exclusive Archives - Page 13 of 14

Surveying the Landscape

By BusinessWest Staff December 17, 2013

Features

WNEU Polling Institute Is Making a Name for Itself

Tim Vercellotti says the Scott Brown-Elizabeth Warren Senate race in 2012 gave the polling institute some national exposure that helped put it on the map.

The high-profile 2012 U.S. Senate race between incumbent Scott Brown and challenger Elizabeth Warren was memorable for a number of reasons.
Start with the amount of money spent — $68 million, making it one of the most expensive Senate contests of all time. There was also the heated rhetoric, epic debates, and, perhaps most importantly, the stakes — most analysts said this race was about nothing less than control of the Senate.
But Tim Vercellotti will also remember it for something else.
He considers that race the moment when the Western New England University Polling Institute, which he has directed since 2008, came into the national spotlight — and essentially came of age.
Launched in 2005, the institute included questions concerning that Senate contest in more than a half-dozen polls between the spring of 2011 and the days just before the election in November 2012. The headlines on the press releases announcing the polls’ results essentially mirrored what was happening in that pitched battle, as Warren, well behind when the contest began, gathered steam and, with the support of those also backing President Barack Obama, triumphed on election day:
• “Brown Holds 8-point Lead in Massachusetts Senate Race” (March 4, 2012);
• “Senate Race a Toss-up as Warren Closes Gap on Brown” (June 2);
• “New Poll Shows Warren Leading Brown in Senate Race” (Sept. 16);
• “Warren Leads Brown by Five Points in Latest Senate Survey” (Oct.7);
• “Poll: Warren Maintains Four-point Lead in Senate Race” (Nov. 4)
She would eventually win by eight points, said Vercellotti, noting that 4% of those polled near the end were still undecided, and the poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
“So we were right there; our polls were correctly indicating what was happening,” said Vercellotti, noting that, beyond the level of accuracy and its impact on overall credibility, the institute’s work during the closely watched race gained considerable national exposure, with mentions in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and other news outlets. “That was our high-water mark … I’m not sure when that kind of clash of the titans will happen again.”
In the meantime, the institute has been garnering public opinion on everything from economic confidence and expectations for holiday shopping (two subjects in the most recent poll, undertaken in early November); from casino gambling to the recent government shutdown and which party was more responsible for it; from the ‘death with dignity’ poll question on last year’s ballot to healthcare reform.
And, while doing so, it is making strides in the all-important work to establish a reputation for accuracy and transparency, a process that can take years and perhaps decades, he said, but one in which he believes the WNEU facility is making solid progress.
“The longer you’re in the field and the more successful you are at building a record of accuracy, the better off you are,” he said, adding that the Brown-Warren race certainly enhanced the institute’s scorecard. “But it only takes a couple of bad polls to undo all of that, and that’s why I take this very seriously and think long and hard about the surveys and how they’re written.
“One of the challenges is that, in politics today, people want answers, they want absolutes, and surveys are merely exercises in probability — that’s why there’s a margin of error,” he went on. “What you’re saying is that, ‘19 times out of 20, we think the answer in the population is within this margin of error. But one time out of 20, it’s not, and that’s life; that’s just how it works.’ But if that one time in 20 is your final pre-election poll in a major, high-profile race, you can talk about probability all you want, but the audience can be very unforgiving.”
For this issue, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at the work being conducted at the institute and the intricacies involved with the often-misunderstood world of polling.

Questions and Answers
While effective polling is both an art and a science, Vercellotti told BusinessWest, it is mostly the latter.
Elaborating, he said that strict attention must be paid to everything from how the questions are phrased to the order in which they are asked; from how political candidates are identified to how their names are pronounced, in order to ensure that the results are reliable and accurately reflect the thoughts of those being asked the questions.
As one example, he pointed to the most recent statewide survey, which polled respondents on the economy, holiday spending, casino gambling, medical marijuana, and other topics.
There were several questions about the health of the national economy, respondents’ personal financial position, and when and if improvement was forthcoming, he said, adding that he was careful to ask them after the queries on holiday shopping so as not to influence replies to that specific line of questioning.
“There was concern that if the shopping question came after the questions about the economy and people were gloomy about the economy, that would shape how they would answer those holiday questions,” he explained, adding that such nuances are shaped by experience and large amounts of pre-testing with surveys.
As another example, he cited polls on specific political races. Those asking the questions don’t have to go in alphabetical order with the candidates, said Vercellotti, but they should change the order of the names on a systematic basis, because a percentage of respondents to such queries will simply favor the first name they hear. Likewise, party affiliation must be mentioned with each candidate (when applicable) because some respondents are inclined to favor candidates by party affiliation.
“You have to rotate the order of those names so that each name appears first half the time,” he explained. “And it’s important to put party label with the name, because we know from political-science research that the less-engaged voters will often default to that label; they won’t know much about the candidates, so they’re just going to go with the party.”
These are just some of the things Vercellotti has learned during a career that has blended graduate-school training in survey research and questionnaire design, work at another college-affiliated polling institute (this one at Elon University in North Carolina), teaching, and his current post. He came to WNEU in the 1990s and became director of the institute in 2008.
He said there was a lot of learning while doing at Elon, and the education process essentially continues with each polling assignment.
“Survey researchers write some clunkers of questions,” he noted. “And with almost every survey, I get to the end and say, ‘I should have asked this.’ You file that away and try to do that the next time.”
Tracing the history of the WNEU program, polling institutes at colleges and universities, and polling in general, Vercellotti said the practice of gauging public opinion dates back to the 1930s, when firms such as the one started by George Gallup would go door to door seeking answers to specific questions.
The telephone became the preferred polling method in the ’60s — when the percentage of households with one reached a critical level — and it remains the best option today, he went on, although Internet polling, considered less reliable by many, is gaining some traction.
In recent decades, several colleges and universities have created polling institutes, he told BusinessWest, with the twin goals of raising the profile of the institution and generating data for a society that has developed an appetite for ever-increasing amounts of it.
The Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers is one of the best-known of these facilities, but there are many others, including some in the Bay State at Suffolk University, UMass Lowell, and UMass Boston, said Vercelloti, adding that the WNEU model is based loosely on programs at other, smaller colleges, and especially Quinnipiac in New Haven, Conn.
WNEU started small, with 12 calling stations in a computer lab in the College of Business, said Vercellotti, adding that it has since grown to 23 stations, all staffed by thoroughly coached students.
Over the past several years, the institute has conducted two or three polls each semester funded by the university itself, he went on, adding that there have also been several projects — including many of those aforementioned Warren-Brown polls — undertaken in conjunction with the Republican and masslive.com.
There have also been a few contract assignments, including one commissioned by the West of the River Chamber of Commerce, which aimed to gauge the thoughts of Agawam residents on potential development of a large parcel on Tennis Road.
There is the potential for more of that kind of work, he explained, but the price tag — roughly $10,000 for an eight-minute, 24-question survey with 500 respondents — is higher than most inquirers expect and often beyond their means.

Numbers Game
As he talked about the polling institute and its work, Vercellotti made early and frequent use of the word transparency.
Such a facility simply must have it in order for the results it generates and then publicizes to have credibility, he said, adding that objectivity is another trait that a successful polling institute must possess, and this explains why he’s turned down a number of potential contract assignments.
“We have been approached for contract work on the casino issue, and from people on both sides — opponents of gaming and advocates for casinos — and I’ve turned down the work,” he explained. “It’s critical that we’re objective; we’re not going to take sides with an election issue. Candidates will sometimes approach us, including some who are alumni of this university, and I make the same point: we’re not here to be engaged in partisan politics or take one side of an issue.
“We’re extremely transparent about who hires us and the methodology we use,” he went on, adding that he’s a member of AAPOR (the American Assoc. for Public Opinion Research), has signed its code of ethics, and is part of an endeavor known as the Transparency Initiative. “The only way the audience can make an informed judgment about the credibility of polling material is to know how it was gathered.”
Overall, the process of reputation building, which affects both credibility and accuracy, takes years and is certainly ongoing, he said, adding that it takes multiple election cycles to establish that a program is reliable.
To date, the institute has amassed a fairly solid track record, or scorecard, said Vercellotti, adding that he does maintain a record of how well the surveys project what is to come. It has not projected the wrong winner in any political race or referendum question, at least when one takes into account the margin for error that accompanies each polling assignment.
That caveat is necessary with the ‘death with dignity’ question on the 2012 state ballot, he explained, relating the story of how public opinion on that measure changed dramatically between the institute’s first polling exercise on the subject and the last one just before the election.
“When we polled on it in the spring of 2012, it was way ahead, a slam dunk,” he recalled. “But I think that, in some ways, opinion on that question was very wide, but not very deep. And by the fall, opponents of that proposal had gotten organized, they started running some advertising, the Kennedys came out against it, the Catholic bishops came out against it.
“Our final pre-election poll, just five days before the election, had it passing by a two-point margin,” he recalled. “Therefore, I said it was too close to call, and it failed by two percentage points, but that’s within the margin of error.”
While the institute is still in its relative youth at only eight years old, it is, Vercellotti believes, gaining the respect from the many constituencies that are seeing and judging its work — from the general public to the press; from campaign operatives to special-interest groups, such as those on both sides of the casino issue.
And then, there are the growing numbers of bloggers, he said, who take polling data and analyze it — and usually aren’t shy about voicing opinions on the sources of that data.
“They’re the toughest audience of all, because they’ll take the time and go through the methodology and raise questions,” he said, adding that the emergence of this audience is a relatively recent phenomenon. “When I got into the business in 2001, there wasn’t that kind of audience, but now there is, and they’ve developed a level of expertise.”
Therefore, he pays attention to what the bloggers are writing. Summing up the reviews to date, he noted that many are positive, but some are what he called “dismissive,” a tone he attributes to the small size of the school and the youthfulness of the polling program.
Looking ahead, Vercelotti said that 2014 could be an intriguing and busy year for the institute. Indeed, the Deval Patrick era is ending — WNEU’s facility conducted its first poll on the coming contest earlier in the fall, headlining the release “Democrats Out in Front Early in Governor’s Race” — and there will be a race for the Senate seat captured in a special election earlier this year by Ed Markey after John Kerry became secretary of State. Meanwhile, there may also be some interesting ballot questions, including the possibility of another referendum on casino gambling.
But after that, things will likely get quieter, he said, noting that, while there is a presidential race in 2016, there won’t be another governor’s race or Senate race (unless someone else leaves office before their term expires) until 2018.
There may be some local, state, or regional issues to fill the void, he went on, adding quickly that, in an age when the public’s thirst for information only grows, there is unlikely to be a shortage of issues on which to conduct polls.

Making the Call
Referring back to all the science involved in polling, Vercellotti said it extends even to what time individuals are called — or should be.
He said the recent World Series, won by the Red Sox, posed some challenges; many were not happy about their viewing being interrupted by a pollster. Likewise, Patriots games add a layer of intrigue to Sunday afternoons, one of the times when those staffing the phones at the institute are most busy.
“I try to make the most of halftime — I make sure the callers are active then,” said Vercellotti, adding that mastering such nuances is all part of the process of making the institute successful — and respected.
Nearly nine years after it started soliciting opinions, this facility is well on its way to achieving those goals.

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

Picking Up Steam?

By BusinessWest Staff December 17, 2013

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]

The New Deal

By BusinessWest Staff December 17, 2013

Autos Sections

Fathers & Sons to Expand, Reshape Facilities on Memorial Avenue

Damon Cartelli is set to create the so-called terminal concept on Memorial Avenue.

It’s called the ‘terminal concept.’
That’s the phrase Audi has attached to a relatively new design it is now requiring for the showrooms that will display its growing roster of models. In literature intended for dealers, the look — which, as the name implies, educes an airport terminal — is explained this way: “designed to evoke the racing history of the brand, support the operational needs of dealers, and represent Audi through innovative design and materials, the Audi terminal concept is another physical manifestation of the ethos ‘progressive, sporty, and sophisticated.’”
Damon Cartelli used fewer, less poetic, but still effective terms to describe it.
“It has a certain look; it’s very German … there’s lots of glass, lots of metal, it’s a clean look,” said the president of the Fathers & Sons chain of dealerships, who will be creating that look at a new facility to be built a half-mile or so down Memorial Avenue in West Springfield.
The facility where he spoke with BusinessWest, currently devoted to Audi, Volvo, and Porsche, opened its doors 12 years ago, carved out of the old Coliseum banquet house. Cartelli still considers it state of the art when it comes to dealership look, feel, and amenities, and if he had his druthers, he’d be selling Audis there for a few more decades. But the carmaker, like many others these days, is more or less demanding a dedicated showroom (one that will display only its product) and one that meets a number of design specifications, inside and out.
Thus, Cartelli is taking what he calls a business “leap of faith.”
“What people tell me is that there’s an increase in business any time you build a new facility — you get an inherent lift,” he noted. “But we already have a facility that I believe is high-end and representative of the brand. It’s a tough pill to swallow to build a new dealership, and I have my doubts, but I’m going to trust what the brand tells me and hope that if you build it, they will come.”
But that’s not all. This project is currently being called ‘phase one’ of an initiative that will change the face of a nearly two-block section of the north side of Memorial Avenue and possibly create some new business opportunities for this chain of dealerships.
Indeed, while creating the new Audi dealership on land currently occupied by a Midas muffler location, a tool-supply shop, and a few buildings housing various Fathers & Sons operations and inventory, Cartelli plans to create one and perhaps two other facilities, which on current blueprints are labeled ‘future dealerships.’
And there will be some options with regard to what carmakers’ names eventually go over the door, he said, adding that the list includes models sold at existing Fathers & Sons facilities on Memorial Avenue — Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen, and Kia — as well as some nameplates not currently sold in Western Mass., including Mercedes-Benz, Infiniti, and Acura, among others.
Meanwhile, the new Audi dealership will provide an opportunity to perhaps better showcase one of the hottest car lines at the moment, one expected to gain additional momentum with new models in the A-3 series, a smaller, less-expensive line, said Cartelli.
“We’re currently selling roughly 20 cars a month,” he said of the Audi brand. “With the new A-3 series coming out, Audi’s projection is that we’re going to almost double that number.”
Demolition of existing buildings on Memorial Avenue will commence within the next month, ground should be broken on the new Audi facility by spring, and the dealership is expected to open its doors by the end of next year, he said, adding that, while this timeline is aggressive, it is also realistic.
For this issue and its focus on auto sales, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at the plans that will give a new look to that section of Memorial Avenue — and write a new chapter in the intriguing history of this family business.

Driving Force

‘The terminal concept,’ as seen in an Audi dealership in California.

Before talking about the future, Cartelli first referenced something now considered mostly a thing of the past in this business.
This would be the so-called auto mall, or facility that sells a number of different nameplates under one roof. There are still many operating, he said, including the dealership the Cartelli family fashioned from the Coliseum, which at one time sold four brands — Audi, Volvo, Porsche, and Saab, the last of which is no longer made.
Increasingly, though, automakers want a facility dedicated solely to their models, mostly to reduce (in theory, at least) the odds of a consumer eventually driving away with another carmaker’s product.
“Customers won’t have contact with the other brands, which is something the factory wants,” he explained while discussing the planned new Audi dealership. “It’s funny how this industry went from the auto-mall-type complex where you could stay inside and shop all the brands and compare and go from there, to the dedicated dealership, because the factories don’t want their models to be compared to the others, even though that’s going to happen anyway.”
This was just one of the dynamics that led to the commencement of discussions between Cartelli and Audi nearly two years ago, with the carmaker aggressively stating its case for both a dedicated dealership and that aforementioned terminal concept, and Cartelli agreeing, if somewhat reluctantly, to take that leap of faith.
Memorial Avenue was the logical place to build such a facility, with the existence of other company dealerships and the potential for economies of scale, said Cartelli, who commenced putting together a plan — one that would involve use of existing Fathers & Sons facilities and acquisition of other property with frontage on that street — and then executing it.
He acquired the Midas property last spring, and entered into a purchase-and-sale agreement on the tool-supply shop late last summer. He also hired an architect to work in conjunction with one commissioned by Audi to develop a design.
The emergence of a casino proposal for property in the southeast corner of the Big E complex that virtually surrounds the existing Audi, Volvo, and Porsche dealership added some intrigue to the planning process, and there were discussions with casino developer Hard Rock International about acquiring the Father & Sons site.
But the talks never advanced, and Cartelli, sensing that the casino proposal would be defeated in a referendum — which it was — proceeded with the mindset that Fathers & Sons would keep its existing facility and expand down the street.
Cartelli visited several Audi dealerships in New England that had created the terminal concept, and eventually adopted something similar to others — especially the Wallingford, Conn. store — but still unique in its own way.

Damon Cartelli says the new Audi dealership is part of a bigger initiative that will change the face of a one-block area on Memorial Avenue and provide new opportunities for the company.

The planned 27,000-square-foot facility, not much smaller than the current home to three makes, will include a showroom big enough to display eight cars (the current Audi space can showcase five or six, depending on the models), an eight-bay service area, and a waiting area with most of the amenities that newer luxury-model dealerships boast, from a flat-screen television to leather couches to Internet access.
The new Audi store, which comes with a sticker price of roughly $3 million, will create both more space and flexibility at the existing facility, said Cartelli, adding that Porsche has been pressing for more showroom space there and will get it when the existing Audi showroom is apportioned to the other German automaker, doubling the number of cars that can be put on display. Meanwhile, the existing Porsche space on the lower level of the dealership will be renovated into a service area for Porsche and possibly Volvo.
As for the ‘future dealership’ notations on the early blueprints for the project, Cartelli said time will eventually tell how these will be colored in.
While it is possible that one of the existing dealerships (Volkswagen or Kia) will be expanded and updated into one or more of those slots, a model (or two) currently not sold in this region may emerge as a contender if the circumstances permit.
“You need some luck and the willingness of the factory to recognize that they need a dealership in this area,” he said, noting that, with some nameplates — Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz, for example — the nearest dealerships are in Hartford, and the manufacturers are currently content with that.

Into a Higher Gear
Looking ahead, Cartelli said he’s optimistic that the new dealership will do what Audi believes it will — bring more people to the showroom and, in the long run, sell more cars.
“I hope the building alone gives us some lift,” he told BusinessWest. “But what I’m really relying on is their products, what I see coming, what I believe is coming, the strength of the brand, and the direction they’re heading. All this leads me to make this investment, because if it wasn’t for what I believe is a very strong brand, I would just stay here and say, ‘thanks, but no thanks,’ and continue to sell cars out of this facility.”
As he said, this is a leap of faith, one that he hopes — and expects — will land him in a position to grow the business and drive more opportunities.

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

Weather Patterns

By BusinessWest Staff December 17, 2013

Insurance Sections

Severe Storms Are Creating a Trickle-down Effect on Policy Holders

With past and future storm damage in mind, Jim Phaneuf says, the state attorney general and insurance commissioner are making sure that carrier premiums and rate increases are justified.

When Jim Phaneuf references the weather, he’s certainly not making small talk.
Rather, he’s discussing big business — the insurance business, which he’s been in for more than 36 years, enough time to see everything, or just about everything, in this industry.
Indeed, over the past several years — and one year in particular, 2011 — Phaneuf, president of Bell & Hudson Insurance Agency in Belchertown, and others in this sector have seen things they’ve never seen before in terms of weather calamities and the resulting impact on the companies that write the policies and the consumers who purchase them.
‘Historic’ is the word he and others have used to describe it all — meaning everything from 2011’s ice dams, tornadoes, hurricane, and freak October snowstorm to subsequent weather events such as Superstorm Sandy in the fall of 2012, and the general consensus that this part of the country will see more of the same in the years to come.
But instead of words, Phaneuf and others like to use numbers to get their points across.
“Between 1980 and 2012, there were 123 U.S. weather-related events that resulted in claims of over $1 billion,” he told BusinessWest. “In 2011 alone, there were 12 U.S. weather-related disasters with over $1 billion in claims, and that caused insurance companies to raise rates to attempt to recover their losses. Our experience has been that most home-insurance customers have experienced rate increases in the past two years, largely as a result of the storms of 2011 and 2012.”
Corey Murphy, president of First American Insurance Agency in Chicopee, agreed, noting that 2011 was a banner year for weather-related claims in this region and others, and the impact from those losses will be felt for some time.
“I knew the insurance companies were going to have to respond — it was a catastrophic year; we had pretty much every natural disaster you could have,” he said, noting that rates have escalated for business and residential policy holders alike, between 3% and 6% on average.
The numbers vary, he said, because in many instances, an agency can sometimes shop for and get a better price, even at a time when many carriers are still struggling to recover losses. Meanwhile, agents can work with clients to lower their insurance bills by making sure they’re buying only what they need, passing on what they don’t need, and employing strategies such as bundling policies, taking higher deductibles, and avoiding marginal claims that will nonetheless trigger premium hikes.

Corey Murphy and his staff have kept their commercial and residential rate increases from storm damage as low as possible by shopping their policy needs with a variety of carriers.

Overall, he said, this is a time for consumers to renew — and tighten — their relationship with their insurance agency, because if predicting the weather is difficult, if not impossible, so too is gauging and minimizing the impact of all that weather on one’s insurance bills.
For this issue and its focus on insurance, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at what has become a perfect storm — in every aspect of that phrase — for insurance carriers, and a time of challenge for those looking to protect their assets and manage the cost of doing so.

Climate Change
Recapping recent events, meaning those of the past few decades and especially the past few years, those we spoke with said things have become more unsettled.
They used that word to refer to both the weather — which, in the opinion of many, is being increasingly impacted by global warming — and the fiscal health and well-being of insurance carriers.
Indeed, due to the recent spate of weather calamities, most insurance companies will not write polices for hurricane-prone coastal properties in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Texas, said Bill Grinnell, president of Webber & Grinnell Insurance Agency in Northampton. So the states have created their own insurance mechanisms and set up rules, collecting premiums from property owners and assessing surcharges to those insurance companies that do business in other regions of those states.
“There is a wide belief that these storms are caused by global warming, which makes the weather less predictable and insurance outcomes less predictable,” Grinnell explained. “As a result, more revenues are needed to create reserves to cover the potential for more disasters, so there’s definitely been an uptick in the cost of insurance.”
According to a 2013 report, “Inaction on Climate Change: the Cost to Taxpayers,” by Ceres, a nonprofit organization advocating for sustainability leadership, the total loss exposure of these state-run insurance plans in the past 20 years has risen by 1,550%, from about $40 billion in 1990 to more than $600 billion in 2010. Additionally, the report says only 50% of the damages in the U.S. caused by extreme weather events are privately insured, which leaves the federal and state governments (the taxpayers) to pick up the remaining tab.
Insurance companies, said Grinnell, earn revenue in two ways: premiums, of course, and conservative, low-risk investments, primarily in the bond markets.
With the historically low rates of return on bonds, insurance companies are not earning as much as they have in the past, and at the same time, they’re seeing higher bills from their reinsurance companies after paying out billions for just the past two years’ worth of catastrophic storms.
“So the reinsurance companies that provide the insurance for your insurance carrier for big disasters have increased their rates to the carriers, and those rates have been passed right down to the policyholders,” Grinnell explained, adding that the regional carriers in New England that do business in Massachusetts weren’t directly affected by Hurricane Katrina or, to a great degree, Superstorm Sandy. “So the majority of the storm-related increases are due to more localized events.”
Locally, Phaneuf added, state Attorney General Martha Coakley and Commissioner of Insurance Joseph Murphy are making sure carrier premiums and rates are justified.
“The attorney general seems to have served as a watchdog with the insurance issue,” he said, “to keep insurance companies’ rising rates in check.”

Policy Statement

Bill Grinnell says insurance carriers are getting hit with higher rates from their reinsurance companies and passing these increases down to policyholders.

In this changing climate — for both weather and insurance to cover the damage it causes — Grinnell said agencies need to work even more closely with clients to reduce the impact on premiums while making sure customers’ bases are covered, literally and figuratively.
For instance, when his staff sees a client’s premiums spike significantly, they will attempt to shop that business around to get similar coverage, but at a better rate.
“We try to find a better home for their insurance if we’re able to, which we can some of the time, but not all of the time,” he said. “It’s definitely worth the effort if the insurance is going up more than 7% or 8%.”
Murphy agreed, but noted that there is seemingly less room for negotiating between agency and carrier in this environment, adding that this is another sign of the times and a product of the more adverse conditions within the industry, even though the weather has been much calmer this year.
“There’s a lot less back-and-forth over the last year or two. Now, there’s a lot less room; they’re pretty firm on what their prices are,” he said. “This year, it was a pretty mild year, but there were predictions that storms would increase, so there were a lot of adjustments by carriers based upon that.”
Those adjustments, Murphy went on, have appeared as higher premiums and a much harder look at what policies companies will underwrite. He called it “getting tighter.”
When Murphy and his agents present a potential policyholder to an underwriter — the person at the carrier who will decide how much to charge on the commercial lines, or even if they’ll write it or not — they want a much clearer picture of what they are writing.
“So, as an agent, we’re trying to present the best possible picture of that potential client,” he added. “The more you can make an underwriter feel comfortable about what they are writing, the better they feel about doing it.”
Meanwhile, agents can work with clients in a number of ways to help control their insurance bills without reducing coverage, said Phaneuf, listing several possible ones, including a willingness to accept a higher deductible.
“They generally mean lower annual premiums, but more out of your pocket when you have a loss,” he explained. “Your agent will also make you aware that you can control premiums by bundling discounts for your home and auto and installation of alarm systems, renewing your policies with the same insurer, and maintaining a loss-free status.”
Elaborating, he said that going years without filing a claim can lead to attractive discounts, savings that could more than offset the long-term costs from filing a claim in an instance where the damage only marginally exceeds the deductible.
In addition, Murphy told BusinessWest, he and his agents make sure their business clients are updating their product inventory and specific elements that they need for doing business.
“Business owners have to understand what their business is rated on,” he noted, adding that some standard ratings are based on square footage, which doesn’t change unless there is an expansion or a move, but other things do change, like real-estate values, replacement costs, inventory levels (up or down), or an increase in sales, all of which accurately reflect the business’s exposure.
The First American staff helps educate their commercial clients about keeping up with the current state of their property and business.
“If you don’t respond to your carrier with any updates, then they assume that all remains the same, and you could be paying more when you shouldn’t have to,” said Murphy. “But you don’t want them to be caught underinsured.”

Batten Down the Hatches
Grinnell and others we spoke with said their background is in business and insurance, not climatology or meteorology.
Predicting the weather is more difficult than ever, he noted, adding that even those with degrees in those subjects can’t say what will happen next year or over the next decade. The best thing to do is be prepared as much as possible, and that philosophy extends to the realm of insurance.
Phaneuf agreed, adding that, when it comes to weather patterns that are predicted to cause havoc in the future, protection of one’s home or business is, now more than ever, a complex business transaction.
“It cannot be effectively and appropriately done in 15 minutes,” he said. “In spite of what some national insurance carriers would like to have you believe, it is not a simple transaction like buying laundry detergent or breakfast cereal. If you treat it too lightly, you may not have the protection that you need when you need it … at a time of great loss.”

Elizabeth Taras can be reached at [email protected]

Constant Contact

By BusinessWest Staff December 17, 2013

Sections Technology

The Latest High-tech Devices Keep Users Connected

It wasn’t too long ago that Americans used their cell phones essentially to, well, make phone calls, and maybe send text messages and take the odd photo or two.
How times have changed. We live in an era of constant communication, where the phone is now a device for staying connected to social media, making financial transactions, playing games, and engaging in 100 other activities guaranteed to keep people staring downward.
They’re called smartphones, and they have evolved over the past five years from a useful tool to a ubiquitous part of the way people interact. According to the Pew Research Center, 56% of all Americans own one (91% own a cell phone of some kind), and that percentage is constantly on the rise.
And that’s why BusinessWest begins its annual feature showcasing the newest and best-reviewed high-tech tools with a few of the leading choices in smartphones.
For starters, Apple’s iPhone continues to lead the pack. Business Insider calls the latest iteration, the iPhone 5S ($199+), the top choice among 2013 models. “Yes, it looks nearly identical to last year’s iPhone 5. Yes, there are plenty of other smartphones out there that are just as good and can do a lot more things. Yes, the screen is relatively tiny compared to a bunch of the giant Android phones out there. But that doesn’t matter,” the magazine notes, because the phone boasts an ideal balance of power, useful features, and design.
The new model adds a fingerprint sensor called Touch ID that unlocks the phone without a passcode, as well as an improved camera with a dual LED flash that helps the phone take better photos in low-light settings, and a new slow-motion video feature. And the phone’s new 64-bit processor is about twice as fast as the processor in the old iPhone 5.
“For now, the biggest drawback for iPhone owners is going to be big-screen envy,” the magazine notes. “Unless you absolutely must have a giant screen, the iPhone 5S is nearly perfect.”
For Android enthusiasts, Business Insider heartily recommends the Samsung Galaxy S4 ($649) and HTC One ($599). “This summer, Google partnered with HTC and Samsung to make new ‘Google Play editions’ of those two flagship phones,” it notes.
Why the hefty up-front costs? Instead of selling them through a wireless carrier, Google is selling the One and Galaxy S4 at full price, unsubsidized. With other phones, carriers typically subsidize the up-front savings through wireless-plan fees over a two-year contract.
In addition, the phones will receive software updates shortly after Google releases a new version of Android. “Historically, both HTC and Samsung have been pretty bad at getting new software updates out to customers because it takes a lot of time for them to modify Android,” the magazine notes. “And overall, Google’s clean version of Android is a lot better than the modifications you normally get from HTC and Samsung. There aren’t any preinstalled apps from HTC, Samsung, or your carrier.”
Business Insider gives a slighty edge to the One, calling it more attractive and fun to use than Samsung’s model. “These two phones are designed for people who don’t want to be locked down by carrier contracts and care about having the best Android experience you can get, all wrapped in excellent hardware.”

Consuming and Computing
Smartphones are only one aspect of this on-the-go culture of constant communication and media consumption. Tablets are another.
According to CNET, Apple’s iPad Air ($499-$539) delivers the best blend of performance and battery life in an attractive, thin, light package, with improvements in the front-facing camera and Retina Display. However, it lacks the Touch ID scanner available on the iPhone 5.
“Functionally, the iPad Air is nearly identical to last year’s model, offering only faster performance and better video chatting,” the site notes. “But factor in design and aesthetics, and the iPad Air is on another planet. It’s the best full-size consumer tablet on the market.”
Meanwhile, those looking for something smaller and cheaper might try the iPad Mini ($399), also with Retina Display, a speedy A7 processor, and improved wi-fi and LTE connectivity, with battery life that’s as good or better than last year’s Mini. It also lacks Touch ID. Still, CNET notes, “the new iPad Mini somehow shrinks down the iPad Air into an even more compact package, sacrificing nearly nothing.”
For media consumption alone, CNET calls Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 ($379) “a performance monster that speeds through websites and UI navigation at a frantic pace. Its screen is impressively sharp and its body amazingly light for a larger tablet.”
Despite the lack (for now) of a remote video viewing feature, no built-in storage expansion beyond the included 16 GB, and lack of Google Play access, meaning many apps still aren’t available, the device “isn’t just a great value, it sets the standard for a media consumption tablet.”
Laptop computers continue to advance in speed and performance as well, and the best of the current crop, according to laptopmag.com, is the MacBook Pro 13-inch ($1,299), featuring an impressive 2560-by-1600-pixel Retina Display. “A fourth-generation Intel Core i5 processor and blazing-fast Flash storage drive make the MacBook Pro with Retina display a speed demon, while a lightweight, 3.46-pound chassis and 9.5 hours of battery life let you carry it all day.”
For consumers on a budget, the site’s top pick for 2013 is Hewlett Packard’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z ($399), which combines a crisp, responsive 11.6-inch touchscreen with good battery life. While it’s not designed for heavy multitasking, offers narrow viewing angles, and is somewhat heavy for an 11-inch notebook, the speedy A4 processor, 320-GB hard drive, and 4 GB of RAM more than make up for those shortcomings, at least for the price.

Image Is Everything
Printers come in a wide variety of price points, depending on the user’s needs for features and performance. Toward the higher side, Samsung’s CLP-775ND Laser Printer ($750) is the current favorite of PC World, which notes that “it breaks no new ground in output quality — photos are a challenge for it, as they are for most color lasers — but it’s fast and well-equipped, and its toner is economical.”
Standard features include automatic duplexing, a 500-sheet main input tray, a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray for envelopes and other thicker media, and a 350-sheet output tray, with room to add up to two more bottom-mounted, 500-sheet feeder trays. On the minus side, the transfer belt — a page-wide plastic band that helps convey toner from the cartridge to the paper — is fully exposed when the printer’s front panel is open, “just asking you to drop something on it.”
Still, with a 600 MHz dual-core processor and 384 MB of memory (expandable to 896 MB), the CLP-775ND posts a fast time of 18.1 pages per minute printing plain text, while color photos come out quicker than average, even though the quality of those pictures is pedestrian.
On the budget end of the printer scale, “the $300 range offers an interesting either/or choice: high-end color inkjets with full feature sets, for small-office or high-end home use, and very low-end lasers for small or home offices,” PC World notes. “But note that, while you can get a pretty nice monochrome laser for $300, a like-priced color model will be slow, lacking in features, and expensive to replenish.”
That said, the magazine’s top pick in this range is HP’s Officejet Pro 8600 Plus ($300), which boasts speed, at 13.2 pages per minute of plain text, and quick performance with printing photos, copying, and scanning. Meanwhile, features include universal automatic duplexing for copying, scanning, and printing, and full support of legal-size paper.
However, it can’t print on a CD or DVD, and its touch controls can be slow to react. Still, it does print from a smartphone or tablet, or from a remote location, through HP’s free ePrint service.
Speaking of photos, digital cameras continue to evolve at a wide variety of price points. For those willing to foot the bill, PC Magazine highly recommends the Fujifilm X100S ($1,299), the follow-up to Fuji’s groundbreaking X100 digital camera.
The camera, like its predecessor, boasts a retro design, as well as a hybrid viewfinder system that can toggle between a big, bright optical view and an electronic viewfinder, as well as a fast lens with a 35-mm (full-frame equivalent) field of view. “The sensor has been upgraded to a 16-megapixel X-Trans CMOS design that is capable of producing some incredible results at extremely high ISO settings, and a notoriously sluggish autofocus system is now a reasonably quick one.”
For significantly less money, PC Magazine called the Olympus Tough TG-2 iHS a solid option at $379. Like its predecessor, the Tough TG-1 iHS — which the magazine described as “a compact shooter with a fast lens that could shoot deep underwater and survive drops, pressure, and extreme temperatures,” while taking great photos in all types of light — the new model makes a few modest upgrades at a lower price. “We haven’t seen another rugged camera that could challenge the TG-1,” it noted, making the TG-2 the logical choice for 2013.

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]

Season of Hope

By BusinessWest Staff December 3, 2013

Restaurants Sections

Despite Challenges, Local Restaurateurs Have a Positive Outlook for the Holidays

Victor Bruno has successfully paired meet-and-greet and food-sampling efforts to bolster his restaurant’s promotional card program.

Victor Bruno has never run from hard work.
As a young boy, he sold cans of soda at the Italian Festival in Springfield’s South End, making a nice profit for pocket change. Fast-forward 30 or so years to 2011, when he used the most basic form of grass-roots marketing — the meet and greet, and food sampling — to brand his barely year-old Worthington Street restaurant, Adolfo’s Ristorante, an homage to his late father.
Bruno and two of his employees spent four weekends in the West Springfield and Enfield Costco locations offering samples of his stuffed mushrooms to promote his new venture through the Costco discount gift-card program.
“I was there from when the store opened until I ran out of mushroom caps each time, and I met thousands, and I mean thousands, of people, and we would talk about the restaurant and downtown Springfield,” Bruno recalled.
He heard it all, and the most pervasive issue was the perception that Springfield isn’t safe anymore. “But I told them, it’s the entertainment district, and we have valet parking and good lighting; you’ll have a great meal — and I’ve seen thousands of those cards come back.”
Bruno knows the restaurant business is one barometer of how willing the public is to indulge in discretionary spending. With the all-important holiday shopping season just beginning, there is some cautious optimism among the restaurateurs that BusinessWest spoke with, although it was tempered with concern about what will be a short holiday shopping season.
“Sadly, this was the latest Thanksgiving possible; we’ve lost a week of shopping time, and that hurts all restaurants,” said Robert Luz, president and CEO of the Mass. Restaurant Association (MRA). “But we continue to extricate ourselves from the Great Recession, and generally speaking, we’re starting to come out of this, and consumers are a little bit more confident about spending dollars.”

In spite of a shortened selling season due to a late Thanksgiving, Bob Luz says, consumers are more confident to spend.

Luz expects holiday sales to be flat or in the negative, mostly due to that lost week. His organization offers business assistance to restaurant-industry members — most importantly legislative advocacy. According to Luz, as restaurateurs get through this shorter holiday season, they have a potentially disparaging issue looming with a recent bill that just passed the Senate and is headed toward the House that could raise not only the minimum wage for all industries, but also the base of tipped wages for waiters and waitresses in the restaurant industry, increasing their minimum wages by 71% (more on this later).
For the restaurateur, food-price increases are only the beginning; city taxes, property insurance, workers’ comp, and liquor-liability costs are also increasing. “There’s only so much you can get from a stone,” said Bruno. “And all businesses have some of these costs, too. But in the restaurant business, we’re working with a profit margin of nickels and dimes.”
For this issue’s focus on restaurants, BusinessWest talked with some industry veterans about the holiday season ahead, as well as the much bigger picture — the challenging environment in which they’re operating and the prospects for improvement.

Main Menu
As if the Great Recession and recent food-price increases weren’t enough for local restaurateurs, a week before Thanksgiving, Senate President Therese Murray advanced a plan to raise the minimum wage from $8 to $11 per hour over the next three years. The Senate voted for that wage increase, and Luz of the MRA was prepared for that hike, which would certainly affect any business owner.
But in the same session, the Senate also voted to increase the minimum wage for tipped employees to half the minimum wage. With the tipped wage currently at $2.63 per hour, it would now force restaurateurs to pay them $4.50 per hour this year, a 71% increase, which will continue to increase over the next two years.
“It’s been frozen since 1999, because it works,” Luz said. “Over that time period, waiters’ and waitresses’ wages naturally increased because of menu inflation and because we educated our members’ employees to declare all of their tips.”
Technically, Luz said, employers have to meet the current minimum wage for those waiters and waitresses whose declared tips don’t equal current minimum wage, but that is rare because they usually do make solid tips. Waiters and waitresses in Massachusetts, he went on, are already paid the most in the country, as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that they earned an average hourly wage of $13.13 in 2012, when tips are factored in. Should this new increase for tipped employees pass, employers will be footing yet another increase for something that Luz said doesn’t need a separate increase.
The MRA offers its members information sharing, education and training, forums for networking, cost-cutting group-discount opportunities, and, most importantly, legislative advocacy.
“The restaurant business is highly labor-intensive, and when you affect wages like that, it’s dramatic,” Luz said. “We’re the entry-level point for a lot of jobs, but the business has a razor-thin bottom line.”
Luz added that the MRA is working to finalize a formal strategy to fight this matter in the Legislature. But heading into the holiday season, there are significant issues that already exist for the network of Western Mass. restaurateurs.
For the past 14 years, Chris Brunelle has been the owner of Pinocchio’s Ristorante (formerly in Amherst, now in Three Rivers), and is also general manager of the new Bistro 21 at the Cold Spring Country Club in Belchertown. Through those two businesses, he’s come to the formal conclusion that there may be no bounce back to where things used to be pre-Great Recession.
“This is the new norm; the cost of doing business in the last year to two years for food alone has gone up 6% to 22%, and everybody is paying for the October snowstorm from two years ago because our insurance prices have gone up another 20%,” added Brunelle. “That’s just the cost of doing business, and you can’t pass that cost down to your customer.”
Judie Teraspulsky, owner for the past 36 years of Judie’s restaurant in the center of the vibrant college town of Amherst, said her professional life revolves around when students are in town; she’s survived the Great Recession by streamlining every area that she can, and running the restaurant, from purchases to staffing shifts, with extreme efficiency.
“We are tight, tight, tight,” said Teraspulsky. “We don’t lay off employees, because they are the most important factor in our business.”
As hard as things get for Brunelle, his philosophy, year-round, is the same as Teraspulsky’s: he’s staying strong due to his allegiance to his employees, many of whom have families, and four specifically who have been with him for the full 14 years.

Gifting Limit
Rudi Scherff, manager of the Student Prince, a landmark eatery in downtown Springfield that just celebrated 78 years in business, is used to the ups and downs of the hospitality business. Scherff, who undoubtedly has one of the strongest and most affluent regular clienteles in the Pioneer Valley, said he’s getting the sense that, while there is apprehension and concern, people are a bit happier with at least the regional economic situation than they were a year ago.
Scherff told BusinessWest that the holidays are “huge” for his restaurant, which does a solid 20% of the year’s business from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, and half of the gift certificates sold are during that same time span.

Rudi Scherff says the holidays are a very busy time, when half of the year’s gift certificates are sold for the Student Prince.

“We’re going to be busy this season, and the eight days before Christmas are as much as we can handle,” Scherff noted, adding that banquets and events, entertaining up to 90, are a big part of that equation.
While Teraspulsky may not be as straight out as Scherff this time of year, she still sees the holiday season as very important to her business.
“Where I shine during the holidays is that you can come in and do just a dessert or a popover, or one of our great cocktails,” she said, adding that her menu, from the beginning, has afforded her customers the ability to have whatever they want, when they want it.
Teraspulsky and her staff of 90 push the gift certificates hard to get that return that will pick up the cash flow once the 50/50 percentage of college students and traditional customers returns.
Bruno is also looking forward to this season, not only to see those Costco cards come back, but to sell more gift certificates in the restaurant, and he’s already booked early corporate parties in his private room upstairs, seating up to 45 people.
“There’s still that caution with spending,” said Bruno, recalling the days in his former restaurant, Caffeine’s, in the same location, where customers used to spend $100 on a bottle of wine.
“Now they’re only spending $25 to $30 on a bottle of wine, but at least they’re spending it here.”

The Garnish
The potential of a downtown Springfield casino complex in the years ahead provides holiday conversation and a giant question mark for many restaurateurs; while they are not sure if it will help or hurt them personally, ultimately, they hope that the pledge of far more people will materialize.
“We’re always optimistic come January, and for the [prospective] casino, during the construction phase — it’s going to be great for downtown,” said Scherff. “And once it opens, it’s going to help some, hurt others, but hopefully it puts more feet on the street and gets more people down here.”
Bruno agreed, adding, “the perception of downtown is far, far worse than it actually is, but with a casino, there will be people, and people bring safety; my position has always been that we’ll be the safest downtown around.”
Until a decision is made, Bruno is doing everything in his power to overcome the challenges that all restaurateurs are facing this holiday season. His greatest compliments thus far have been from those who tell him that Boston’s North End, renowned for authentic Italian restaurants, has nothing on Adolfo’s.
“They tell me I should consider opening up another restaurant,” Bruno said, laughing as he explained, “because if you can make it in Springfield, you can make it anywhere.”

Elizabeth Taras can be reached at [email protected]

Unwrapping Anticipation

By BusinessWest Staff December 3, 2013

Holiday Gift Guide Sections

2013 May Be the First Healthy Holiday Sales Season Since Before the Recession

Joy Leavitt is supporting locally owned independent businesses with a new nonprofit organization and educating consumers about buying local.

Walking into Kiddly Winks, a popular children’s toy store in Longmeadow, runs a close second to visiting the ‘real’ Santa’s Toyland at the North Pole.
Once in the store, customers are greeted by the cheery owner, Joy Leavitt, who easily takes on the role of a much younger Mrs. Claus with her warm smile and genuinely welcoming character. These qualities, combined with a spot-on toy selection, have made for a very successful business for the past 28 years, and allowed her to open a second store in Canton, Conn. in 2004.
Meeting the Kiddly Winks owner close to the holiday season is only heightened by her frequent use of the word ‘magical,’ which she uses to describe everything from the thousands of customers who have supported her two businesses to the growing popularity of the annual American Express Small Business Saturday — the day after Black Friday — to the nonprofit organization she started this year called Living Local (more on this later).
However, magic is exactly what retailers may need in this year’s sales season — defined by retail sales organizations, like the Retailers Assoc. of Massachusetts, as running from Black Friday to Christmas Eve — because there are six fewer shopping days than last year, including one less vital weekend for shopping, due to Thanksgiving being so late this year. Despite the loss of days, the Retailers Assoc. still predicts a 3.5% gain in sales ($15 billion) over last year, which is a shade less than the National Retail Federation’s projections for this year of 3.9%, which equates to $602.1 billion in total sales. It’s a progression that economists are calling ‘cautionary, slow growth’.
In the Western Mass. region, the independent retailers that BusinessWest spoke with seem to be relatively unconcerned about the shopping-week loss because the past year has shown steady growth, and for the first time since the Great Recession, they are viewing this sales season with anticipation, not trepidation.
“This year has been very, very good, and I do think it’s going to be an active holiday season,” said Dave DiRico of Dave DiRico’s Golf and Racquet in West Springfield. “The economy seems to be getting better, and people seem to be out shopping more.”
DiRico, a former club pro who purchased the well-known Fran Johnson’s Golf & Tennis from owner Cindy Johnson in March 2012 and reopened under his own name the following month, is looking forward to his second successful holiday season as a retailer, based on the success of last holiday season and his growth this year.

Kate Vishnyakov’s clientele has already followed her boutique’s move from East Longmeadow to Longmeadow, proving that consumers are willing to support local business.

And while one might think that Kate Vishnyakov of Kate Gray Boutique should be nervous about this upcoming season since relocating her shop from East Longmeadow to Longmeadow this past October, she’s actually not. As she explained to BusinessWest, she launched her business six years ago at the beginning of the recession but is still going strong.
“The key is to adjust with the times,” Vishnyakov stated. “It got to the point where I didn’t have to depend on what was happening in Washington, or politics, or the economy; I built something that could support and sustain us.”
Her clientele has already welcomed her into town because, with a large percentage of customers coming from Longmeadow, Vishnyakov’s move has made it all that much easier to shop locally, which is vital to her existence. In fact, her sales in October, even being closed for 10 days for the move, were stronger than the same month last year.
Weather, economics, and tragedies can all affect the holiday shopping season, said Diane Merrick, owner, with her sister, Ann Marie Moloney, of It’s All About Me, a women’s boutique in Hampden. But preparing in spite of challenges is a risk that is necessary because the sales of the past holiday seasons reflect what the inventory should be for the present.
“We can’t control people’s fears,” said Merrick. “All we can do is focus on being positive, listening to what customers say they want to see in the store, and provide those products with excellent personal service.”
While Leavitt uses the word ‘magical,’ Victor Ounduian, president of Lorilil Jewelers in downtown Springfield’s Tower Square, is cautiously optimistic. “There’s definitely more positivity this year, if that’s a word,” he said with a chuckle. (Indeed, the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes positivity as ‘the state of being positive.’)
For this issue’s focus on the upcoming holiday sales season, BusinessWest spoke with local business owners who are taking that positivity to heart, at the same time they acknowledge the unscientific nature of making holiday shopping predictions.

Local Shift
During the year, Leavitt sees a lot of young women enter her store to show off their babies.
“And they were my customers when they were little girls,” Leavitt said, smiling. “That’s the beauty of what a legacy business is all about.”
Leavitt is passionate about local businesses, many of which are run by the second, third, or fourth generation, and the reason that she created Living Local (www.living-local.net), a nonprofit organization of local independent business owners in Western Mass. and Northern Conn.
“Shop local has become a real trend in the U.S., and I looked around at our lovely communities, and we didn’t have one,” said Leavitt, referring to an organization that would promote such a philosophy. She worked with local media, and the first meeting brought more than 35 independent business owners just to hear what Leavitt had to say.
“The first story that I told was that, for every $100 that a customer spends in an independently owned store, whatever type it is, $69 of that stays in the community, through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures,” she told BusinessWest, adding that, for national chains, only $43 stays in the community, and worse yet, Internet shopping offers nothing for the local community. “But the real story is to educate the public that if they just shift they way they shop, even 10% of their shopping to shopping locally, they will positively impact local communities and our local tax base.”
After that April 2013 meeting, 20 local businesses signed up and paid the $100 fee to join that night. Now, 55 members of all sizes and counting — from Big Y to Merrick’s It’s All About You — can benefit from the group’s PR and in turn help educate the public about the importance of buying locally, Leavitt said.
The response has been magical (there’s that word again), she said; a recent week-long promotional event offering a $5 tote bag filled with members’ discount coupons sold out of the 500 bags in only six days, and a portion of those proceeds went to the Food Bank of Western Mass.

Business for the year to date has been very good for Dave DiRico, who is anticipating a busy holiday season for sporting-goods sales.

DiRico has high praise for Leavitt and her success with Kiddly Winks, having lived with his wife in Longmeadow for years. He is now benefiting from local shoppers, as she has done for years, due to the communities in Western Mass. and the Berkshires supporting his West Springfield sporting-goods store.
Another source of help for DiRico, Leavitt, and their fellow small-business owners is Small Business Saturday, which was launched in 2010 by American Express to promote its small-business customers and brand a special shopping day that could seize the momentum of Black Friday. The day allows card holders a percentage discount for all charges at participating local stores, and last year, Leavitt saw a 30% increase in American Express sales for that day.
“American Express really did that to grow their own company, but what they also did was to create something amazing and magical for small local business owners,” said Leavitt. “But a lot of people don’t even know that American Express started it or offers a discount; they just like to help out and shop locally on that special day.”
Regardless of why the day was created, American Express advertising alone is making it catch on nationally, and Leavitt said she and all the other local business owners are just happy that some light can shine on them, just as the holiday season is getting in to full swing.

Giftology
With no grandiose expectations, Merrick, a young widow with two small boys, took a risk and purchased her small boutique in 2004, offering eclectic yet affordable gifts, jewelry, women’s clothing, and accessories of all kinds. The venture took off, and she soon expanded to a 2,300-square-foot location and, in late 2010, opened a second location in Greenwich, Conn.
For Merrick, the 25% or more of annual sales in the month of December alone are worth all the shopping and researching unique vendors throughout the year.
One risk, she said, is purchasing large volumes of items that will theoretically appeal to a wide variety of customers. Miscalculations can leave the business owner with thousands of dollars of stock that sits, she noted, adding that such gambles should be taken only after considerable due diligence.
Lewis White, owner of A.O. White in East Longmeadow, a 4,200-square-foot men’s and women’s fine clothing and specialty shop since the 1940s, has been through three major recessions and has spent decades trying to figure out such challenging holiday inventory questions.
He credits his success to his buying standards, opting for fine-quality fabrics, styles, and brands that aren’t found at national chain retailers. And like Vishnyakov and Merrick, he relies on his customers to tell him what they like so his inventory can always remain fresh and unique. During the holiday season, White and his staff are monitoring stock daily and ordering by phone or online to keep up.
“We’re always projecting for increases; you can’t have too much or too little,” he explained. “And that’s the part of the business where you have to use your judgment.”

Perfect Fit
Having endured the economic downturns of the early ’90s, post-9/11, and more recently the Great Recession, Ounduian’s business has bounced back many times.
“Any non-essential item is what goes first — it happens to everyone,” said Ounduian, referring to how consumers change their habits during downturns. “But with this last recession, it didn’t bounce back as fast.”
But with the holidays approaching, Ounduian is using his judgment and banking on that positivity to sell his increased holiday inventory of branded names like David Yurman, Rolex, Mikimoto pearls, and Roberto Coin jewelry, which tend to be top sellers each holiday season.
Soon, he said, the male shoppers will start their shopping around the 12 days before Christmas, and especially the last two days before Christmas, which he expects will keep his store hopping.
“I think we’re going to have a busy season,” Ounduian added. “It’s just a gut feeling — but a good gut feeling.”

Elizabeth Taras can be reached at [email protected]

Plane Speaking

By BusinessWest Staff December 3, 2013

Cover Story

Gulfstream’s Westfield Facility Is in Takeoff Mode

Fran Ahern, general manager of Gulfstream’s Westfield facility.

Fran Ahern acknowledged that the analogy isn’t perfect, but, for the most part, it works, and it helps him effectively tell the story of one of the region’s least-known — and least-understood — business success stories.
“We’re a service center for airplanes,” said Ahern, general manager of Gulfstream’s sprawling operation at Barnes Municipal Airport in Westfield. He would go on to draw a number of loose comparisons between his operation and the corner garage or auto dealership where one might bring their Buick for new tires, a tuneup, or an inspection sticker.
But as he did so, he noted that he and his staff of 230 are obviously working with much bigger vehicles — and numbers — of every kind.
Indeed, the Gulfstream G650, the latest model developed by this subsidiary of General Dynamics, costs roughly $65 million out of the box. It has a 100-foot wingspan, weighs roughly 40 tons when empty, and stands 25 feet high. Meanwhile, the various hangars at the Westfield operation cover more than 200,000 square feet of real estate. The latest addition, opened earlier this year as part of a $24 million expansion, spans 125,000 square feet and has a 50-foot-high ceiling and overhead crane.
Still, the comparisons to the corner garage are effective, said Ahern, noting that, in both situations, service — which in this case is provided to Gulfstream models as well as competitors’ aircraft — is king, word-of-mouth referrals are critical for attaining vital new customers, and retention is ultimately the most important ingredient in the formula for success.
“This is a relatively small business in that everyone knows everyone,” he said of the aerospace industry and especially the service component. “This facility has a good reputation in the marketplace, and that’s through the hard work of all the employees, but it’s also a business where it’s ‘what have you done for me lately?’ So you have to continue providing quality service.”
The Westfield operation is doing well in this close-knit environment, said Ahern, noting that it is near full capacity on a regular basis — there are ebbs and flows in this business, as with most others — and the new hangar and its amenities and equipment present opportunities to keep the service slate full.
Also, the company’s diversity of products and services has enabled it to expand its client list and do more for those already on it. Examples include an expansive shop where interior work — from re-upholstering seats to installing new cabinetry — takes place, as well as a mobile service, called FAST (Field & Airborne Support Team), which brings Gulfstream technicians to the planes needing work, instead of the other way around.

Gulfstream’s expanded presence in Westfield has equated to roughly 100 new jobs and new opportunities for economic development in that area.

There have been challenges to overcome, certainly, especially in recent years, he noted. The sharp economic downturn impacted corporate travel significantly, with many corporations cutting back on this often-controversial expense item. Meanwhile, negative press about corporate fleets — especially those headlines about auto-industry executives taking company jets to Washington in the fall of 2008 to plead for bailout money — also impacted the industry.
“There were layoffs here and elsewhere as a result of those stories and their impact,” said Ahern, adding that some segments of the industry, especially the so-called ‘large-cabin’ planes, such as the G650 and other Gulfstream models, have rebounded from those setbacks.
And the skies certainly look brighter, he went on, as corporate travel rebounds in this country and expands in rapidly developing regions of the world such as Asia and South America, where Gulfstream is expanding its presence.
“We help make the world smaller,” said Ahern, referring to corporate air travel in general and Gulfstream in particular. “And that helps people get business done.”
For this issue, BusinessWest goes behind the scenes at a company where an intriguing kind of business is indeed getting done, and an operation is taking off — in every aspect of that phrase.

The Sky Is No Limit
Tracing the history of Gulfstream’s presence in this region, Ahern said the Georgia-based company’s name went on the sign outside the former KC Aviation facility at Barnes in 1998, a time of profound growth for the plane maker — and, thus, a need for facilities to build and service the aircraft. Gulfstream actually acquired three service centers from KC, with the others in Appleton, Wis. and Dallas, Texas.
That sign on the Westfield complex would be replaced by one that said ‘General Dynamics Aviation Services’ (the defense giant acquired Gulfstream in 1999) a few years later, Ahern went on, adding that this change was yet another illustration of how this business is very much like an auto-service center.
“The KC facilities were not only working on Gulfstream airplanes, but some of our competitors’ planes,” he explained. “And when Gulfstream acquired those facilities and put up Gulfstream signs, those other airplane owners didn’t think the facility would service those airplanes any more, so they stopped coming. “
The General Dynamics signs helped bring them back, he told BusinessWest, adding that the eventual strategy was to go back to Gulfstream signage, but with an intense marketing effort, one aimed at hammering home the point that the company was the only original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to service other OEM’s planes. Today, the facility at Barnes also services planes made by Bombardier, Dassault/Falcon, Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft, and others.
There have been few such instances of turbulence (another industry term) since Gulfstream came to Westfield as part of a broader effort on the part of the company to build service capacity across the country and, more recently, around the world, said Ahern.
The corporation, which first went into business with twin propeller jets in 1958, now has similar facilities domestically in Appleton; Brunswick, Ga.; Dallas; Las Vegas; Lincoln, Calif.; Long Beach, Calif.; Savannah, Ga.; Westfield; and West Palm Beach, Fla. It has also sites in Mexicali, Mexico; Luton, England; Beijing, China; and Sorocaba, Brazil.
These locations were chosen for strategic purposes, said Ahern, adding that they service geographic sectors and, especially in the case of the international locations, regions with strong growth in corporate air travel.
While the Westfield location, like all the others, handles what Ahern called “unscheduled maintenance” — planes based outside this area but which are in the Northeast and need service — the bulk of the aircraft in the hangars at any given time are based in New England and surrounding states such as New York and New Jersey. The Bay State’s sales-tax exemption on aircraft parts and maintenance, which has withstood several recent attempts to eliminate it, gives the Westfield location a competitive advantage that Ahern and others at Gulfstream certainly don’t want to lose.
The facility at Barnes specializes in everything from airframe maintenance to inspections; from avionics (instrumentation) services to that aforementioned interior work, which accounts for roughly 15% of the total volume. Much of the engine and airframe work is required, or scheduled, maintenance, he went on, adding that there are regular, hourly driven inspections for such aircraft.
The customer list is equally diverse, he continued, noting that it includes corporations, wealthy individuals, and commercial fleet operations such as Net Jets.
Ahern said the expansion completed earlier this year was driven by market demands for more capacity, and the simple fact that many of the latest large-cabin planes, such as the G650, were simply too big for the hangars at Barnes at the time.
To drive that point home, he pointed to the tail section of a G450 being serviced in one of the older hangars. There was probably less than five feet of clearance between the top of the tail and the ceiling, he said, adding that the G650 simply wouldn’t fit in that building.

Soar Subject
As he talked with BusinessWest in the new hangar at the Westfield location, Ahern pointed toward the back corner of the facility and something called a ‘tail dock.’
This is a moveable set of scaffolding, which, as the name implies, allows technicians easy and effective access to a plane’s tail assembly.

The new hangar at Gulfstream’s Westfield facility provides the room — and opportunities — for continued growth.

And it represents a considerable improvement over the scissors lift that was used by crews before the expansion project, said Ahern, adding that there are many similar examples of how the facilities have not only been enlarged — in a big way — but upgraded and modernized to improve efficiency, enhance service, and, hopefully, drive new business.
Another example is the overhead crane that was being used on this day for engine replacement on a G450, he noted, adding that, prior to the expansion, the facility would have to rent such equipment, an arrangement that was less efficient and less cost-effective.
Overall, the $24 million expansion project enables the company to add capacity — more and different kinds of jets can fit in the hangars — and also improve service to customers and broaden its impact on the community and local economy.
Elaborating on the service component, Ahern again referenced this tight industry sector where everyone knows everyone else, and noted that good experiences for customers lead not only to repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals, but also to some of those new models rolling out of Gulfstream assembly plants.
“You provide good service and a quality product to those customers with competitor aircraft, and maybe at some point, when they’re upgrading their airplane, they’re going to think about maybe upgrading to a Gulfstream,” he explained. “We have a saying around here: ‘product support sells new airplanes.’”
As for impact within the community, Ahern said it starts with the roughly 100 new jobs that have been added, many of which required technical skills and are good-paying positions. Meanwhile, with more planes in the hangars, the company can broaden its economic impact, he said, noting that the jets’ crews will stay in the area, often for several days, while they’re being serviced, staying in local hotels and dining at area eateries.
And from the economic-development standpoint, the state-funded expansion of Airport Industrial Road — one of the local and state incentives offered to induce Gulfstream to expand in Westfield — makes industrially zoned property at the airport more accessible for development, he noted.
Looking ahead, Ahern said, while the hangars are full many days, as they were when BusinessWest visited, there is always room for growth.
Elaborating, he said the company has to minimize those aforementioned peaks and valleys — to the extent possible — and move ever closer to what he called utopia: “100% loaded, 100% of the time.”
“Our goal is to get there, and right now, we’re pretty close,” he said, adding that, while the additional room and amenities in the expanded facilities, as well as programs like FAST and positive reviews in such industry publications as Professional Pilot magazine and Aviation International News will help close that narrow gap, ultimately, it’s quality of service that will eventually get it done.

Smooth Landing
While acknowledging that comparisons between service to the family mini-van and a $60 million jet aren’t perfect, Ahern said the principles of both business operations are essentially the same.
The tires may be a lot bigger on the jet, and the cost of the services provided to it will likely have a few more zeros, but in the end, it comes down to the customer’s experience, he noted, adding that Gulfstream has become an industry leader by understanding this and, more importantly, making those experiences positive.
And that’s plain speaking — or plane speaking, as the case may be.

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

He’s Still Climbing

By BusinessWest Staff December 3, 2013

Features

This Veteran Goes to the Front Lines — of Home Healthcare

Nicholas Colgin is still climbing — both literally and figuratively — as a guide for blind individuals on summits, an advocate for unemployed veterans, and now as the owner of his own home-care business.

There have been a number of datelines attached to news stories involving Nicholas Colgin.
Many of them originated in the Tagab Valley in eastern Afghanistan, where, as a combat medic serving in Bravo Company for the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, he saved the life of a French soldier shot in the head while facing enemy fire himself, an act of bravery that earned him the Bronze Star. It was also while serving in that remote region that others in his squad saved 42 Afghanis from a flooding river, an experience that he believes gave additional validation to his time serving in that conflict.
Later, though, there were stories out of Washington, first when he went to speak before Congress on the difficulties many veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were experiencing as they sought gainful employment, and later when he was mentioned in speeches given by President Obama that outlined steps to combat the high jobless rates among what are known as the ‘9/11 generation’ of veterans.
Referencing Colgin, who, despite those actions that earned him a medal, couldn’t get a job as an EMT in Wyoming because he lacked the proper certification, the president said, “that isn’t right, and it doesn’t make sense — not for our veterans, not for the strength of our country. If you can save a life in Afghanistan, you can save a life in an ambulance in Wyoming.”
Fast-forward roughly two years from that speech in a former gun factory at the Washington Navy Yard, and the latest dateline for news on Colgin is, improbably, Springfield, Mass. Indeed, he’s not in an ambulance, nor in Wyoming, but instead in one of the many corner offices on the 12th floor of 1350 Main St., also known as One Financial Plaza. There, a map covering more than half of one wall identifies his territory — all of Western Mass. and some of Northern Conn. — as a franchisee for a national chain called Right at Home, which, as the name suggests, is a home-care agency.
There are a number of pushpins now on that map. They identify major healthcare providers in the Greater Springfield area as potential partners of sorts as Colgin looks to obtain market share in what is becoming a crowded playing field for home-care services.
Cultivating such relationships is now a major part of Colgin’s job description, although he noted quickly that there are many pressing issues as his gets this business off the ground, from interviewing candidates for caregiver positions to hiring an operations staff to staging an open house.
“We’ve had more than 300 applications in the past two or three weeks,” he noted, adding that the process of screening these candidates is ongoing. “They go through orientation, and we put a lot of time and investment into training to make sure we’re not sending someone into a person’s home that we wouldn’t let in our own grandmother’s home or parent’s home.”
How and where this entrepreneurial gambit came to be is an intriguing saga, one that says a lot about this determined individual, who overcame a number of injuries himself to put his name — which at one time he had trouble spelling because of a traumatic brain injury, or what those who’ve suffered one call a TBI — and the title ‘owner’ on his current business card.
Summing it all up, he said it has to do with mountains, or, more specifically, with climbing, and the need to keep doing it.
Elaborating, he divided returning veterans (and people in general) into three categories: ‘quitters’ — those who give in to their frustrations and often become substance abusers; ‘campers’ — individuals who come home and “relax for a while” (something he admits he did to some extent); and ‘climbers’ — those who “just keep climbing.”
“I decided I was going to be a climber,” he said, “and do it literally by taking blind people up mountains, and more figuratively by finding the next goal in life.”

Nicholas Colgin earned a Bronze Star for saving a man’s life in Afghanistan, but later was wounded himself, an experience that transformed a helper into someone who needed help.

For this issue and its focus on the business of aging, BusinessWest talked at length with Colgin, who has gone from being the face of unemployment among returning veterans to an individual now employing others in a venture with which he feels, well, right at home.

In the Line of Fire
Colgin was in the Peruvian Andes late last month, leading a team of 12 disabled veterans up 18,000-foot Mount Mariposa, when he received word that his franchise had secured the license necessary to operate in Massachusetts.
The juxtaposition of those happenings adds some poignancy to Colgin’s remarks about climbing, and also to the many facets of his life and the ways he measures success.
“I was going to do one last guiding trip before opening the business,” he explained. I submit the application and hop on a plane to Peru. I get one day in, and our application has been approved. It was a tricky place to be in — I’m in Peru, and now my business is open, and I’ve got to get back and hire employees.
“It’s been quite a journey, and this part of it is really just getting started,” he went on, before venturing back to another dateline in his life, the first.
That would be Chesterfield, Va., a small community not far from Richmond, where he spent several generally unhappy and challenging years.
His mother wound up in prison, and his father, with only a sixth-grade education, struggled to earn a living. Colgin said he was essentially raised by his grandmother, and by his senior year in high school, he was in many ways rudderless. It was a friend bent on joining the Army who provided inspiration and a compass point, but Colgin still had no idea what to do with himself — in the military or after his tour of duty was over.
“I signed on as a medic,” he said, following those words with a pause and shrug as if to indicate there was no profound reason for that choice. “I had never done anything in healthcare … when I went to sign up, I didn’t really know much about the military other than what you see in movies. I had just seen Black Hawk Down, and I said to them, ‘I want to be one of those guys.’
“They chuckled at me and said, ‘that’s not really a job,’” he went on. “They said, ‘you’re pretty smart … you can be this, or this, or maybe a medic.’ I said, ‘I’ll be a medic — that sounds like a job people really look up to.’”
He would eventually find out just how off he was in that reasoning — at least when it came to finding a job a few years later.
Fast-forwarding a little, Colgin passed the six-month training course to become a medic; two-thirds of those in his class did not. He worked in several facilities stateside, teaching medical classes, and was set to get out of the military without being deployed, but wound up volunteering for an assignment. “I figured, we’re at war; I might as well do my part,” he said, adding that a deployment he thought would last six months to a year instead stretched to 15 months.
He called it the “quintessential war experience,” one that took place mostly at Firebase Morales-Frazier. The highlight of his tour, if one could call it that, came in 2007 when he went to the aid of a French soldier hit by Taliban fire. The two were pinned down for about three hours, under constant fire, while Colgin administered care credited with saving the man’s life.
Colgin has several scattered memories of that experience, everything from being able to put whatever French he managed to retain from high-school classes to good use, to his own emotions as he offered care and counseling to the wounded soldier.
“You’re in Afghanistan, you’re getting shot at, people are getting blown up … you’re treating these people day in and day out, but you don’t really get scared; you just say, ‘this is just a job, this is what I’m here to do, treat it as a professional situation,’” he recalled. “But then I remember taking care of him. We’re in a small vehicle finally getting out of there, and his legs are on mine. I’m trying to tell him everything’s going to be all right. I was saying it confidently, but my legs just wouldn’t stop shaking, because I didn’t know if he was going to be all right. But I knew if he wasn’t going to be all right, it was not going to be because I slacked on my job and didn’t do all I could.”
Just a few months later, Colgin was driving a Humvee — something medics don’t often do, but he felt compelled to take his turn behind the wheel — when it took a glancing blow from a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG. He said his head hit something, probably the steering wheel or windshield, breaking his nose and giving him what he called a “concussion of sorts.”
“One side of my body was numb, and I remember thinking that something wasn’t right,” he recalled. “We didn’t really know a lot about traumatic brain injuries at the time. I came home, had a lot of surgeries on my face — they rebuilt my nose — and needed a lot of treatment.
“I had been this helper overseas,” he went on, “and then I came home and needed help for the first time in my life. I’d never been in that situation before and didn’t really know anyone who had been in that situation before.”
And while he would eventually find some assistance, he essentially helped himself to a new career opportunity and that suite on the 12th floor.

Peaking His Interest
While serving in the Tagab Valley, Colgin, like many veterans, filled the idle time by reading whatever he could get his hands on. And increasingly, this meant books and especially magazines — because they weigh less and are thus easier to carry — about the outdoors.
“I was going to be an outdoor guide,” he said of plans he was making for life after military service, adding quickly that most of these were mapped out before he was injured. “I had never seen these huge mountains in person — I’d never really left the East Coast — and was just fascinated by that country.”
Upon returning home and “healing up” in North Carolina, Colgin would settle in Wyoming to pursue that dream, but he failed in his quest to graduate from the National Outdoor Leadership School due to lingering health problems, physical and mental — he would go back four years later and complete the program, though — and eventually shifted his career aspirations to healthcare, only to find more frustration.
“I had provided medical care in extreme situations — I’d saved someone who was shot in the head while I was getting shot at myself, in the middle of Afghanistan with limited resources — so I figured I shouldn’t have any problem doing emergency medicine, such as work as an EMT,” he told BusinessWest. “Unfortunately, I was wrong.
“And this is an issue that many people in the military are facing and that they’ve just started addressing in the past few years,” he went on. “Basically, you’re trained to do a job in the military, and you can do it in the military, but the certifications do not transfer to the civilian sector. I was trained as an EMT basic, sent to Afghanistan. I’m treating people who were shot in the head, I’m giving IVs and administering medications — and you can’t do that stateside.”
Those who drive trucks and service vehicles in the military face similar roadblocks, he said, adding that thousands of individuals have struggled with the task of turning experience with the armed forces into a job back home.
And this was the message Colgin wanted to bring to elected leaders and the civilian population as the dateline for his story shifted to Washington in mid-2011.
As a representative with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), he spoke before Congress on his frustrations with finding employment in what he considered his chosen field, and made it clear that he was not alone in this predicament.
His comments caught the attention of many groups and individuals, including the commander in chief.
“I remember I showed up to work one day — I was interning for the IAVA — and someone said to me, ‘the White House called for you,’” he told BusinessWest. “That’s not something you hear all the time, and I thought they were joking with me, but they were serious.
“I called them back, and they told me the president was considering telling my story in a speech the next day,” he went on. “They weren’t sure he was going to tell it, but I had to get to D.C. I got a haircut, grabbed my suit, and hopped on a train to Washington.”
After the president’s speech, Colgin found himself in demand — with the media, at least. He did appearances on CNN, the Rachael Maddow Show, the CBS Early Show, and others, becoming adept at live interviews. This face time with the public brought him some job offers — “although not as many as you might expect with the president telling your story” — and eventually he took one, working as membership coordinator with the IAVA, and resettled in Manhattan.
That island is worlds away from Chesterfield, Va. in every respect imaginable, and Colgin liked being an advocate for veterans, working with Congress, and getting plenty of coverage in the media. But something was missing from the equation.
Actually, two things.
The first was an entrepreneurial venture that he could call his own, and the second was what he called “a community in the true sense of the word, a place where I could rest my head, then get up and really get involved in making a difference.”
He would eventually find both in Springfield.

Summit Meetings
Recalling the chain of events that led to his grand opening nearly a month ago, Colgin started with his decision to “step back,” as he put it, and take a sabbatical from his job with the IAVA. He took this opportunity to do some of the outdoor work he’d started dreaming about in Afghanistan, and eventually made acquaintances with Eric Weihenmayer, the first blind man to scale Mount Everest.
“He and I became good friends, and I ended up picking up a lot of skills to guide individuals up mountains and in the back country,” he recalled. “It was a great experience … I started guiding blind people up mountains. I came back to New York after my sabbatical and realized I had to make a change in my life.”
Coincidentally, he attended what he called a “business boot camp for veterans” in Boston, an intense, three-week program conducted in conjunction with Harvard that helped him discover latent entrepreneurial instincts and drive.
“I realized that what was inside me was stronger than anything in my way,” he told BusinessWest. “I realized that I could open a business; I left and started looking for investors.”
As that search for financial backing commenced, so, too, did the process of choosing what kind of business to get into, he went on, adding that he soon concluded that he would like to do something healthcare-related, and something that would make a difference in peoples’ lives. Discussions with a consultant specializing in linking individuals with franchise opportunities narrowed the search to a few national chains, and eventually to Right at Home, an Omaha, Neb.-based enterprise launched in 1995 that by that time had facilities in more than 40 states as well as in the United Kingdom, Brazil, China, and Canada.
It was not, however, doing business in Western Mass., and Colgin, with $250,000 from some investors, decided to seize that opportunity.
“It was just me and the dog, and I could go anywhere and do anything,” he said, referring to his English pointer, Dixie, whom he described as his rock. “I wanted to stay on the East Coast, and started looking at places and scheduling visits. I ended up coming to Springfield, and it looked like a place where I could put down roots. I moved around a lot with the military and never really had a family growing up, but when I came here, I got a sense that this was a place where I could grow.”
Colgin acknowledged that there is considerable competition within the growing home-care industry and that he has a lot to learn as he joins that crowded field of players. But he believes he has the basic ingredients to reach his goals, which he admits are still being set.
“The language of healthcare is pretty universal, and caring is pretty universal as well; if you can care for Afghanistan locals in the middle of a war, you can take care of anyone in the world,” he said, adding that Right at Home has a proven model and track record for success that he believes he can build on. “I care about helping people realize their dreams, and I care about doing the right thing, and at the end of the day, that’s what this is all about.
“They’re extremely innovative,” he said of the chain. “They have great brand management and amazing quality.”

On a Grand Scale
Based on all that has happened in his life since those initial, awkward discussions with Army recruiters nearly a decade ago, it would be logical to assume that Springfield probably won’t be the last dateline for news stories about Colgin.
As he said, he’s a climber, and he doesn’t intend to stop doing that.
For now, though, the climb has reached Western Mass. and a critical juncture in his career, and there are immediate goals right ahead of him.
The plan is to keep reaching higher — in every aspect of that phrase — but that’s something Colgin has been doing his entire life.

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

Climate Change

By BusinessWest Staff November 19, 2013

Features

Chambers Respond to a Challenging New Environment

Jeff Ciuffreda says the ACCGS and Springfield Chamber have “retooled” when it comes to the services offered to members.

Roy Nascimento told BusinessWest that there’s a saying of sorts used within his industry, one that goes something like this: “when you’ve seen one chamber of commerce … you’ve seen one chamber of commerce.”
The president and CEO of the New Bedford Area Chamber and the incoming president of the Mass. Assoc. of Chamber of Commerce Executives (MACE) summoned that phrase to express the sentiment that, while many have a tendency to paint these institutions with one broad brush, they are in many ways very different from one another.
This is true with regard to everything from size to geography to the specific focus of programs and energy within each organization, he said, noting that his chamber, for example, leads a number of initiatives aimed at supporting and growing the New Bedford area’s $1 billion fishing industry.
But despite these apparent differences, chambers across this state — and around the country, for that matter — are facing some common, and formidable, challenges.
Chief among them is membership. It is down for almost all chambers, and by 25% or more at many of them from 10 or even five years ago, said Jeffrey Ciuffreda, president of the Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield and executive director of the Springfield Chamber. That latter organization had perhaps 750 members five years ago, he said, and now counts roughly 520, a nearly 30% decrease that he described as “typical,” at least in his estimation.
There are several reasons for such drops, said Ciuffreda and others we spoke with. He and Nascimento both mentioned lingering effects from the Great Recession and a related, ongoing trend toward consolidation in many industries — from banking to insurance; from healthcare to the media — that has simply left fewer players to pay dues to a chamber.
But there are other factors, said Ciuffreda, listing everything from competition from other chambers and groups such as young professional organizations to some changing attitudes about chambers on the part of the mostly smaller businesses that now dominate membership rosters.
“Before, the larger, more established corporations joined the chamber because it was the right thing to do, and the chamber was looked upon as the chief cheerleader for that community,” he said. “Now, when you’re out there getting new members, you’re getting mostly smaller businesses that are looking to the chamber for more assistance, guidance, and some advocacy.”
Summing it all up, Ciuffreda described the current environment as “the changing face of chambers,” and said some organizations are reacting to it more quickly and more effectively than others. Overall, chambers are doing things they haven’t done recently, or much at all, he told BusinessWest, mentioning such initiatives as strategic planning, marketing studies, and deep introspection about mission, programming, and ways to bring more value to members and prospective members.
According to Kate Phelon, a relative newcomer to chamber administration — she took the reins of the Greater Westfield organization three years ago — while providing value has always been a key element in any chamber’s success, in this changed environment it is more imperative than ever to provide what amounts to ROI to members.
And this means all members, she said, adding that the Westfield Chamber has been working to identify the needs of specific sectors, or groups, and develop programs to meet them.

Kate Phelon says the Westfield Chamber is focused on finding ways to serve members across all business sectors, from manufacturers to nonprofits.

“Not all members have the same needs, nor do they all see the same value in their chamber,” she explained. “If you look at manufacturers, nonprofits, and very small businesses, those with three employees or fewer, they all see a different value. My manufacturing members will not get business coming to an after-5 event, but my nonprofits and small businesses love those events; it’s their bread and butter. Providing value to each one of these groups is a real challenge, but you have to meet it.”
Kathy Anderson, who segued from Holyoke City Hall, specifically the office of Planning and Economic Development, to the directorship of that city’s chamber 18 months ago, agreed.
She said the Holyoke Chamber has been aggressive in development of new programs, ranging from an ‘Ask a Chamber Expert’ initiative to an endeavor to spotlight the work of manufacturers based in the city, to something called SPARK (Stimulating Potential, Accessing Resource Knowledge), a venture aimed at “fanning the flame of entrepreneurship” (more on these efforts later).
They were all blueprinted, she said, to provide value-added services to different business groups, while also enabling the chamber to “keep changing and evolving, and providing something fresh and different.”
For this issue, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at this changing face of chambers of commerce, and at what area organizations are doing to adjust to — and thrive in — this new environment.

Matters of Relevance
As he talked about the current climate for chambers and their leaders, Nascimento said there are both challenges and opportunities, and that the common denominator involving elements of each category is the term ‘relevance.’
He used it to describe what chambers must have at a time when they are smaller — at least in terms of membership — than they were years ago, but more is being asked from them, both in the community and from those members.
“Relevance is not a new term, but it is re-emerging within our industry,” he explained. “Is the programming relevant to our members? Is it adding value to our members? Is it providing value to our communities?”
Elaborating, he said that the chambers that are most effectively responding to the changing times are becoming involved in the many facets of economic development — from education to tourism to advocacy — and are becoming more focused on the communities they’re serving.
As examples, he noted his chamber’s work to support the fishing industry — it has helped create what’s known as a ‘seafood buyers mission,’ an event that last year recorded $12 million in sales — and also its work with other groups to revive the region’s convention and visitors bureau, thus bolstering another strong sector of its economy.
There are similar examples from across the state, he said, adding that proactive chambers are changing and getting more involved, again, out of necessity, to gain and retain members.
Indeed, the biggest challenge facing what Nascimento called the “chamber industry” is the same one confronting most all business sectors — ongoing consolidation.
“Our members are merging, they’re being bought out, they’re retiring, and all because of a number of factors — globalization, competition, and others,” he explained, noting that his chamber has seen membership drop from 1,200 to roughly 950 over the past decade or so. “The market out there for traditional members of a chamber are the stakeholders in the business community — your banks, your credit unions, insurance companies, printers, local media, hospitals — and all those industries are consolidating themselves.
“Since I’ve been here over the past seven years, we’ve seen several of our local community banks merge with other community banks that are members,” he went on. “And we’ve seen media merge; at one point, we had a daily newspaper in New Bedford, another daily in a neighboring community, a business publication, and a weekly newspaper in each of the towns. Now, there’s one company that owns them all.”
Similar developments have taken place within the insurance sector, where a number of smaller, family owned agencies have been merged into larger operations; the printing sector; and even office supplies, he said. “We used to have three or four office-supply companies in New Bedford, but they’re all gone — there’s one company, and it’s a regional company.”
This “shrinkage” within the marketplace, as he called it, has left chambers with little choice but to sharpen their focus on services to members and find new — or sometimes old — ways to be relevant.
Ciuffreda agreed, and said the ACCGS and the Springfield Chamber are responding to this challenge in many ways, but mostly a sharper focus on identifying needs and concerns among members — and in the community — and then addressing them.
“We’ve retooled a little bit,” he told BusinessWest, using a word he would come back to often. “When we look at the reasons why people join chambers, it’s clear that we’ve moved on from those days when it was the right thing to do. People are much more focused on services and what they can get out of being a member.”
And this goes beyond benefits such as programs that aggregate small businesses to provide savings on health insurance or discount pharmacy cards, he went on, adding that members are looking for more technical assistance, advocacy, and involvement in key issues.
He said the ACCGS, which has been “in and out” with regard to providing technical assistance to small businesses, will look to get back in if funding can be secured from the state and the private sector. Meanwhile, he said the organization is already more involved in such matters as education and closing the so-called skills gap that is impacting many sectors.
“We’re getting much more involved in education because we are hearing from businesses that want to expand that there is clearly a skills gap,” he noted. “We’re more involved with the school systems, the vocational schools, and the community colleges to try and close that gap.”

Getting Down to Business
The need to effectively identify member needs and tailor a roster of services to meet them is one of many motivating factors behind the ACCGS’s continued involvement in programs with marketing and business students at Western New England University, specifically those taught by marketing professor Janelle Goodnight.
She told BusinessWest that, on several occasions, her students have gathered research on the ACCGS, competing chambers in this region, and chambers in general, and then developed comprehensive marketing plans for consideration.
The latest of these plans will be ready by the end of the fall, she said, adding that, because the ACCGS is a client, she could not get into specifics about what will likely be in the document. But she did say that research conducted last spring revealed that many ACCGS members and prospective members did not fully understand the full range of services the chamber provides, and thus need an education through effective marketing.
Meanwhile, that research also revealed that the chamber’s membership is getting older — “members are aging out” was the phrase Goodnight used — and it is not as diverse, from a demographic standpoint, as the region it serves. Thus, moving forward, two obvious goals are to attract both younger business owners and minority business owners.
The need to more effectively serve members represents one of the many ways in which chambers are very much like the small businesses that dominate their membership roles, said Phelon. They are still coping with the lingering effects of the Great Recession, she noted, but also myriad other issues, ranging from the challenge of understanding and making effective use of technology to mastering the many nuances of social media, to simply finding ways to grow in an environment where it is difficult to do so.
“I have IT issues every day,” she said. “Things are changing constantly … should I get this piece of equipment? How am I going to swipe my credit cards? It’s very hard to keep up, and that’s just one challenge we’re facing.”
Some of the others give credence to Nascimento’s comments about each chamber being different. The Westfield Chamber, for example, serves 10 communities. Westfield and Southwick are home to most members, but the organization’s reach also extends to the small hilltowns (many with populations of 1,000 people or fewer) to the west.
Reaching out to the business owners in these communities, and then convincing them to take part in events and programs several miles down Route 20, can be difficult, she went on, but succeeding in those efforts not only helps the chamber, but it builds a stronger regional business community.
Phelon’s philosophy is summed up in the slogan she puts on the front of her membership packets: ‘The Power of Connectivity.’
She said it refers to the many ways in which the chamber can provide connections — from face-to-face networking events, which she still considers far more effective than social-media outlets, to simply providing information that can help a business owner solve a problem or seize an opportunity.
Phelon said the Westfield Chamber probably had between 400 and 450 members in the late ’80s, but is now roughly half that size, with about 215 at present. While it is not realistic to think the organization can again reach its high-water mark, she said there is certainly room for improvement, and it’s happening, thanks in large part to the hiring of a business development manager.
“Now, we’re actually growing,” she said, noting that, in recent years, new memberships have barely kept pace with the inevitable attrition chambers see each year. “And our ability to keep growing is related directly to our success with providing value to all our members.”

Value Proposition
As she talked about the many new initiatives at the Greater Holyoke Chamber, Anderson said they’ve been developed with several goals in mind. Providing more value to members is obviously one of them, she noted, but beyond that is a desire to help businesses with the challenges that are common to all of them — marketing, gaining new business, and saving money.
One of these concepts, called ‘Ask a Chamber Expert,’ has all these goals in mind.
Started last year, this series of workshops, as the title suggests, enables participants to ask a designated chamber member about some specific subject matter, which to date has included ‘How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business,’ ‘How to Use LinkedIn as a Connecting Point,’ ‘How to Write a Business Plan,’ and even ‘How to Read a Blueprint,’ a requested program that was comparatively well-attended.
“I certainly learned a lot that day,” said Anderson, adding that the program brings benefits to both those asking the questions and those answering them.
“If I use my own members for these workshops and they become the expert in the room, this gets the people to network and know the businesses within our chamber organization,” she explained. “But it also gives low-cost [$10] advice to members, and if they want more help beyond that and want to hire that person to help them, they can do that.”
Meanwhile, another new initiative is aimed specifically at manufacturers, a constituency that, as Phelon noted, doesn’t directly benefit from many traditional chamber programs, such as after-5 events and breakfasts, where service-related businesses can more easily secure new customers.
The multi-faceted initiative is instead designed to build awareness of manufacturing facilities, said Anderson, noting that such exposure could help generate new business while also introducing young people to potential career opportunities.
“October was Manufacturing Month,” she said, pointing to a full slate of events and programs designed to celebrate and draw attention to that sector. “We had three different tours of manufacturing facilities, and they were open to the public because manufacturers want people to know what they do and what’s being made in the community.”
Another endeavor, in which the chamber will partner with the city’s Boys & Girls Club and, more specifically, with those involved in videography, will place three-to five-minute vignettes about Holyoke-area manufacturers on the chamber’s website.
“This is a value added for them, because they want people to know what they’re doing,” she explained, adding that businesses with specific needs may learn that a Holyoke business can make that part or product. “And down the road, we’re going to have a number of Baby Boomers retiring, and there are questions about who’s going to fill those positions. This program will allow these companies to show what kinds of great jobs there are in our manufacturing businesses.”
And then, there’s SPARK, which is designed to help people bring ideas to reality, said Anderson, by connecting individuals with resources and getting them the support they need. The program will offer mentoring, training, advising, tutoring, teaching opportunities, micro loans and below-market real-estate services, she noted, adding that the name was chosen in part to recognize those who have the ‘spark,’ or desire, to take their dreams to the next level, but need various forms of help to make them happen.
Like Phelon, Ciuffreda, and Nascimento, Anderson also mentioned efforts to partner with other chambers and various economic-development-related organizations to bring still more value to members and bolster the business community or specific sectors within it.
These efforts and the others chronicled above represent a response to the new landscape facing chambers, said Nascimento, adding quickly that the scene didn’t change overnight, and the necessary adjustments won’t come that quickly either.
“There are a lot of challenges for chambers,” he said in conclusion, “but there are also a lot of opportunities. This is an exciting time for chambers and our industry; we’re helping our members, and our communities, with many difficult challenges taking place out there.”

Joining the Fight
While Nascimento contends that if you’ve seen one chamber, you’ve seen just one chamber, these organizations are facing a number of common challenges in a climate seemingly far removed from the one that existed decades ago, when joining the chamber was simply the responsible thing to do.
Words like ‘value’ and ‘relevance’ were not recently added to the chamber industry’s lexicon, but they have certainly taken on new meaning — and importance.
And they will continue to be watchwords in the months and years to come.

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

Western Mass. Business Expo 2013

By BusinessWest Staff November 19, 2013

Features

A photographic look back at the Expo

The third annual Western Mass. Business Expo, produced by BusinessWest and again presented by Comcast Business, was staged Nov. 6 in downtown Springfield. More than 2,200 attendees passed through the doors at the MassMutual Center, and they had an opportunity to visit more than 120 exhibitor booths, take in a dozen educational seminars, and watch several special presentations on the Show Floor Theater. The day’s programming started with the ACCGS November breakfast, featuring Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Co. and the Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream Program. Other highlights included the Professional Women’s Chamber November Luncheon featuring Kathrine Switzer, the first women to run in the Boston Marathon, as well as a Pitch Contest and Demo Day presented by Valley Venture Mentors, the day-capping Expo Social, and the announcement of the winner of the Greater Springfield Extreme Website Makeover contest.

Far left, Kate Campiti, associate publisher of BusinessWest, looks on as Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno welcomes the crowd and kicks off the Expo. Left, members of the Young Professional Society of Greater Springfield represented the nonprofit networking organization at the show. From left are Kristin Foley, senior employment coordinator at Human Resources Unlimited; Stephanie Killian, event coordinator/marketing assistant at Inspired Marketing; Ashley Clark, commercial services officer at Westfield Bank; Jill Monson, owner of Inspired Marketing; Claudine Gaj, owner of Magic Spoon Catering; and Jeremy Casey, assistant vice president/commercial services officer at Westfield Bank. Below left, Wendy Bryne, left, strategic sourcing manager at MGM Resorts International, speaks with Sophia Sarno, office manager and sales at WhiteStone Marketing Group, at the MGM booth.

More than 120 businesses and nonprofits exhibited at the Expo. Among those seeking the attention of attendees were (clockwise from far left): QualPrint in Pittsfield, represented by, from left, Karen Vosburgh, head estimator, Michael Lennon, account executive, and Audrey Procopio, director of Marketing and Human Resources; Comcast Business, represented by, from left, Adam Dubilo, sales leader, Tina Peel, business account executive, Tim O’Brien, client solutions engineer, Charlie Tzoumas, regional vice president, Stephanie Bedard, marketing communications and operations specialist; Jessie Horne, commercial technician, Tim Paige, business account executive, and Jody Hart, business account executive; and Bay Path College, represented by Sheryl Kosakowski, director of Graduate Admissions (left), and Heather Bushey, associate director of Graduate Admissions.

Left to Right from top left: Eric Harlow, broker relations manager with Health New England, speaks with Kyle Seesman, community relations at ProEx Physical Therapy, at the HNE booth; Jill Tower, associate at Johnson & Hill Staffing (left), and June Liberty, director of Operations for the company, meet Albert Rivers, employment specialist with the Department of Elder Affairs in Springfield; attorneys David McBride and Amelia Holstrom await visitors to the Skoler, Abbott & Presser, P.C. booth; Representing the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst were, from left, Kyle Bate, academic advisor, Judith Miller, director of Undergraduate Online Programs, Jennifer Meunier, director of Business Development and Promotional Strategies for Professional Programs, and Trista Hevey, business development analyst; John Veit, marketing and recruiting coordinator with Meyers Brothers Kalicka, and Teresa Perkins, senior associate for the firm, talk with Susan Smith, director of Business Development for We Care Computers; Brendan Fontanello, promotions manager, and Christine Moauro, marketing and web advertising specialist, staff the abc40/FOX 6 Springfield booth.

The Expo featured entertainment, informative seminars, special presentations, and other highlights that gave attendees plenty to see, learn, and do. Left to right from top left: Kirk Smith, CEO of the Greater Springfield YMCA, presents a seminar titled “The New Business of a Nonprofit”; Luncheon speaker Kathrine Switzer relates the story of how she was the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon; Hector Bauza, president of Bauza & Associates, presents a seminar titled “Effectively Reaching the Hispanic Community”; from left, panelists Audrey Morse Gasteier, deputy director of Policy and Research and director of Employer Policy at the Health Connector; Elin Gaynor, Esq., complaints and appeals manager at Health New England and leader of the company’s Affordable Care Act implementation team, and Marc Criscitelli, vice president at FieldEddy Insurance, lead a presentation titled “Understanding Obamacare”; Peter Ellis, creative director/vice president of DIF Design and organizer of the Springfield Extreme Website Makeover contest, presents a ceremonial $25,000 check to La Esperanza: The Hope of the Pioneer Valley Inc., an organization that provides comprehensive breast-health education and support services to Latina women in Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee. Beside Ellis, from left, are Linda Cooper, a member of La Esperanza’s board of directors, Jeanette Rodríguez, the organization’s executive director, and Kate Campiti, associate publisher of BusinessWest; Alysia Cutting Cosby (above), a vocalist and actress from Dream Studios of Springfield, leads a group in a performance on the Show Floor Theater; John Maguire, president and CEO of Friendly’s Corp., talks about ongoing efforts to revitalize the company’s brand; Jim Koch, co-founder and chairman of the Boston Beer Co., the breakfast keynote speaker, uses some of his own product to gets his points across; Duane Cashin, president and CEO at Cashin & Co., presents a seminar titled “The Future of Sales.”

A special Pitch Contest & Demo Day showcased local entrepreneurs and those looking to get businesses off the ground. Left to right from far left: Dave (left) and Mike Mullen from KloudBook make their two-minute pitch. Bottom left: judge Ryan Walsh, operations manager from MassChallenge, makes some comments to one of the presenters. The other judges were Paul Peter Nicolai, principal of Nicolai Law Group P.C. (also pictured); Linda Peters, with the Isenberg School of Management at UMass; Stephen Davis, with the Irene E. and George A. Davis Foundation; and Joel Vengco, vice president and chief information officer, Information & Technology, for Baystate Health. Above: the pitch contestants contestants included, from left, Daniel Ross of Mission Control, Mike Mullen from KloudBook, Kacey Clark from PeopleHedge, MJ Jang from Voncierge, Natasha Clark of Lioness magazine, Richard Stevens from Worksafe Technology, Diane Pearlman from Berkshire Film and Media Commission, Dan Koval from Worksafe Technology, Dede Wilson from Bakepedia, Marcie Muehlke from Celia Grace, Dave Mullen from Kloudbook, and Dino Larouche from KnowledgeWare21.

The Expo Social, the day-capping networking event, drew a large crowd. Left to right from far left: from MGM Resorts International, from left, Gerri Harris, director of Contract Administration, Frank Scharadin, executive director of Strategic Sourcing, Michelle Reichert, strategic sourcing manager, and Mark Stolarczyk, vice president of Global Procurement; from left, Kristi Reale, senior manager of Meyers Brothers Kalika, P.C.,Teresa Utt, senior account executive for Andrew Associates, and Joanne Haley, senior associate, and Anthony Gabinetti, senior manager, audit and accounting, both with Meyers Brothers Kalicka; from left, John Gormally, publisher of BusinessWest and owner of WGGB abc40/FOX 6 Springfield, Jeff Ciuffreda, president of the Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield, John Garvey, president of Garvey Communication Associates and board member of Valley Venture Mentors, and Dawn Creighton, regional director of AIM; David Condon, owner of Northern Security Systems (left), and Jim White, co-owner of Go Graphix.

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]

Start the Presses

By BusinessWest Staff November 19, 2013

Commercial Printing Sections

Commercial Printers Emerge Strong from Recession Years

Greg Desrosiers says adding digital services at Hadley has opened up significant opportunities with small-run projects.

While many industries are still feeling the aftereffects of the Great Recession, commercial printers are telling a different story.
“It’s been very strong,” said Greg Desrosiers, vice president of sales at Hadley Printing in Holyoke. “When the economy first started to tank, printers, as a whole, were among the first to feel it. We really felt it back in early 2009. We, along with many other printers, felt people were holding back on expenses they normally would not have held back on, because there was a lot of uncertainty.”
However, he told BusinessWest, “I can say all that is truly behind us. People are moving forward, and the past two years have been very, very strong from a production standpoint.”

TigerPress, which recently celebrated its 28th year in business and moved two years ago from Northampton to a larger facility in Easthampton, reports a similar surge in volume.
“We moved because we had expanded, and we had two different production facilities,” CEO Jennifer Shafii said. “We finally found a building where we could house both. It was very important to be under one roof.
“Our clients are kind of across the board,” she added. “Large clients, small clients — we take care of everyone. We do everything from offset-print magazines to business cards, to package printing on boxes and folded cartons. We have a very wide range of printing capabilities here. And it has been a good year. We’ve been growing steadily since our move to East Longmeadow.”
Stephen Lang, president of Curry Printing in West Springfield, has also enjoyed a strong year. He said his company has made a concerted effort to stay away from ‘commodity’ jobs — like business cards and postcards — that people can have produced just as easily on the Internet.

Jennifer Shafii says TigerPress has been a regional leader in environmentally friendly printing.

“We’re concentrating on specialized projects and tight-deadline projects, not commodity-type printing that’s more cheaply done if you’ve got the time to go online and do it. A lot of our work is time-sensitive and requires more human contact than just plugging things in online; that’s what’s keeping us busy.”
Curry has also thrived through diversity, as evidenced by its growing niche in large-format printing.
“The sign business is coming into its own. We’re doing more large-format digital stuff, more sign work, and more trade-show graphics,” said Lang. “A lot of times, someone going to a trade show not only needs cards but signage as well. We’ve become the one-stop shop, able to provide everything they need.”
Reflecting his store’s growth, Lang recently moved Curry from its longtime storefront on Elm Street to a larger facility on nearby Union Street, complete with 1,000 square feet of extra space and indoor bays to install vehicle graphics.
“We’ve always done vehicle graphics, but waiting for a nice day in New England is not always the best way to schedule an install,” he said with a laugh.

Steve Lang says one key to success today is diversity of services, such as Curry’s niche in large-format printing.

The Internet has changed a print shop’s needs when it comes to visibility, he added. “When we first started, it was important to be on a main road and be easily found. But it has become less important with workflow the way it is now. A lot of people, instead of walking through the door, just upload their files.”

Lean and Green
Hadley Printing has changed with the times in some ways, too, said Desrosiers.
“We’re now closing in on our second year offering a digital print service — digital, short-run, high-end printing. If someone wants to do 1,000 postcards, instead of having to go on the printing press, we offer that digitally, and it’s a very economical avenue,” he explained. “It’s been a huge bonus for us and really opened a segment of business we struggled with for a long time — how do you fire up the printing press for 1,000 postcards?”
He noted that many clients would much rather order small runs of a product four times a year then order in bulk once a year, which clashed with Hadley’s focus on larger-run projects.
“It’s tough, because in printing, the commodities of scale are always there,” he said. “If you know you’re going to use 5,000 brochures in a year, it’s so much cheaper to just order 5,000 of them. But people fear something might change in the brochure — they might edit employee information, for example — so they feel more comfortable ordering in smaller batches. That’s where digital has its strengths. We’ve been marketing it just as we do offset printing, with all the same proofing and delivery to your door as with offset.”
While offset printing still represents 80% of Hadley’s business, Desrosiers said, he’s pleased that the company is now able to take on smaller jobs that don’t utilize offset technology. “One of the things printers struggle with is, how can you make it financially worth your while to produce 100 of this and 100 of that? But we’re doing it, and it’s opened up some really nice opportunities for us, some new avenues that were never there before.
“With the influx of digital printing,” he continued, “if someone only wants 25 of something, we can do it. Four years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to do that; we only did jobs of 500 and up. I don’t have to say that anymore, which is nice.”
TigerPress, meanwhile, has increasingly come to the forefront as a ‘green’ printer, Shafii told BusinessWest. Her husband, Reza, the company’s president, recently updated his book on the subject, Go Green on Your Next Print, and they both “take pride in being eco-friendly and being environmentally conscious,” Jennifer said.
The changes TigerPress has implemented over the years range from chemical-free plates to vegetable-based inks.
“We were one of the first printers to be eco-friendly,” she said. “We were the leader of the pack for green printing. I think it’s important, both for both me personally — I have kids, and we should all be responsible for the environment in every industry — and our customers appreciate it too.”
Shafii said offset printing has been more amenable to eco-friendly practices than, say, digital printing. “A lot of people feel that digital printing is green, but it’s not that green. With offset printing, we use vegetable ink as our house stock. We use chemistry-free plating systems, so we’re not putting chemicals into the environment. With digital, you’re very limited in paper stock, and you have to buy the toner, which is not green.”
Shafii said customer response to the company’s green image has been heartening, “but a lot of our success is due to the quality of our products and the quality of our service. We get a lot of repeat business because people are happy with the service they get at TigerPress.”

In Demand
To keep customers happy, Lang said, today’s printers are expected to adhere to much more rigid time demands. Part of the change has to do with companies that set deadlines for marketing campaigns or other types of projects, and when different stages of the project fall behind the timeline, the printer is expected to make up the difference. He understands that business reality, and has marketed Curry as a shop that will take on time-crunched — even same-day — jobs.
“What happens is that, in the planning stage, maybe printing is the last thing that has to be done,” he said, citing the example of, say, a playbill that has to be produced before a show opens. “We’re used to the tight deadlines, the drop-dead deadlines. We’re down at the end of a lot of planning, and we usually have to pick up the slack and make sure it gets done.”
And there’s no shortage of work out there to get done, Desrosiers told BusinessWest.
“There’s this whole buzz out there — is printing dead? is printing going away? — because of the whole digital world,” he noted. “If anything, it’s starting to show its value as a whole other channel. It has its strengths, its worth, and its place.
“As an example of that,” he said, “you can send out these e-mail blasts, but e-mail is becoming such a congested channel. If you look at it as a highway, it’s a congested highway. Yes, you can send it out, and there are economies to it, but people are not opening it and reading it because they’re getting so much in their box. With printing, you can send something to someone they can hold and touch and read when they want. It has value. And the more and more congested that digital arena becomes, the more valuable print will become.”
And not just the print products people can produce at home or in their offices, he added.
“When people are doing something in print, they really do want it done well, because it’s representing their corporation,” Desrosiers said. “When you print something off a personal desktop printer, if it doesn’t have that crispness and sharpness and classiness you get from a commercial printer, and that can really do your business more harm than good.”
He compared that scenario to a non-mechanic who tries to fix his own car, insisting that, just as skilled mechanics will always be in demand, so will high-quality commercial-printing services.
Shafii agrees. “Because of the recession, a lot of printers went out of business, sadly for them,” she said, noting that there was a proliferation of shops over the past two decades — probably too many for the regional market to sustain. “But we’re still going strong, and we have a lot of repeat customers, because they like what we do.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]

Reflections on ‘Glennfield’

By BusinessWest Staff November 19, 2013

Commercial Real Estate Sections

Developer Edwards Says Springfield Is Poised for Rebirth

Glenn Edwards wants to attract UMass to the Harrison Place block by touting a ‘campus’ of services students might need.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Glenn Edwards is bullish on Springfield.
“I love Springfield,” the real-estate developer told BusinessWest from his New York office. “My friends call it Glennfield because I talk about it so much — how beautiful my buildings are and how great the city is, with its museums and symphony and everything else.”
The buildings he refers to comprise the Main Street block between Harrison Avenue and Falcon Drive, including Harrison Place, the Johnson’s Bookstore Building, the Northwestern Mutual Building, and several other properties, which he acquired between 2005 and 2007.
That was just before the Great Recession struck, but Edwards more than weathered that storm, reporting more lease activity in the block over the past year than he’s experienced in a long time — at a time when Springfield’s downtown is on the rise, buoyed not just by a probable $800 million casino development, but plenty of other commercial activity, and possibly plans for a UMass satellite campus.
“For me, it’s a freak of nature that it’s not successful on its own because of its location,” Edwards said of Springfield’s accessibility to Boston, New York, Hartford, and Albany. “Yes, it’s had hardships downtown, but so did Harlem, Tribeca, Brooklyn, the Back Bay, the Fens — so many places can identify.”
But Springfield has plenty going for it, Edwards said, and it’s difficult not to put the casino — which MGM Resorts International has proposed to build in the South End of the city — at the top of that list, especially now that voters in West Springfield and, shockingly, Palmer have rejected casino projects in their communities. That leaves Springfield with the only proposal standing in Western Mass. mere months before the state’s Gaming Commission makes its decisions on where to issue licenses for the gaming palaces.
“How can someone turn down a billion-dollar venture?” Edwards said of the stunning defeat of Mohegan Sun’s casino proposal for Palmer. “But I was telling everyone from day one that Springfield was the logical selection. The city is in such need of this investment.”
He compared the city’s central business district to an ocean where a whale — MGM — might splash down, raising all boats. With MGM buying up properties and business tenants facing lease expirations, Edwards hopes other landlords in Springfield get the benefit of their relocations, rather than, say, Longmeadow or Northampton.
“If we take 200,000 square feet of retail and office out of the market, it immediately changes the demand equation for space in the city, and that is favorable, no matter what MGM does,” he explained. “If MGM never builds a casino but takes 200,000 to 300,000 square feet out of the market, the market would benefit. There’s an oversupply of space right now because the population hasn’t been growing in Springfield for 30 years.”
His vision is for other property owners to absorb the displaced tenants and use the influx of capital to further improve their properties, creating more demand to do business downtown. He has already been busy making improvements to his Main Street buildings, but his sense of optimism certainly needs no polishing up.
“The only thing that could get me really shook up is if MGM is not selected by the Gaming Commission — and that’s certainly not guaranteed; there are no guarantees in life,” he said. “Other than that, my outlook is very, very positive.”

Schools of Thought
Edwards says he has long been optimistic about Springfield, well before MGM was a factor. “Over the last year, we’ve had more activity — renewals of major tenants, new prospects looking, and new leases signed — than in any other year. And this is before the demand changes with MGM taking 14 acres and all the tenants to be displaced.”
He says companies are starting to look to Springfield for its reasonable real-estate costs, compared to other cities, and noticing the improvements being made by city officials in the business improvement district, which include everything from better lighting to an increased police presence. “The streets are much safer because of what the BID and Mayor Sarno have done, and all those things are laying the groundwork for a UMass or an MGM to look at Springfield seriously and say, ‘we want to be a part of this.’”
UMass? Quite possibly. Edwards was referring to the state university system’s recent investigation into whether Springfield might one day house a satellite campus.
“We applied for the UMass location,” he told BusinessWest. “When we did, what we said was, ‘we have a bank, we have a Fedex, a sports bar, a convenience store, a coffee shop, we’ll have a sandwich shop soon.”
That eatery will replace a B’Shara’s restaurant that recently closed in the Market Place alley behind the row of Main Street buildings. “We’ve actually turned down a few prospects; we want someone who has a good vision for it. We’re not going to take the first person; we’ll wait. We turned down startups that didn’t have the capital or the knowhow.”
In the upper floors of his buildings, he added, are tenants ranging from insurance and financial-services firms to a chiropractor and a dental office. “We are like a little city by itself. We’re trying to get UMass to embrace the downtown campus, so we’re promoting the Market Place where the street is closed off. It’s immaculate and safe, and cameras and plantings from the BID have changed the whole feel of that.”
Edwards said UMass responded positively to his properties and mix of tenants, but the most important goal is simply for the university to locate somewhere downtown.
“It’s not in our control. We hope and pray they follow through and move downtown; that’s the primary goal, that we end up with UMass taking up to 50,000 square feet downtown, whether they do that in my building or in two or three buildings. That would be an ideal situation for the city, to have all those students and faculty and visitors walking around the city from building to building. We’ll take any piece of that, or no piece, but it’s just so important to keep building on this Knowledge Corridor as one component to whatever else is going on downtown, from Union Station to the Paramount to MGM and sports and concerts. We hope it comes to fruition.”
Edwards has experienced some setbacks, like when the Dennis Group, a major tenant in Harrison Place, moved out in 2009 and relocated to the nearby Fuller Block. “That was the only major loss we had, and we didn’t lose them to going out of business or relocating out of Springfield. We just couldn’t supply them with enough space.”
And he said he wanted Cambridge College, which moved into Tower Square earlier this year, to locate in one of his buildings. But he also believes that success for any downtown landlord is a positive for all property owners, because it helps build overall momentum.
“I want everyone to do well downtown. If they do well, we’re going to do well,” he told BusinessWest. “We thought we had a great location for Cambridge College. But from a psychological standpoint, I’m just thrilled that they have a campus downtown. They didn’t select me, but life goes on. I hope that UMass comes downtown, that Union Station is filled; these are all very favorable things.
“Really, what it comes down to is, people want to go to a place where something is going on; they want their customers to come to a place where something is going on,” he continued. “And Springfield has something going on right now. If I was the only one getting tenants, and no one else was getting any tenants, eventually all my tenants would leave. I can’t do this alone. Kudos to the mayor, the City Council, all the people who are working very hard to make this happen.”

Looking Up
Meanwhile, Edwards said he’s poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into his buildings, often in ways that aren’t immediately noticeable, from elevator improvements to security cameras to high-tech wiring. “Now we’ll be spending on cosmetic things, to attract new tenants and enhance the experience of existing tenants. And I’m just one landlord. We’re all going to do this.”
It has often been a challenge to draw tenants to a downtown characterized by a shrinking population and too many commercial vacancies, but the tide might be turning; out of 260,000 square feet in Edwards’ Springfield properties, only 75,000 remain untenanted, and he’s currently negotiating over 30,000 of it.
He laughed when he mentioned his business partner, who’s 89 years old. “It’s hard to get him excited, but he’s so excited about Springfield. He calls me every day, asking, ‘what’s happening today?’ There is an excitement around this city you wouldn’t believe.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]

High Stakes Assignment

By BusinessWest Staff November 4, 2013

Features

Bruce Stebbins Relishes His Role with the State’s Gaming Commission

Bruce Stebbins doesn’t remember the exact wording of the letter from the search firm that came roughly 20 months ago and would eventually prompt an abrupt career course change and thrust him into the middle of the casino era in Massachusetts.
But he remembers the gist, and the key sentence or two that certainly caught his eye.
“It talked about how the firm was trying to find an individual or individuals to serve on the Massachusetts Gaming Commission,” he said. “I don’t recall whether it said ‘from Western Massachusetts,’ but it did say, ‘if you know of anyone, or if you yourself might have any interest, feel free to give us a call.’
“So I called them back,” continued Stebbins, who, at the time, was serving as business development administrator in Springfield. “And while I was really happy doing what I was doing for the city, I inquired a little more about the position and what it involved. I didn’t have any friend or colleague or someone I knew who I was going to recommend, but I just wanted to find out more about it. By the end of the phone call with the recruiter I’d made up my mind to send him my resume.”
Fast-forward just a few weeks (things were moving quickly because deadlines for filling the panel were looming) and he was being interviewed by the governor, attorney general, and treasurer — the three officials who would collectively decide who won this slot on the board — and eventually prevailed. Jump ahead another 18 months, and he and the other four members are closing in on some of the most anticipated decisions in recent state history, choices that will change the landscape of cities and regions, both literally and figuratively, and alter the fortunes of countless individuals and businesses.
At present, the commission is neck deep in the process of deciding the winner of the contest for the one slots parlor that was made part of the gaming legislation passed nearly two years ago. Three proposals are being reviewed, and a decision is due early next year, said Stebbins.
Concurrently, the board is also advancing the process of determining who will win up to three licenses for resort casinos; there are competitions being played out in the three designated regions for such licenses — the Boston area, Western Mass., and Southeastern Mass.
And while a decision is not due on those licenses until early next spring, the commission is already having a huge impact on the proceedings.
Indeed, when a suitability assessment by commission investigators raised questions about Caesars Entertainment, a partner in the bid to put a casino at Suffolk Downs in East Boston, the industry giant abruptly withdrew — at the behest of its partner — throwing the Boston area competition into something approaching chaos as a Nov. 5 referendum vote on the proposal looms and the Suffolk Downs team scrambles to find a new partner.
The startling turn of events prompted the Boston Globe to praise the commission for setting the bar high when it comes to the standards that casino companies will have to meet in the Bay State. And it also inspired Caesar’s President Gary Loveman to opine that the bar has been set too high.
“It’s going to be very difficult for sophisticated multi-jurisdictional operators to tolerate the environment this commission has created,” he told the press.

Deciding the winner of the contest for the Western Mass. casino license — likely to be between MGM Springfield, left, and Mohegan Sun Massachusetts — will be one of many challenging assignments facing Stebbins and the other gaming commission members.

Deciding the winner of the contest for the Western Mass. casino license — likely to be between MGM Springfield, top, and Mohegan Sun Massachusetts — will be one of many challenging assignments facing Stebbins and the other gaming commission members.
[/caption]When queried about the Suffolk Downs development and, in general, the height of that aforementioned bar, Stebbins, obviously choosing words carefully and sounding a lot like Bill Belichick at one of his press conferences, said, “this is what the statute was intended to do; we need to be as thorough as possible, and our investigators have to be diligent and follow up every lead. We want to impress upon people that we want operators who have great business practices to be the ones operating casinos in Massachusetts.”
And when asked if he and his fellow commission members are feeling the pressure that will certainly accompany the decisions to come, Stebbins smiled broadly, implied that ‘pressure’ was probably too strong a word, but nonetheless verified the enormity of the moment.
“All five of us acknowledge that because there’s a limited number of licenses, we understand that we have one shot to get this done right,” he said. “We’re also buffeted by the fact that over half the states in the U.S. have done this before and there is a great working relationship with other jurisdictions.”
For this issue, BusinessWest talked at length with Stebbins about everything from his experiences on the commission to date to the factors he believes will ultimately decide how the casino licenses are awarded, including the one for the Western Mass. region.

Playing His Cards Right
Stebbins isn’t the official Western Mass. representative on the gaming commission, but that’s how he’s generally regarded.
He’s the only member from this part of the state, and he acknowledges that a desire on the part of those assembling the panel to create geographic diversity probably aided his cause. As did a quest for political diversity — Stebbins is a Republican, and one of the stipulations for this commission, he said, was that there not be more than two members for any one political party. (He assumes there are two Democrats and two Republicans, but isn’t sure of the affiliation of the fifth member; “we don’t wear our politics on our sleeves.”)
And he believes his work history, which includes a number of roles in business and economic development, might have turned some heads.
Indeed, Stebbins’ resume includes everything from a stint in the White House — as associate director of Political Affairs while George Bush the elder was in office — to two terms as a Springfield city councilor; from a short run as director of the Mass. Office of Business Development to a decade-long tenure as senior regional manager of the National Association of Manufacturers.
He said the experience gained at these various stops has certainly helped him with his current workload, but that his time with the gaming commission has also helped him grow professionally and sharpen existing skills sets.
“I think there are certainly skills and experiences I’m having that will help round me out as a professional and as an executive,” said Stebbins, who repeatedly compared his work on the commission — and its role in bringing the gaming industry to Massachusetts — to getting a startup business off the ground.
“I was intrigued by two things,” he said, when recalling what prompted this latest line on his resume. “Part of it was setting something up from the ground floor, albeit a government, regulatory agency. Taking something and building it from a piece of legislation — I thought that was a unique opportunity considering my years in public service. I’d never really had the opportunity to do that before; it was enticing.
“It’s not completely akin to a small business, because we came with an operating budget already in hand from the Legislature,” he continued, “but similar to a small company, we were building a way to do business, recruiting and building a team, and coming up with a mission statement, just like any business does, while at the same time learning about a business that was completely new to Massachusetts.
“The other intriguing part of this was the economic aspect,” he went on. “We’re introducing a whole new industry to Massachusetts and really focusing on the priorities of the statute, which are the job creation piece in difficult economic times, and the impact on tourism and small business — this was right up my alley when it came to my background and experiences.”
He said he took on the assignment expecting that there would be large amounts of travel and reading, and there have been both; he commutes to Boston four days a week, spending Friday in Western Mass., and the three slot parlor applications alone account for roughly 20,000 pages of material, although he acknowledged quickly that he doesn’t have to consume all of that.
Beyond that, he anticipated that it would be a learning experience on a number of levels, and it has been that as well.
When asked to elaborate on what he has learned, Stebbins listed everything from insight into just how competitive the gaming industry is, to lessons learned from the experiences of other jurisdictions, such as Atlantic City.
“New Jersey felt that by introducing casino gaming in an effort to revive Atlantic City there would instantly be jobs and opportunities for all the people living in that city,” he noted. “But the casinos came in, the people living in Atlantic City didn’t have the skills and the basic training assistance, and they missed out on the job opportunities that were created, and that’s why Atlantic City languished and some would say it continues to languish. It missed out on some opportunities.”

Odds and Ends
When asked if the decisions regarding the casino licenses were matters of objective or subjective analysis, Stebbins said there is certainly far more of the former, but there is certainly some of the latter.
Elaborating, he noted that proposals will be weighed in five categories — financial, building and site design, mitigation, economic development, and something he called ‘general overview of the project,’ and then described as the “wow factor.”
It is in that last category where there is some subjectivity, he told BusinessWest, adding that with the other four, analysis generally comes down to hard numbers, and lots of them.
“A good percentage of the information is very objective — ‘tell us the number of people you’re hiring,’ ‘show us the plans you intend to work with,’ ‘what’s your debt-to-equity ratio?,’ ‘what are your plans for implementing LEED gold design into your building?, ‘what are your plans for mitigating the impact on the lottery?,’” he explained, noting that for each of the five categories he mentioned applicants are given one of four ratings.
These are ‘insufficient,’ ‘sufficient,’ ‘exceeds expectations,’ and ‘outstanding,’ he went on, adding these ratings, as well as the answers to the 230 questions applicants must answer will be discussed in a public meeting before votes are taken on the specific licenses, including the one for what’s known as Region 2, Western Massachusetts.
When asked what may decide that competition, which will likely be an urban versus suburban matchup featuring MGM Springfield and Mohegan Sun Massachusetts in Palmer (a vote on the host-community agreement in that latter community is set for Nov. 5), Stebbins said it, like the others, will be determined by the tenets of the legislation — and perhaps by that ‘wow factor.’
“The purpose of the statute was to generate revenue for the Commonwealth and create jobs,” he explained. “A lot of the evaluation questions address the other requirements that were put in the statute.
“The general overview portion of this, the ‘wow factor,’ might well be more of a subjective answer,” he continued. “But backing all this up is that we want to know what these players’ track records are in other jurisdictions; have they met their promises? Have they done what they said they were going to do? How have those other facilities operated?”
Meanwhile, the commission will attempt to emulate the best practices of other jurisdictions and learn from what has gone right — and wrong — in other states, he went on.
“We’re all happy to share information and regulations,” he said of those other states. “They’ve been great to talk to; they’re candid and honest — they’ll say ‘we tried to do it this way and didn’t really work out that well. There are great opportunities to build on the best practices of other jurisdictions.”
While the pending decisions on the licenses are certainly the most pressing item facing the commission, its work certainly won’t end there, he told BusinessWest, adding there will be considerable regulatory work to finish, issues with the licensing process, and monitoring the progress of those companies who win the regional competitions.
“It shifts into a regulatory and oversight function,”he said, “but there will be a lot of important work to do.”

The Bottom Line
Stebbins said he’s just over half-way through a term that will last three years. It is possible that he will be awarded another, longer term and perhaps even two (commissioners can serve up to 10 years), but he acknowledged that there will be different people serving as governor and attorney general by then, and they may have some other ideas.
At the moment though, he isn’t focused on the future, but rather the present, and his large role in something that could only be described as historic.
Looking back on that letter from the recruiter that started him down this road, he said that what appealed to him initially — a chance to bring a new industry into Massachusetts and be part of a huge economic development initiative — continues to fuel his imagination today.
If his career gambit was a roll of the dice, he believes he’s thrown a 7.

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

Woman’s World

By BusinessWest Staff November 4, 2013

Law Sections

Royal LLP Helps Clients Get Down to Business

Amy Royal, founding partner of Royal LLP.

It’s an accepted trope that society has become more litigious, Amy Royal says, but not every business understands the implications of that fact.
“When someone loses a job, nine times out of 10, they don’t accept ownership or think it was anything they did, but it must be someone else’s fault,” said Royal, founding partner of Royal LLP, a Northampton-based, management-side labor and employment law firm.
“Unfortunately, our system makes it very easy for disgruntled employees to file claims against their former employer,” she continued. “You can go to a state agency and file for free. You can go to an attorney and engage their services without any real out-of-pocket costs. Because of that, numerous frivolous claims are filed every single day. A lot of people who may have engaged in misconduct are still able to take advantage of the system. It impacts everyone.”
Therefore, one service Royal provides its business clients is helping them to be proactive in a litigious world and develop practices that will save money and headaches in the long run.
“Documentation is key — and adequate documentation,” Royal told BusinessWest. “On the litigation end of things, when I get a case, I meet with the client and hear about how awful this employee was, stories of acts of misconduct, times they didn’t show up for work, and I think this is going to be a slam dunk. And I ask to see the personnel file, and there’s nothing in there to support that, or the documentation isn’t very good.”
So Royal teaches supervisors not only the importance of creating a paper trail, but how to write disciplinary actions that will stand up to scrutiny later on. “You’re writing it for the future — for courts, judges’ eyes, investigators’ eyes. What information do you want to put in there? It goes back to the journalistic principles of who, what, when, where … just stick to the facts.”
That’s one example of how Royal LLP aims to be a partner with its clients, not just a resource they turn to when they’re in legal hot water.
This month marks the five-year anniversary of the firm, which was launched first as Royal & Munnings — with Aimee Munnings, who now runs a large nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. — and later as Royal & Klimczuk, with Kimberly Klimczuk, who currently works at Skoler, Abbott & Presser, P.C. in Springfield.
Since operating under her solo name, Royal has built a law firm of nine attorneys and has largely realized her initial goal “to create a pre-eminent management-side labor and employment law firm that would support the growth of women and minority attorneys.” Five full-time attorneys are women, and one is African-American.
“It’s really been my mission to provide these opportunities to women and minorities, primarily because, when I started my career, I didn’t see that support, or depth of support,” she recalled. “What prompted me in particular was a report that came out of MIT, around 2007 or 2008, that basically talked about the fact that women attorneys were leaving the private practice of law in large, startling numbers.”
She wondered why, then found the answer. “The women that MIT polled, who took part in the study, said there was no work-life balance in the law firms; they just didn’t support it. I thought, how can that be, especially with the technology today? With the way law firms are structured, a lot of the work can be done at any time, so why is that happening? There must be a solution.”
For this issue and its focus on law, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at that solution and how this firm intends to stay on its current pattern of consistent growth.

Case in Point

Amy Royal (center, with Karina Schrengohst, left, and Tanzania Cannon-Eckerle) says she set a goal early on of establishing a law practice where women attorneys could succeed and still maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Royal said the economic downturn of the past few years caused many companies to scale back their budgets — in some cases, cutting out preventive work such as training, policy development, audits, and record keeping. But that’s not smart practice, she added.
“I’m a firm believer that, if you spend a little bit of money now, it goes a long way to prevent headaches later,” she said. “While I think I’m really good at putting out fires for clients and problem solving and coming up with innovative solutions immediately, from a business perspective, that’s not the way you want to operate. You don’t want to always be reacting.”
That applies to a wide variety of situations, not just dealing with disgruntled ex-employees.
“For example, fairly recently, I had a company that has always been union-free, and hopefully will continue to be union-free, but they’ve had some union chatter in their organization, and once that train gets going, it’s harder to stop.” So she worked with the client on strategies to reduce the risk of unionization.
“Obviously, there are steps you can take to prevent a union from successfully coming through the door,” Royal said, “but there are many steps you can take before they even arrive, and it’s so much harder to stop it once it’s already on that course than to think about the steps you want to take over the next year, two years, three years to prevent it from ever happening.”
The launch of her own law firm coincided with the financial collapse of 2008, and building a practice over the next five turbulent years has given Royal some strong ideas about what clients want.
“It got me thinking about the future of the law and trends in the law and the delivery of legal services,” she said. So, this year, the firm introduced a flat-fee system that can be structured in several different ways. “I do believe the trend is move away from traditional billable hours, because in what other field do you purchase a product without knowing what the price is going to be? It’s only human that people want certainty in their billing; they want to know what they’re paying for. So we’ve come up with different flat-fee programs; one is all-inclusive and encompasses litigation as well.
“Even some law firms that may be on the cutting edge and have decided to provide some flat-fee services, I don’t think they have done that in the context of litigation because litigation can be so unknown,” she continued. “However, since we have this niche in management-side labor and employment law, we’re able to predict the costs, and we’re able to provide a very reasonable flat-fee arrangement to clients, similar to what you get with insurance, where you share in the risk, so to speak.”

Navigating a Minefield
The risk for businesses comes in many forms, especially at a time when employment law is becoming more complex and tilting, in many ways, toward broader workers’ rights. For instance, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was amended in 2008 to define virtually anyone with any form of physical and mental impairment as ‘disabled,’ granting them added protection in the workplace.
“That has obviously created a lot of issues and uncertainties,” Royal said. “It’s also an area our state agencies and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination have focused in on. They’ve taken the position that everyone is disabled, and therefore your company needs to be providing accommodations and engaging in dialogue with employees about what accommodations you can give them.”
Those issues can, frankly, be confusing for businesses, which often need a consultant like Royal LLP to train them in how to engage in that dialogue.
The training she and her fellow attorneys provide often takes the form of role-playing exercises with a company’s supervisory staffers, which can be a more effective learning tool than a dry lecture. “We’ve tried to make our trainings very practical and very interactive,” she said.
Other expertise the firm offers has nothing to do with litigation or employee grievance. For example, it helps companies create succession plans — not just for key executives, but for other critical staffers, such as a program manager for a nonprofit. “Do you have a plan in place to deal with the loss?”
The broad range of issues involved in employment law appeals to Royal, as do the long-term relationships she has built hammering out those issues for clients.
“We end up being their trusted business confidant, and that’s the really exciting thing,” she said. “We get to wear different hats — we get to be their advocate in court and litigate hard and aggressively for the client; we get to be their counsel that advises and helps them make plans that are both business-based and have legal implications; and we also get to be their educator, get to train them and their staff in how to stay out of trouble, or at least miminize their exposure to legal risk.”
The steps companies need to take might seem obvious, she told BusinessWest, but aren’t always followed in the day-to-day struggle to survive in a down economy.
“A lot of what I hear from management is there’s not enough time in the day to document issues, and I’m sensitive to that, because I run a business, too,” Royal said. “Again, if you go back to the training and the journalism approach of who, what, when, where, if you jot that down on a piece of paper, it’s not going to take you all that long, and it’s going to save you time in the long run, when you’re embroiled in litigation.”

Community Ties
As she builds the firm’s reputation in area communities — it has a second office in Springfield — Royal said it’s equally important to stay involved in civic life outside the workplace.
“Something I hope to instill in the other attorneys is being active in the community and giving back to the community,” she said. “It’s so important and so beneficial to everyone. So we do have a lot of our staff active in the community.”
Specifically, Royal serves on four different boards and chairs the United Way of Hampshire County, while the other attorneys are active on various boards or nonprofits. “It’s really important to me, and something that has really engaged the attorneys here and gets them to connect with our clients and the community in a different way.”
That’s the kind of work-life balance she knew was possible when she set out with a goal to establish, as she puts it, the pre-eminent labor and employment law firm in this region.
“I do expect additional growth, especially in the Connecticut arena,” she told BusinessWest. “Three of our attorneys are admitted to practice there, and I do have a Connecticut client base.”
Royal LLP has come a long way in just five years, but that doesn’t surprise its founder.
“That was my hope and my vision and my push. I’ve worked really hard to get the Royal name out there in every way I possibly could. So I’m really pleased, but I continue to make that push and want to continue to grow.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]

Western Mass. Business Expo

By BusinessWest Staff November 4, 2013

Cover Story

Your complete guide to the 2013 show

Click here to download a PDF flip book of the entire guide

Click here for the latest show information
Click here to download a PDF of the show schedule

Calculated Decisions

By BusinessWest Staff November 4, 2013

Accounting and Tax Planning Sections

Effective Planning Now Can Lower Your Tax Burden

Kristina Drzal-Houghton

Tax planning is inherently complex, with the most powerful tax strategies often relying as much on clairvoyance as they do on calculations.
As 2013 begins to wind down, the need for a crystal ball lessens, and the ability to strategize with more certainty is upon us. This developing certainty provides opportunities for individuals and businesses to manage tax liabilities through tax-planning techniques.
Year-end tax planning has always been arduous, but early 2013 legislation complicated the tax structure by layering in new tax brackets and income buckets, bringing a multi-dimensional complication to tax planning this year.
In this article we focus on tax-planning techniques that can be executed during the remainder of 2013, but specific facts and circumstances may open up other opportunities or limit some of the tactics discussed.
Tax Strategies for Business Owners
Business equipment. Significant tax benefits remain available for business equipment purchases during 2013. A 50% bonus depreciation deduction is available for qualified property placed in service during 2013. The deduction is set to expire for 2014. To qualify for bonus depreciation, equipment must be new and placed in service by year-end.
Section 179 expensing rules provide full expensing for up to $500,000 of qualifying property placed in service during 2013. However, the full deduction is available only if the total amount of qualifying property placed in service in 2013 does not exceed $2 million. The Section 179 deduction limit is scheduled to be drastically reduced in 2014.
• Planning point: If you are planning to purchase a significant amount of machinery and equipment for your business in the next year or two, consider accelerating your order so the assets are delivered and placed into service by Dec. 31, 2013. To take full advantage of the Section 179 deduction, monitor total purchases to prevent its phaseout.
Deduction for qualified production activities income. Taxpayers can claim a deduction, subject to limits, for 9% of the lesser of (1) the taxpayer’s ‘qualified production activities income’ for the tax year (i.e., net income from U.S. manufacturing, production, or extraction activities; U.S. film production; U.S. construction activities; and U.S. engineering and architectural services), or (2) the taxpayer’s taxable income for that tax year, before taking this deduction into account. This deduction generally has the effect of a reduction in the taxpayer’s marginal rate and, thus, should be taken into account when making decisions regarding income-shifting strategies.
Net operating losses and debt-cancellation income. A business with a loss this year may be able to use that loss to generate cash in the form of a quick net operating loss carry-back refund. This type of refund may be of particular value to a financially troubled business that needs a fast cash transfusion to keep going.
There also are a number of different kinds of debt-cancellation or debt-reduction transactions that may generate taxable income in 2013 if not deferred until 2014.
Retirement Plans. Starting a small-business retirement-savings plan is easier than you think and offers significant tax advantages. Employer contributions are deductible from the employer’s income, employee contributions are not taxed until distributed to the employee, and investments in the program grow tax-deferred. Further, the tax law offers a small incentive of a $500-per-year tax credit for the first three years of a new SEP, SIMPLE, or other retirement plan to cover the initial setup expenses for certain small employers.

Individual Tax-rate Management
In prior years, the main concern was that, if you reduced your regular income tax too far, the alternative minimum tax (AMT) would step in to appropriate your hard-earned tax savings. There are now additional dynamics to consider, when certain thresholds are exceeded, in the form of a 3.8% net-investment-income (NII) tax levied on investment income, a 0.9% Medicare payroll tax levied on wages and self-employment earnings, and a multi-tiered, long-term capital-gains tax-rate structure.
These new taxes, beginning in 2013, apply when adjusted gross income exceeds certain thresholds ranging from $200,000 for single filers to $250,000 for married taxpayers. For these thresholds and most others mentioned in this article, married filing separate uses one-half the married threshold.
Additionally, the 39.6% tax bracket returns this year after a long hiatus for taxpayers above thresholds ranging from $400,000 of taxable income for single filers to $450,000 for married filers.
Net investment income tax. The 3.8% NII tax now applies to most investment income. For individuals, the amount subject to the tax is the lesser of (1) the net investment income; or (2) the excess of modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) over the applicable threshold amount.
NII includes dividends, rents, interest, passive-activity income, capital gains, annuities, and royalties. Passive pass-through income will be subject to this new tax, but non-passive will not. Self-employment income, income from an active trade or business, and portions of the gain on the sale of an active interest in a partnership or S corporation with investment assets, as well as IRA or qualified plan distributions, are not subject to the NII tax.
• Planning point: Weighing a decision about selling marketable securities to meet current cash needs? Consider using margin debt for replacement securities. The interest on the debt will be deductible, subject to the investment-interest limitation, which could reduce your NII for purposes of the new tax.
• Planning point: To the extent your NII is income from a passive activity, increasing your material participation in the activity between now and the end of the year can reduce the amount of income subject to the NII tax. Proceed with caution, though, because a change in participation level may impact other short- and long-term tax obligations.
• Planning point: As you near the applicable threshold, consider revising the timing of distributions from retirement plans to manage your net investment income. While the distributions themselves are not NII, the distributions increase your MAGI, which could subject more of your investment income to the NII tax.
Increased maximum tax rates on long-term capital gains. While avoiding or deferring tax may be your primary goal, to the extent there is income to report, the income of choice is long-term capital gain income thanks to the favorable tax rates available. The available rates differ depending on the taxpayer’s tax bracket.
Taxpayers in the 39.6% bracket will now pay a 20% long-term capital gains and qualified dividends rate. Additionally, those above the previously noted thresholds will pay the 3.8% tax in addition to the increased capital-gains rate.
• Planning point: The netting rules provide an opportunity to manage the net gain or loss subject to taxation, making it prudent to review your investment gains and losses before the close of year to determine whether additional transactions prior to year-end may improve your tax outlook.
Recognition of same-sex marriage for federal tax purposes. Beginning in 2013, legally married same-sex couples must file a joint or married-filing-separately return. The rules do not extend to cover domestic partnerships. The ruling is retroactive, opening up a refund opportunity in certain circumstances for those who were previously prohibited from joint filing. Amended returns may be, but are not required to be, filed for tax years still open by statute of limitations.

Year-end Timing Strategies
Managing the alternative minimum tax. The AMT applies when income, as adjusted for certain preference items, exceeds certain exemptions, but the rate applied to that income falls below the AMT rate, essentially acting as a tax-leveling mechanism. Residents of states with high income and property taxes, like Connecticut and Massachusetts, are more likely to be subject to the AMT because these state taxes are not deductible when computing AMT income.
The AMT exemptions are subject to phaseouts when AMT income exceeds $115,400 for single filers and $153,900 for married joint filers.
Delaying or prepaying expenses. As a cash-method taxpayer, you can deduct expenses when you pay them or charge them to your credit card. Payment by credit card is considered paid in the year the charge is incurred. Expenses that are commonly prepaid in connection with year-end tax planning include:
Charitable contributions. A tax deduction is available for cash contributions to qualified charities of up to 50% of adjusted gross income (AGI) and up to 30% (20% for gifts to private operating foundations) of your AGI for charitable gifts of appreciated property.
• Planning point: Consider contributing appreciated securities that you have held for more than one year. Usually, you will receive a charitable deduction for the full value of the securities, while avoiding the capital-gains tax that would be incurred upon sale of the securities.
State and local income taxes. Consider prepaying any state and local income taxes normally due on Jan. 15, 2014, or with the filing of the return if you do not expect to be subject to the AMT.
• Planning Point: If you expect to owe state and/or local income tax when you file your return for 2013, consider paying that amount before Dec. 31, 2013. Although you relinquish your cash in advance, the benefit from accelerating the tax deduction and lowering your current federal income tax could be significant. It is particularly powerful if the deduction could be lost through the AMT in 2014. Just be careful that your prepayment does not make you subject to AMT in 2013.
Real-estate taxes. Like state and local income taxes, real-estate tax levies due early in 2014 can often be prepaid in 2013. For real-estate taxes on your residence or other personal real estate, just be mindful of the AMT in both years. Real-estate tax on rental property is deductible whether or not you are subject to AMT, and it can be safely prepaid.
Mortgage interest. There are limits on your ability to deduct prepaid interest. However, to the extent your January mortgage payment reflects interest accrued as of Dec. 31, 2013, a payment prior to year-end will secure the interest deduction in 2013.
Other itemized deductions. Miscellaneous itemized deductions, like many deductions, are deductible only if you itemize your deductions and are not subject to AMT. Where miscellaneous itemized deductions differ is with the requirement that the total deductions exceed 2% of your AGI to be deductible.
Itemized deduction phaseout. After a three-year hiatus, 2013 marks the return of the phaseout of certain itemized deductions for higher-income taxpayers. For affected taxpayers, itemized deductions are reduced by 3% of the amount by which AGI exceeds thresholds ranging from $250,000 for a single filer to $300,000 for married joint filers.
However, deductions for medical expenses, investment interest, casualty and theft losses, and gambling losses are not subject to the limitation. Taxpayers cannot lose more than 80% of the itemized deductions subject to the phaseout.
Exemption phaseout. A personal exemption is generally available for you, your spouse if you are married and file a joint return, and each dependent (a qualifying child or qualifying relative who meets certain tests). In 2013, the exemption amount is $3,900, subject to a reinstated phaseout of the exemption for higher-income taxpayers. These phaseout thresholds begin at the same AGI limits discussed for itemized deductions above.
Retirement-plan distributions. If you are over age 59½ and your 2013 income is unusually low, consider taking a taxable distribution from your retirement plan, even if it is not required, to use the unusually low tax rate for the period. More powerful still, consider converting the funds to a Roth account.
• Planning point: If you expect to be in a higher tax bracket in the future, consider converting your traditional IRA into a Roth IRA during your lower-income years. You will be paying taxes early, but future appreciation of the assets in your account may escape income taxes entirely.
IRA distributions to charity. If you are over age 70½, you can make a tax-free distribution of up to $100,000 from your IRA to a qualified charity before Dec. 31, 2013. Under current law, this opportunity will not be available for 2014.
Note that this opportunity is doubly powerful beginning in 2013. In addition to prior tax benefits, now the IRA is not included in your MAGI, and thus this strategy may reduce exposure to the new 3.8% NII tax.
Worthless securities and bad debts. Both worthless securities and bad debts could give rise to capital losses. Since no transaction generally alerts you to this deduction, you should review your portfolio carefully.
• Planning point: If you own securities that have become worthless or made loans that have become uncollectible, ensure that the losses are deductible in the current year by obtaining substantive documentation to support the deduction.
Contributing to a retirement plan. You may be able to reduce your taxes by contributing to a retirement plan. If your employer sponsors a retirement plan, such as a 401(k), 403(b), or SIMPLE plan, your contributions avoid current taxation, as will any investment earnings until you begin receiving distributions from the plan. Some plans allow you to make after-tax Roth contributions, which will not reduce your current income, but you will generally have no tax to pay when those amounts, plus any associated earnings, are withdrawn in future years.
You and your spouse must have earned income to contribute to either a traditional or a Roth IRA. Only taxpayers with modified AGI below certain thresholds are permitted to contribute to a Roth IRA. If a workplace retirement plan covers you or your spouse, modified AGI also controls your ability to deduct your contribution to a traditional IRA. There is no AGI limit on your or your spouse’s deduction if you are not covered by an employer plan. If your modified AGI falls within the phaseout range, a partial contribution/deduction is still allowed.
• Planning point: If you would like to contribute to a Roth IRA, but your income exceeds the threshold, consider contributing to a traditional IRA for 2013, and convert the IRA to a Roth IRA in 2014. Be sure to inquire about the tax consequences of the conversion, especially if you have funds in other traditional IRAs.

Other Personal Tax-planning Considerations
Withholding/estimated tax payments. With higher rates in effect for 2013, more taxpayers may find themselves exposed to an underpayment penalty. Underpayment penalties can be avoided when total withholdings and estimated tax payments exceed the 2012 tax liability or, in the case of higher-income taxpayers, 110% of 2012 tax.
• Planning point: If you expect to be subject to an underpayment penalty for failure to pay your 2013 tax liability on a timely basis, consider increasing your withholding between now and the end of the year to reduce or eliminate the penalty. Increasing your final estimated tax deposit due Jan. 15, 2014 may reduce the amount of the penalty, but is unlikely to eliminate it entirely. Withholding, even if done on the last day of the tax year, is deemed withheld ratably throughout the tax year.
Losses from pass-through business entities. If your ability to deduct current-year losses from a partnership, LLC, or S corporation may be limited by your tax basis or the ‘at-risk’ rules, consider contributing capital to the entity or, in some cases, making a loan to the entity prior to Dec. 31, 2013, to secure your deduction this year.
• Planning point: If you anticipate a net loss from business activities in which you do not materially participate, consider disposing of the loss activity by Dec. 31, 2013. Assuming sufficient basis exists, all suspended losses become deductible when you dispose of the activity. Even if there is a gain on the disposition, you may still benefit from having the long-term capital gain taxed at 23.8% (inclusive of the NII tax) with the previously suspended losses offsetting other ordinary income.
American opportunity tax credit (AOTC). The AOTC for college costs has been extended for five years through 2017. A credit of up to $2,500 may be claimed during the first four years of college. The credit phases out for AGI in excess of $80,000 for single taxpayers and $160,000 for married taxpayers filing a joint return.
• Planning point: If your income is too high for you to qualify for the AOTC, consider gifting your children the funds necessary to pay the qualified education expenses, making them eligible to claim the AOTC.
Energy credit. The $1,500 credit for new windows and doors has expired, but a credit of up to $500 for residential energy property is still available if prior years’ credits were not taken.
Estate and gift taxes. For 2013, taxpayers are permitted to make tax-free gifts of up to $14,000 per year, per recipient ($28,000 if married and using a gift-splitting election, or if each spouse uses separate funds). By making these gifts annually, taxpayers can transfer significant wealth out of their estate without using any of their lifetime exclusion.
• Planning point: Consider making similar gifts early in 2014. Each year brings a new annual exclusion, and a gift early in the year transfers next year’s appreciation out of your estate.
• Planning point: Additional gifts can be made using the lifetime gift exclusion, which is $5.25 million ($10.5 million for married couples) in 2013. Future exclusions are indexed for inflation. The recent increases to the exclusion make it a good time to review any existing estate and gift plans to ensure they best meet your needs.
• Planning point: When combined with other estate and gift-planning techniques, such as Section 529 plans to help fund your children’s or grandchildren’s college education, the potential exists to avoid or reduce estate and gift taxes while transferring significant wealth to other family members.

Conclusion
The changes initiated during 2013 added layers of complexity to an already difficult tax system, but with a purposeful, informed plan in place, taxpayers can still reap significant benefits. Consult your tax advisor so they can best support you in building your plan for 2013 and beyond.

Kristina Drzal Houghton, CPA, MST is a partner with the Holyoke-based accounting firm Meyers Brothers Kalicka, and director of the firm’s Taxation Division; [email protected]

Every Step of the Way

By BusinessWest Staff November 4, 2013

Health Care Sections

Navigators Guide Cancer Patients Along Their Journey

Jolene Lambert (right) says HMC’s patient-navigation program has helped increase the hospital’s breast-cancer survival rate.

The five-year survival rate for breast cancer, nationally, is 89%.
At Holyoke Medical Center, it’s 95%. And Jolene Lambert believes she knows part of the reason why.
Lambert is HMC’s ‘cancer care navigator,’ working with breast-cancer patients from their initial diagnosis through the often-difficult journey of treatment and recovery. She has also spearheaded community-outreach efforts to persuade women to be screened for breast cancer in an effort to find early-stage disease before it spreads.
Since she took the position less than a year ago, Lambert has found striking success on both fronts. All the patients she helps as navigator are 100% compliant with getting to their medical appointments, taking the proper medication, and following other treatment recommendations — all of which enhances their long-term odds of beating the disease.
At the same time, the hospital has become more visible with community efforts to convince healthy women to get mammograms. “Some people are afraid to get it checked,” she said, “but the sooner you get it checked, the greater your chance of survival.”
The overarching idea, she explained, is that cancer is a frightening and often confusing subject, and helping women, well, navigate it will ultimately save lives.
“Patients absolutely require assistance navigating the very complicated silos of our healthcare system,” said Dr. Wilson Mertens, medical director of Cancer Services for Baystate Health. “I would consider navigation to be part concierge service and part rapid contact for patients, to help them manage their symptoms and side effects.”
Baystate offers navigation across a number of cancers, while Holyoke will expand its program beyond breast cancer early next year.
Yet, “I think this concept really started in breast centers across the country because of the complications associated with moving patients from a screening scenario to a biopsy and ultimately surgery, if that’s required,” Mertens said. “Moving through all those steps is complicated, and patients are bewildered when they have to arrange it themselves. They often don’t know how to take the next step, and care is increasingly fragmented.”
The idea behind a navigator, Lambert said, is to give a cancer patient a resource who will guide them every step of the way — in the case of breast cancer, from an abnormal mammogram through all treatments and follow-up. One of her roles is to ensure that the process moves quickly, because patients want answers.
“Patients who are seen in the women’s center meet with the navigator,” she explained. “If they have an abnormal mammogram, they are called on the phone right away to come back for more films, and if they need a biopsy, they are seen within two days for that. The biopsy results are then reviewed with the physician who ordered the mammogram, and they follow up within two days to schedule their surgery.”
But the navigator’s services don’t end there. “If they need rides to appointments, we can help them, or if they don’t understand what the physician is saying to them, we go with them to the appointments so we can explain to them in simpler terms what their care should be,” she told BusinessWest. “I start with the patient’s positive diagnosis and then follow the patient through her care — through surgery, through chemo, through survivorship — to make sure she’s making her appointments, following up, and not getting lost in our healthcare system.”
And it’s a trend becoming much more evident nationwide, she noted. “It is eventually going to be mandatory for all hospitals to have a navigator for cancer; we just happened to start a little early.”

Breaking Down Barriers
The concept of patient navigation was first developed by Dr. Harold Freeman in Harlem, N.Y., as an effort to reduce disparities in access to diagnosis and treatment of cancer, particularly among poor and uninsured people.
“During his practice, he realized he was seeing a lot of women who presented to him with stage 3 breast cancer,” Lambert said. “He felt there should be some way to get to these people because there is a cure for breast cancer if it’s detected early enough.
“So he devised a whole navigator program — not only following people through the disease, but getting out there in the community, getting people to their scheduled mammograms, offering them rides, and preventing barriers to getting mammograms, whether they don’t have insurance, they’re afraid, they don’t have transportation, or they don’t want to pay the co-pay, but would rather spend the money to feed their families. He helped them overcome the barriers to get the care they need.”

Dr. Wilson Mertens says cancer patients should not be made to feel burdened with every decision.

In 2007, with a $2.5 million grant from the Amgen Foundation, the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention established the Harold P. Freeman Patient Navigation Institute to train organizations in patient navigation. The core principles of the institute — which Lambert has attended — include:
• Informing people about the need for recommended examinations and providing timely access to such examinations;
• Eliminating any barriers to timely care across the entire healthcare continuum, and
• Eliminating any barriers to timely diagnoses and treatment in patients who have abnormal or suspicious findings.
Lambert said Holyoke’s program takes seriously the concept of breaking down barriers to care. “If people don’t have insurance, we write to drug companies and get them free medications — anything we can do, we do. We’ve gone as far as buying shoes for patients.”
Traditionally, one of the major barriers to patient compliance has been frustrating lags between diagnosis and consultation. When Lambert became navigator, she reviewed every patient’s chart and noticed a lag time between finding an abnormal mammogram and the resulting biopsy or surgery — in some cases, almost four weeks.
Now, “breast cancer patients are usually seen in one or two days. Some patients who are anxious about their diagnosis have been seen the same day,” she said. “It’s a relief for the patient. I’ve had patients say to me, ‘this would have been my first appointment at a different institution, but here, I already have three treatments under my belt.’ We’re really trying to get people treated quickly.
“Imagine having breast cancer and waiting three weeks for an appointment, or even two weeks,” she added. “I want to be seen the next day.”
At Baystate, Mertens said, navigators tend to work with certain doctors, or the same type of cancer, and they are considered a critical part of the cancer-care team.
“Cancer care has become more complicated,” he told BusinessWest. “Every disease, every patient requires a different set of services and support. What a head and neck cancer patient might need in terms of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation are very different from a breast-cancer patient, and a colon-cancer patient needs a whole different set of players and a different structure.”
Navigators who are well-trained in certain diagnoses are able to effectively answer patients’ questions and guide them to the right resources. “If we don’t provide that kind of support, the patients would be left to sort it out for themselves,” he continued. “But we don’t require patients to be their own physicians; we really need to be able to provide that to them.”
Meanwhile, navigation benefits physicians by making sure patients do what they’re instructed to do. Mertens used the example of someone whose primary-care doctor advises him to call a gastroenterologist to schedule a colonoscopy, but the patient decides to put it off. That’s just human nature, after all.
“Well, I can’t afford to have that with my patients,” he said. “If we need something arranged, we need to have it done. But I also think this is complicated enough that we need to own those arrangements.”

Community Minded
Lambert said no navigator program is complete without a public-outreach component that aims to identify cancers before they’ve advanced. She has distributed booklets throughout Holyoke, given several talks in the community, and recruited four physicians and two nurse practitioners for a free breast-cancer screening in March.
“We’re trying to reach all those people,” she said of such efforts. “In October, we’ll be at Stop & Shop booking mammograms on laptops.”
Once they’re in the system — particularly if a doctor detects early-stage breast cancer — she said patients are grateful that someone gave them the nudge to get checked. But she also deals with cultural barriers to care. “A lot of patients have certain religious beliefs, and think they have cancer because they’ve done something bad in their lives.”
Whatever the barrier, Lambert said, her job is to help break through it to get locals the help they need. After all, the mortality rate from all cancers combined has fallen to one-third what it was 40 years ago, and “immediate care and follow-up care are a big plus for these people.”
Patients are grateful for these targeted efforts to treat their cancer and keep them healthy, Mertens said. “They really appreciate the relationship. They spend a fair amount of time contacting the nurses, and the amount of information they receive is very robust.
“I think that it’s a great comfort for them,” he added, “and it’s a comfort for us on the physician side to know they have another healthcare professional with a deep, profound knowledge of what the patient is going through and can get the appropriate services they need.”
One challenge for the future, Mertens noted, is the still-unclear effect of healthcare reform, and new models of treatment like accountable-care organizations, on patient navigation. “There’s no specific payment for navigation, even though we think it’s critical and needs to be provided,” he said. “We’re not sure exactly what it’s going to look like.”
Still, the trend in oncology has been toward more navigation services, not fewer. And that’s bringing a measure of comfort to patients during some of the most difficult times in their lives.
“I had someone say to me the other day, ‘I don’t want to go to Holyoke; I had a bad experience there,’” Lambert said. “I said, ‘try it again; I’ll go with you.’ She said, ‘you would?’”
And she did just that, relieving the anxiety for one more woman in need. “If you don’t have a medical background nowadays,” she said, “you are lost — very lost.”
And when you’re lost, a navigator sure comes in handy.

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]

The Super 60

By BusinessWest Staff October 22, 2013

Sections Super 60

Depth, Diversity Define the 2013 List of Top-performing Companies

Jeffrey Ciuffreda says there are a number of encouraging signs to take from this year’s roster of Super 60 companies — the 24th compilation of the region’s top-performing businesses.
For starters, there are the numbers — for both revenue and revenue growth — posted by the winners, said Ciuffreda, president of the Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield, which has presented the program since 1990. He noted that companies in the first category averaged more than $35 million last year and combined for more than $1 billion. Meanwhile, one-third of the companies in the revenue-growth category averaged in excess of 50% growth over the past three years, and the average for those 30 honorees was 49%.
These figures speak to how well the area business community has rebounded from the deep and lengthy recession that began in 2008, said Ciuffreda, noting that another positive sign is the diversity represented by this year’s list, which includes everything from colleges to technology companies; healthcare facilities to manufacturers; financial-services firms to retailers.
The number of small, and in some cases very small, businesses on the list is also encouraging, he noted, adding that perhaps the most noteworthy quality when it comes to this year’s roster is the number of first-timers; there are seven, the largest group of newcomers in several years.
“To get new folks on there shows that maybe over the past few years, when people had their heads down and were just surviving, there were some businesses that were experiencing pretty good progress,” he told BusinessWest, adding that their participation in Super 60 shows a desire to tell their story. “It’s a good sign for the economy when you can get new businesses that can exhibit that kind of growth.”
Still another source of encouragement is the large number of companies — 12 in all — that qualified for both categories, said Ciuffreda, noting that this stat indicates that some larger companies have been experiencing strong growth.
The 2013 edition of the Super 60 will be feted at the program’s annual luncheon on Oct. 25, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Chez Josef in Agawam. The event will feature introductions of the winners and include a presentation on a unique business venture in the region — Simple Diaper and Linen, a growing enterprise that has mastered the technique of eco-friendly laundering.
Principals Angie Gregory and Jessica Montagna will detail the company’s profound growth and unique business model, and thus continue a pattern of letting emerging entrepreneurs take center stage at the Super 60 lunch. In recent years, Paul Kozub, founder of V-One Vodka, and Stanley Kowalski, founder of FloDesign, have been keynoters.
Meanwhile, for this issue, BusinessWest spotlights the 60 winners (snapshot profiles begin on page 21) in both the total-revenue and revenue-growth categories.
Topping the former is Springfield College, led by new president Mary-Beth Cooper, followed by Noonan Energy Corp., a residential heating and cooling company, and Whalley Computer Associates Inc., a Southwick-based technology-solutions firm.
Whalley is one of six companies in the category to also qualify for the revenue-growth list. The others are Gandara Mental Health, Joseph Freedman Co. Inc., Maybury Associates, Millennium Power Services Inc., and Tighe & Bond.
Topping the revenue-growth category (where there are actually 31 winners) is Mahan Slate Roofing Co. Inc., which specializes in slate and copper roofing for residential, institutional, and commercial structures, followed by Paragus IT, the Hadley-based outsourced IT solutions firm, and Troy Industries Inc., a U.S. government contractor that designs and manufactures small-arms components and accessories.
Troy was one of six in that category to also qualify for the total-revenue list. The others are ABLE Machine Tool Sales Inc., the Futures Health Group, LLC, NUVO Bank, Specialty Bolt & Screw Inc., and Titan USA Enterprises Inc.
To be considered, companies must be based in Hampden or Hampshire counties or be a member of the ACCGS, have revenues of at least $1 million in the last fiscal year, be an independent and privately owned company, and have been in business at least three full years. Companies are selected based on their percentage of revenue growth over a full three-year period or total revenues for the latest fiscal year.
For more information regarding the Super 60 or to make reservations for the luncheon, call (413) 755-1313 or order online at www.myonlinechamber.com. Tickets cost $50 for ACCGS members and $70 for non-members.

Elizabeth Taras can be reached at [email protected]

TOTAL REVENUE

* Indicates company qualifed in both categories

1. Springfield College
263 Alden St., Springfield
(413) 748-3000
www.springfieldcollege.edu
Mary-Beth Cooper, President
Founded in 1885, Springfield College is a private, independent, coeducational, four-year college offering undergraduate and graduate degree programs with its Humanics philosophy — educating students in spirit, mind, and body for leadership in service to others.

2. Noonan Energy Corp.
86 Robbins Road, Springfield
(413) 734-7396
www.noonanenergy.com
Ted Noonan, President
Founded by Timothy Noonan in 1890, the fifth-generation energy company is now led by Ted Noonan, and installs, replaces, maintains, and upgrades heating and cooling systems throughout the Pioneer Valley.

3. Whalley Computer
Associates Inc. *
One Whalley Way, Southwick
(413) 569-4200
www.wca.com
John Whalley, President
WCA is a locally owned family business that has evolved from a hardware resale and service group in the ’70s and ’80s into a company that now focuses on lowering the total cost of ownership of technology and productivity enhancement for its customers. Whalley carries name-brand computers as well as low-cost performance compatibles.

Aegis Energy Services Inc.
55 Jackson St., Holyoke
(800) 373-3411
www.aegisenergyservices.com
Lee Vardakas, Owner
Founded in 1985, Aegis Energy Services is a turn-key, full-service provider of combined heat and power systems (CHPs) that generate heat and electricity using clean, efficient, natural-gas-powered engines. These modular CHP systems reduce a facility’s dependence on expensive utility power, reduce energy costs, and reduce one’s carbon footprint.

American International College
1000 State St., Springfield
(800) 242-3142
www.aic.com
Vincent Maniaci, President
The 128-year-old private, coeducational, liberal-arts school is interracial, interfaith, and international. One of the keystones of the AIC experience is the opportunity to interact with students from many different backgrounds. The college is organized into schools of Arts, Education, and Sciences; Business Administration; Health Sciences; and Continuing Education.

Associated Electro-Mechanics Inc.
185 Rowland St., Springfield
(800) 288-4276
www.aemservices.com
Elayne Lebeau, Owner/CEO
Associated Electro-Mechanics is a diversified, one-stop industrial sales and service center servicing the New England region and beyond, with a variety of industrial repair and rebuilding services.

The Association for Community Living
220 Brookdale Dr., Springfield
(413) 732-0531
www.theassociationinc.org
Barbara Pilarcik, Executive Director
For 60 years, the Association For Community Living has been creating opportunities, building relationships, and improving lives of children and adults with developmental disabilities and their families. The agency’s caring and experienced workforce empowers individuals with developmental disabilities to live with dignity, bringing fulfillment, community, and valuable relationships into their lives.

Baystate OB/GYN Group Inc.
2 Medical Center Dr., #206, Springfield
(413) 794-8484
www.bogg.com
dr. Howard Trietsch, managing partner
Caring for patients for more than 25 years, Baystate Ob/Gyn Group Inc. offers experienced care for pregnancy, gynecology, menopause, and surgical gynecology for women from teens through the elder years at four office locations in the region.

Braman Chemical Enterprises
147 Almgren Dr., Agawam
(413) 732-9009
www.braman.biz
Gerald Lazarus, President
Braman has been serving New England since 1890, using state-of-the-art pest-elimination procedures for commercial and residential customers. The company has offices in Agawam, Worcester, and Lee, as well as Hartford and New Haven, Conn.

Bridgeport National Bindery Inc.
662 Silver St., Agawam
(413) 789-1981
www.bnbindery.com
Bruce Jacobsen, Executive Vice President
A full-service bindery with on-demand book-printing capabilities, BNB offers a wide variety of binding styles and professional rebinding services, including binding for libraries, pre-binding, textbooks, editions, and conservation. The company also offers digitization, the process of reformatting a print item into an electronic format.

Charter Oak Insurance and Financial Services Co.
330 Whitney Ave., Holyoke
(413) 374-5430
www.charteroakfinancial.com
Peter Novak, General Agent
A member of the MassMutual Financial Group, Charter Oak been servicing clients for 127 years. The team of professionals serves individuals, families, and businesses with risk-management products, business planning and protection, retirement-planning and investment services, and fee-based financial planning.

City Tire Company Inc.
25 Avocado St., Springfield
(413) 737-1419
www.city-tire.com
Peter Greenberg, President
Brothers Peter and Dan Greenberg, the third generation of a family-owned business founded in 1927, have grown the business to 11 locations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The company offers one-stop shopping for tires of all shapes and sizes and a full complement of maintenance and repair services.

Commercial Distributing Co. Inc.
46 South Broad St., Westfield
(413) 562-9691
www.commercialdist.com
Richard Placek, Chairman
Founded in 1935 by Joseph Placek, Commercial Distributing Company is a family-owned and operated business servicing more than 1,000 bars, restaurants, and clubs, as well as more than 400 package and liquor stores. Now in its third generation, the company continues to grow through the values established by its founder by building brands and offering new products as the market changes.

The Dennis Group, LLC *
1537 Main St., Springfield
(413) 746-0054
www.dennisgrp.com
Tom Dennis, CEO
The Dennis Group offers complete planning, design, architectural, engineering, and construction-management services. The firm is comprised of experienced engineering and design professionals specializing in the implementation of food-manufacturing processes and facilities.

Environmental Compliance Services Inc.
588 Silver St., Agawam
(413) 789-3530
www.ecsconsult.com
Mark Hellstein, CEO
For more than 25 years, ECS has specialized in environmental site assessments; testing for asbestos, lead, indoor air quality, and mold; drilling and subsurface investigations; and emergency-response management.

Gandara Mental Health Inc. *
147 Norman St., West Springfield
(413) 736-8329
www.gandaracenter.org
Dr. Henry East-Trou, CEO
Focusing on the Latino/Hispanic community, Gandara Center provides substance-abuse recovery, mental-health, and housing services for men, women, children, adolescents, and families throughout the Pioneer Valley.

Joseph Freedman Co. Inc. *
115 Stevens St., Springfield
(888) 677-7818
www.josephfreedmanco.com
John Freedman, President
Founded in 1891, the company provides industrial scrap-metal recycling, specializing in aluminum, copper, nickel alloys, and aircraft scrap, and has two facilities in Springfield — a 120,000-square-foot indoor ferrous facility and a 60,000-square-foot chopping operation.

Delaney Restaurant Inc. / The Log Cabin
500 Easthampton Road, Holyoke
(413) 535-5077
www.logcabin-delaney.com
Peter Rosskothen, President
The Delaney House restaurant offers 13 private-themed rooms for any special occasion, with seating for up to 260. It offers two dining options — fine dining and the more casual Mick. The Log Cabin Banquet & Meeting House offers banquet facilities for weddings, showers, anniversaries, engagement parties, bar/bat mitzvahs, business meetings, holiday parties, and other events.

Marcotte Ford Sales
1025 Main St., Holyoke
(800) 923-9810
www.marcotteford.com
Bryan Marcotte, President
The dealership sells new Ford vehicles as well as pre-owned cars, trucks, and SUVs, and features a full service department. Marcotte has achieved the President’s Award, one of the most prestigious honors given to dealerships by Ford Motor Co., on multiple occasions over the past decade.

Maybury Material Handling *
90 Denslow Road, East Longmeadow
(413) 525-4216
www.maybury.com
John Maybury, President
Since 1976, Maybury Material Handling has been designing, supplying, and servicing all types of material-handling equipment throughout New England. Maybury provides customers in a wide range of industries with solutions to move, lift, and store their parts and products.

Millennium Power Services Inc. *
79 Mainline Dr., Westfield
www.millenniumpower.net
(413) 562-5332
Michael Pellegrini, President
Founded in 2000, Millennium Power Services is a full-service valve-repair shop and manufacturer of new valve parts. With a fleet of mobile machine shops, the company offers on-site service throughout the U.S., which allows customers to monitor their jobs, and also offers emergency valve service both at customer sites and in shops located in Massachusetts, Maine, and Florida.

PC Enterprises d/b/a Entre Computer
138 Memorial Ave., West Springfield
(413) 736-2112
www.pc-enterprises.com
Norman Fiedler, CEO
Entre assists organizations with procuring, installing, troubleshooting, servicing, and maximizing the value of technology. In business since 1983, it continues to evolve and grow as a lead provider for many businesses, healthcare providers, retailers, and state, local, and education entities.

Poly-Metal Finishing Inc.
1 Allen St # 218, Springfield
(413) 781-4535
www.poly-metal.com
Jason Kudelka, President
Poly-Metal Finishing Inc. has served the metalworking industry for more than three decades and specializes in providing the aerospace, military, and commercial sectors with complete anodic services: sulfuric anodizing, color anodizing, chromic, hardcoat, polylube processing, chemical conversion of aluminum, and pre-bond coatings.

Rediker Software Inc.
2 Wilbraham Road, Hampden
(800) 213-9860
www.rediker.com
Richard Rediker, President
Rediker software is used by school administrators across the U.S. and in more than 100 countries, and is designed to meet the student-information-management needs of all types of schools and districts.

Rocky’s Hardware Inc.
40 Island Pond Road, Springfield
(413) 781-1650
www.rockys.com
Rocco Falcone II, President
With locations throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, the family-run business founded in 1926 is a fully stocked, convenient source for not only typical hardware-store items but also a line of goods for the home, yard, and garden.

Sarat Ford Lincoln
245 Springfield St., Agawam
(413) 789-5400
www.saratford.com
Jeff Sarat, President
Founded in 1929 by John Sarat Sr., Sarat Ford has become the largest Ford dealership in Western Mass., and today, grandson Jeff Sarat leads the company. The full-service dealership includes a state-of-the-art body-shop facility, and a new, 10,000-square-foot expansion offers a 24-bay service center that houses a $1 million parts inventory featuring Ford, Motorcraft, Motorsport, and a variety of other specialty manufacturers.

Spectrum Analytical Inc.
11 Almgren Dr., Agawam
(413) 789-9018
www.spectrum-analytical.com
Hanibal Tayeh, CEO
For more than a decade, Spectrum Analytical Inc. has provided quantitative analysis of soil, water, and, more recently, air samples, as well as petroleum products. Consulting firms, industries, municipalities, universities, and the public sector are among the constituencies that make up the client list.

Tighe & Bond Inc. *
53 Southampton Road, Westfield
(413) 562-1600
www.tighebond.com
David Pinsky, President
Launched in 1911, Tighe & Bond specializes in environmental engineering, focusing on water, wastewater, solid-waste, and hazardous-waste issues, and provides innovative engineering services to public and private clients around the country and overseas.

United Personnel Services Inc.
1331 Main St., Springfield
(413) 736-0800
www.unitedpersonnel.com
Patricia Canavan, President
United provides a full range of staffing services, including temporary staffing and full-time placement, on-site project management, and strategic recruitment in the Springfield, Hartford, and Northampton areas, specializing in administrative, professional, medical, and light-industrial staff.

W.F. Young Inc.
302 Benton Dr., East Longmeadow
(800) 628-9653
www.absorbine.com
Tyler Young, CEO
This family-run business prides itself on offering a variety of high-quality products that can effectively improve the well-being of both people and horses with its Absorbine brands.

REVENUE GROWTH

* Indicates company qualifed in both categories

1. Mahan Slate Roofing Co. Inc.
P.O. Box 2860, Springfield
(413) 394-3513
www.mahanslate.com
John Mahan, Vice President
While Mahan Slate Roofing does not install asphalt shingle roofing or commercial flat roofing, they do specialize in beautiful and lasting slate and copper roofing for residential, institutional, municipal, and commercial structures. Mahan also has a full sheet-metal shop, which allows the company to produce a wide range of copper products including custom gutters and downspouts, and it designs snow-guard systems, often a much-needed accessory for slate roofs.

2. Paragus IT
84 Russell St., Hadley
(413) 587-2666
www.paragusit.com
Delcie Bean IV, President
While still in high school, Delcie Bean founded Paragus IT in 1999, first under the name Vertical Horizons and then Valley ComputerWorks. The name Paragus, short for asparagus, one of Hadley’s most famous agricultural products, has grown dramatically as an outsourced IT solution for area clients. From information technology solutions to CMR-17 compliance to EMR implementation, the Paragus experts in computer systems and information technology provide business computer service, computer consulting, information-technology support, and other proactive services to small and medium-sized businesses.

3. Troy Industries Inc. *
151 Capital Dr., West Springfield
(413) 788-4288; (866) 788-6412
www.troyind.com
Steve Troy, CEO
Troy Industries was founded on the principle of making reliable, innovative, over-engineered products that function without question when lives are on the line. All products are American-made and designed to perform flawlessly under intense battle conditions. The choice of special ops, law enforcement, and war fighters worldwide, Troy Industries is a leading U.S. government contractor that designs and manufactures innovative, top-quality small-arms components and accessories and complete weapon upgrades.

ABLE Machine Tool Sales Inc. *
800 Silver St., Agawam
(413) 786-4662
www.ablemts.com
Alan Lockery, President
ABLE Machine Tool Sales distributes some of the world’s finest machine tools, but it also offers clients the Able Metrology Tech Center, providing measurement tools to suit manufacturing-inspection requirements. ABLE’s experienced sales staff and service technicians are given extensive training, and the company is factory-authorized to assist with mechanical and electrical repairs, preventive maintenance programs, and employee-training programs.

Adam Quenneville Roofing and Siding
160 Old Lyman Road, South Hadley
(413) 536-5955
www.1800newroof.net
Adam Quenneville, CEO
Adam Quenneville offers a wide range of residential and commercial services, including new roofs, retrofitting, roof repair, roof cleaning, vinyl siding, replacement windows, and the no-clog Gutter Shutter system. The company earned the 2010 BBB Torch Award for trust, performance, and integrity.

Advance Welding
47 Allston Ave., West Springfield
(413) 734-4544
www.theperfectweld.com
Christopher Kielb, President
Since 1978, Advance Welding has served its clients with high-quality welding, brazing, and metal fabrication with state-of-the-art facilities and more than 100 years of combined welding experience. The company recently added 6,000 square feet of new facilities and actively participates as role models to young people who may someday seek a career in welding, by showing that the manufacturing industry still thrives in America.

Aegenco Inc.
55 Jackson St., Springfield
(413) 746-3242
Spiro Vardakas, President
Aegenco, an energy-conservation consulting firm, has grown steadily since its inception in 2005.

REVENUE GROWTH
* Indicates company qualifed in both categories

1. Mahan Slate Roofing Co. Inc.
P.O. Box 2860, Springfield
(413) 394-3513
www.mahanslate.com
John Mahan, Vice President
While Mahan Slate Roofing does not install asphalt shingle roofing or commercial flat roofing, they do specialize in beautiful and lasting slate and copper roofing for residential, institutional, municipal, and commercial structures. Mahan also has a full sheet-metal shop, which allows the company to produce a wide range of copper products including custom gutters and downspouts, and it designs snow-guard systems, often a much-needed accessory for slate roofs.

2. Paragus IT
84 Russell St., Hadley
(413) 587-2666
www.paragusit.com
Delcie Bean IV, President
While still in high school, Delcie Bean founded Paragus IT in 1999, first under the name Vertical Horizons and then Valley ComputerWorks. The name Paragus, short for asparagus, one of Hadley’s most famous agricultural products, has grown dramatically as an outsourced IT solution for area clients. From information technology solutions to CMR-17 compliance to EMR implementation, the Paragus experts in computer systems and information technology provide business computer service, computer consulting, information-technology support, and other proactive services to small and medium-sized businesses.

3. Troy Industries Inc. *
151 Capital Dr., West Springfield
(413) 788-4288; (866) 788-6412
www.troyind.com
Steve Troy, CEO
Troy Industries was founded on the principle of making reliable, innovative, over-engineered products that function without question when lives are on the line. All products are American-made and designed to perform flawlessly under intense battle conditions. The choice of special ops, law enforcement, and war fighters worldwide, Troy Industries is a leading U.S. government contractor that designs and manufactures innovative, top-quality small-arms components and accessories and complete weapon upgrades.

ABLE Machine Tool Sales Inc. *
800 Silver St., Agawam
(413) 786-4662
www.ablemts.com
Alan Lockery, President
ABLE Machine Tool Sales distributes some of the world’s finest machine tools, but it also offers clients the Able Metrology Tech Center, providing measurement tools to suit manufacturing-inspection requirements. ABLE’s experienced sales staff and service technicians are given extensive training, and the company is factory-authorized to assist with mechanical and electrical repairs, preventive maintenance programs, and employee-training programs.

Adam Quenneville Roofing and Siding
160 Old Lyman Road, South Hadley
(413) 525-0025
www.1800newroof.net
Adam Quenneville, CEO
Adam Quenneville offers a wide range of residential and commercial services, including new roofs, retrofitting, roof repair, roof cleaning, vinyl siding, replacement windows, and the no-clog Gutter Shutter system. The company earned the 2010 BBB Torch Award for trust, performance, and integrity.

Advance Welding
47 Allston Ave., West Springfield
(413) 734-4544
www.theperfectweld.com
Christopher Kielb, President
Since 1978, Advance Welding has served its clients with high-quality welding, brazing, and metal fabrication with state-of-the-art facilities and more than 100 years of combined welding experience. The company recently added 6,000 square feet of new facilities and actively participates as role models to young people who may someday seek a career in welding, by showing that the manufacturing industry still thrives in America.

Aegenco Inc.
55 Jackson St., Springfield
(413) 746-3242
Spiro Vardakas, President
Aegenco, an energy-conservation consulting firm, has grown steadily since its inception in 2005.

American Pest Solutions Inc.
169 William St., Springfield
(413) 781-0044
www.413pestfree.com
Robert Russell, President
For nearly 100 years, American Pest Solutions has been taking care of families and business owners to keep their properties free from ants, bedbugs, rodents, roaches, termites, and other harmful pest infestations. By utilizing products and pest-treatment solutions designed to minimize impacts on the surrounding environment, American takes an ecologically sensitive approach to pest control for the environmentally concerned client.

Axia Insurance & Affiliates
933 East Columbus Ave., Springfield
(413) 788-9000
www.axiagroup.net
Michael Long, CEO
“AXiA” translates from Greek to mean ‘value, capability, merit, and worthiness’; it’s Axia Insurance’s philosophy of doing business. Representing several carriers for commercial clients, Axia also represents other personal-insurance companies specifically for MassMutual employee services, but can service to anyone for personal lines.

Con-Test Analytical Laboratory
39 Spruce St., East Longmeadow
(413) 525-2332
www.contestlabs.com
Thomas Veratti Sr., Founder
Established in 1984, Con-Test provides environmental consulting and testing services to a variety of clients throughout Western Mass. The laboratory-testing division originally focused on industrial hygiene analysis, but rapidly expanded to include numerous techniques in air analysis, classical (wet) chemistry, metals, and organics, and has the capability for analyzing nearly all water, air, soil, and solid materials.

Dynamic Dock & Door Inc.
64 Lowell St., West Springfield
(413) 731-1114
www.dynamic-dock-door.com
Bret Leveillee, Vice President
Dynamic Dock and Door is a complete materials-handling company specializing in loading-dock equipment, overhead doors, storage systems, and energy conservation. Providing companies across New England and New Jersey for more than 20 years with quality overhead door and loading-dock equipment, installation, and service, the company has recently added installation, sales, and service of traditional commercial man doors to its product and service mix.

FIT Solutions
25 Bremen St., Springfield
(413) 733-6466
www.fitsolutions.us
Jackie Fallon, President
Since 2004, FIT Solutions has been partnering with clients, from small-business owners who have only a few IT needs to large companies that have small IT departments, to provide the best candidates for a variety of IT positions. Meeting with the hiring manager, FIT Solutions determines the exact qualifications and skills needed, as well as the personality traits desired in order to find candidates that fit an array of technology-based positions. FIT Solutions now serves both the Massachusetts and Connecticut markets.

Fletcher Sewer & Drain Inc.
824a Perimeter Road, Ludlow
(413) 547-8180
www.fletcherseweranddrain.com
Teri Marinello, President
Since 1985, Fletcher Sewer & Drain has provided service to homeowners as well as municipalities and construction companies for large pipeline jobs from Western Mass. to Southern Conn. From unblocking kitchen sinks to replacing sewer lines, this woman-owned company keeps up-to-date with all the latest technology, from high-pressure sewer jetters to the newest camera-inspection equipment.

The Futures Health Group, LLC *
136 Williams St., Springfield
(800) 218-9280
Peter Bittel, CEO
The Futures Health Group provides special-education and clinical services and management to 25,000 students and individuals. Bittel has more than 35 years of clinical and executive leadership experience in the areas of special education, rehabilitation, and developmental disabilities.

The Gaudreau Group
1984 Boston Road, Wilbraham
(413) 543-3534
www.gaudreaugroup.com
Jules Gaudreau, President
A multi-line insurance and financial-service agency established in 1921, the Gaudreau Group combines the traditional service philosophy of an agency with the talents of a dynamic marketing organization. With the expertise and resources that enable clients to respond to an ever-changing economic environment, the agency offers a broad range of insurance and financial products from basic life, home, and auto insurance to complex corporate services, employee benefits, and retirement plans.

GMH Fence Co. Inc.
15 Benton Dr., East Longmeadow
(413) 525-3361
www.gmhfence.com
Glenn Hastie, Owner
Serving the Western Mass. area for more than over 20 years, GMH Fence Co. is one of largest and most respected fence companies in the region. The fencing contractor offers quality service and fence installations from a selection of wood, aluminum, steel, and vinyl fencing that are durable and virtually trouble-free for residential, commercial, and industrial fencing requests.

Janice Yanni, DDS, PC
180 Westfield St., West Springfield
(413) 739-4400
www.yanniorthodontics.com
Dr. Janice Yanni, Owner
It’s never too early or too late to think about improving a smile, and Yanni Orthodontics has a mission to make all their patients smile. Dr. Janice Yanni specializes in orthodontic treatment for children, teens, and adults with offices in West Springfield as well as Tolland, Conn., using the latest in technology and a variety of treatment options, including Invisalign, Invisalign Express, Incognito, Six Month Smiles, and traditional braces.

Lattitude
1338 Memorial Ave., West Springfield
(413) 241-8888
www.lattitude1338.com
Jeff Daigneau, Owner
Executive chef and owner Jeff Daigneau opened Lattitude in 2007 and offers a unique, continually changing menu, based on local, seasonal product and his own classically trained talent for inimitable cuisine. The recent addition of a large outdoor patio-bar area for dining and live music will complement new interior expansions, including a new, 80-seat banquet room. Lattitude offers private, on-site events as well as off-site catering for 10 to several hundred people.

Market Mentors, LLC
1680 Riverdale St., West Springfield
(413) 787-1133
www.marketmentors.com
Michelle Abdow, Principal
A full-service marketing firm, Market Mentors handles all forms of marketing, including advertising in all mediums, media buying, graphic design, public relations, and event planning.

NetLogix Inc.
181 Notre Dame St., Westfield
(413) 586-2777
www.netlgx.com
Marco Liquori, President
NetLogix offers a wide range of IT services, including equipment sales; managed network services and remote monitoring; network design, installation, and management; network security and firewalls; disaster-recovery and business-continuity services; VoIP; wi-fi; and more.

NUVO Bank & Trust Co. *
1500 Main St., Springfield
(413) 787-2700
www.nuvobank.com
M. Dale Janes, CEO
Chartered in 2007, NUVO is an independent, locally owned bank that provides deposits, residential and commercial loans, and cash-management services for both personal-banking and business-banking needs.

O’Connell Professional Nurse Service Inc.
14 Bobala Road, Suite 1B, Holyoke
(413) 533-1030
www.opns.com
Francis O’Connell, President
For more than two decades, O’Connell Professional Nurse Service Inc., (O’Connell Care at Home and Healthcare Staffing) has grown to deliver a range of home-health and staffing services across the Pioneer Valley. Services range from nursing care and geriatric healthcare management to advocacy and transportation.

Powervestors, LLC
55 Jackson St., Holyoke
(413) 536-1156
www.aegisenergyservices.com
Spiro Vardakas, Owner
Powervestors provides services in power-generating equipment installation throughout the region.

R & R Industries Inc.
195 Rocus St., Springfield
(413) 733-2118
www.randrind.com
Bruce Robinovitz, President
Family-owned and operated since 1957, R & R Industries is a full-service metal and auto recycler serving Western Mass. and Northern Conn., providing recycling and container services to commercial, industrial, and residential customers. The company also purchases all ferrous and non-ferrous metals at market prices and supplies hard-to-find auto parts for older models.

Robert F. Scott Co. Inc.
467 Longmeadow St., Longmeadow
(413) 567-7089
Leonard Rising III, President
Robert F. Scott Co. Inc. (known as Longmeadow Garage) is a locally owned and operated, full-service gasoline and automotive service station. Its staff includes ASE-certified technicians well-versed in all makes and models.

Specialty Bolt & Screw Inc. *
235 Bowles Road, Agawam
(413) 789-6700
www.specialtybolt.com
Alan Crosby, CEO
Founded in 1977, Specialty Bolt & Screw Inc. is a distributor of innovative fastener solutions. The company has engineering resources on staff to help determine the optimum fastener for each application, and utilizes state-of-the-art technology along with more than 30 years of experience to help clients achieve their objectives.

Titan USA Enterprises Inc. *
140 Baldwin St., West Springfield
(888) 482-6872
www.titanman.com
Ralph Colby, CEO
For almost four decades, Titan USA Enterprises has served industrial distributors as a manufacturer of premium-quality, solid-carbide, high-speed steel and cobalt cutting tools.

United Industrial Services Inc.
120 Almgren Dr., Agawam
(413) 789-0896
www.unitedindustrialinc.com
Tony Reopel, Vice President
From the simplest hand truck to the most sophisticated conveyor systems and in-plant racking layouts, United Industrial Services has been providing material handling solutions for every size of business for more than 30 years. The company supports sales, leasing, rentals, parts, and services for all forms of industrial mechanical needs, and offers OSHA experts to provide guidelines for safe operation of every machine sold.

Universal Plastics Corp. *
75 Whiting Farms Road, Holyoke
(800) 553-0120
www.universalplastics.com
Joseph Peters, CEO
Since 1965, Universal Plastics has been a leading force in the custom thermoforming industry. It specializes in precision custom thermoforming, a plastic-manufacturing process that converts a sheet of plastic into a highly detailed finished product with less tooling investment than other plastic molding processes.

Whalley Precision Inc.
28 Hudson Dr., Southwick
www.whalleyprecision.com
DAVID WHALLEY, PRESIDENT
Whalley Precision Inc. is a family-owned small business and full-service manufacturing company/FAA repair station founded in 1990. The company performs general fabrication, machining, and assembly. Its services include CNC/manual milling and turning; ID, OD, and surface grinding; jig boring; honing; MIG and TIG welding; metal forming; and robotic welding and assembly. In addition to carbon steel, the company routinely works with stainless steel, aluminum, space-age alloys and plastics, and materials such as Inconel and Kovar, as well as various other hardened materials.

Wright Architectural Millwork Corp.
115 Industrial Dr., Northampton
(413) 586-3528
www.wrightmw.com
Walt Price, President
Wright Architectural Millwork embraces current technology, blending digital technology and traditional craftsmanship for the highest quality of millwork solutions, which can be found in the facilities of some of the world’s best-known companies and institutions. The firm procures and works with non-wood materials (such as stone, glass, leather, fabrics, and architectural metals), integrating them into quality woodwork for complete, customized designs.vv
American Pest Solutions Inc.
169 William St., Springfield
(413) 781-0044
www.413pestfree.com
Robert Russell, President
For nearly 100 years, American Pest Solutions has been taking care of families and business owners to keep their properties free from ants, bedbugs, rodents, roaches, termites, and other harmful pest infestations. By utilizing products and pest-treatment solutions designed to minimize impacts on the surrounding environment, American takes an ecologically sensitive approach to pest control for the environmentally concerned client.