from observing what other schools had done and learning from mistakes they had made, and, in the end, created a facility worthy of the phrase ‘state of the art.’
The Amherst campus had what was becoming an urgent need for more residential facilities, said Subbaswamy, noting that overall enrollment is up 22% from a decade ago, but also a desire to create that campus within a campus.
Students mulling top private schools with $60,000 price tags now have another big reason to consider the state university’s flagship campus, which, for in-state students, costs just over $23,000 annually, he said, adding that many top private schools are currently challenged by endowments diminished significantly the Great Recession and the fact that more students need help paying for a college education today.

Rebecca Spencer and Wilmore Webley, associate professors at UMass, say the CHCRC will make the school more competitive in its quest for top students.

“This gives an option to high achievers who have traditionally looked at the private colleges, and it provides an alternative that is much more affordable,” he said. “Many of those private colleges cannot support as many students as they used to.”
Tracing the history of the honors college at UMass Amherst, Gordon said it began in 1960 as a program that made honors courses available not only in the arts and sciences, but professional schools as well. By the late ’70s, there were 400 students enrolled in the program, a number that continued to swell through the ’80s and ’90s.
In 1996, the Mass. Board of Higher Education proposed the concept of an honors college for the Commonwealth, and accepted a model proposed by UMass Amherst. Commonwealth College, as it was called then, welcomed its first class in 1999. The college had requirements to be met for entry, including a minimum grade point average and class rank, he explained, and students were required to take a specifed number of classes and complete a senior honors thesis. The college staged a number of special programs and lectures annually.
While the college’s enrollment continued to grow, Gordon continued, its facilities didn’t, at least not proportionately. He described its offices as a series of cubicles in Goodell Hall, which served as the school’s library before the current 27-story tower opened in the early ’70s.
“There wasn’t even a sign in front of the building that said ‘Commonwealth Honors College’ — it was very cramped, and we were sharing space with many other programs,” he told BusinessWest, adding that, while honors students were encouraged to attend lectures at Goodell, many found the long trek from dorms located in remote corners of the campus inconvenient.
The limitations posed by the honors college’s location and facilities drove home the need for what could truly be called an honors community that would include residence halls, said Gordon, adding that long-time Honors College Dean Priscilla Clarkson, who died just weeks before the CHCRC opened its doors, led the drive to make it reality.
There are now roughly 3,000 honors students at the university, and about half of them live at the CHCRC, which consists of an administration building and six residence halls, all named after trees: Birch, Elm, Linden, Maple, Oak, and Sycamore.
The honors college, strategically located only a few minutes from most classroom buildings, also features nine seminar-style classrooms, two faculty members in residence, the events hall, an art gallery, a café, and the Bloom Honors Advising Center, which helps students maximize the opportunities available to them and plan their academic paths, especially that year-long senior honors thesis that remains a prerequisite for graduation.
And while the CHCRC is somewhat separated from the rest of the campus, it is very much an inclusive, rather than exclusive, community, said Gordon, who repeatedly summoned the word “permeable” to describe it.
He noted that more than 20% of the classes held in its classrooms are for courses open to all students, the Roots Café is open to all members of the campus community, and a roadway through the honors complex connects it to other areas on campus, especially a residential community called Southwest.
Still, the honors college and its new residential community have become something to aspire to, he said, adding that this phrase applies to students already on campus who can transfer into the honors program, and high-school students as well.

Course of Action
Gordon said there is already some evidence that CHCRC is making a difference and that the Amherst campus is become more of a viable option for top students. And it comes in the form of an informal statistic of sorts called “the melt.”
That’s not an acronym, but rather a term used to describe the sum of those students who get accepted at a school, say they’re attending, but then ultimately go elsewhere.
“The residential community has ratcheted up our competitiveness,” said Gordon, adding that there was recognizably less melt this past spring and summer (he didn’t have exact numbers), and he believes the CHCRC has something to do with that.
“We haven’t seen a big difference, but we will soon,” he said, noting, as others did, that the residential honors community is just one of many factors putting UMass increasingly into that aforementioned mix, or discussion.
“UMass is no longer the ‘safe’ school that some people used to consider it,” said Webley. “Every year, we see the average SAT scores moving up and the number of incoming students increasing, and with a community like this one, it will only continue to increase, because we’ll be able to attract the kinds of students with high academic standing that we’ve always said we wanted to attract.
“With the university putting this kind of investment into an academic facility, it’s saying, ‘we’re serious about this; we’re not just talking about this,’” he went on. “And that gets me excited as a professor.”
Beyond making the school more competitive when it comes to attracting top students, however, the new residential campus has created an intriguing learning environment, said Spencer, returning to that notion of positive peer pressure among those living and learning at the CHCRC.
“It takes those good students and puts them together, and they seem to have very quickly caught on to challenging each other,” she explained. “They hear in the hallway that one student’s already started their research as a freshman, so then they all feel they need to get their research started early, which is great for us.
“That’s one thing that Harvard probably has always had,” she went on, “and now we have it as well.”
Barouxis told BusinessWest that the honors college created this sense of community at something called ‘honors RAPs’ (residential/academic programs) on designated floors in some of the dorms spread across campus, but the new honors complex takes it to a much higher level.
“There was a sense of positive competition on my floor,” she said, noting that it was occupied by fellow political science majors. “I think the honors college saw how effective that program was, and that gave them even more inspiration to go about a project like this.”
Barouxis, who interned with U.S. Rep. Richard Neal’s office last spring and later worked on Elizabeth Warren’s successful campaign for the Senate, said she believes the honors complex and its many programs will not only inspire competition within the walls of its residence halls, but also inspire other students not currently in the program to reach higher and be a part of that community.
Webley agreed. “I take both honors and non-honors students,” he noted, “and my non-honors students are being challenged by the honors students, and they’re working very hard to improve their GPAs, because they hear the honors students talking about their experiences there. It’s a very positive thing.”
Added Spencer, “I’ve always incentivized students about what honors can do for them — there are opportunities that the honors college gives students that the general population doesn’t get, such as smaller class sizes and the opportunity to apply for small research grants.
“There are a lot of incentives beyond just the buildings,” she went on. “But what the buildings do is give a face to it — it gives that real distinct character to the honors college that it didn’t have before.”

Class Act
As he talked with BusinessWest about the CHCRC, Gordon repeatedly pointed out the windows of his office to the surrounding dorms, dominated by glass, brick, and attractive landscaping.
He did so to reference everything from the two faculty apartments to the complex’s proximity to academic facilities, to the view to the Holyoke Range to the south and west.
But he reiterated many times that it isn’t the air conditioning, the view, or the pizza oven (or, at least, not only those things) that make this facility special.
Instead, it’s that sense of community that has historically been missing from the equation, but is now there in abundance at a facility that may be setting a new standard when it comes to honors colleges. n

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Western Mass. Business Expo

By BusinessWest Staff November 4, 2013

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Grass Roots Effort

By BusinessWest Staff October 22, 2013

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Medical Marijuana Poses Business Opportunities — and Concerns

One year ago, marijuana use was illegal in Massachusetts. Now, it falls under the category of economic development.
“It’s a business opportunity,” said Dr. Ronald Dunlap, president of the Mass. Medical Society. “In Maine, this is a more than $300 million industry, and that’s a small state.”

Those financial opportunities come in several forms. In January, the Mass. Department of Public Health (DPH) will choose up to 35 applicants — from a field of 158 — to open marijuana dispensaries for patients who have been certified by their physicians to use the drug.
At the same time, Internet entrepreneurs have been popping up as well.
“There are online services starting up where, if you pay $250, they will find you physicians who will certify you,” Dunlap said. “The people doing this are simply business people with money who are investing.”
But such activity poses issues with the medical-marijuana law, which was written to ensure that doctors can certify only patients with whom they have an established relationship.
And that’s just one point of confusion surrounding the new law, which is why at least 130 communities have placed moratoriums on marijuana dispensaries until they can work out the myriad zoning, housing, and public-health issues posed by such a sea change in the Bay State’s drug norms.
Helen Caulton-Harris, Springfield’s director of health and human services, explained that the city’s moratorium will give it time to develop a broad strategy for addressing the ancillary issues that have arisen with the legality of medical marijuana.
For example, “the law does not give immunity under federal law or obstruct federal enforcement of federal law,” she explained, nor does it supersede Massachusetts General Laws prohibiting the possession, cultivation, transport, distribution, or sale of marijuana for non-medical purposes. In addition, she noted, the new law requires no accommodation of the medical use of marijuana in any workplace or, in fact, accommodate smoking marijuana in any public place.
“The city must have the time to study the public-safety implications and whether additional resources are necessary,” she continued. “While I am appreciative of the thoughtful process of the state Department of Public Health and was a member of the state Public Health Council when these regulations were passed, the implications will directly impact our residents and perhaps our quality of life. In addition, on the local level, there must be a process to educate the residents about the potential impact of the regulations.”

Business Plans

Helen Caulton-Harris says Springfield needs time to grapple with the health, public-safety, and other issues that marijuana poses.

What is clear is that serious money is at stake, which is why the state has set significant financial barriers for entry into the marijuana market.
Specifically, a company that wants to open a dispensary would be subject to $50,000 in annual renewal and registration costs, as well as a yearly $500 registration fee for each of its employees. Applicants also had to make a $1,500 payment for the first phase of consideration, and a $30,000 payment for the second phase. In addition, the state is requiring potential business owners to have $500,000 cash on hand.
“This is a very competitive process, and we required applicants to meet high standards to advance,” DPH Commissioner Cheryl Bartlett said after the initial field of 181 applicants was trimmed by 23 earlier this month, mainly due to incomplete applications or insufficient capital. “We are fortunate that Massachusetts has a large field of serious applicants who are capable of making a significant investment to benefit qualified patients and safeguard communities.”
Each county in the state will be assigned at least one dispensary, but no more than five, with the total capped at 35 statewide. Twenty-two applicants are currently vying for sites in Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin, and Berkshire counties. Once licenses are approved early in 2014, it will take at least 120 days for a dispensary to open — hopefully giving cities and towns time to work out their issues and lift their moratoriums.
And those temporary moratoriums are now in place in at least 130 communities, including Agawam, East Longmeadow, Longmeadow, Ludlow, Hadley, Hampden, Hatfield, Palmer, Springfield, West Springfield, Westfield, and Williamsburg — and they typically apply to not only sellers, but home cultivation of marijuana, which will be permitted under certain circumstances for certified patients who lack easy access to a dispensary.
Unlike many of the other 19 states that allow medical-marijuana dispensaries, the Massachusetts law includes what’s known as ‘hardship cultivation,’ allowing certain individuals to grow their own marijuana — specifically, those who are physically unable to access reasonable transportation, demonstrate verified financial hardship, or lack a treatment center within a reasonable distance of their home.
“The city of Springfield needs to vet the potential impact of this section of the regulation on our residents as well as housing,” Caulton-Harris said. “Our thought process must include the impact on neighborhoods and mitigation strategies.”
To be assigned a dispensary license, entrepreneurs will have to prove to the DPH that their business plan is in compliance with all municipal regulations, ordinances, and bylaws. They are required to grow the marijuana they offer for sale, and they may also sell edible forms of marijuana.
The DPH noted that applicants will be evaluated on their ability to meet the health needs of patients, site appropriateness, geographical distribution of dispensaries, local support, and public-safety assurances.

Who Will Be Certified?
Patient and physician eligibility rules run in the thousands of words, but at their heart, a patient may use marijuana for medical purposes only after receiving written certification from a doctor of a debilitating medical condition — defined as cancer, glaucoma, positive status for HIV, AIDS, hepatitis C, ALS, Crohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or another condition as determined in writing by the certifying physician.
‘Debilitating’ is defined as “causing weakness, cachexia, wasting syndrome, intractable pain, nausea, impairing strength or ability, and progressing to such an extent that one or more of a patient’s major life activities is substantially limited.”
As for physicians, they are required to conduct a clinical visit before issuing a certification, must complete and document a full assessment of the patient’s medical history and current medical condition, must explain the potential benefits and risks of marijuana use, and must have a role in the ongoing care and treatment of the patient.
In addition, physicians may not issue a certification for themselves or their immediate family members, and certifying doctors — as well as their family members and employees — may not have a financial interest in a dispensary, receive anything of value from a dispensary or any person related to the dispensary, or offer a discount to a qualifying patient for using a particular caregiver or dispensary.
If those standards are met, physicians may certify for up to a 60-day supply, which is defined as 10 ounces of marijuana. If a physician determines that a patient needs more than 10 ounces during that 60-day period, he must document the amount and rationale in the medical record and in the written certification.
It’s the language defining a bona-fide relationship that concerns Dunlap — or, rather, the potential skirting of that language, which the Mass. Medical Society (MMS) lobbied to include in the law.
“Let’s set aside the controversy over the indicators, and let’s assume there are five or six acceptable indicators,” he said, referring to medical conditions where marijuana would be an acceptable treatment. “People that I call Internet opportunists are essentially getting a doctor or list of doctors they feel will certify patients, and simply inviting patients to pay them money as a finder’s fee.”
Dunlap called it a “second level” of for-profit centers, which essentially say, “‘I will certify you, and you pay us $250.’ Most of it goes to the doctor, the rest to the center to find the physician.”
There are reasons why it’s important that a doctor and patient have an established relationship, he noted, the first of which is a knowledge of the patient’s medical history and the types of medications they’re already taking.
“That’s a big issue. If you wanted oxycodone and your doctor didn’t agree, we would have a problem with you going to one of the pill mills in Florida to get it. You’d be going around your primary-care physician to get a controlled substance,” he said. “There’s a lot of anxiety surrounding the fact that this is a parallel system to the treatment the physician might be aware of. We already have patients taking over-the-counter medications we don’t know about.”
Add to that the fact that marijuana has never gone through the rigorous clinical trials all other prescription drugs are subjected to — which is one of the reasons the MMS originally opposed the ballot question legalizing it — and it adds up to concern among doctors, not all of whom are expected to certify patients.
“Many doctors don’t feel there are indicators for marijuana and won’t want to certify patients, but there are doctors out there who will certify — if they have a real relationship with the patient,” Dunlap said. “If they don’t have that relationship, that will run afoul of the regulations we had adjusted.”
There is one other issue, he added, and that’s existing federal law, under which all marijuana use is still illegal. That affects its use, even medicinally, when federal funds are involved, such as in community health centers and government-subsidized housing.
“The federal government has not sued any physician in any state where marijuana has been legalized for medicinal purposes or medical use,” he said. “But it recently came to light that community health centers, which are federally funded, could lose their funding if they certify patients for marijuana. They have a conflict.”

Untangling the Knot
Conflicts, in fact, are at the heart of the moratoriums municipalities have set forth.
“The city itself has an internal team meeting on this,” Caulton-Harris said. “The Planning Department has issued a moratorium, and the Public Health Council has supported that moratorium, and we are going through the process now. We are thinking critically about some of the issues that might be before us as we think about dispensaries, as well as cultivation sites.”
Addressing all conceivable impacts — as well as the issues of fees, zoning changes, and municipal oversight — takes time, she added. For instance, while the law addresses the proximity of dispensaries and cultivation sites to schools, buildings that contain a doctor or pharmacy, motels, and hotels, other scenarios are less clear.
“While the regulations attempt to assure broad definition location exemptions, there are areas of concerns for the city of Springfield,” she noted. “For example, while we hope that all day-care facilities are licensed, we know that there are unlicensed facilities that exist with the city of Springfield. It is important that we have the time to think about and thoughtfully address those areas that are not covered in the regulations.”
She added that public-health officials have also expressed concern about the DPH’s strategy to inspect medical-marijuana treatment centers that dispense edible forms of the drug.
“The sanitary code does not currently have regulations in place to address inspection of medical-marijuana dispensaries,” she noted. “Depending on the number of centers in the city, additional staff may be required. The council felt it is critical that we are thoughtful about the implementation process as well as our responsibility to educate the residents about the potential impact of the legislation.”

Joint Concerns
When it comes to the Mass. Medical Society’s concerns about the health and legal risks of marijuana, Dunlap admits that ship has sailed, and today, he’s more focused on the role of physicians in the process.
“This is an opportunity to have a fast way to get marijuana to some people who need it, but they really would be better off just legalizing it as opposed to putting physicians in the pathway for potential liabilities,” he told BusinessWest. In short, he worries that some people — both doctors and business owners — might game the system.
“Again, we don’t have an issue if they have an existing relationship and the patient has one of the indicators,” he said of doctors issuing certifications. “But if you were the person who wrote 300 of those in your neighborhood, that will be an issue.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]

Setting a Course

By BusinessWest Staff October 8, 2013

Cover Story

Mary-Beth Cooper Takes the Helm at Springfield College

Mary-Beth Cooper says her dog, Dakota, feels right at home on the picturesque Springfield College campus.
The 8-year-old yellow lab — now sporting a tag, a gift from some friends, that identifies him as ‘First Dog’ — has become somewhat of a fixture at the school only a month or so after moving into the President’s House, she said, adding that he’s making friends quickly, especially with students and faculty who appear willing to share their lunch or afternoon snack with him. “He loves it here; he’s very comfortable with the new surroundings.”
And the same can be said for his owner, the 13th president of the 128-year-old school and the first woman to hold that title.
She told BusinessWest she was comfortable with the institution long before she actually toured it, and even well before her first two interviews for the position, the first via Skype and the second at a hotel at Bradley International Airport — although those sessions and her subsequent visit certainly reinforced her opinion.
She liked the feel and the fit so much that she quickly terminated a quest for another college president’s position to focus all her energies on this one.
The primary reason why is the culture that pervades the school, one summed up by its motto (“Spirit Mind Body”), she said, noting that she was aware of it from work she had done, first as a volunteer and later as chair of the board, with the YMCA in the city of Rochester, N.Y., where she served as an administrator at both the University of Rochester and, later, the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Springfield College and the Y organization share a unique history, she said, noting that the college was once known as the International YMCA Training School, and there is still a strong relationship today. From that connection, she became familiar with the college’s humanics philosophy to educate the whole person.
But there were other factors that made her comfortable with the school located on the shore of Lake Massasoit, she said, listing, for starters, many similarities between Springfield and Rochester, and also between the work done within the community at both Springfield College and the Rochester schools she served.
Both cities are former manufacturing centers still trying to reinvent themselves, she said, noting that, while Rochester once boasted such industry giants as Kodak, IBM, and Xerox, its major employers today are those aforementioned colleges and a supermarket chain.

Mary-Beth Cooper says she understands the relationship between a college and the community.

As for work within the community, she said the schools in Rochester and Springfield College have strong track records of caring that are part of the institutions’ fabric.
At SC, this tradition is perhaps best exemplified by the recent Humanics in Action Day, during which students, faculty, and staff (including Cooper) performed a day of concentrated community service throughout Springfield involving roughly 100 specific projects.
“Some people do service because they believe it’s an obligation,” she noted. “Students here are drawn to service because it’s part of who they are. And they go on from their experience here and become involved members of the community where they live.”
As she talked with BusinessWest just a few weeks after taking the reins at the school, Cooper noted that her predecessor, Richard Flynn, had registered some notable accomplishments in recent years — everything from increasing enrollment to significant building and renovation projects on campus, to several new academic initiatives, including an MBA program unwrapped in 2011. Meanwhile, he established and strengthened relationships with a number of constituencies, including the YMCA and Springfield City Hall.
“He did a lot of the hard work and left me in a good position,” she said with a laugh, noting quickly that there is still plenty to do in the months and years to come.
At the top of that list is raising the school’s profile, she said, adding that, while it is well-known regionally, the college is far more of an unknown commodity in other parts of the country. Also, while enrollment has risen, there is still room for improvement, and also a need to broaden the applicant pool for this school known for everything from its affiliation with the Y to its diverse degree offerings in health and fitness, to its strong graduate programs.
For this issue and its focus on education, BusinessWest talked at length with Cooper about her latest career challenge and how she intends to build on the progress recorded at this venerable Springfield institution.

Degree of Difficulty
Roughly five years ago, Cooper told BusinessWest, she decided that, from a personal- and professional-development standpoint, her next job in higher education should be as a college president.
However, her son, Calvin, was a sophomore in high school at that time, and she had basically already made another very personal decision — not to disrupt that important time of his life with a move to another part of the country, and to wait until he was at least a freshman in college to make such a career move.
Last fall, with Calvin firmly entrenched at the University of Delaware, she started looking at opportunities to lead a college campus, and was actually fairly deep into the process of applying for a job when friends and colleagues, including the director of the Greater Rochester Y, urged her to train her sights on the position at Springfield College she had seen posted in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
At the time, she was senior vice president of Student Affairs at RIT, a role she described as “responsibility for anything outside the classroom that doesn’t involve a transaction.”
That definition fits everything from sports — and she’s been involved with them for most of her career, and continues that pattern today — to what would be considered ‘town-gown’ activities and relationships.
Prior to that, she served as dean of students at the University of Rochester and vice president for Student Affairs at St. John Fisher College, also in Rochester.
This is not a traditional path to the president’s office, she noted, adding that many campus leaders today still come from the academic or development (fund-raising) realms. But she said her background has provided tremendous insight into how a campus functions and how a school can, and should, become involved in the community.
And she does have some background in academics, having taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education for many years.
Meanwhile, she has a strong track record of work within the Rochester community, working with both the YMCA and the United Way in that city, among other endeavors. In 2005, she was named one of the city’s “most influential women” by the Rochester Business Journal.
She said her work with the YMCA was particularly eye-opening, providing her with insight into the needs of a community and how an educational institution can help address them.
“As a member of the administration at the University of Rochester, I began to learn what that community needed,” she explained. “And for me, it was an opportunity to think about youth, families, affordable daycare, and the plight of a population much different than the students at the college. It was an interesting time for me, and it helped me understand the relationship between a school and a community.
“The core values at Springfield College could not have been a better match for me — it was a perfect fit,” she continued. “When I applied, I was hopeful that they would see it the same way.”
Obviously, they did, as she prevailed in what she called a “robust” search at Springfield College that involved more than 100 candidates, including some sitting college presidents.
She said she’s proud of being the first woman president at the school, and believes the choice represents another bit of progress when it comes to putting more women in the corner office on college campuses. But she contends that gender remains an issue in too many hiring scenarios.
“There are women in positions who are ready to take leadership roles,” she said. “Our workforce in higher education is like every other workforce; there are many people who are retirement-eligible, and when positions become available, you’ll see more and more female presidents. I don’t know how long it will take for real change to happen, but it will come.”
Since arriving on campus, she’s been very busy meeting with students, faculty, administrators, and other on-campus constituencies, and has met with Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno to discuss the community and the school’s role within it.
She’s also taken in a number of Springfield College sporting events, including the recent gridiron triumph over Western New England University, attended the Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremonies last month (the game was invented at Springfield College, and the first hall of fame was located on the campus), and has commenced a search for a running club to join.
“I’m not very fast, but I can run long distances,” she said, adding that she’s looking forward to getting out into the community in the months ahead and gaining a full appreciation of the challenges facing the region and the ways the college can help address them.
“People want my ear,” she went on. “So I’m trying to listen to our faculty, students, and staff and get their thoughts on what the college should focus on. And I’m trying to get out there.”

School of Thought
Since she first interviewed for the job — and especially since arriving on campus — Cooper said she’s been somewhat overwhelmed by the positive sentiments and equally positive energy that exists on campus, within the alumni ranks, and what could be called the Springfield College community.
“I’ve never been to a campus — and I’ve worked at several, big schools, small schools — where people speak so favorably about the institution,” she told BusinessWest. “Whether it’s alumni, parents, current students, staff, faculty … it’s almost unbelievable. And so something right must happen here in terms of what the experience is like.
“My hope is that I don’t become blasé about all this,” she went on. “My hope is that I continue to be amazed by the good will that goes on here.”
While it’s not her official job description, maintaining this steady flow of positivity is Cooper’s broad mission at the college. She said the philosophy she will take to this assignment is to resist resting on the accomplishments of the past several years and instead build on what’s been accomplished.
Efforts to continue growing enrollment are certainly part of this equation, she said, adding that, while she has no specific goals in mind, she believes there are opportunities to increase the numbers of both undergraduate and graduate students.
This can be accomplished through a combination of more aggressive marketing and awareness-building efforts, she said, adding that one of her priorities is to tell the school’s story through every vehicle available to do so, and especially ongoing efforts to anticipate the needs of both students and employers and then meet them through effective academic programming.
Elaborating, she said the school must maintain and sharpen its focus on properly preparing graduates for the rigors of the workforce and the specific challenges of their chosen fields.
And with that, she summoned the phrase “cross discipline,” which she used to describe the path higher education must take in the future.
Elaborating, she said that what students want — and need — today is the ability to couple study paths, such as a major and a minor, two majors, or a four-year degree with an additional one-year MBA, to enhance their odds of succeeding in a profession.
“The question is, what offerings do we provide for students that give them the most robust portfolio, a skill set to go out and be an entrepreneur, and understand the business side of a program as well as the content?” she said. “Cross discipline will be the key, and in fact, I’ve been blunt enough to stand in front of the faculty on my second day here and say, ‘the future of Springfield College really lies in your hands,’ because what we deliver for students is significant, and the experience we offer is stellar, and we must to continue to do that.”
And while focusing on what happens in the classroom, Cooper will also work to find new avenues to express that commitment to service that was one of the many factors that drew her to the school months ago.
“I’m going to examine our relationship with the community, and look at both what we’ve done in the past and what we might do in the future,” she said. “The community has incredible challenges, but so do so many other cities, in the Northeast in particular. We have to ask ourselves, ‘what is the role of this college, or any college, in dealing with these challenges?’”
Overall, she said, the challenge moving forward is to continually enhance what the the school can offer to students in terms of the “total experience,” but without eroding the traditions and programs the school is noted for.
“We have some terrific traditions,” she said, “and students embrace those, and they come here because of them.”

Tail End
Summing up her first month or so on campus, Cooper said it’s been a whirlwind of meetings, large and small, with a wide range of constituencies that, as she said, want her ear.
Through all that talking and especially listening, she’s become even more convinced that she, the school, and its culture constitute a perfect match.
“I’m really glad to be here,” she told BusinessWest. “I think this is going to be a great time for me and the school.”
Like the First Dog, she’s very comfortable in her new surroundings.

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Life’s Work

By BusinessWest Staff September 24, 2013

Cover Story

Bill Ward Has Spent His Career Focused on the Big Picture: Jobs

Bill Ward has a wide assortment of photographs adorning the walls and shelves of his office in downtown Springfield.
There’s one of him conferring with Sen. Edward Kennedy, for example, and also one that puts him in a group with, among others, Dick and Rick Hoyt, the father-son team famous for their exploits in marathons and triathlons. There are others featuring a host of local, state, and national political leaders, and even a framed copy of the story announcing him as one of the first winners of BusinessWest’s Difference Makers award.
But maybe the one he’s most partial to shows him sharing the podium with Herb Almgren and Ben Jones. They were the first two chairmen of an organization called the Private Industry Council (PIC) — which would later become the Regional Employment Board of Hampden County — and individuals who would set a tone for the important work that Ward and those agencies would undertake.
It was Almgren, the long-time president of Shawmut Bank, who aggressively recruited Ward to be the first director of the PIC in 1981, later convinced Jones (who wasn’t even on the board at the time) to follow him as chair, and worked tirelessly to convince other business leaders of the need for workforce-development initiatives.
“He was very persuasive,” Ward recalled. “Thanks to him, people got the message that this was important work.”
And it was Jones, then-president of Monarch Life Insurance Co., who gave Ward a line he’s repeated dozens of times over the course of his career. “He was the first one to say to me that ‘a job is the best social program you can put in place,’” Ward recalled. “And he was certainly right about that.”
While Ward, who is “transitioning his career to its next phase” — that phrase has become his substitute for ‘retiring,’ because he said the latter is not at all accurate — is looking mostly ahead these days, and to what will come next, both for him and the region, he was compelled by BusinessWest to look back.
Indeed, as he prepares to leave the REB, probably by the end of the year if a successor has been chosen by then, he was asked to reflect on his career, the progress he’s seen in the broad realm of workforce development, the changes that have come to this region and its business community, and the many challenges looming for Greater Springfield — and his successor.
He started by going back to his days working at the Hampden County Skills Center, later known as the Mass. Career Development Institute (MCDI), where, for more than two years, he conducted extensive assessments of people who came to that organization seeking assistance and a path to a better life through gainful employment through training programs.
“I personally interviewed 2,000 low-income individuals, mostly women and adults, to gain perspective on their aspirations and goals,” he said, adding that some had been laid off from jobs, but many had never been in the workforce. “What I got from that was an incredible sense of the human potential in the city that was going to waste in part because people were not given the educational foundation or the training opportunities to make a better life for themselves and contribute to the workforce.”
And while reducing this wasted potential was never his official job description, it nonetheless became his career’s work. And he believes he can measure — in one way or another — what amounts to tangible progress.

Bill Ward, at right, is seen at an early annual meeting of the Private Industry Council with Herb Almgren, center, and Ben Jones.

“From a strategic point of view, there’s been a true buy-in at all levels on the absolute importance of workforce development to economic and community development,” he noted. “It happened here [in Greater Springfield] first, almost more than any other place, as a wholly embraced principle of economic growth.
“There’s been a really focused effort by the business community, and a level of collaboration has developed on how to address these workforce issues,” he went on. “What I see today is a better, stronger alignment in efforts to build a workforce; that’s been a major accomplishment.”

Hire Purpose
Before addressing a single question from BusinessWest, Ward spent probably half an hour reflecting on the words, deeds, and advice of Almgren, Jones, and many other individuals captured in the photos on his walls.
He did so to illustrate that what has been accomplished over the past three decades hasn’t resulted from the work of one man, but rather from the contributions of a wide array of individuals — from staff members to elected officials to volunteer board members.
Among the many anecdotes he offered was one concerning Jones a few months after he became chair of what was still the PIC.
“He was a very busy guy, and I remember going to his office one time to talk about a problem … like literacy within the community,” Ward recalled, noting that he didn’t remember the specific challenge in this case. “We talked for a long time, and finally he said to me, ‘Bill, from now on, if we’re going to meet for a half-hour, I want you to spend a maximum of eight to 10 minutes on the problem, and then I want you to spend the next 22 minutes on proposed or possible solutions, and what business can do about it.’
“That’s an interesting formula,” he went on. “And it impacted me. It forced me, in life going forward as I worked here, to look at a problem and say, ‘let’s get it defined quickly, and then let’s spend more time identifying solutions.’ That way, you don’t get into that ‘ain’t it awful’ game all the time.”
Ward said that story and many others help him explain how his career has been a series of personal and professional learning experiences that have made him a better administrator and helped him, his staff, his board, and supporters achieve positive results in many aspects of workforce development.
These range from a successful summer jobs program for young people to efforts to bolster adult basic education programs; from broad efforts to train workers for the region’s growing healthcare sector to programs aimed at having a pool of workers ready for the casino that will soon become part of the Western Mass. landscape.
And it all began very humbly, he recalled, adding that Almgren and others recognized the work he was doing at the Hampden County Skills Center and saw him as the potential leader of a new, federally funded initiative called the Private Industry Council, which involved the business community in efforts to help individuals become part of the workforce.
“He [Almgren] sensed that I was a willing learner,” said Ward. “I wanted to understand the dynamics between business people and the community at large. When you’re a willing learner, sometimes the teacher sees that potential and draws it out, and that’s what he did.”
The PIC started with a budget of $60,000, one full-time employee in Ward, and a part-time secretary. Today, the REB has 25 employees and a $15 million budget.
Ward credits both Almgren and especially Jones with giving the PIC, and then the REB, credibility in the community and something ultimately more important, access to business leaders who could drive change and progress.
“It was never said this way, but people felt that if Ben was involved with something, it was important work and things would get done,” he told BusinessWest. “And if he asked someone to come on the board, the response was almost always ‘yes.’”

Work — Force
Over the past 32 years, Ward said, the PIC and then the REB have achieved real progress in the broad realm of workforce development, with much of it coming in the form of answers to a nagging and somewhat perplexing problem that has dogged the region for most of his tenure — the so-called ‘skills gap.’
As the name suggests, this connotes the gap between the skills employers are demanding and those possessed by those seeking employment. In some ways, the gap is exaggerated by employers, but, by and large, it’s real, said Ward, adding that it is particularly acute in certain industry sectors, such as healthcare, precision manufacturing, and financial services.
And some of the REB’s most intriguing success stories have come in those sectors, where collaborative efforts involving industry players, academic institutions (especially the area’s community colleges and UMass Amherst), and REB officials have produced tangible results.
“We coined a phrase — we called it ‘sector strategy,’” Ward told BusinessWest. “What we’ve learned is that bringing these collaboratives together and getting agreement on a common mission and ways to identify progress is critical.”
Through such programs, said Ward, the REB and its various partners have succeeded in taking that word ‘collaboration’ out of the category of buzzword and making it something people can comprehend — and aspire to.
And one of the real challenges moving forward, he went on, is to make these collaborations between industry, higher education, and workforce-development groups more impactful.
“We need to touch more people and forge collaborations that create more and better jobs,” he explained, “so that, at least in several key industries, jobs will not go begging.”
Taking a big-picture perspective, Ward reiterated that perhaps the most significant and positive development during his tenure at the REB has simply been broad recognition of the fact that workforce development is, in fact, economic development.
While this may sound simple and logical, he went on, convincing legislative, business, and academic leaders of this hasn’t historically been easy.
And some of the most significant progress has come in efforts to engage the county’s two community colleges – Holyoke and Springfield Technical — in workforce-development efforts, he said, adding that, in many respects, this region is ahead of the rest of the state in this regard.
“Years ago, schools like this saw the workforce-development system as the stepchild,” he said, adding that, until recently, most community colleges were more focused on transferring students to four-year schools than preparing them for the workforce. “That’s all changed, and they see the other piece now, and there’s a huge alignment there.
“The first college that I know of to ever hire someone as the director of workforce development was Holyoke Community College,” he went on. “Years ago, these colleges thought of workforce development as something that limited their role, which they thought was to educate people and give them degrees. Now, they fully embrace their role in workforce development.”

Work in Progress
One of the challenges moving forward, he went on, is determining how to capitalize on this phenomenon to get the most responsive training programs for a host of industry sectors.
“Those leading the community colleges would be the first to say that their work is far from done, but there have been pockets of success,” he noted, adding that programs involving the wide spectrum of jobs in healthcare have, collectively, been the most visible and impactful initiative.
There will be plenty of other challenges for his successor and others involved in economic development when it comes to putting people to work, said Ward.
He put the economy at the top of that list, noting that, despite the best efforts of the REB and other agencies like it, unemployment will persist if employers lack the confidence and wherewithal to hire individuals — or if they persist in their desire to search for what has come to be known as a ‘purple squirrel.’ That’s a metaphor used by HR recruiters to identify the unrealistic expectations of a client company for the type of employee they desire.
“I think the phrase was born in the IT industry,” said Ward, adding that it now crosses all sectors and is certainly a factor in why unemployment remains high. “There is no such thing as a purple squirrel, but you keep searching for one anyway. Sometimes employers want a perfect person, and if they think there’s one coming in the door tomorrow, they’ll wait, and wait, and wait.”
Technology is another challenge, he said. As it advances, jobs are sometimes threatened because companies can do more with less, meaning fewer workers. Still, businesses can’t be afraid of technology, he said, and must instead embrace it to allow themselves — and the region as a whole — to become more competitive.
And the casino that eventually comes to Western Mass. will obviously be a challenge as well, he said, noting that workers will have to be trained for that work — the community colleges have already put programs in place — and, in the meantime, existing employers must prepare themselves for what 2,000 to 3,000 new jobs will mean for the employment landscape.
As for his own employment status, Ward said he’s seen a number of business leaders he’s worked with over the years struggle with the concept of retirement, and these tribulations have become yet another learning experience.
And that’s why he uses the term ‘transition phase.’
Meanwhile, he doesn’t like ‘consulting’ or ‘consultant’ much, either, but those words approximate what he will do and become — most likely in the fields of education and workforce development.
He expects he’ll do some advising (the term he much prefers) perhaps 10 hours a week, while also doing some volunteer work and getting back to golf and especially tennis, two sports he once enjoyed but put aside, especially after knee-replacement surgery five years ago.
“I’m transitioning to a different style of work,” he said, adding that his preference would be project work and, more specifically, initiatives with a beginning and an end. “I’m certainly not ready to fully retire.”

Developing Story
Look closely at the photo of Ward, Almgren, and Jones, and you’ll see three people seemingly looking out together in the same direction.
That’s obviously a photographer they’re looking toward, but it might as well be the region’s future.
The three men, and countless others, many of them captured in other pictures in Ward’s office, came together over the past three decades and embraced his overriding philosophy that workforce development is economic development.
Or, as Jones so eloquently put it, ‘a job is the best social program you can put in place.’
Bill Ward spent a career proving him right.

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Generation Next

By BusinessWest Staff September 10, 2013

Cover Story

Why Workplaces Must Nurture the Millennial

Charles Schewe says businesses need to harness the strengths of Millennials, from their idealism and confidence to their entrepreneurial bent and technological savvy.

Charles Schewe recalls a conversation he had with the head of a local bank, who told him about a recent interview with a young job seeker.
“He told me one of these guys came in, and halfway through the interview he said, ‘every day from 1:30 to 3, I go to the gym; I hope you can accommodate that.’”
That interviewee isn’t alone; the generation known as Millennials — who currently range in age from 13 to their early 30s — have a reputation for demanding work-life flexibility.
“Older people say, ‘what, are these people crazy?’” Schewe said. “There’s a sense that this is inappropriate, and we have to change them. But wait a minute — there are 72 million of them.”
Schewe, an author and professor of Marketing at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, has been studying generational differences for more than 20 years. His most recent book — Defining Markets, Defining Moments: America’s 7 Generational Cohorts, Their Shared Experiences, and Why America Should Care — distills much of that research and applies it to the marketplace.
He says the Millennials — the second-largest generation in American history, behind the Baby Boomers — have arrived in the workforce with the baggage of a reputation for being lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and restless, perceptions that are, in many cases, exaggerated at best.
But whatever they bring to the business world, both positive and negative, Schewe said, their Boomer and Gen-X employers and managers had better learn how to incorporate their very distinct work styles. “Baby Boomers came up with casual Fridays; now it’s casual every day, and people at the top can’t change that. We need to learn to love them, not leave them, because they are the future of the workforce.
“The demographics are evident,” he reiterated. “There are 72 million of them marching into their 20s and early 30s, and they’re a force to be reckoned with, both in the marketplace and especially in the workplace.”

Tumultuous Times
The first step in dealing with Millennials, Schewe said, is understanding them and recognizing the factors that have shaped them. The term ‘cohort’ isn’t precisely a synonym for ‘generation,’ but a parallel to it, representing a group of people connected and shaped by common experiences.
“There’s a perception of Millennials out there — that they’re entitled, they’re lazy, they want everything but don’t want to give much, and so on. But that may not be true,” he told BusinessWest. “In the work I do and have done for the last 20 or so years with generational cohorts, there’s an understanding that what happens to us, what we experience from our environment and events — particularly hugely cataclysmic events when we’re coming of age, roughly 17 to 23 years of age — creates values that remain relatively stable in our lives.”
There are recent historical examples of this, he explained. “People in their 90s who experienced the Great Depression still save. The ones who went through World War II are still the most patriotic of any age group. Each group has different sets of values from the other groups, and yet there’s a cohesion of values within each group.”
The Millennials, who were born roughly between 1980 and 2000 — although some set the dates as far ahead as 1984 to 2004 — are, by either account, the second-largest cohort the U.S. has ever seen, trailing only the Baby Boomers. The earliest of them came of age during the rise of the Internet, and that has become perhaps their most important cultural touchstone.
“The introduction of the Internet changed everything,” Schewe said. Notably, it ushered in a brief moment of economic hope, followed by disillusionment, which then set the stage for the disappointments of the past decade.
“We didn’t know it at the time, but look back and see how different the world was in the late 1990s,” he said. “Young people all thought they would retire by 30 — they’d get an Internet company going and sell it off. But the [dot-com] bubble burst in 2000, then we had 9/11, then the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
That was followed in short order by the global implosion of the financial markets in 2008 and the Great Recession, all of which has brought worry to a generation otherwise known for its confidence and high levels of education. But the Internet spawned something else as well — the sense of being connected to a global community, combined with a drive for technological advancement.
“The Internet has morphed into a constancy of change, and a media change — the life expectancy of a cell phone today is 18 months, and then we’ve got to get something new,” Schewe said. “We have this sense of constant speed. This sense of urgency and speed of change is a value Millennials have.”
Other factors — from the first African-American president to the scandals of Enron and Bernie Madoff; from the incompetence following Hurricane Katrina to the shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Newtown — have also coalesced into the Millennial generation’s unique mix of idealism and skepticism.

Workplace Revolution
But how does this youngest sector of the workforce interact on the job? That’s where executives and managers begin to wring their hands.
“I would say the cohort gap between Millennials and older managers is dramatic,” Schewe said. “There’s a huge gap and huge conflict between older managers who expect some sort of respect, and young people who come in and call the CEO by his first name; older people aren’t used to that. [Young workers] come in and dress the way they want to, and they expect that’s acceptable.”
They also have a reputation for casual irreverence that, as a professor, Schewe says is not completely unearned.
“I need to put on the syllabus that I prefer to be called Professor Schewe; they’ll call me Charles or Schewe, like, ‘hey, Schewe, when’s the exam?’ Or they’ll walk out the door to go to the bathroom in the middle of class — but they only do that once,” he told BusinessWest.
“They don’t have the respect for older people” that previous generations have shown, he continued. “We always thought wisdom, age, and experience had some sort of status … but that isn’t the way now. In part, it’s because they’re on top of things more than we are, particularly the technological advancements, and that gives them a sense of superiority over older people. In the past, there was some expectation of deference, but nowadays it’s just assumed we’re on an equal plane.”
The Millennial reputation for restlessness is also borne out by recent career trends. “On average,” he said, “a college graduate will have three career shifts by the age of 30. That’s not the way it was when this boy went into the job market. You were loyal to General Motors, and if you were lucky enough, you had a job all your life. Today, if they’re not happy, they’re likely to take your investment in them and go somewhere else.”
To slow down that revolving door — and avoid the costs of constantly recruiting, hiring, and training new employees — he said companies need to create a sense of community among their employees, as that’s something young workers crave.
“They’ve always been put in teams, even in school. They’re used to working with people,” Schewe said, noting that today’s forward-thinking companies are built much more around collaboration than in the past — and feature communal activities outside the office as well — because Millennials tend to be happier in such an environment. Again, he noted, if they’re not happy, they’ll jump ship.
Meanwhile, “they’re also extremely entrepreneurial, so give them challenges they can jump on, and they can take with them a sense of success, of being their own boss. That will make them more incentivized. And, of course, they’re multi-taskers, so give them multiple projects at the same time.”
The generation’s technological savvy can benefit the workforce in multiple, and often unexpected, ways, Schewe noted. For instance, it can become a sort of reverse mentorship, with Millennials teaching their managers about ways to incorporate new technology in the workplace.
That’s not easy for some older supervisors, who tend to look at employees below them in the managerial hierarchy as somehow lacking, he went on “when, in fact, they have skills and opportunities to guide managers above them. Companies should take advantage of that, and Millennials feel good about that. These people are far more creative and innovative in their thinking than prior generational cohorts.”
In addition, “they’re not going to be satisfied if they’re forced to do menial tasks; they need to be challenged,” he noted. “If, in their situation, they’re not being challenged, the company ought to think about moving them laterally — not down, because they’ll feel undervalued — but move laterally to find that sense of challenge.”

Changing Tides
Evidence suggests plenty of reluctance to embrace the Millennial way; recruiting firm Adecco found in a 2012 study that hiring managers were three times more likely to hire a worker over the age of 50 as they were to hire someone between 18 and 32. And 75% of managers in the survey said Millennials’ biggest job-seeking mistake was wearing inappropriate clothing to the interview, while 70% cited potentially compromising social-media content as a red flag to hiring.
But Schewe said Millennials bring plenty of positives as well, including their well-honed sense of idealism. While previous generations dreamed of working for a large company and making a large salary, today’s college students are just as likely to say they want to improve the world in some way. Others say money is less important than doing work that gratifies them or offers scheduling flexibility or work-life balance, so they have time to pursue their other interests.
“As an employer, how do you harness that? The answer is, you can shift the company — as any company should be doing anyway — in order to be more consistent with the marketplace, more into social responsibility, sustainability, even volunteerism. It’s unbelievable what my students do in terms of volunteering. It’s so pervasive at the university. They value that, and you as a company ought to tap into that,” he said, either by sponsoring programs or offering time off to pursue such activities.
The bottom line, he said, is that the career landscape will gradually be overtaken by a highly educated cohort — more than two-thirds of high-school graduates now go on to college, as opposed to 45% in 1960 — with much different ideas of how a workplace should operate.
Some Millennial habits seem odder than others — for instance, stories abound of young people bringing their helicopter parents to job interviews. And it’s not entirely predictable how the recent recession and a still-contracted job market will change the economic values of today’s college students.
Whatever the case, Boomers and Gen-Xers need to be ready, Schewe said.
“The point is, as an older cohort with a different set of values, you can’t just say, ‘they’ve got to bend to us; we’re not going to bend to them.’ There are just too many of them, and their values are too pervasive and too deeply embedded to be ignored.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]

Grape Expectations

By BusinessWest Staff August 27, 2013

Sections Travel and Tourism

Area Vintners Are Seeing the Fruits of Their Labor

Larry Godard says a close-knit network of vintners has sprung up organically across the region.

Larry Godard acknowledged that he considers them somewhat backhanded compliments. But he loves hearing them anyway.

“They’ll taste one and look at me and pause and say, ‘this is really good,’ and they emphasize the ‘really good’ part as if they are surprised at the high quality,” said Godard, referring to comments about the labels, including Red Hen Red, he’s now producing at Mineral Hills Winery at the Red Hen Farm in Florence.

Elaborating, he said that many of the growing number of visitors to Mineral Hills are from Connecticut and New York. They are wine connoisseurs, and they’ve been to many small wineries across the Northeast. But Western Mass. is a relatively new destination for many of them, and this is one of the reasons behind many of those ‘really good’ comments.

And Godard’s not the only one hearing them.

Millennials are a promising new customer base for Gary and Bobbie Kamen at Mount Warner Winery.

Indeed, he is the sole proprietor of one of a growing number of what could be called start-up vineyards and wineries across the Valley, including Black Birch Winery down the road in Southampton, Amherst Winery in Amherst, Mount Warner Winery in Hadley (which overlooks the UMass Amherst campus), Pioneer Valley Vineyard in Hatfield, Les Trois Emme Vineyard & Winery in New Marlboro in the Berkshires, and several others.

They are all part of something called the Massachusetts Wine & Cheese Trail, overseen by the Mass. Farm Wineries and Growers Assoc. (MFWGA), to which Godard belongs, but could eventually comprise a separate wine trail in the four western counties.

In the meantime, Godard and others like him — individuals with a passion for wine and the means and the inclination to go into business making and selling it — are creating what could be described as a community of vintners, and a close-knit one at that.

“A wine trail is already happening by default,” Godard said, explaining that he’ll send his guests to Black Birch and Amherst Winery, and they will in turn send their visitors along to the other wineries in the area. “We have a nice little cluster right here. In fact, Ian Modestow [partner with Black Birch Winery] came over one day to borrow a cup of yeast, like a neighbor borrowing a cup of sugar.”

Mary Hamel, a partner with Black Birch Winery, also noted the fellowship among the region’s wine makers. “That’s one thing about the wine industry that I think is very cool,” she noted. “You don’t feel like you’re in competition with anyone because we support each other, and the more wineries there are, the better it is for all of us.”

More wineries would seem to be a likelihood in every state because demand is growing, and there are many aging Baby Boomers eyeing wine making as a bridge to full-time retirement. According to the 2012-13 “State of the Wine Industry” report by Silicon Valley Bank, a California financial institution specializing the U.S. wine industry, Millennials and Baby Boomers are the two largest sectors of wine consumers, and consumption rates are growing most rapidly among Millennials and men.

And while a burgeoning wine trail will help the region’s vintners, an official trail will certainly be a boon to the Greater Springfield Convention & Visitors Bureau (GSCVB).

Michele Goldberg, director of marketing for the GSCVB, told BusinessWest that, while the Connecticut Vineyard and Wine Assoc., with its established wine trail, is a longtime member, Western Mass. wineries fall perfectly into the emerging ‘farm-to-table’ movement in the tourism industry.

Ed and Mary Hamel of Black Birch Winery have doubled their visitation for wine tastings through great word-of-mouth referrals.

“From a tourism perspective, wine tasting is incredibly popular with groups and for ‘girlfriend getaways,’ and a future wine trail would be a welcome addition to our diverse list of things to do in the Pioneer Valley,” said Goldberg, adding that the tourism bureau is constantly fielding inquiries from meeting planners looking for unique after-hours activities for convention attendees.

For this issue and its focus on tourism, BusinessWest visited with several area vintners to talk about their businesses and their outlook on how wine can become a prominent part of the region’s economy and tourism sector.

Heard It Through the Grapevine

The stories beyond the wineries taking root in the Valley all vary, but there are many common denominators.

They were started, in most cases, by professionals who decided to turn a hobby into a business venture. These entrepreneurs had some struggles getting things both in the ground and off the ground, but they’re now seeing the fruits of their labors — in more ways than one. And they all will inevitably use the phrase ‘an art and a science’ to describe the process of making a fine wine.

Godard, former vice president at MassMutual, with his wife, Susan, a schoolteacher, is a great example of today’s vintner whose passion for making wine became his ‘second-life’ business.

They established their 60-acre Mineral Hills farm in 1984, and for years they had a well-established honor-system farm stand offering apples, blueberries, cider, and honey products from Susan’s bees. Soon their hobby grew to include a variety of flavors of wine made from apples, blueberries, and grapes. It was only after Godard retired from MassMutual in 2009 that he decided to “go pro,” as he called it, and turn the winemaking hobby into a full-time venture, launching Mineral Hills Winery in the fall of 2010. Godard now produces wines from French-American hybrid grapes, but also imports European vinifera grapes from California for his reds.

At Black Birch Winery, two couples share various duties to run one of the newest wineries in the area. Florence dentist Ian Modestow is the vintner, while construction and home-inspection-company owner Ed Hamel manages the two acres of new vineyards, with five more acres soon to be cultivated.

Modestow’s wife, Michelle Kersbergen, and Hamel’s wife, Mary Hamel, both dental hygienists, manage the marketing and outreach, but all four partners pitch in wherever needed.

Because the vineyards at Black Birch were planted in 2010 and are young (they still have about two years of maturity until they can be harvested), the proprietors currently source their grapes from Southeastern Mass. or the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Since June 2012, they’ve doubled their visitation, from 650 tastings to 1,480 this August, with wines priced between $16 and $20.

Hamel was one of the many who put ‘art’ and ‘science’ in the same sentence as she talked about wine making. “That’s why Ian is so good at it, because that’s what dentistry is, too,” she explained. “A dentist has to know the science, but has to be an artist to get your tooth to look exactly as it did before.”

The owners of Mount Warner Winery in Hadley — Gary Kamen, a UMass professor of Kinesiology who is in ‘phased retirement,’ and his wife, Bobbie, a strategic planner with AARP — agreed.

“I think the reason I enjoy grape growing and making wine is because they are both part art and part science, probably because of my science background,” said Gary Kamen. “Each person who gets into this business enters it with a different perspective.”

Like Godard and the partners at Black Birch, the Kamens started growing grapes with six cuttings, or vines, in their field in 2000. Soon they were making wine, and, like Godard, they decided to ‘go pro’ in 2010, opening their winery in June 2012. Now, with 725 vines per acre, they have six wines, including two dessert wines priced between $14 and $20.

Les Trois Emme Winery in New Marlborough, owned and operated by Wayne and Mary Jane Eline, is located just south of Ski Butternut in Great Barrington and minutes from the Norman Rockwell Museum and Tanglewood. While the rural town has a residential population of 1,400, it swells to more than 3,000 with tourists and second-home residents from New York.

Wayne Eline is a former chemistry teacher and high-school principal who, like Godard, took his hobby to a whole new level after retirement in 1999. The Elines set their first vines in the dirt in 2000, and by 2003, they were open for business.

“If you’re going to get into it, you’ve got to make it into a real business, rather than just playing games. It didn’t take long to go from where it was to where it is now,” he said, adding that he has tripled his yield over the past decade due to “getting really earnest” about the business in 2009.

The venture now produces 11 to 13 wines, with Stingy Jack Pumpkin, a white wine with a fusion of pumpkin spices, emerging as the most popular.

Age-old Tradition

Godard described wine tasting as a very personal experience — for both the taster and the winemaker — and something he’s getting used to as visitation numbers continue to climb.

But he admits that some comments, including those spiced with ‘really good,’ leave him amused and often surprised.

He recalled one visitor from California who commented, “your wines aren’t like our wines,” to which Godard jokingly replied, “that’s like saying your chicken isn’t like our duck.”

The difference, he said, is between French hybrid grapes that grow best in the Northeast, and European vinifera grapes that area vintners source from California, and the two very different climates in which they grow.

“Our wines are different, and they [people from California] should have learned their lesson, because they were treated the same way by the French until the French had their eyes opened when the California wines started taking gold medals at international wine competitions. And that’s happening here now.”

All four wineries have won awards regionally for their wines, and this is perhaps one reason why they’re seeing and meeting a number of avid wine lovers from Connecticut, venturing past that state’s wine trail.

To help bolster visitation, the MFWGA has been promoting the annual Massachusetts Wine Passport Program, which offers a $2 passport to 15 participating wineries in the state. Once the visitor has all 15 unique passport codes from each winery, they are eligible to enter a drawing to win a cellar full of Massachusetts wine.

For Goldberg and the GSCVB, anything that promotes regional ‘buy-local’ efforts is beneficial, and a Western Mass. wine trail would certainly help bring more people to the western counties.

“Eventually, having a number of successful wineries could lead to a Pioneer Valley Wine Trail, wine festivals, and harvest festivals,” she noted.

A number of wineries already feature their labels at area farmers’ markets, thanks to the Massachusetts Farm Winery Bill, backed by the MFWGA, which allows vintners in the Commonwealth to sell their wine at such venues.

Keeping with the theme, the Kamens’ philosophy is to make wine only from grapes and fruit that they grow.

“We intend to make a Massachusetts product out of a Pioneer Valley product.” he said, adding that his winery regularly attends the Amherst and the South Hadley farmers’ markets, while Hamel said Black Birch Winery has seen definite growth and awareness of their wines through their appearances at the Northampton Farmers’ Market.

Juicy Futures

Just this summer, the Wine Marketing Council, working with the Nielsen Co., released its annual statistics regarding the global wine market, and found that Baby Boomers spend the most on wine, but with more than 15,000 Millennials coming of age per day, a new target market is emerging. Bobbie Kamen is definitely seeing more young people at Mount Warner Winery.

“Millennials are very eager to try a lot of different things; it’s an exploration for them,” she said. “And if they like it, they’ll buy it.”

Hamel said Black Birch also sees a number of Millennials, which she considers somewhat surprising, but very promising for the future. “On our Facebook likes, the Millennials age group is the biggest,” she said, adding that, while they may not yet have the disposable incomes that Baby Boomers do, they appreciate fine wine and are establishing themselves as solid customers for decades to come.

While advertising will be important, trust in the valued word-of-mouth endorsement will become even more important to this younger generation in learning about the next new thing in wine.

“Word of mouth is really important for us no matter what age, because, yes, we’re in the business of wine,” Hamel stated, “but we’re also in the business of giving people a great experience.”

And at the moment, this is a business laden with potential — not only to spur economic development and jobs, but also to provide a big boost to a host of efforts to put Western Mass. on the map for many different types of visitors.

In other words, when it comes to wine and wineries, the region’s producers have grape expectations.

Elizabeth Taras can be reached at [email protected]

Slow Climb

By BusinessWest Staff August 13, 2013

Cover Story

Headwinds Continue to Impede the Recovery

It was Ronald Reagan who, while trying to unseat incumbent Jimmy Carter in the heated 1980 presidential race, famously asked Americans if they were better off than they were four years earlier.

Enough answered ‘no,’ either literally or figuratively, to put him in the White House. And since then, countless politicians have borrowed or slightly amended the phrase in an effort to advance their cause.

But economists have taken to employing that line as well, and many are asking that question today, although with a slight twist.

Indeed, people in virtually every region of the country can answer ‘yes,’ because four years ago was the height — or the nadir, depending on how one chooses to look at things — of the Great Recession, with national employment at or just above 10%. So the questions being asked today, especially in Western Mass., are ‘just how much better off are you than four years go?’ and, increasingly, ‘why aren’t we better off than we are?’

There are many factors that play into that latter query, ranging from persistent uncertainty on the part of business owners regarding the short and long term, to the emerging matter of sequestration and its impact on many sectors, from healthcare to precision manufacturing; from economic turmoil halfway around the globe to the simple fact that companies continue to find ways to do more with the same number of people (or fewer); from the expiration of the payroll-tax holiday, which has taken money out of the pockets of consumers, to widespread uncertainty about the effects of Obamacare.

Bob Nakosteen

Put it all together, and it adds up to a recovery that Bob Nakosteen, professor of Economics at UMass Amherst, called “surprisingly mediocre.”

Others we spoke to for this hard look at the economy and the prospects for real improvement used other words and phrases to describe the recovery (or lack thereof) to date, ranging from ‘painfully slow’ to ‘uneven’; ‘essentially jobless’ to ‘less than robust.’

That last, somewhat tongue-in-cheek offering was given by James Barrett, managing partner at Meyers Brothers Kalicka, P.C., who has prepared and analyzed second-quarter numbers for dozens of clients, and believes they speak to ongoing trends concerning companies in this region.

Jim Barrett

“Businesses are spinning faster than they used to, and they’re basically staying in place,” he told BusinessWest in what would be the first of several attempts to convey the opinion that businesses are working harder to merely stay at something approaching an even keel. “I haven’t talked to anyone, except in a few isolated cases, that has a June 30 year end that is hitting it out of the park. Companies are working harder, but they’re not necessarily seeing it on the bottom line.”

To be sure, there are some sources of optimism regionally, said Mary Burke, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, putting a surging housing market and its many ancillary benefits at the top of that list.

“The housing recovery is certainly one significant bright spot — prices are going up, people feel wealthier, they feel like things are moving in the right direction, they don’t feel stuck in their homes,” said Burke, adding that demand for housing has given the region’s construction sector its first real boost in years. “All that’s positive news, and it seems to be providing some momentum.”

Other encouraging developments include a record-busting stock market (indexes were up another 4% or more for July), long-awaited improvement in household balance sheets, and growth in some emerging business sectors, such as technology and the biosciences, she added, noting that the big question moving forward is whether these upward-arrow elements can overcome the considerable counterproductive pull of sequestration, rising interest rates, falling confidence among business owners, and other factors.

But the “$64 billion question” concerns if and when employers will begin hiring again, said Burke, noting that jobs, or the lack of them, has been the primary reason why the recovery has been defined by those aforementioned adjectives, with more discouraging news coming recently: July was the slowest hiring month since March.

“We still have a very elevated unemployment rate” of 7%, she noted. “It’s come down from the worst, but it’s still quite high.”

And it won’t be until a real, meaningful, and sustained dent is made in the jobless rate that more positive terms can be used to describe this recovery.

Getting Right Down to It

The lackluster state of the recovery is spelled out in the latest issue of MassBenchmarks, the journal of the Massachusetts economy published by the UMass Donahue Institute in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

It recaps a significant slowdown in the second quarter that was not unexpected, due to factors such as sequestration and the employment-tax hike mentioned above, but was nonetheless troubling.

Real gross domestic product in the state grew at an annual rate of 0.8%. That’s in contrast to the 1.7% GDP growth nationwide for the same quarter, and the 2.8% logged in the state in the first quarter of this year. Meanwhile, state payroll employment, which grew at an annual rate of 3% in the first quarter, stalled in the second quarter, declining by 0.1% on an annualized basis, a number that has analysts concerned.

“The recent rise in unemployment is particularly disconcerting,” wrote Alan Clayton-Matthews, MassBenchmarks senior contributing editor and associate professor of Economics and Public Policy at Northeastern University, noting that overall unemployment rose from 6.4% in March to 7% in June. “It appears that unemployment rates increased for both men and women, and those increases were concentrated among youth — those less than 25 years old, and those with less than a high-school education. However, unemployment rates also rose for those between the ages of 25 and 54, and for those with a high-school diploma and some college but less than a bachelor’s degree.”

Burke concurred. “It looks like we’re going in the wrong direction,” she noted, adding that the numbers were down in almost every metropolitan area in the state, and this consistency is, in and of itself, alarming. “For a while, it looked like Western Mass. was weaker, and Boston has been doing very well, for the most part, in this recession, so I’m really surprised that Boston had an increase in unemployment.”

Nakosteen, who also serves as the executive editor of MassBenchmarks, said that employment numbers for the Springfield metropolitan area, which includes part of Connecticut, were lower than they were a year ago — 286,000 for 2013 versus 290,000 for 2012.

“And that’s really not a good sign for a recovery,” he told BusinessWest, “because that’s been the pattern. Every month, employment is lower than it was a year ago — not by much, but enough. What these numbers tell me is that the recovery is experiencing some headwinds.”

He didn’t add the word ‘again,’ but it was certainly implied, and with good reason, because there always seems to be some impediment to real improvement, from the fiscal cliff to turmoil in a host of European countries.

And when asked to look behind the numbers and identify these headwinds, those we spoke with said federal policy moves are starting to take the toll that many predicted they would.

Indeed, sequestration is starting to have an impact on overall federal employment, said Burke, and there is mounting evidence that major defense contractors in Rhode Island and Connecticut are reducing their workforces or, at the very least, being wary about new hiring or replacing those who leave or retire.

“Growth has been quite tepid for the year, and some believe sequestration is having an impact, taking perhaps as much as a percentage point off GDP growth, according to one estimate I’ve seen,” she noted. “That is definitely having effects across the country because it affects how much money flows to the state governments from the federal government. State-government jobs have been falling in the region, and federal-level government jobs that are situated in the region have been falling as well.”

Locally, Dave Smith, president of Tell Tool in Westfield, which logs 55% to 60% of its parts-manufacturing business from the military, said company officials talked about sequestration as a business risk, and there was verbiage to that effect placed in the strategic plan. Accordingly, a flat year was projected, and that’s what has transpired.

“We haven’t seen a reduction in orders,” he explained. “I wouldn’t describe them as strong, but they’re stable.”

Elaborating, he said that, apart from a slowdown in orders for the F-35 joint strike fighter, for which Tell Tool makes several parts, sequestration hasn’t had a deep impact — yet.

And as he speculated on why, Smith said that, while military aircaft (such as those at Westover or at Barnes Municipal Airport in Westfield) are not in the air as much, they’re on the ground being serviced, which thus far has led to more orders for parts.

Overall, the manufacturing sector on the whole has been off by about 1% across the country, said Burke, noting that a big reason for this has been a decline in due in exports to spiraling economies in China and elsewhere.

As for the payroll tax increases, or the elimination of the tax holiday, Burke said there are no hard numbers available yet to quantify its impact, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that people are spending less.

“Retailers say they’re seeing consumers being stingy again, and they noticed that it started happening after the payroll-tax increase,” said Burke, noting that, while the policy change to the FICA tax represents a loss of $1,000 to $2,000 annually for most families, those amounts are enough to take a toll.

Hire Power

Another factor contributing to the decline in employment and sluggish second quarter is waning confidence among employers, said Burke, noting that the Business Confidence Index (BCI), as measured by Associated Industries of Mass., fell below neutral on its 100-point scale in June to 48.9 after a drop of 3.2 points from May.

June swoons are not uncommon for the BCI — it fell 8.5 points during that month a year ago — but this decline is perhaps yet another indicator that business owners are troubled by the slowdown in the first half of this year and are likely still concerned about will happen — or not happen — next.

“Confidence has been quite volatile,” she explained. “It’s always volatile, but even moreso in this recovery. There have been so many times when we might think we’re out of the woods, and then some other roadblock happens.”

Barrett agreed. “Although we’ve heard that things are bottoming or turning around,” he noted, “I don’t think people have seen enough of a turnaround to get moving. They haven’t seen the growth — and I don’t think they have the confidence yet — to start financing expected future growth long-term.”

Looking ahead, though, those we spoke with said they can find some reasons for optimism, and they don’t have to look very hard.

The housing market is certainly one of those factors, said Burke, who noted that this sector is stronger in the eastern part of the state, but things are improving in the 413 area code as well. Analysis she’s seen indicates that the market could certainly weather the 1% increase in interest rates that many are predicting.

Meanwhile, household balance sheets are improving, which puts people in a position to spend more, said Burke, noting that, while interest rates have increased somewhat, they are still at historically low levels.

Bill Sullivan, senior vice president of Commercial Lending at Holyoke-based PeoplesBank, concurred, noting that this is a time for companies to be proactive and ready for when the skies are considerably brighter.

He said the phrase ‘cautious optimism’ is quite overused and he didn’t want to contribute to that phenomenon, but he did anyway.

While doing so, he looked back to the recession of the early ’90s — which was like the current cycle in terms of how slow the recovery was — for what amounts to inspiration.

“You try to find a point in time where that recession turned around,” he said, “but to me, it just seemed like one morning, people woke up and said, ‘hey, we’re still in business. We have sales, though not at the level we like; let’s move forward.’

“I don’t know what moves that rock forward,” he went on, “but I think it starts with confidence; people are pessimistic, and they have to be, and they really have to believe it before they make a capital investment or hire employees.”

Those we spoke with said the best-case scenario is that the economy can work its way through these latest headwinds and start to pick up some speed. But there are many questions concerning when and if that will happen.

“We definitely have to get through these tax increases,” said Barrett, noting that policy changes that will impact wealthier Americans will start to be felt later this year. “And it takes a while for them to work their way through the economy; it’s the same with sequestration.”

While the impact of those steps is still taking shape, there will be another round of Congressional action to deal with matters such as the deficit and the debt ceiling, he continued, adding that anticipation about what will happen could heighten levels of uncertainty.

The key, again, is jobs, and unfortunately, recent history is showing that recoveries are becoming increasingly jobless, and most signs indicate that this trend will continue.

“We’ve been having these jobless recoveries, and there’s a lot of work going on to try and figure out why that is,” said Nakosteen. “The recession in the early ’90s, the one in the early 2000s, and this one … they’ve been not entirely jobless, but that’s the phrase that’s been attached to them. Economists don’t fully understand why that is, but jobs don’t seem to be generated as quickly as economies recover anymore.

“I’m pretty optimistic about the next two or three years,” he went on, “but I just can’t understand why we can’t get there more quickly.”

The Bottom Line

In comments to the Boston Globe made in reference to the sluggish second quarter recorded in the Bay State, Nakosteen seemed to sum up the frustration felt by many with regard to the recovery.

“I’ve never seen a report when the economy is supposed to be growing that’s so somber,” he said. “It’s so deflating in a way.”

Deflating, because even though the Great Recession cut deep and the impact was felt across the country and in every business sector, actual recovery, which has often seemed close and real, has instead proven to be slow and quite elusive.

“The kind of recession we had, a financial-crisis recession, has historically had very slow and painful recoveries,” said Nakosteen. “I’ve been surprised by just how slow and painful this one has been, even though I’ve read the history.”

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Awash in Innovation

By BusinessWest Staff July 30, 2013

Cover Story

Resilience Drives Belmont Laundry for More Than a Century

When Gaetano “Tommy” D’Amato was about 14, his mother became ill, and around that time, she began using Belmont Laundry to do the family’s heavy washing.

The centenarian, who celebrated his 100th birthday on May 8, remembers a horse and buggy — or horse and sled, depending on the weather — that came to pick up the family’s sheets from their home on the corner of Oakland and Orange streets in Springfield. “There weren’t any phones back then, but they told us they would be back every third day,” he said, adding that they couldn’t afford to have the laundry dried, so it was delivered wet, and his sister hung it on the clothesline. Over the years, D’Amato met many people who worked for the company, including one who retired after 47 years.

April McCarthy, who runs the Belmont Laundry Wilbraham Road store, shows off a 1912 wringer washing machine used when her great-grandfather ran the business.

The laundry was founded in 1907 by Harry Samble, who emigrated to the U.S. with his family from Scotland. It has withstood the test of time, an achievement that has taken Herculean resolve due to deaths, a devastating fire, and dramatic changes in the industry and economy.

The tragedies began when Harry died unexpectedly. At the time, his son Robert was 14, and his wife, Corrine, was forced to run the business. History repeated itself a generation later, when Robert, who had taken over the business, died at age 43 and his wife, Dorothy, had to run the laundry. Ironically, their son, Robert Jr., was also 14.

Today, 89-year-old Dorothy still spends Friday mornings at the business on 333 Belmont Ave., which is run by her son Robert (Rob) Jr. and his children, Matthew, Derek, and April McCarthy. The company has expanded and has two branches: Belmont Laundry and Custom Dry Cleaners, which has four storefronts — two in Springfield, one in Longmeadow, and one in West Springfield — as well as the Belmont Linen and Uniform Rental service, which comprises the majority of the business.

“There is a lot to this, and you have to be good at many things to survive, grow, and remain strong, because there is always something that needs attention and improvement,” Rob said. “But we have not only kept up with things, we’ve been pioneers in the latest advances.

Robert Samble, left, with his son Matthew, says the 106-year-old business has persevered through tragedy and calamity by keeping a constant focus on innovation.

“At one point, we were the only ones in the world using radio frequency identification chips with bar codes in our garments and entrance mats. We were also the first in the Northeast to put in spot cooling for our employees,” he told BusinessWest, noting that his sons spent an entire summer installing thousands of electronic chips in the mats used by area businesses.

“Every new idea that comes out gets evaluated, and if it’s feasible, we jump on it,” Rob continued, adding that Belmont is a green company and has recycled 23.5 million gallons of water over the past five years, recovered thousands of BTUs of energy, recycled thousands of hangers and garments each year, and uses environmentally friendly detergents and chemicals.

In the Beginning

Harry’s business began as a home-based operation. “The laundry was picked up on bicycles, washed in a tub in a barn behind the house, and brought back to people while it was still wet,” Rob said.

As the customer base grew, Harry graduated to a horse and wagon, then an electric truck, and, later, a gas-powered vehicle.

His wife Corrine ran the business after his early death, until the couple’s oldest son, Harry Jr., took over. He was joined by his younger brother Robert (Bob) when he returned from serving as a fighter pilot with the Army Air Corps during World War II. “By the early ’60s, my father had become president,” Rob recalled, explaining that his dad took the helm when Harry Jr. retired.

Competition had always been stiff, as there were more than 20 laundries in Springfield, but many of the owners were friends, and Bob’s cronies included Russ Dale of Dale Brothers Laundry on Union Street and Bill Hamilton of Royce Superior Laundry.

When Maytag began running coin-operated laundromats in low-income neighborhoods in 1958, they all signed on to the program. “They thought they would get rich,” Rob said. “But the laundromats were left open 24/7 without any supervision, which proved to be a bad idea.”

He remembers accompanying his father in the middle of the night when windows were shattered or money was stolen from coin boxes. It wasn’t long before Maytag’s experiment failed, and when the company switched gears and began selling washing machines to the public, many local laundries went under. The D’Amato family was one of millions who purchased a washer, which meant they could do their own laundry.

“The last nail in the coffin came when polyester was introduced, as it didn’t need ironing,” Rob said. “By the early ’70s, there were only two commercial laundries left in Springfield.”

As a child, he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. But during his teens, his interests shifted, and after graduating from high school, Rob attended Springfield Technical Community College for six months, worked as an auto mechanic, then moved to Arkansas, where he revived and ran a catfish farm.

In time, he returned to Springfield and was working as a refractory mason when his mother told him she was tired of running the struggling laundry. The year was 1974, the economy was floundering, and she said he either had to take over or the business would be sold. So Rob entered the family enterprise at a time when other laundries were closing their doors.

“I had held things together for eight years,” Dorothy said. “My youngest son was only 8 when my husband died. He was killed on Saturday, and I went to work the following Tuesday. It was a crazy time. I had had nothing to do with the business when my husband was alive, but my dad gave me advice, and everyone there was friendly and worked very hard.”

She also received help from her mother-in-law, who was in a nursing home. She was still very interested in the business and wanted to see an itemized expense sheet every week. “She had been treasurer at one time and signed all the checks,” Dorothy recalled. “I signed them too, once I took over, but the place was much smaller then. It was homey, and a lot of ladies worked there. I knew everyone by name.”

When clothes came into the laundry, they went to a ‘marker,’ who put a number on every garment. Each family was assigned their own number, which ensured they got their laundry back. “We used to wash wool blankets and hang them over a big board suspended from the ceiling, because they couldn’t go into the dryer. It was so different back then. Everything was done by hand. Now we use pulleys, lifts, and belts,” Dorothy said.

Although it was all she could do to keep the laundry operational, her husband had purchased new machines and rebuilt the structure before he died.

Rob said the company’s expansion began when his grandfather sought and received a variance to put an addition onto his building, which was in a residential zone. His father purchased adjacent properties as they became available, but by the time Rob became vice president, some of them had been sold to meet expenses.

New Ventures

The business took a new spin when Dorothy sent Rob to the National Institute of Dry Cleaning in Joliet, Ill. He returned with new ideas, but the manager immediately shot them down.

However, a short time later, the man had a stroke, and the trustees at Security National Bank named Rob vice president. “I was only 21 at the time,” he said.

His first coup was landing a contract after union workers walked off the job at the Worcester State School. “One day, the school showed up with a 53-foot trailer filled with sheets,” he said, adding that the Worcester operation also did the laundry for the Belchertown and Northampton state hospitals.

Belmont also served as a backup for Baystate Medical Center’s laundry and “they always had work for us,” Rob said. “The revenue we made from those accounts allowed us to grow into the textile-rental business.”

That venture was in line with the training he had received at the Institute of Dry Cleaning, because it did the laundry for a nearby prison. Rob’s work as an auto mechanic also came into play as he purchased old equipment and rebuilt it to keep up with the expanding business, which soon grew more competitive.

Large, national firms began vying for hospital accounts, and as a result, Belmont lost its contracts. But the company was already branching out into new territory, and in 1980 Rob hired two salesmen for the textile business. One didn’t last, but Ernest Gagnon, who stayed with the company for 20 years, helped make Belmont Laundry a recognized name in the uniform- and linen-rental industry.

The family laundry storefront also remained open, and in 1977, when Dale Brothers Laundry closed, Rob purchased its routes and customer list. “It was a good decision because we had done family laundry for so long, we were on automatic pilot, so although it was a dying industry, we were able to keep up with it,” he said. However, the business was threatened as one-hour cleaners were coming into vogue and Rob’s competitors were going bankrupt.

The next blow came in 1981 when Belmont Laundry was devastated by a fire. “We lost our offices and the store, but were so efficient, we delivered laundry and dry cleaning the next day,” Rob said.

He set up a temporary office and “scrimped and saved” until he had enough cash to build again, which was possible because he served as general contractor. “I only had enough money for a down payment and went back into debt. But I was able to rebuild with help from friends in the trades, who guided me,” he told BusinessWest.

In 1988, Rob purchased the Shea/Flair Dry Cleaning chain. “It made us the market leader in dry cleaning. We took over three plants with stores, which brought up us to seven locations. Then, in 1989, the economy tanked, and although we continued to invest in the stores and plants, it was a futile effort,” he said.

Today, four of those stores are still open, including one on Wilbraham Road in Springfield, which is run by Rob’s daughter, April McCarthy. The Main Street store is being used as a storage facility, and the former Flair location at the ‘X’ in Springfield, as well as another store, were sold.

“But our rental business continued to grow — we specialize in uniforms, sheets, and patient gowns,” Rob said, adding that the company’s accounts include restaurants and auto dealerships.

Rob’s sons began working at Belmont when they were about 10, and Matthew, now vice president, recalls straightening out hangers, then manning the counter when he was in high school. Derek, who is the dry-cleaning division manager, said he and Matt painted the roof of the building when he was 12.

They have followed the family tradition of implementing change. “I pushed for green cleaning, and by 2009, we were totally green; it was the right thing to do,” Derek said, adding that the company needed new machines, and he felt it was ready to handle more business.

“We put in a new shirt department and revamped it twice within five years,” he said. “Technology is changing so quickly, and I wanted to have the highest level of quality for our customers. The market has slowed, but we’ve held our own. We have tried different styles of marketing and spent time learning how to implement new ideas. I spend about 55 hours a week here and look forward to coming to work every day.”

April began working in the Longmeadow store when she was 14. “I had a lot of responsibility,” she said, adding that she closed the store at the end of the day.

When she went to Westfield State University, she worked in the West Springfield store, and although she earned degrees in elementary education and psychology, “I could never leave. I’ve been here almost 22 years, and it’s a great business. We depend on each other and have customers who have been coming to us since I started working as a teen. This is such a part of my life.”

Forging Forward

Matt and Rob plan to visit a laundry in Davenport, Iowa in August to evaluate the operation and see what they can learn from it. “We have to work to stay ahead of things. There are a lot of different angles to the business,” Matt said.

Rob agrees. “I’ve made mistakes, but it was diversity that put us on the map in the rental business, and it’s diversity that allowed us to stay in the retail business. We have a good product and take care of our employees. They are very good to us, and if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be here today. They take care of our customers, who can rely on a consistent product.”

Which is exactly what D’Amato experienced when the centenarian called them a month ago for the first time in about 25 years. “They still do a good job,” he said.

Summer in the Valley

By BusinessWest Staff July 2, 2013

Cover Story

25 Ways to Enjoy Everyone’s Favorite Season

It’s officially summer in the Pioneer Valley, an exceedingly enjoyable, if all-too-short time marked by a seemingly endless variety of diversions. Some of these — Six Flags, Tanglewood, and Jacob’s Pillow come to mind — are well known, or should be. But others fall into that ‘best-kept-secret’ category, and shouldn’t. These include everything from the Holyoke Blue Sox to the Nash Dinosaur Tracks in South Hadley; from one of the few remaining drive-in movie theaters (located near the New Hampshire border) to the often-overlooked Quabbin Reservoir. For this issue, BusinessWest offers 25 intriguing suggestions for how one can devote some time during this summer in the Valley. There are myriad more, but these provide a good indication of what this region has to offer during everyone’s favorite time of the year.

Berkshires Arts Festival

www.berkshiresartsfestival.com
Ski Butternut, 380 State Road, Great Barrington, MA
(845) 355-2400
Schedule: July 4-6 and July 12-14
Admission: $5-12
The Berkshires Arts Festival has proven to be so successful in its 12 years of existence that organizers have expanded the event into a second week. The festival attracts hundreds of acclaimed artists and big-time collectors from across the country for two consecutive weekends, transforming Butternut from a ski lodge into an outstanding art gallery. And while the artwork is the main focus, the festival also provides musical entertainment from renowned local, national, and international acts. Visitors can also participate in fun, interactive events like a puppetry and storytelling workshop. Besides, it’s hard to turn down tented AC and free parking.

Berkshire Botanical Garden

www.berkshirebotanical.org
5 West Stockbridge Road, Stockbridge, MA
(413) 298-3926
Schedule: May 1 to Oct. 14, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily
Admission: Free for members; adults, $15; seniors, $12; students, $12; children under 12, free
If the flora indigenous to, or thriving in, the Berkshires of Western Mass. is your cup of tea, try 15 acres of stunning public gardens at the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge. Originally established as the Berkshire Garden Center in 1934, today’s not-for-profit, educational organization is both functional and ornamental, with a mission to fulfill the community’s need for information, education, and inspiration concerning the art and science of gardening and the preservation of the environment. In addition to the garden’s collections, among the oldest in the U.S., visitors can enjoy workshops, special events, and summer-guided tours on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 10 a.m., from June 15 through Sept. 1.

Blandford Fair

www.theblandfordfair.com
10 North St., Blandford, MA
Schedule: Labor Day weekend, Aug. 30 to Sept. 2
Admission: $5-10
Not much appears to have changed in the 145 years of the Blandford Fair, but that’s what makes it so charming. This Labor Day weekend, at the 146th edition of the event, fairgoers can witness the classic rituals of the giant pumpkin display, the pony draw, and the horseshoe tournament. Most likely not seen in the earlier days is the fantastically loud but always-intriguing chainsaw-carving demonstration and the windshield-smashing demolition derby, both highlights of this year’s fair. With many more exhibits and attractions to offer, a weekend at the Blandford Fair is a wonderful way to close out the summer.

Bridge of Flowers

www.bridgeofflowersmass.org
Shelburne Falls, MA
Schedule: April 1 to Oct. 30
Admission: Free
Where can you find Siberian Iris and Iris Germanica (the bearded beauties, of course), Wild Wings, Ghost Train, Fire Breather, or False Indigo? The Bridge of Flowers, of course. With interesting names, and even more amazing flowers, this once-abandoned trolley bridge is now a garden pathway, cared for by the Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club Bridge of Flowers Committee for more than 80 years. While advances in transportation doomed its original use, the bridge eventually bloomed as a tourist attraction, and from bulb season to Dahlia season, and every bloom season in between, it welcomes flower followers from all over the country.

Brimfield Antique Show

www.quaboaghills.com
Route 20, Brimfield, MA
(413) 283-6149
Schedule: July 9-14, Sept. 3-8 (Tuesday-Sunday); open from sunrise to sundown
Admission: Free
Call it tkotchke heaven, or adopt the old phrase ‘one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.’ But whatever your connection to this wide variety of aged items, you’ll find folks flocking to a mile-long stretch of antiques and collectibles along Route 20 in Brimfield during six days in July, rain or shine. The annual Brimfield Antique Show labels itself the “Antiques and Collectibles Capital of the United States,” and it’s hard to disagree when, during the course of three events a year — in May, July, and September — the shows attract 6,000 dealers who buy, sell, and trade items from bygone eras to more than 130,000 antiques aficionados from around the world.

Green River Festival

www.greenriverfestival.com
Greenfield Community College
One College Dr., Greenfield, MA
(413) 773-5463
Schedule: July 20-21
Admission: $65-75; weekend pass, $90; children 12 and under, free
The Green River Festival remains the Pioneer Valley’s one-stop option for fans of both hot-air balloons and eclectic musical acts. Located on the Greenfield Community College campus, the festival began in 1986 as purely a hot-air-balloon affair, but quickly integrated musical entertainment into the event. Now, the festival features a packed weekend lineup including acclaimed musicians drawn from an assortment of traditional as well as unconventional genres such as ‘high-intensity gypsy swing’ and ‘adventurous folk.’ Sore from the high-intensity dancing, visitors can sample the local cuisine, try their hand at a crafts workshop, or check out all the action from above in a colorful balloon.

Hancock Shaker Village

www.hancockshakervillage.org
1843 West Housatonic St., Pittsfield, MA
(413) 443-0188
Schedule: Through Oct. 27
Admission: $8-18
In 1774, a small group of persecuted English men and women known as the Shakers — the name is derived from the way their bodies convulsed during prayer — landed in New York Harbor in the hopes of securing religious freedom in America. Nearly 250 years later, their utopian experiment remains available to the public in the restored 19th-century village of Hancock. Through 20 refurbished buildings and surrounding gardens, Shaker Village successfully illuminates the daily lives of its highly productive inhabitants. After spending a day in the recreated town, visitors will surely gain a greater appreciation of the Shakers’ oft-forgotten legacy in the region.

Holyoke Blue Sox

www.holyokesox.com
MacKenzie Stadium, 500 Beech St., Holyoke, MA
(413) 533-1100
Schedule: June 6 through early August (playoffs Aug. 4-12)
Tickets: $4-6; children 5 and under, free; group rates available
Valley residents do not have to trek out to Boston in order to catch a Sox game this summer. The Holyoke Blue Sox, members of the New England Collegiate Baseball League, play close to home at MacKenzie Stadium in Holyoke. These Sox may not have David Ortiz batting cleanup, but they do feature a roster comprised of elite collegiate baseball players from around the country, including some who have already been drafted into the major leagues. Frequent promotional events like postgame fireworks and numerous giveaways help make every game at MacKenzie Stadium a fun, affordable event for the whole family.

Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival

www.jacobspillow.org
358 George Carter Road, Becket, MA
(413) 243-0745 (box office)
Schedule: June 15 – Aug. 25
Admission: $22 and up
As the 81st season of Jacob’s Pillow opens this summer, the annual dance festival finds itself firmly rooted as one of the premier venues for dance in the U.S. The picturesque, 220-acre campus in the Berkshires is a national historic landmark, and was recently awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Obama. Dance enthusiasts will surely marvel at the 350 free and ticketed recitals performed by celebrated companies from around the world, but any devotee of the arts will enjoy Jacob’s Pillow’s other offerings of photography and art exhibits, seminars, discussions, and film screenings, many of which come at no cost.

Lady Bea Cruise Boat

www.brunelles.com
1 Alvord St., South Hadley, MA
(413) 315-6342
Schedule: May through early October
Admission: $10-20; season passes available
Western Mass. residents should be reminded that Interstate 91 is not the only direct thoroughfare from South Hadley to Northampton. The Lady Bea will take you up and back on daily cruises along the Valley’s other major highway: the Connecticut River. If you don’t feel like sharing the 75-minute narrated voyage with others, rent the boat out for a private excursion. Or take advantage of the entertainment and themed cruises that feature local artists. Just like your car, the Lady Bea is climate-controlled and chock full of amenities, though your Honda Civic doesn’t come equipped with a full bar.

Lupa Zoo

www.lupazoo.org
62 Nash Hill Road, Ludlow, MA
(413) 583-8370
Schedule: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily
Tickets: $6-10
Lupa Zoo brings the African savannah to Western Mass. residents. The late Henry Lupa fulfilled his lifelong dream of creating a zoo right next to his Ludlow house, filling it with hundreds of animals and instilling a warm, familial atmosphere. At Lupa Zoo, you can be entertained by monkeys, feed giraffes on a custom-built tower, or marvel at the bright colors of tropical birds. In addition to offering animal shows and animal-feeding programs, the staff at Lupa Zoo promotes conservation and sustainability, so if you’re thinking about heading to the zoo, grab your bike from the garage and start pedaling.

MASS MoCA’s Bang on a Can

www.massmoca.org
1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA
(413) 662-2111
Schedule: Museum summer hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Bang on a Can: July 15 to Aug. 3, weekdays, 1:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 4:30 p.m.
Admission: Adults, $15; students, $10; children 7-16, $5; children 6 and under, free; members, free
MASS MoCA has a big-bang theory that large-scale, contemporary art isn’t the only interesting reason to venture to the northwest corner of the Commonwealth. So at MASS MoCA, the former 19th-century factory buildings turned art galleries, the annual Bang on a Can music series turns the whole campus into a spontaneous combustion chamber for music from talented students and renowned guest conductors. Daily gallery recitals offer an extra measure of creative expression during a visit to the multiple buildings housing contemporary forms of art. Bang on a Can recitals are free with museum admission.

Mountain Park at Mount Tom

www.iheg.com/mountain_park_main.asp
Mountain Park Access Road off Route 5, Holyoke, MA
(413) 586-8686 (box office)
Schedule: July 27 and Aug. 16; 8 p.m.
Admission: $31-75
Tucked inside dense woods near the base of Mount Tom is one of the Valley’s hidden gems. What began as a recreation area near a trolley station more than 100 years ago became a popular amusement park in the early to mid-1900s, only to fade from the landscape in the late ’80s. Reconstituted as a concert venue in 2009, Mountain Park is back in favor and playing host to established musical groups in a summer concert series. This summer, jam to English prog-rockers Yes (July 27) and Boston punk stars Dropkick Murphys (Aug. 16) at the park’s scenic amphitheater.

Mount Sugarloaf State Reservation

www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/central/msug
300 Sugarloaf St., South Deerfield, MA
(413) 665-2928
Schedule: May through October, dawn to dusk
Admission: Free
If you really want to commemorate your summer of 2013, then you might want to drive or climb the steep road up Mount Sugarloaf in South Deerfield to take some photos with the family at one of the most picturesque locations in Western Mass. Indeed, the view from the Observation Tower atop the peak, overlooking the curved, tree-lined Connecticut River far below, is the most brochure-worthy, and published, image of this region. The state reservation, which consists of two summits, North and South Sugarloaf, boasts more than 500 acres of land for picnicking, picture taking, and hiking the many trails. Be warned, some of the trails will be quite challenging … and provide some of the most stunning views of the Connecticut River Valley.

Nash Dinosaur Track Site and Rock Shop

www.nashdinosaurtracks.com
594 Amherst Road, South Hadley, MA
(413) 467-9566
Schedule: Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.
Admission: Adults, $3; children, $2
Walk where the dinosaurs walked, literally. It’s hard to believe that the first documented dinosaur tracks found in North America were on the shores of the Connecticut River, near today’s site of Nash Dinosaur Track Site and Rock Shop in South Hadley. Originally uncovered in 1802 by a farmboy plowing his family farm, the findings weren’t officially called dinosaur tracks until the 1830s. Over the years, thousands of dinosaur tracks have been discovered; many were sold to museums and private individuals all over the world, but many more can be seen due to the extensive work of Carlton S. Nash. Visit the site and learn about some of this region’s earliest inhabitants, and also about the geology of the area.

Northfield Drive-In

www.northfielddrivein.com
981 Northfield Road, Hinsdale, New Hampshire
(603) 239-4054
Schedule: Fridays and Saturdays at dusk, rain or shine
Admission: Adults, $9.50; children under 12, $5.50
Take a trip back in time to the Northfield Drive-In and experience summer movie watching like your parents used to do … under the stars. Serving Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont for 65 years, the venue welcomes families to gather for a summer Friday or Saturday evening of clean, fun-filled entertainment, which includes two or three first-run movies. And don’t forget the hot dogs, pizza slices, and hot, buttered popcorn from the snack bar, of course.

Quabbin Reservoir

www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/central/quabbin
485 Ware Road, Belchertown, MA
(413) 323-7221
Schedule: Open dawn to dusk, year-round
Admission: Free
If you love the outdoors, there is nothing but pure nature on more than 25,000 acres overlooking the man-made, 412-billion-gallon Quabbin Reservoir. A warm summer day can be filled with hiking, biking, picnicking, nature photography, fishing, and wildlife watching, especially the growing population of resident eagles. After flooding five towns, the Commonwealth created the Quabbin during the 1930s as the main drinking-water source for the city of Boston. It has since become the ‘accidental wilderness’ due to the thousands of acres of protected watershed area. Be sure to visit the Quabbin Interpretive Services Program in the Quabbin Visitor Center to learn more about this carefully regulated, yet open-to-all, park.

Six Flags New England

www.sixflags.com/newengland
1623 Main St., Agawam, MA
(413) 786-9300
Schedule: Six Flags: weekdays, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., weekends, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Hurricane Harbor: weekdays, 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.; weekends, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Admission: $45-55; advance tickets and season passes available
Summer doesn’t have to be filled with lazy days. Consider a free-fall through a 250-foot enclosed waterslide at Six Flags New England called the Bonzai Pipeline. Just launched this summer, the all-new, 65-foot tall waterslide complex is in Hurricane Harbor water park and joins numerous rollercoasters boasting foreboding names like Scream, Mind Eraser, and Cyclone — and, of course, the world-famous Bizarro coaster, the centerpiece ride of the popular theme park. But fear not: the park has attractions for everyone along the stomach-queasiness spectrum. The carousel and bumper cars are significantly closer to sea level, as are the two giant wave pools in Hurricane Harbor. No matter what type of ride you prefer, Six Flags will provide many smiles — or screams — on a summer day.

Stearns Square Concert Series

www.springfielddowntown.com
Worthington and Bridge streets
Springfield, MA
(413) 781-1591
Schedule: Thursdays, July 11 through Sept. 12; opening bands, 6-7:30 p.m.; headline bands, 8-9:30 p.m.
Admission: Free
The sounds of guitars, saxophones, and drums bouncing off the buildings in downtown Springfield tells you it’s summer in the city when the Stearns Square Concert Series makes its run from July 11 to Sept. 12. What started 13 years ago as the coolest free Thursday-night summer concert series to liven up the cerntral business district has become the hottest outdoor spot to catch a diverse range of live music, people watch, and marvel at the spectacle of motorcycles parked along the park that have given the successful series a secondary moniker — ‘Bike Night.’ This year’s slate of performers includes internationally acclaimed musicians Ana Popovic (Aug. 8), Springfield native Taj Mahal (July 18), and returning favorites FAT (Aug. 22), Roomful of Blues (Aug. 29), and Georgia Satellites (Sept. 5), to name a few.

Tanglewood

www.bso.org
297 West St., Lenox, MA
(617) 266-1200
Schedule: June 23 through Sept. 1
Admission: $21 and up
For outdoor music, Tanglewood represents the best of what Western Mass. has to offer. This beautiful campus in Lenox has been the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1937, and has been drawing visitors from around the country for just as long. Pack some sandwiches for a picnic, throw a blanket and folding chairs in the car, and take in a magical evening of music on the lawn. While Tanglewood always puts forth its fair share of classical programs with superb concert soloists, it also offers performances by contemporary groups, like this summer’s shows by the Steve Miller Band and Guster, for those more inclined to the Beatles than Beethoven.

Western Mass. Vineyards and Wineries

www.masswinery.com
Various towns in Western Mass.
Schedule: Check websites
Admission: Free
Western Mass. is the perfect place to ‘wine’ down with friends at a winery, and there are several to choose from. Consider Green River Ambrosia in Greenfield (ever heard of honey wine?); or Mount Warner Vineyards in Hadley, open by appointment; or the Black Birch Winery in Southampton, which offers summer wine tastings on weekends. If you’re still thirsty for more local variety, try the Amherst Farm Winery in Amherst, Les Trois Emmes Winery & Vineyard in Hadley, or the Pioneer Valley Vineyard in Hatfield, which all have retail shops to explore as you’re sipping the fruits of the past year’s labor.

Williamstown Theatre Festival

www.wtfestival.org
1000 Main St., Williamstown, MA
(413) 597-3400
Schedule: June 26 through Aug. 18
Admission: $20 and up; some events free
For 58 years, the Williamstown Theatre Festival on the campus of Williams College has been offering Tony Award-wining theater in the Berkshires. During that time, the theater venue of the Main Stage and Nikos Stage has attracted such performers as E.G. Marshall, Blythe Danner, Colleen Dewhurst, and Christopher Reeve, and the summer of 2013 will be no different. The festival will present a range of both classical and original productions, late-night cabarets, free theatre, and other special programs like the Family Friday Workshops, from 4 to 6 p.m. from July 5 to August 9.

Yidstock

www.yiddishbookcenter.org/yidstock
Yiddish Book Center
Hampshire College, 893 West St., Amherst, MA
(413) 256-4900
Schedule: July 18-20, 7 p.m.; July 21, noon, 2, 4, and 7 p.m.
Admission: $8-38; festival pass: $135 for members or $175 general admission; pass includes admission to all concerts, lectures, and workshops
Forget Woodstock; discover the best in klezmer and new Yiddish music at the 2nd annual Yidstock. Set on the stage at the Amherst-based Yiddish Book Center, the weekend will offer an engaging glimpse of Jewish roots and jazzy soul music through popular Yiddish bands like the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Klezperanto, Margot Leverett & the Klezmer Mountain Boys, and the Yidstock All-Stars. Come early on Friday for a lecture on lost Hebrew musical treasures or learn Yiddish folk dance.

Zoar Outdoor

www.zoaroutdoor.com
7 Main Street, Charlemont, MA
(800) 532-7483
Schedule: Through Oct. 15
Admission: Varies; family packages available
This summer it may be time to cancel that Netflix account and take advantage of the many outdoor opportunities found at Zoar Outdoor. Zoar offers virtually every option available to the adventurous soul in Western Mass.: kayaking, rock climbing, white-water rafting, canoeing, and ziplining in the trees down a mountain that overlooks the Deerfield River. Zoar offers on-site camping and lodging to those itching to escape the pressures of the city and suburbia. For those inclined to get really close to nature and experience the Berkshires in the trees and on the water, the staff at Zoar also lead overnight rafting and zipping tours into the wilderness.

The Zoo in Forest Park and Education Center

www.forestparkzoo.org
Forest Park, 302 Sumner Ave., Springfield, MA
(413) 733-2251
Schedule: Weekdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; weekends, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Admission: $4-8.50
Located in Springfield’s historic Forest Park, the Zoo and Education Center offers a number of exhibits and educational programs to the Valley’s animal lovers. Visitors to the zoo can behold the power of an African lion and alligator, or determine for themselves whether the Madagascar hissing cockroach lives up to its name. Children can be especially engaged at the Zoo in Forest Park through Zoo Camp and the Crew in Training volunteer program. End the visit with a train ride through the grounds.

Star Search

By BusinessWest Staff June 18, 2013

Cover Story Sales and Marketing Sections

Hiring Top Sales Performers Is Certainly No Accident

By Jim Mumm
Determining the right person to hire isn’t easy, and when it comes to hiring a top-performing sales superstar, it’s even more difficult.
Let’s face it: there is a sea of apparently strong candidates looking for a job. And don’t kid yourself; any sales person worth their salt is going to be able to talk a good game.
But making a poor hiring decision will cost you dearly. Depending on which expert you listen to, the cost of making a poor hiring decision is anywhere between one and two and a half times the candidate’s annual fully loaded salary.
What should strong leaders do to mitigate the risks and maximize the return on investment pertaining to hiring top-performing sales professionals? What can an organization do to not only greatly reduce hiring mistakes, but also build a highly effective sales organization? We need to paint a very clear picture of the perfect fit before we start looking for the candidate. Then, we can objectively determine if the candidate truly fits in our picture. Here’s how.
Managers must follow a systematic, step-by-step recruiting, hiring, and on-boarding process. This system begins with identifying the primary function indicators (PFIs) of the sales role you are attempting to fill. PFIs are the basic tasks that a salesperson must be able to accomplish, such as prospecting, negotiating, and closing. Next, a professional manager must identify and determine the winning attributes of the best-fit candidate. Finally, the manager must ascertain whether or not the candidate is a proper fit for the team by building a team matrix.
To accomplish this, the manager utilizes these three core components (PFIs, winner attributes, and team matrix) to develop a series of questions designed to uncover the information needed to make a good hiring decision. The questions are constructed so that the answers reveal how well the candidate fits the desired job profile. Scores to all answers are summed, and the best-fit candidate is revealed.

Three Steps
Let’s break down each of the three components and reveal how questions are developed from each area and give some sample questions that could be used.
Step one of building a hiring template includes identifying the actual functions the sales professional will be expected to perform. We call these functions primary function indicators because they reveal the actual functions the candidate must be able to accomplish and the behaviors at which the candidates must be proficient to perform these functions. Finally, we must determine the questions we should ask that will help us determine whether or not the candidate can perform these behaviors to the desired level of proficiency.
For example, if you are attempting to hire a sales professional capable of bringing in new business, he would have to effectively prospect. A question might be, “if we hired you to build this new territory to $2 million in one year, how would you do it?” The answer to this question will speak volumes. And you should be able to differentiate a made-up answer from one given by a sales professional who has actually lived it.
To make this step easier, we incorporate the SEARCH model. SEARCH is an acronym that stands for skills, experiences, attitudes, results, cognitive skills, and habits. If we can create questions that reveal the candidate’s relative strengths and weaknesses in these six areas, we are well on our way to determining if they can actually perform the tasks. Once you’ve determined the questions needed to determine a candidate’s PFIs, you are ready to proceed to step two.
Step two is to identify whether or not the candidate has what it takes to be a top performer (winner) in your specific organization. We call these ‘winner attributes.’ To figure out whether or not the candidate has the winner attributes you require, it is helpful to use the BAT method. BAT stands for behavior, attitude, and technique. Behavior is all about what they do, technique concerns how well they do it, and attitude is how they feel about doing it. Let’s take a look at each.
Behavior involves understanding the planning, goals, and actions necessary to be successful in that role in your organization. For example, how well does the candidate set long-term, short-term, and daily goals, and how does this compare to how well your top performers set goals? You might ask, “tell me about your experience building and executing a plan to hit your sales objectives,” followed by “tell me what you did when you found yourself behind your target goals.”
Again, the answers will reveal how the candidate thinks and should give you a good idea of whether or not they have actually successfully built plans. If you ask the same question pertaining to goals to 20 different candidates, you’ll get 20 different answers. It is our job as managers to understand the required behaviors our top salespeople have and to identify the candidates whose behaviors are the closest match.
Next is technique, which consists of personal presence, tactics, and strategy. These are all measures of how well they are able to perform the behaviors that are necessary for success. Finally, attitude involves what’s between your ears. For example, some people don’t mind attending networking events and actually enjoy meeting and talking to new people. However, others dread networking events and would sit in the corner, check their e-mails, and talk only to people they know. The difference is their attitude toward, or how they feel about, networking. You might ask, “what are your favorite and least favorite prospecting activities, and why?”
Some examples of winner attributes for top-performing salespeople are the desire to win, strong internal motivation, superior discipline, and the ability to build and nurture relationships. Again, the key is to develop written questions that will help you determine whether or not the candidate has these desired attributes.
The final step in developing the hiring template is to determine how well the candidate will fit within your team. When filling a position in an existing department, it is important to find a candidate who fits best with your specific team. Often, managers try to hire the best producers, only to end up with a group of ‘fighter pilots,’ when what they really needed was a group of strong team players who can work and play well together for the good of the organization.
The key questions to ask are, do they supply skills needed by our team, or do they have skills that everyone else has? Are they a match for the current team or for the future team that we’re trying to build? For example, if you need to land new business and you have a stable of account managers, you need to ask questions that reveal the candidate’s ability to bring in new business because it complements the skills of your existing sales staff.
Once you develop four or five questions from this area that will help you uncover the facts, add them to your previous questions from PFIs and winner attributes. By now, you should have a good 30 core questions to use for each and every interview. Score each candidate on a scale from one to 10 for each question and determine, before you start interviewing, a lowest acceptable summed score from all questions. Create a list of ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves.’ If any candidate doesn’t achieve the minimum score or have all the ‘must haves,’ they are eliminated from the process.

Moving Forward
Once you’ve developed this approach to recruiting and interviewing candidates, you’ll be able to choose the best fit objectively based on relative, objective scores. Once you’ve chosen the best-fit candidate and informed the others that they are no longer in consideration, it is now time to implement your 90-day on-boarding plan.
At this point, you’re probably thinking, who’s got time to do all this? Before you decide this is too much work, ask yourself how much time you spent talking to poor performers last year. Think of how many hours were spent writing up politically and legally correct ‘fix-it-or-hit-the-road’ letters last year. How many hours did you spend trying to coach or motivate poor performers who weren’t hitting their sales objectives? How many hours did you agonize over a weaksales person that you wish you would have never hired in the first place, but now that you have, you are hoping they’ll finally provide an acceptable ROI?
Consider having to fire them and start back at the beginning of the hiring process all over again. Think about the recruiter fees, the advertising costs you spend to place the ad, all the time your real performers wasted trying to bring them up to speed.
Perhaps it’s less expensive to invest time now finding the right salesperson for the role and properly on-boarding them, instead of spending all the time on the back end when you are stuck with a bad hire. We’ve all heard the saying, ‘pay me now, or pay me later.’

Jim Mumm is CEO of Sandler Training, serving Western Mass. He is an award-winning trainer, author, speaker, and successful entrepreneur; (646) 330-5217; [email protected]; www.jimmumm.sandler.com

Using Psychological Science to Hire People Who Can Sell

By Michael A. Klein
“Do you know what you can learn about someone from an interview?” I like to ask potential clients. My answer: “Plenty, and it begins with how well someone performs during an interview.”
Now, some think that in sales, if the candidate sitting across from you can sell themselves to you, then they can sell. But can they really? You know that they can sell you on them. And for some products and services, potential customers need to be sold on the salesperson. But other components loom large: can they sell to others? And will they sell to others? And can they sell what you are hiring them to sell?
Résumés and interviews (behavioral interviews, specifically) can provide valuable information, and, of course, no job offer — even for commission-based positions — should be made without a careful review of prior experiences, reference checks, and probably more than one interview. But that information is still amazingly limited, and tells us little about whether this person can and willsell your product or service to others. This is where small or mid-sized businesses can benefit from the millions of dollars that large companies have spent on selection testing and assessment.
While using psychological testing to predict performance has a controversial, and some would say problematic, history, work being done over the past 15 years has led to a clear conclusion: we can predict work-related behaviors with great accuracy legally, quickly, and easily through the use of reputable assessment tools.
It’s important to note that there are currently no regulations for claiming accuracy in the sale of pre-employment tests. Therefore, unless taken to court, test publishers and distributers roam freely about the commercial countryside, making outlandish claims regarding the ‘science’ and usefulness of their hiring tests.
Fortunately, there is a silver lining here. industrial/organization (I/O) psychologists and other psychometricians have been setting guidelines for the design, construction, validation, and reliability of these tests for more than 25 years. As a result, reputable test publishers adhere to these guidelines and can easily back up their claims with detailed (and frequently updated) technical manuals, validity and reliability studies, and published peer reviews. In the case of selection tests, it can’t be said often enough: let the buyer beware.
If you know where to look, and can assess the assessment, you will save time, effort, and great expense in the hiring process. As much as human beings are complex creatures, no two people are the same, and measuring something as complex as personality can feel insulting to our egos, the selection-testing industry has learned which traits, values, and emotional and social skills are far more likely to lead to those behaviors that result in actual sales. Although seemingly complicated, if there is a magic bullet, it’s this: the more psychometric data you have on someone, the more likely you are to hire the right person and avoid a hiring disaster.
There are an amazing variety of pre-employment assessments available, and they generally fall into one or more of these categories: personality, values and motivators, interests, emotional intelligence (maturity and polish), cognitive ability (intelligence tests), skills, and knowledge.
Even once this data is gathered, there needs to be a clear differentiation between what can be scientifically justified for the specific position and what is simply a personally desirable characteristic. For example, while a hiring manager may believe that successful salespeople have a strong desire to be acknowledged for their achievements (this particular motivator is known as ‘recognition’), that may be true of all salespeople, not just successful ones. One of the most basic mistakes managers make is assuming that a high level of a specific attribute, trait, or skill is responsible for success when, in fact, it has little to no actual impact on performance.
A client of mine told me that he didn’t need to study his salespeople (i.e. determine what traits, motivators, etc. differentiate high performers from low) because he knew that his top people all had two particular behavioral styles (from a test known as the DISC): dominance and influence. I explained to him that almost all of his salespeople probably have those styles regardless of potential because he only hires people with those styles, not to mention the fact that the impact of these two styles on sales has no basis in science whatsoever.
His desire to simplify and find a single score, result, or number is very common and, unfortunately, very misguided.
To answer the question of whether they can do the job, we must look first at personality traits. Based on studies using the most accepted model of personality in business (the five-factor model, or FFM), the following are a few of the traits that predict this ability:
• Self-confidence — demonstrating a belief in oneself;
• Experience seeking — enjoyment of new opportunities and adventures;
• Openness to others — concern for others’ experiences and feelings; and
• Drive — ambition and eagerness to advance and succeed.
However, that only answers the question of whether they can do the job. Whether they will do the job is answered by looking at the key motivators and values of the candidate. From other studies, we know that these values and preferences are key:
• Connection — the desire to build social networks and collaborate; and
• Business — the desire for financial success and wealth.
Unfortunately, a great salesperson can have these traits and motivators, but can still cause major problems internally. For example, ego can get in the way of working with others in the office, impulsivity can result in frequent mistakes, and a lack of common sense can turn into unrealistic expectations of themselves and others. Here is where one’s EQ (emotional intelligence) comes into play.
In short, EQ tells us how well someone understands and manages themselves, others, and the world generally. While EQ increases with age and can also overlap with personality traits, it can also be developed. Therefore, personality is more about hardwiring, while EQ looks at skills. The following are a few EQ scales that are important to sales, but can also be problematic if they are too high:
• Assertiveness – expressing oneself appropriately and not aggressively;
• Optimism — Staying positive despite setbacks, seeing opportunity; and
• Self-regard — Knowing and accepting oneself and one’s strengths and weaknesses
Lastly, many clients ask about the accuracy of self-assessment testing. “What good is this if the job candidate is not answering the questions honestly?” “Can’t they just answer how they think we want them to?” The good news here is that many tests now utilize questions that are difficult to game. For example: “would you like to be a race-car driver?” To a test taker, answering this affirmatively might mean that they interested in exciting experiences, or, alternatively, it could mean they are someone who is an adrenaline junkie or someone who takes too many risks.
The tests are constructed in such a way that we know how successful salespeople answer (or, rather, their patterns of answers) as opposed to focusing on any one question. When good science is involved, it becomes far less obvious to the test taker, as well as the fact that it’s the combination of responses that tell us something.
In addition, psychological self-assessments have developed ways of identifying faked results — again, because of developers doing their homework during test construction. So, for many tests, we receive a report that tells us the likelihood that someone has attempted to present himself or herself less honestly than hoped.
Finally, no test can determine on its own if a person is a good job candidate. Psychological assessments or pre-employment testing must be only one part of a larger selection process that includes many other sources of information, including thorough background checking. To reiterate, if there is a magic bullet in the process of hiring effective salespeople, it is this: the more information we have on someone before they start, the better-positioned we are to make a good decision.

Michael A. Klein is president of Northampton-based MK Insights2. He has more than 16 years of experience as an assessment specialist, consultant, speaker, and facilitator. He focuses on the application of psychological data for the selection and development of individuals in organizations, including executives, leaders, salespeople, and highly trained professionals, with a specialty in family-owned firms. He has worked both internally and externally in human capital, including positions in organizational development and human resources. He has experience in healthcare, financial services, publishing, entertainment, pharmaceuticals, construction, and private equity, and is a full member of the American Psychological Assoc. and Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology; (413) 320-4664.

The ‘Inside-out’ Casino

By BusinessWest Staff June 4, 2013

Cover Story

MGM’s Unique Concept May Be a Trump Card

Editor’s Note: This is the latest in a series of stories concerning the ongoing competition for the Western Mass. casino license.

Mike Mathis says the phrase ‘inside-out casino’ wouldn’t technically be considered an industry term within the gaming sector, although he believes it’s close to becoming an important part of the lexicon, especially in the context of the competition for the Western Mass. casino license.
‘Inside-out’ is an adjective being used liberally by officials at MGM Resorts International, including Mathis, who serves as vice president of Global Gaming Development, to describe the company’s $800 million proposal for Springfield’s South End.
It is being used interchangeably with ‘outward-facing’ to describe what this proposed resort complex is — as well as how it differentiates itself from most urban gaming facilities, as well as the other players in the contest for the 413 area code’s casino license.
“This is really about changing and evolving the model of the casino box,” Mathis explained, adding that this concept is quite unique for an urban gaming complex. “In the traditional model, there are a couple of points of entry, with the operation heavily driven by gaming, with the few amenities being offered sort of buried within the facility, forcing the traffic through the casinos to get to those amenities.
“What we’ve done with our design is put all the great amenities around the gaming floor, with multiple points of entry,” he went on. “So the customer could spend their entire day at our resort — whether it’s in our entertainment plaza, where we’re going to have free public entertainment, or at any of the restaurants we’re going to have along Main Street — without necessarily having to go through the casino.”
In this respect, the Springfield proposal is much like some of the so-called ‘neighborhood casinos’ in Las Vegas that are especially popular with families, he noted, and also like MGM’s ambitious City Center, its flagship property in Vegas.
Opened in late 2009, at the height of the recession, the center boasts a combination of retail, entertainment, convention facilities, and residential units, and is thus a truly mixed-use facility, he explained, adding that, while the scale will be exponentially smaller with MGM Springfield, the concept is essentially the same.
And it will represent a meaningful change from the approach taken with most all urban casinos.
Elaborating, Mathis said most inner-city gaming complexes end up becoming islands unto themselves, with little connectivity to the neighborhoods around them. The inside-out model is different, he went on, adding that, with this design, restaurants and other amenities such as a bowling alley, theaters, a skating rink, and others, face out to the community surrounding the gaming complex. This makes such facilities more attractive to families and adults who don’t gamble.

Top, Mike Mathis, seen near the tornado-damaged South End Community Center, says MGM’s conception of an inside-out casino is unique for an urban gaming facility. Above, an architect’s rendering of that same area as transformed by MGM Springfield.

“A lot of companies can build casinos — we build resorts,” he told BusinessWest. “And that’s what this will be — a true resort.”
Mathis and others at MGM believe this inside-out design will give the company an edge in the ongoing competition for the Western Mass. license, because of its uniqueness, potential to generating revenue beyond the casino floor, and ability to address many of the concerns raised by the Legislature when it passed a sweeping gaming measure in the fall of 2011 — especially those concerning impact on existing businesses and entertainment venues.
“We thought if we did it [the design concept] well, and we think we have, that our proposal would be unique in creating not only a gaming experience, but a tourism and economic-regeneration story in the downtown corridor,” he explained. “It would be something that would be well-received by the public, who may have their own thoughts about a casino coming to town, and we thought it would be well-received by the Gaming Commission as well; this is something unique that also supports the existing community. With this plan, we can check a lot of boxes.”
For this issue, BusinessWest continues its series of stories on the casino competition with a detailed look at this inside-out model, and why MGM believes this concept will give the company the equivalent of a trump card.

Coloring Outside the Lines
Mathis told BusinessWest that he’s been involved in many aspects of the project known now as MGM Springfield, including the drafting of the host-community agreement that was inked just over a month ago.
Early on, though, one of his primary responsibilities was to identify a site for the company’s foray into the Massachusetts market. Like other developers, MGM targeted the Western Mass. sector — it was considered a more open competition than those in the Boston and Southeast regions — and initially set its sights on rural Brimfield.
But that plan was scuttled due to a number of logistical hurdles, not the least of which was the complex matter of building a new interchange on the Mass. Turnpike, without which the project didn’t make sound business sense.
So the company recalibrated and eventually focused on Springfield, as other developers did, because of its proximity to Northern Conn., accessibility (especially from I-91), and the likelihood that a ballot initiative would pass in the city.
And the search within the city eventually took the company to the four-block area in the South End, much of which was heavily damaged by the June 1, 2011 tornado.

MGM officials say the inside-out concept will give the company an edge in the competition for the Western Mass. casino license.

“There were a few key attributes to that site that really drove the decision,” he explained. “Its proximity to the MassMutual Center was important to us; the gaming legislation talks about having an operator supporting existing facilities and not cannibalizing or competing with existing entertainment facilities. Right across from the site is a state-owned, really wonderful entertainment venue that is, by all accounts, underperforming and undersupported. We thought this was a natural tie.
“Also, the proximity to I-91 is important,” he went on. “Oftentimes, traffic can drive the success or failure of a project early on. The ability to take millions of visitors off the highway into the project and then put them back onto the highway without interfering with the surface streets in the local neighborhood was critical for us.”
Elaborating, he said the site provided MGM with an opportunity to do something unique, while also addressing many of the concerns of the Legislature when it drafted its gaming measure.
And while much of the debate going forward will center on the ‘urban versus rural’ argument, with the Palmer and West Springfield proposals fitting the latter description, to one or extent or another, the inside-out casino concept forwarded by MGM takes those discussions to a different, higher level.
That’s because most urban casinos become those islands that Mathis described, adding that the plan for MGM Springfield seeks to address shortcomings with the traditional urban model, as outlined by Las Vegas casino consultant Andrew Klebanow in recent comments to the Boston Globe.
“We just haven’t seen it done right yet,” he told the Globe, in reference to the urban model, noting that, with few exceptions, these casinos are not connected to the neighborhoods around them, and casino patrons generally don’t get beyond the gaming complex.
He cited Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati, which opened just three months ago, as a facility that could be considered different. Designed by Rock Gaming in partnership with Caesars Entertainment, it was built downtown and designed with restaurants on the outside, facing the streets, to encourage foot traffic.
“I think it’s the next great effort to do this thing right,” Klebanow told the Globe. “It’s a porous building — there are multiple entrance and egress points — so it allows pedestrians to walk in and out.”
Mathis told BusinessWest that he has heard the phrase ‘inside-out’ used in reference to the Cincinnati casino, but he believes MGM Springfield will soon set a new standard when it comes to that term.

Outside the Box

Another view of the planned MGM Springfield, looking down Main Street.

Indeed, as he walked the site with BusinessWest, Mathis noted that MGM Springfield will not only change the tornado-ravaged landscape, but create a facility that will be truly worthy of the word ‘resort,’ rather than casino.
As he stopped in front of the battered former South End Community Center, for example, he said it will be one of several buildings that will be incorporated into the casino design, thus making the resort part of what he called the “downtown urban fabric.”
“This will be one of the most modest resorts you’ll ever see,” he noted. “The casino is hidden, in a lot of respects, inside the facility, and on the outside, it will be difficult to know there is even a casino within this complex, because we’ve matched the architecture with the surrounding Main Street facades.”
While walking back downtown from the South End, Mathis pointed to the marquee on the MassMutual Center, announcing the May 24 performance of hip-hop artist Pitbull as another example of how this outward-facing model will manifest itself.
“Providing quality entertainment is a big part of our proposal,” he said, adding that all ticketed events will be staged at outside venues such as the MassMutual Center and Sympony Hall. “Springfield was once known as a must-stop for the great entertainment acts in the country, and because of our relationships born out of the all the great entertainment we push through Las Vegas, we intend to put the city back on the entertainment map.”
Connecting the casino with the community in such ways is a big part of the inside-out model, said Mathis, adding that, overall, this concept is designed to make the casino part of the neighborhood, not an island within it.
And while the inside-out casino addresses concerns outlined in the gaming legislation, it also represents a sound business strategy for MGM, said Mathis, adding that this model creates more opportunities to attract families and individuals who have no interest in visiting the casino floor.
“We’re going to bring in the outdoors,” he said. “Our restaurant spaces are designed to have outdoor plazas so people can enjoy the outdoor experience, we have a skating rink and free outdoor entertainment — and these amenities speak to how we’re trying to get visitation from families who aren’t interested in the casino.
“And that’s part of our business plan,” he went on. “As a company, across all our businesses domestically, we’re unique in the business in that we generate close to 65% of our revenues outside the gaming floor.”
It will be difficult to generate that ratio in Springfield, he continued, because the scale of the project is much smaller than the company’s properties in Las Vegas, for example, which have 3,000 rooms and millions of square feet of convention space.
But MGM Springfield can — and likely will — generate more revenue outside of the casino floor than a traditional urban gaming complex, he noted, because of this inside-out operational philosophy.

Over and Out
MGM’s Springfield proposal has many more hurdles to clear before it becomes reality. The next challenge is a July referendum vote that will include the entire city. If that goes successfully — and most predict that it will — then the company must prevail over whichever Western Mass. proposals also make it before the state Gaming Commission.
But there is a quiet confidence among company officials, including Mathis, that the company is in a strong position to prevail, and the so-called ‘inside-out’ casino plan is one of the many reasons why.
The concept represents a fundamental change from how urban casinos have been built, he explained, and it brings potential benefits for the state, the city, the South End neighborhood, and the company.
“When they chose MGM a few weeks ago, Springfield officials said this proposal could set the standard for inside-out, or outward-facing, casinos, and we’re very proud of that,” said Mathis. “We intend to do just that.”

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

It’s Been Quite a Ride

By BusinessWest Staff May 21, 2013

Cover Story Sections Travel and Tourism

Holyoke’s Happiness Machine Marks a Milestone

The Holyoke Merry-Go-Round marks 20 years in operation at Heritage Park this December.
Thus, this is a time of reflection and celebration in Holyoke, concerning both the remarkable story of how residents and businesses in the city rallied to keep the attraction within the community, and the success enjoyed since: more than 1 million riders, hundreds of events staged at the facility, restoration of nearly half the ride’s hand-crafted wooden horses, and the creation of untold memories for generations of area residents.
There will be many opportunities to rejoice and look back this year, with the highlight being a huge fund-raising gala at the Log Cabin Banquet and Meeting House on Sept. 19, an event that is expected to severely test the facility’s fire-code capacity.
But for those most closely involved with this landmark, known to them as PTC 80 (the 80th carousel built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Co.), this is a time for much more than celebrating — although they will do plenty of that. It’s an occasion to do some strategic planning and take important steps that will ensure there are many more anniversaries to celebrate down the road.
And it’s a time, said Angela Wright, to do some difficult, yet very necessary, succession planning when it comes to management of what those in the city call the ‘happiness machine.’

Friends of PTC 80, as it’s called, will mark its milestone anniversary with an eye toward ensuring that there are more of these celebrations for decades to come.

Difficult, noted Wright, who was co-chair of the group that raised the money to keep the carousel in Holyoke and has been its volunteer director since it opened, because that’s the only word to describe what it will be like to “let go.”
“We’re reluctant to give up something that is close to all of us, and something that we worked so hard at — it’s been a labor of love for all of us,” she said, referring to a strong corps of volunteers that has been with this project from the beginning and seen some of their ranks pass away in recent years. “We don’t want to let go of this, but it’s something we know we have to do.”
Elaborating, she said the Friends of the Holyoke Merry-Go-Round, as this group is called, is engaging in discussions about hiring a full-time executive director for the facility, an individual who will assume many duties currently carried out by those volunteers, from fund-raising to marketing, while also taking on the primary assignment — maintaining the relationships that have enabled this city treasure to survive and thrive, and creating new ones.
Hiring a director is one of many suggestions forwarded during strategic planning sessions staged recently with a consultant, Jeff Hayden, former city development director and current director of the Kittredge Center, said Maureen Costello, administrative manager of PTC 80.
Others include everything from recruiting additional board members to developing and implementing a marketing plan; from multi-faceted efforts to increase visitation to a host of initiatives to increase revenues, especially the scheduling of more birthday parties and other events.
These steps are in various, but mostly early, stages of implementation, said Costello, noting that one important step — a doubling of the price of a ride to $2 after more than 18 years — was undertaken in 2012.
“That was a difficult decision for us, because we had prided ourselves on keeping the ticket price at a dollar since we opened in 1993,” she explaned. “But it’s been very well-received by our visitors; many people said, ‘it’s about time you did this.’”
There will be more difficult and far-reaching steps taken in the months and years to come, said Jim Jackowski, business liaison and customer service and credit manager for Holyoke Gas & Electric and current president of the Friends board. He noted that, while the attraction’s first two decades in operation could be deemed an unqualified success, these are tenuous times for independently operated carousels like this one.
The challenges are many, and include everything from the high cost of insurance (carousels have historically had high mishap rates, although this one hasn’t recorded any) to the escalating competition for the time of young children (the ride’s lifeblood) and their parents.
“There are just a lot more things for kids and families to do today,” said Jackowski. “We have to respond to that by promoting ourselves and doing what we’ve always done — providing a truly unique experience.”
Wright agreed. “Many carousels are closing — hardly a week goes that we don’t hear of one of them shutting down,” she said, noting that she and others read about such casualties in industry publications like the Carousel News & Trader and Merry-Go-Round Roundup. “These things are becoming very expensive … our liability insurance is extremely high. Between insurance, staffing, maintenance, upkeep, promotions, and marketing, they’re becoming simply too expensive for many operators to run.”
For this issue and its focus on travel and tourism, BusinessWest takes a quick look back at how PTC 80 remained a Holyoke institution, but a more comprehensive glance ahead to the challenge of making sure the happiness machine will be there to create memories for future generations of area residents.

Turns for the Better

‘Middle horse #5’ is next in line for a complete restoration. To date, nearly half of the horses on the carousel have been refurbished.

It’s known simply as ‘middle horse #5.’ And that says it all — if you know this carousel.
It has three rows of horses (there are 28 in all, both ‘standers’ and ‘jumpers,’ with two chariots), with the largest animals on the outside and the smallest on the inside. This particular specimen is fifth in a sequence known only to those intimately involved with this attraction. And it is showing some definite signs of wear and tear, much of it caused by the buckle on the stirrup, which has knocked off badly faded paint in several areas.
As a result, it is next in line for restoration work that will make it look like the much shinier and newer ‘middle horse #4’ just ahead. This work, to be carried out at the New England Carousel Museum in Bristol, Conn., will cost roughly $5,000, said Costello. To help pay that cost, the merry-go-round is staging a raffle this summer, with the winner gaining the right to give the horse a real name — like ‘Lancelot,’ ‘Flower Power,’ and others that have been assigned to other animals on PTC 80.
Restoring horses, staging raffles, and giving names to the stars of this attraction have been some of the many aspects of that labor of love which Wright described, made possible by the truly inspiring story of how Holyoke came together to keep its carousel a quarter-century ago.
Most in this region are now at least somewhat familiar with the saga, which began with Mountain Park owner Jay Collins’ decision to shut down the popular tourist attraction after the 1987 season ended.
After unsuccessful efforts to sell the park, the 300 acres it sat on, and all the equipment and inventory as one package (asking price: $4 million), Collins opted to start selling off the pieces. He had some attractive offers (up to $2 million, according to some accounts) for PTC 80, which was in extremely good condition. And while he was considering them, John Hickey, then manager of Holyoke’s Water Department, approached him with a plan to keep the carousel in the city.
The two agreed on a price of $875,000, and Collins gave Hickey one year to raise the money.
The rest, is, well, history.
An elaborate ‘save the merry-go-round’ campaign was launched, complete with a request for pledges with rhetorical calls to action that included ‘stop them from riding off with Holyoke’s mane attraction’ and ‘if you care about Holyoke’s future, put some money down on her past.’
In the end, residents, business owners, and schoolchildren heeded those calls, raising enough money to buy the carousel and build it a new home in Heritage State Park. Thus, PTC 80’s second life began in December 1993.
To say that it’s been a smooth ride since then would oversimplify things, said Wright, who noted that there have been many challenges over the first two decades, from getting people to come to downtown Holyoke to attracting revenue-generating events, such as birthday parties and weddings, to overcoming the loss several years ago of the four-day Celebrate Holyoke event that gave the carousel much-needed exposure and ridership.
“The real business challenge for us has been to replace the revenue from the Celebrate Holyoke festival, which was probably 10% to 15% of our annual revenue,” said Jackowski. “We’ve done it largely through the promotion of the birthday parties, the private functions, and the corporate functions, and spreading the word through an extended Pioneer Valley area.”
The attraction has managed to remain in the black throughout and meet its annual budget of roughly $100,000, he noted, largely through perseverance, imagination, and resourcefulness.
But if PTC 80, one of only 100 antique classic wooden merry-rounds still operating in North America, is to keep its Holyoke address, it must continue to act as a small business would, and that means strategic planning and, as Wright and Costello said, succession planning.

Round Numbers
That later assignment is a difficult one for many small businesses to even acknowledge, let alone address, said Wright, adding that it’s the same with the merry-go-round, where this exercise takes a number of forms.
For starters, it means active recruiting of younger professionals within the community to join the board and become involved with the carousel, she said, adding that a new generation of leadership must eventually take the reins — literally and figuratively — from the group that waged the campaign to save PTC 80 a quarter-century ago.
Succession planning also means developing and advancing a plan to hire a full-time executive director, said Costello, adding that the merry-go-round has a part-time operations manager (15 hours per week), and there are others who have held that position in the past.
Hiring a full-time manager would be a big step, one that would dramatically alter the budgetary picture, Wright told BusinessWest, but such a move is necessary given the current challenging climate. But the broad “transition,” as she called it, will nonetheless be difficult for the carousel’s older ‘friends.’
“We’ve all been here 25 years,” she said. “And we’re all somewhat reluctant to let anything happen to this merry-go-round. We all have a personal investment in this, and it’s a sizable investment.”
Succession planning is just part of the discussion when it comes to securing the long-term future of the merry-go-round, said Costello, adding that strategic planning initiatives involving the attraction, like those staged for businesses of all sizes, have focused on that acronym SWOT — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Clearly, the 20th-anniversary celebrations fall into that third category, she said, adding that the attraction’s leadership intends to use the many events and special programs on tap this year to introduce (or re-introduce) people to the carousel, with several goals in mind. These include everything from increasing direct ridership to booking more special events involving both children and adults; from recruiting more supporters to simply raising more funds.
“The 20th anniversary is a time to reflect on the many things that we’ve accomplished here and be proud of those accomplishments,” Costello said. “But it’s also an opportunity to re-connect with our supporters and make more friends.
“We recognize that, while our merry-go-round was the crown jewel at Mountain Park, the people who remember the park are older now,” she went on. “We understand that those people are not going to be able to share their memories of Mountain Park, so we need to attract a new generation of riders and supporters, and we’re cognizant of that as we make our plans for the future.”
As it did 25 years ago, the Friends group is reaching out to the community for donations, she said, adding that donors can become members of the merry-go-round’s Ring of Honor, a collection of brass plaques that bear the names of supporters ranging from Holyoke schoolchildren to businesses across all sectors.
Beyond fund-raising, one of the main goals moving forward is to maximize other revenue resources, said Costello, adding that the increase in ticket prices resulted in a roughly 70% increase in total revenue in 2012, “which made a huge difference.”
But long-term, the merry-go-round must be more successful with scheduling events, she continued, because they are both solid revenue generators and vehicles for generating future ridership and more get-togethers.
Overall, the ongoing assignment for the merry-go-round’s leadership team is to make the attraction — and downtown Holyoke in general — more of a true destination for families with children, said Jackowski, adding that there are many developments that are moving the city closer to that designation.
“We hope, by keeping this building as attractive as it is, and this park as attractive as it is, that the future looks bright,” he told BusinessWest. “We have our new neighbor, the computing center, we’re hopeful that the canal walk comes to fruition in the next five years, and there is more development down here that creates optimism. We want to be the focal point of all that.”

The Ride Stuff
John Hickey, who passed away in 2008, once wrote of carousels, “man, and high tech, has not yet devised a better way to illuminate the faces of children and parents with pure joy. The lights, the music, the kids dashing for the right horse, the clang of the starting bell, and the motion … you don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave every time around … and their parent will wave back. It never fails … it never will.”
PTC 80 has lived up to those words for more than eight decades, and especially in its new home in Holyoke’s downtown. Its first two decades there have been an extraordinary ride in every sense of that word.
And that’s why this anniversary will be a time to celebrate, but also a time to make sure that the ride will continue for decades to come.

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

The 2013 Restaurant Guide

By BusinessWest Staff May 7, 2013

Cover Story Restaurants Sections

Area Landmarks Serve Up History — and Much More

While all restaurants are destinations in many respects, some locations are unique, not just for the food prepared in the kitchen, but because of the rich history of the setting in question. For this special section, the 2013 Restaurant Guide, we venture to three establishments that could truly be called landmarks.

Inside:

Not Your Typical Haunt

Theodores’ Thrives with Its Blend of Music, Barbecue, and Tradition

All Aboard

Steaming Tender Mixes Hearty Food and Railroad Culture

Center-stage Cuisine

The Whately Inn Has Come a Long Way Since it Hosted Burlesque

Off the Menu

A list of the region’s finest restaurants

Introducing the Class 2013

By BusinessWest Staff April 23, 2013

40 Under 40 Cover Story The Class of 2013

The Young Business and Community Leaders of Western Massachusetts

In 2007, BusinessWest introduced a new recognition program called 40 Under Forty. It was intended as a vehicle for showcasing young talent in the four counties of Western Mass. and, in turn, inspire others to reach higher and do more in their community.
Six years later, it has accomplished all that and much more. The program has become a brand, the awards gala has become one of the most anticipated events of the year, and the 40 Under Forty plaque that sits on one’s desk has become both a coveted prize and symbol of excellence, recognized by all.
On June 20 at the Log Cabin Banquet & Meeting House in Holyoke, 40 more plaques will be handed out, to members of a class that is both distinguished and diverse. It includes bankers, lawyers, and accountants, but also a Holyoke city councilor, a contractor who specializes in blitz building, and Springfield’s senior project manager. And it represents virtually every business sector, from healthcare to education; from technology to the nonprofit realm.
With that, we introduce the Class of 2013 with words (enough to explain why they’re an honoree) and pictures that tell a big part of each story, whether the winner is captured with his or her children, dog, company mascot, or even a giant corpuscle. The stories are all different, but the common denominator is that these young individuals possess that most important of qualities: leadership.

2013 40 Under Forty Winners:

Timothy Allen
Meaghan Arena
Adrian Bailey Dion
Jason Barroso
Elizabeth Beaudry
Melyssa Brown
Kam Capoccia
Jeremy Casey
Tommy Cosenzi
Erin Couture
Geoffrey Croteau
William Davila
Ralph DiVito Jr.
Shaun Dwyer
Erin Fontaine Brunelle
William Gagnon
Allison Garriss
Annamarie Golden
Lina Alexandra Hogan
Samalid Hogan
Xiaolei Hua
Mark Jardim
Danny Kates
Jeremy Leap
Danielle Letourneau-Therrien
Isaac Mass
Kelvin Molina
Brenna Murphy McGee
Vanessa Pabon
John Pantera
Justin Pelis
Shonda Pettiford
Shannon Reichelt
N. Andrew Robb
Stacy Robison
Rachel Romano
Jennifer Root
Jonathan Stolpinski
Walter Tomala Jr.
Mark Zatyrka

Meet the Judges — Click Here

Photography for this special section by Denise Smith Photography

Strong Viewpoints

By BusinessWest Staff April 9, 2013

Cover Story

Crumpin-Fox Club Focuses on Providing an Experience

Mike Zaranek says Crumpin-Fox is a thought-provoking golf course, meaning that one needs a game plan to attack it.

Mike Zaranek describes the Crumpin-Fox Club as a “thought-provoking golf course.”

And by that, he meant that one can’t — or shouldn’t — plan on muscling their way around this picturesque track in Bernardston, just outside Greenfield. Rather, they have to think their way around.

“There’s a lot of shot-making that’s involved here,” said Zaranek, the head golf professional, gesturing with his hand to the 18th hole as he looked out on the course from a seat at Zeke’s Smokehouse Grill, the club’s 19th hole. “It’s not a bomber’s golf course where you hit your driver on every hole and try to get it as close as you can to the green. This course makes you think off each tee, and on every second shot as well.”

And just as the player needs a strategic plan for taking on this Robert Trent Jones Sr. creation, Zaranek and the rest of the management team needs one of their own to enable the club to continue growing at a time of stern challenges and mounting competition in the golf industry.

The essence of that plan is to let the course become not merely a destination, but an experience, said Zaranek, adding that it does this naturally, through its views and challenges, both of which create lasting memories.

“Each tee you stand on, and each green you look back to the tee on, is like a postcard,” he explained, adding that this effect is heightened by many changes in elevation and is especially dramatic at fall-foliage time. “There is a uniqueness to it, and that’s what brings people back.”

Repeat business is obviously one of the keys to success for any golf operation, but it’s especially critical for one that charges just under $100 a round for public play — which accounts for roughly 60% of the business at this semi-private course — and is tucked away in one of the most remote areas of the state, just a few miles from the Vermont border.

The Crump’s eighth hole forces the player to make a number of decisions.

Thus, the staff puts the accent on the total experience — from the golf to the meal afterward — and also on both driving first visits (which often prompt return trips) and convincing players that Crumpin-Fox should be a more than a once-a-year course.

“That sentiment is summed up in one of our marketing slogans — ‘minutes away, worlds apart,’” said Zaranek. “We’re a destination, but we don’t want to be just a destination; we’d love to have people visit us two, three, or four times a year. Overall, we want to make this an experience, one that you’ll enjoy and want to mark on your calendar every year.”

For this issue and BusinessWest’s annual Golf Preview, we take an indepth look at what is still a hidden gem, and Zarenek’s efforts to make it less so.

On the Hole

The eighth hole at ‘the Crump,’ as it’s called, is certainly one of the more thought-provoking holes on this 7,023-yard layout.

There is water along almost the entire left side of this lengthy par 5 (nearly 600 yards from the tips). And the decision making really begins after the drive, even if it’s a very good one.

The player is faced with the option of hitting a safer mid-iron to a still-relatively wide section of fairway for a third shot of roughly the same length over the lake to a narrow, undulating green, or bringing out more artillery and hitting down to a narrower strip of fairway, leaving just a wedge onto the putting surface.

There are many such decisions to be made on this course, which offers what Zarenek described as a Pine Valley-like feel, if not look, although it has some of that, too.

This is a reference to the George Arthur Crump-designed track in Southern New Jersey that is generally regarded as the world’s most difficult course, and one of its very best. The comparison doesn’t involve degree of difficulty — although Crumpin-Fox is certainly challenging — but rather the notion that every hole is an entity unto its own, with other holes rarely visible from tees, greens, or fairways.

“Each hole is set in its own scenery here — you play that hole, and then you move on to another piece of scenery, and that’s what we mean by a Pine Valley-like course,” Zaranek explained. “You barely see the group in front of you or the group behind you all day.”

The overall tightness of the layout also contributes to that description.

“At one time, especially on the back nine, it was basically the tee, the fairway, about five feet of rough, and then there was brush, the jungle,” he noted, adding that the course has been opened up somewhat over the years, but still demands accuracy. “What you see is what you get in front of you.”

This was the general idea when, in 1969, area businessman David Berelson engaged the services of Roger Rulewich, a noted golf-course architect then with Robert Trent Jones Inc., to locate a parcel for a destination golf course.

The current site in Bernardston was chosen, but the project stalled and didn’t begin to take shape until 1977, when Andy St. Hillaire, owner of Mohawk Plastics, bought the land and project, completed what are now the back nine holes, and built the present clubhouse.

The name Crumpin-Fox, said Zaranek, was derived from some of the old soda bottles found on the property as construction of the course commenced. The Bernardston-based Crump Soda Co. was eventually sold in 1853 to one Eli Fox, he noted, and then renamed the Crump & Fox Soda Co.

In 1987, St. Hillaire sold the club to William Sandri, president of the Sandri Co., which owned a number of gas stations in Western Mass., Vermont, and New York, and would eventually diversify into a number of business sectors, including real estate, clean-energy products, and golf.

The company now has three courses that operate under the name Fox Golf. The others are the Fox Hollow Club in Trinity, Fla., which opened in 1994 — its 18th hole was at one time rated the number-one par 4 in Florida by Florida Golf Central magazine — and Fox Hopyard in East Haddam, Conn., which opened in 2001.

Round Numbers

All three clubs operate under the same model — that of a semi-private course that has members but is also open to the public at most times during the week. Zaranek said this model is perhaps the most successful in golf today because it offers both the stability provided by a core of members (that number is roughly 235 at Crumpin-Fox, one Zaranek said he’s comfortable with) and the flexibility and additional revenue opportunities that come with making the course open to the public.

Membership at Crumpin-Fox has been steady, with relatively little fluctuation in the number in recent years despite turbulence in the economy, said Zaranek, adding that the public-play component of the equation has been more impacted by the downturn, as well as a number of other contributing factors.

These include everything from the weather — which has both helped and hurt; the 2012 season began on March 23 (a record for the Crump) after a nearly snowless winter, but the hurricane of 2011 took a heavy toll — to new competition in the destination-course market.

Indeed, while the pace of new-course construction has slowed in recent years, some additions in the eastern part of the state, especially a new cluster of tracks in the Plymouth area, as well as the Ranch in Southwick and some new venues in Connecticut, have had an impact on play in Bernardston, said Zaranek.

“From Route 3 down to the Bourne Bridge, they built 15 or 16 golf courses since 1997, and that took some of the traffic we used to get from the Boston area,” he noted. “We still get some, though, and we’re seeing those numbers climb because people are expanding their visions, and they’ve played all those new courses. People say, ‘have you ever played Crump?’ and once people come out here once, I think they like putting us back on their docket.”

Last year, even with that early start, the club recorded roughly 19,000 rounds between members and guests, he told BusinessWest, adding that, in banner years (such as the late ’90s), volume has exceeded 25,000, and the present goal is to get closer to 22,000.

To get there, the general strategic plan for the course, which hasn’t really changed since it opened, is to convince players from maybe a 75- to 100-mile radius that Bernardston is not that far away, and certainly worth the time and trouble for a course that is unique and challenging.

And this is the message being sent to a host of constituencies, from smaller groups (a foursome or two) to larger entities, such as leagues or clubs, to charitable organizations planning fund-raisers. The club already hosts a number of events, said Zaranek, including a large gathering for Big Brothers Big Sisters and another for the It Takes a Community foundation.

While the Crump name certainly resonates within the Western Mass. market, it is still somewhat of an unknown commodity in other areas, especially with younger golfers, he continued, adding that one of the club’s stated goals is to build brand recognition across the region it serves.

With each of those aforementioned constituencies, the key is providing value — and an experience — that will drive repeat business, Zaranek explained, adding that this goal, or mission, has prompted improvements ranging from extensive renovations to Zeke’s Grill, including the addition of a smoker, to an ongoing facelift in the locker rooms.

“There are a lot of elements that go into making a club successful,” he explained. “And you have to make each guest that comes through feel like a member that day, and make them feel like they had a great experience. And that all has to gel together. We keep trying to improve everything we do every day.”

Long-term, the club is exploring a possible expansion of the clubhouse and perhaps the addition of a large pavilion for outings, he said, adding that many events are currently staged under tents erected on the driving range.

Course of Action

Zaranek said the club has historically strived to be open by Masters weekend, the unofficial start of the golf season for those in the Northeast.

Looking out on a course that still had a number of areas covered by more than a few inches of snow, he said that goal is likely within reach (the Masters is set for April 11-14), but some assistance from Mother Nature will probably be needed.

She has already contributed a dramatic setting that has contributed to those postcards Zaranek described, and given the Crump a strong selling point to draw players for what will likely be the first of several visits.

“It’s one of the most unique, pretty, and, yes, demanding golf courses that you’re ever going to play,” he said in summation. “You don’t go away forgetting many of these golf holes as you play them.”

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Top Entrepreneur for 2010

By BusinessWest Staff January 4, 2011

Cover Story Sections Top Entrepreneur

Fueling the Imagination: Pride Founder Bob Bolduc Stays Ahead of the Curve

Bob Bolduc, Top Entrepreneur for 2010

Bob Bolduc said the concept came to him early last fall as he was pondering ways to say thank you to his ‘friends,’ a word he would use interchangeably with ‘customers’ early and often.

For years, Pride has offered free coffee on Christmas, New Year’s, and Veterans Day (Bolduc was in the Army and has a deep appreciation for all those who have served their country), but he thought it was time to take things up a notch — or several, as the case may be.

“Free coffee for the month of December,” he said slowly, as if to add emphasis and convey the enormity of this executive decision.

“A lot of people here looked at me funny, and some thought I was out of my mind,” he admitted while explaining the promotion that would involve the chain’s 24 stores, scattered across Western Mass. “That’s because we’re in the coffee business; it’s one of the things we do best, and it’s quite profitable.

“I can’t say how much it has cost us, but it’s expensive, very expensive,” he continued. “It’s worth it, though; it’s been fun, and it’s certainly created a buzz. This is a big cup we’re giving away — 16 ounces — not some dinky thing.”

With 10 days left in December, Bolduc could easily do the math concerning his coffee giveaway, and he was already declaring it a good business decision. And he should know, as he’s made quite a number of them in an entrepreneurial career that now spans nearly 40 years.

“There have certainly been some that haven’t worked out well,” he conceded with a hearty laugh, one of many that would punctuate his candid interview with BusinessWest. “But many have gone right for us over the years.”

Indeed, starting with his decision to get into the wholesale tire business in the early ’70s — and then out of it when the radial changed the landscape of that business by adding tens of thousands of miles to a tire’s lifespan — Bolduc has penned a number of success stories. And he’s made several of what he called ‘firsts,’ listing everything from the first fire-suppression system at a self-serve gas station to the first in-house Dunkin’ Donuts in this market; from cash acceptors at the fuel pumps to the first ethanol sold in Western Mass.

This body of work, as well as the indication that there’s plenty more to come, has earned Bolduc BusinessWest’s Top Entrepreneur Award for 2010.

“Bob Bolduc exemplifies what entrepreneurship — and this award — are all about,” said BusinessWest publisher John Gormally. “His career, most notably his work with Pride, has been characterized by risk-taking, having the vision to see the future of his industry, and getting there first in many cases, and simply being innovative; in many ways, he’s redefined the convenience store.

“We created this award to honor people who have those qualities — vision, innovation, and risk-taking,” he continued, “and he’s a very worthy recipient.”

Russell Denver, president of the Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield, agreed, and praised Bolduc for his career accomplishments, as well as his recent aggressive steps in the face of the worst downturn in nearly 80 years.

“Here is a man who didn’t sit back during the last two or three years of difficult economic times,” he noted. “He charged forward and has dramatically redone most of his properties and built new properties. And he ended up increasing his employment levels in our communities.

Pride’s ‘free coffee for the month of December’ promotion, prominently displayed on the store at the North End Bridge, is one of many risks Bob Bolduc has taken during his career.

“What he has done to the troubled property that used to be Valley’s Steakhouse, and after that Razzles, has put a whole new face on Springfield as one enters from West Springfield,” Denver continued, referring to the latest Pride store just east of the North End Bridge. “Where there was a vacant building, an eyesore, is now a thriving business that employs about 70 people; it’s a stunning turnaround.”

And like most projects Bolduc has taken on since he first went into business for himself, the North End initiative involved a good deal of risk that he considers part and parcel to being a successful entrepreneur.

“If you don’t take risks … if you just play it safe, you’ll limit what you can do,” he said. “There are lots of risks and gambles in business; it’s not for the faint-hearted, and it never really stops.”

Pedal to the Mettle

BusinessWest sat down with Bolduc near the end of the work day (at least for most other people at Pride), a time he chose because the preceding hours were packed with more pressing matters.

The 90-minute conversation was interrupted, briefly, perhaps a dozen times by employees stopping by Bolduc’s office on the way out the door with questions, answers, updates, and agendas for the following day. When asked about what appeared to be micromanagement, Bolduc smiled and said, “show me a successful entrepreneur who is not involved in every aspect of his business.”

He then proceeded to say he’s better than he used to be when it comes to delegating responsibilities, but that he still considers even the smallest of details paramount to his operation and thus worthy of his time and attention.

“Every decision you make is important when you’re talking about your business,” he continued. “There are no small matters.”

This penchant for micromanagement is one of many aspects of Bolduc’s personality that come across loud and clear after only a few minutes of discussing business and society in general and watching him operate. Others include a real passion for what he does — this is a man who went on for five minutes about the quality of the breakfast sandwiches in his store and how proud he is of them — and both concern for and commitment to the city of Springfield (where he grew up), but also the broader subjects of education and parental involvement.

“Springfield has a serious education problem, there’s no question about that — 60% of kids drop out of high school, that’s a problem, and 60% of the fourth-graders can’t read to fourth-grade level,” he said. “That’s why we’re big supporters of early-childhood education and the early years, because it’s been proven that, if we don’t get kids started on the right track, and early, they will never make it.

“We need to get more people involved, and we need to convince some parents — I said some, not all — to get more involved in their children’s education, and make them do their homework, see that they get to bed on time and have a good breakfast, and inspire them to learn. On a bigger note, the whole country needs to do that; we need longer school days and longer school years, and we need to raise our standards — a lot — if we’re going to compete in the global economy.”

In many ways, the Pride chain and its various causes — from books to pajamas to toys — reflect Bolduc and his priorities, and it’s been that way since the beginning, or when he started down the path to entrepreneurship, which is the road he knew he would eventually take even as a mechanical engineering student at Notre Dame.

“I knew I wanted to be in business for myself some day,” he said. “I thought I had it in me, and my father and grandfather were both entrepreneurs.”

Born in Indian Orchard, Bolduc attended local public and parochial schools. After graduating from Notre Dame he went on to Purdue, where he earned an M.B.A. — and he’s put both degrees to good use. “I always enjoyed the engineering part as well as the business part.”

After graduate school, but before enlisting in the Army and eventually serving in Vietnam, he worked as a quality engineer at American Bosch. Upon returning from Southeast Asia in 1970, he briefly went to work at his father’s gas station in Indian Orchard before buying him out, thus becoming the third generation of the family to run that business.

In addition to running the station, he became a tire and auto-parts wholesaler, specifically a distributor for BF Goodrich and Continental, and became proficient enough at it to be chosen to address a national sales convention of Goodrich retailers at age 30.

As good as he was at tire wholesaling, Bolduc saw the handwriting on the wall with the introduction of the radial — and also foresaw changes that would cut out two layers of ‘middle’ people in this business — and thus sold off the venture. He then moved into an emerging field on the business landscape, one that he would ultimately help shape locally: the self-service gas station.

Priming the Pump

He started with one, again in Indian Orchard, in 1976, and continued to expand over the next 34 years, and counting.

In the process, he would not merely create a chain, but continually break ground when it came to the concept of marrying the self-service station with another emerging phenomenon, the convenience store.

Part of this matrimony was taking what was then a small store that sold bread, cigarettes, and dairy items (many people called them ‘milk stores’) and thinking outside that small box, he explained.

“We were the first chain in Western Mass. to put a Dunkin’ Donuts in our stores,” he went on, “and, later, we were the first to put a Subway in our stores — and then everybody copied both.

“We already had our own little deli shops, but when I saw the Subway concept, I said, ‘let’s give this a try,’” he continued. “And as for coffee and donuts, we were already making our own coffee, and buying a full line of products from the [former] Liberty Bakery. I sold cakes, donuts, everything; you could come in here and order a wedding cake from us, and people did.”

As he expanded the line of products and services inside the stores, Bolduc also expanded geographically, moving beyond his Springfield roots across the Pioneer Valley. “We expanded as we saw opportunities arise,” he explained, adding that many of his locations have been enlarged and renovated over the years to keep pace with his vision of what his stores should be offering.

“We’ve built and rebuilt our stores to keep up with the times and keep up with the changes we’ve made as a company,” he said. “I’ve rebuilt some stores four times as we’ve evolved from a full-service gas station to a gas-only self-service, to small stores, to large stores, and, now, to super-large stores that are able to pump fuel into as many as 20 vehicles at a time — cars and trucks.”

Bolduc said that, when many people think of the Pride name, they associate it with gasoline. He understands this — well, sort of, because this is how and why many trips to his locations begin or end. But he becomes somewhat animated as he stresses that his chain is about so much more than that.

Bob Bolduc, center, with his senior management team

And to get his point across, he proceeded down the roster of what is now in the Pride inventory, for lack of a better term. This would be 24 stores; a commissary that makes baked goods, those aforementioned breakfast sandwiches, and a host of other items for those stores; 10 Subways, making Pride the largest franchisee in the region; six Dunkin’ Donuts locations (those spaces are leased out to the corporation); two truck stops; one package store; two beer-and-wine stores; a trucking company; a construction company; and a commercial fueling station for local fleets.

Today, in addition to Dunkin’ Donuts and Subway locations, the larger Pride stores are, in essence, full markets complete, in some cases, with shopping carts, and, in all locations, prices he says can compete with supermarkets.

Indeed, beyond the sheer volume of locations is what’s in the stores, Bolduc told BusinessWest, that should compel people to think of this as more than just a chain of gas stations.

“We’re in the milk business,” he said, again with a large dose of pride in accomplishment. “We’re a dairy store; we sell milk $1 or $1.50 less per gallon than the supermarkets. And it’s so fresh, because we’re turning it over every day.

“In some of the stores, we changed the name to Pride Market,” he continued, going on, in great detail, as always, about what his locations now offer. “We now have major food areas with all kinds of coffee, hot and iced, and our own brand of sandwiches, subs, and bakery items — fresh-baked cookies and muffins every day.”

This emphasis on price and variety is just one way Bolduc says he’s trying to take the perceptions about convenience stores — especially the one about how people have to trade this convenience for higher prices — and turn them on their ear.

“People from several generations wouldn’t think to buy in a convenience store because the price was too high,” he said. “You buy here, and you can save money.”

What’s in Store?

When asked if he and others at Pride spend much time studying consumers as they go about designing, stocking, and staffing Pride stores, Bolduc shrugged his shoulders slightly as if to indicate ‘not really.’

He said much of the success that he or anyone else enjoys in retail comes from instinctively anticipating what his customers or ‘friends’ want — like free coffee for the month of December — and then providing it in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

This thought process has taken him from simply putting Subway franchises in his stores to adding full delis and his own baked goods, as he described.

It also led him to the cash acceptors, which, it would seem to some, but not Bolduc, would work against the larger overall mission to get people into his stores.

“This saves someone the trouble of coming into the store and standing in a line to pay someone for the gas,” he said. “If someone was going to come in, they would come in anyway; this is a great convenience for people, and it’s worked out very well.”

And it also represents one of the many risks Pride and especially Bolduc have embarked on over the years. He said his goal has always been to make these risks calculated, and to manage the many gambles he’s taken, while also working to continually move his operation forward and to new heights.

And he says this is always a difficult task, no matter how much practice one has at it.

“In this business, you have to be a high-risk taker, and you need to have a very strong stomach at times,” he explained. “You don’t get to build a chain of our size with the real estate we have without taking some gambles and putting serious money on the table.

“And then, of course, you have to make it work,” he continued. “And the same goes for other decisions you make; when you’re an independent operation like ours, there’s no fallback — if you make a mistake, there’s no one to catch you.”

As an example of this risk-taking, Bolduc sited the North End location in Springfield, the biggest in the chain. It’s known to many long-time, or very-long-time, residents as the Valley’s Steakhouse site, even though that restaurant has been closed for decades. Bolduc expressed hope that it will someday be known as the ‘Pride site.’

He said he acquired the property a decade or so ago, sensing there would be an opportunity, but going on with the intent of being patient until he knew the time was right.

“I wanted to be sure I could build and operate the kind of facility the site deserved,” he explained. “So I took my time developing it.”

Eventually, two years ago, just as the Great Recession was getting started, he decided to move ahead. Why then, when most business owners were hunkering down?

“I just decided that it was the right time,” he said. “How did I know … I can’t tell you that.”

Today, Bolduc, along with a young leadership team (comprised mostly of women), is mulling the next gambles and the next steps in the evolutionary process for the chain and the genre. And while Bolduc did indeed use the word ‘I’ quite a bit in his talk with BusinessWest, he stressed repeatedly that what he’s accomplished in 34 years has been a team effort.

“I’ve hired a lot of great people along the way,” he said. “I owe it all to them and couldn’t have accomplished all this without them.”

And, often in concert with that team, he continues to get involved in the Greater Springfield community and especially the City of Homes, with support for everything from Springfield School Volunteers to Square One to the Springfield Falcons.

He said that, like many who grew up in the city and have watched it struggle in recent years, he’s eager for a turnaround and doesn’t believe it’s far off. And, like many, he said part of the problem is a lack of self-confidence and a preoccupation with all things negative.

“Yes, we have problems; all cities do,” he said. “We need to work on those problems, especially those involving our schools, but all we hear, unfortunately, is the negative.”

The Bottom Line

Bolduc was non-committal when asked if he would be repeating his free-coffee promotion through December later this year.

As with many other aspects of his business, he knows, or probably knows, the answer to the question, but isn’t exactly eager to share it.

What he does know, and can share, but in a very vague way, is that he is going to continue to develop ‘firsts,’ and strive to remain at the forefront of the ongoing evolution of the convenience store/self-service gas station.

He’s not sure how many times he’ll have to tear down and rebuild or find new, often-innovative ways to assemble sites and create locations. But he’s quite sure he’s not done taking risks — “because that’s what being an entrepreneur is all about.”

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

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