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It’s Time to Get the Message

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Sections Supplements
Why Your Customers Will Never Be the Same

‘Let’s put it all behind us.’ These few words capture Americans’ unquenchable optimism. If there’s a roadblock, we go around it, and no hurdle is ever too high. Nothing stops us. We regroup and move on. Besides, tomorrow will be a better day.

Without such a heritage, we would be a far lesser nation.

Yet, there is nothing less than a sea change taking place. We have been forced to turn to Middle Eastern and Asian countries to save us from financial disaster, the same ones that have long been siphoning off millions of U.S. jobs.

If all this isn’t enough, we are rendered impotent to do anything about rising energy costs and falling home prices. The situation is so serious that hundreds of thousands of consumers have abandoned their homes before foreclosure. On top of all that, we’ve parked our pickups and abandoned buying SUVs.

At the supermarket, Spam sales have shot up for the first time in 40 years, while canned beans and macaroni and cheese fly off the shelves. Half the current crop of college graduates is boomeranging back home, and families are missing from family restaurants.

Unquestionably, our country and the economy are in the midst of what may be an unprecedented upheaval that no one can escape. Incredibly, however, many in sales and marketing seem to ignore the unpleasant realities, even pretending the harsh realities don’t exist.

But in the words of Warren Buffett, “the party’s over.”

Rather than burying our heads in the sand, a much more productive approach is to discover the marketing and sales messages that make sense to customers in a clearly painful economic situation. Here are five essential marketing and sales themes:

1. It’s time to stop pretending nothing has changed. It took a decade for General Motors and Ford Motor Company to finally confess that the auto-buying public wants small, fuel-efficient vehicles. They are on life support today because they couldn’t resist blaming their problems on just about everything else as they failed to see that they were the ones on the wrong road.

There’s a huge lesson in all this. It’s not just that buying behavior has changed. There’s far more to it: those in marketing and sales often persist in the belief that it’s someone else’s customers whose buying behavior has changed. They want to believe that their customers are different.

We want to believe that we will get over this and every other hurdle and all will once again be well. When the term ‘downsizing’ was first heard nearly 20 years ago, we said it was a temporary situation, even though there were indications that it was a permanent part of the corporate landscape.

The point: basing marketing and sales on what we want to believe rather than reality can and will hurt us.

2. Recognize that caution prevails. Let’s face it — there’s a serious problem when the auto repo trucks roam the nation’s suburban neighborhoods day and night, while a Mortgage Bankers Assoc. report indicates that nearly 1 in 10 American homeowners with a mortgage faced foreclosure or fell behind in their payments in the first quarter of 2008.

Then, pile on the dramatic downsizing of the nation’s airlines, add widespread job insecurity and the fact that companies are warning employees to be alert to gas tank thefts, and there’s a flood of uncertainty and fear. To ignore this situation is a strategic mistake.

A more beneficial approach is to create marketing strategies and sales messages that acknowledge the uncertainty and demonstrate how buying your products or using your services minimizes risk and creates greater security.

The point: no one wants to get in too deep into anything. Offering assurance that customers will avoid getting in trouble is an appealing message.

3. The desire to do something is strong. Whether the current ‘green revolution’ is real or a fad is irrelevant. There may be some of both. The cynics are always quick to point out that such activities as annual ‘clean up the town’ days or ‘save the something or other’ are more PR than practical. Even so, in times of crisis, people want to feel that they are doing something to help. They remember these experiences for years to come.

It’s difficult to get our arms around global warming, and we’re impotent when it comes to doing anything about the price of oil. Yet, we want to feel that we’re helping, and the current green movement is a way to take a stand.

During World War II, millions of Americans planted ‘Victory Gardens’ and collected scrap rubber (including millions of elastics), cans of fat, and tons of metal. All this may have helped the war effort, but it also gave Americans the opportunity to be involved.

The point: finding ways to support and align ourselves with the ‘green revolution’ or similar movements allows consumers and companies to feel they are making a difference and that we are all in this together.

4. Life is filled with disappointment. No matter how you look at it, Americans are being bombarded with disappointment: pensions are disappearing, and cost-of-living increases and the day one can retire are fading. Even the horizons of those largely unaffected by such experiences are changing.

As Sandra Block of USA Today writes, “Patty Stewart of Redlands, Calif., is beginning to think she won’t be able to retire at 65. Or 67. Or possibly ever.” With the drop in her 401(k) and the equity in her home sinking fast, retirement may be an illusion.

Since the 1950s, we have been able to gratify more desires than any people on earth, culminating in the bizarre belief that $50,000 or $60,000 annual incomes could support $400,000 and $600,000 mortgages.

Now, disappointment prevails. Even Boomers are moving back in with their parents, and their kids are joining two generations under the same roof.

To some extent, gratification is not just being delayed; it is disappearing.

The point: the genius of Starbucks is immediate, low-cost gratification. It took the founder to see that the company had strayed from this path. The product is affordable, immediate gratification, a powerful message in all marketing and sales today.

5. Get off the slam-dunk sales mentality. Selling is a tough job, but had it not been for a population that could afford the plethora of products and services produced by U.S. corporations, it would have been a thousand times more difficult.

Companies have been able to raise quotas, cut commissions, minimize territories, and give little support to their salespeople and get away with it, primarily because most of the fruit was waiting to fall to the ground.

That party is over, too, leaving companies unhappy with their salespeople and salespeople making excuses without really knowing what’s wrong.

The problem was expressed by an insurance agency president when he said, “what we need is more sales,” as if there is some magical way to turn doubting, worried, cautious, reluctant customers into instant buyers. He is not alone with his ‘slam-dunk’ sales mentality.

The point: the marketing-sales challenge today is one of identifying and cultivating specific customers with messages that speak to their perceptions and understanding of where they are in life. That takes time, time, and more time. We have left ‘getting the sale’ behind, and now we are in a period where ‘deserving the sale’ prevails.

The only real marketing and sales challenge today is having the strength and will to take our marketing and sales direction from our customers instead of from our companies.

Balance of Power

By
Cover Story
Rising Fuel Costs Force Tough Decisions for Businesses

It’s an election year, so it’s no surprise that, as soaring energy costs fuel increasing concern across America, the rhetoric is flowing as freely as $4-per-gallon gas.
A Congressional panel recently called a group of oil-company CEOs on the carpet, berating them for profiteering during an economic slowdown. The execs, in turn, blamed Congress for restricting drilling and refining at home, contributing to an unhealthy dependence on oil-rich but often-unfriendly foreign governments.
Caught in the middle of this heated exchange are average Americans, who increasingly find themselves diverting money from other household needs to filling up the gas tank, leading to often-difficult spending decisions.

Receiving less media attention, however, are businesses of all kinds, which are also forced to make tough decisions, whether it’s retail stores pondering whether to pass hefty shipping surcharges to customers or construction firms seeing profits shrink as the cost of fuel and supplies far outstrips what they had anticipated during the bid process — not to mention auto dealers watching as consumer anxiety keeps would-be buyers from making that big purchase.

“It’s certainly having an effect on the auto business,” said Don Pion, president of Bob Pion Buick Pontiac GMC in Chicopee. “Any time people feel uncertain about the economy, they tend to hold back and not make long-term purchases — and that’s what automobile purchases are. Few people are coming in paying cash; it’s a four-, five-, six-year commitment. A lot of people are standing on the sidelines and seeing how this all shakes out.”

Big Y Foods, with more than 50 stores across the region, has seen its fuel surcharges on produce trucked from California and other distant locales increase by $1 million over just the past six months, on top of everyday energy costs that also continue to rise.

“Our customers are accustomed to having a great variety of produce, and we want to provide it, but those costs have gone up tremendously,” said Claire D’Amour, Big Y’s vice president for corporate communications. Rising energy costs have also raised the cost of paper and plastic packaging, and while the chain looks for alternative products where possible, that’s not always — or even often — possible. “If you’re buying Cheerios,” she said, “well, that’s the package it comes in.”

“Paper costs are higher than they’ve been in years, because of the higher fuel costs to get that paper to our door,” added Greg Desrosiers, sales and marketing director at Hadley Printing in South Hadley. “And it’s costing us more to fill up our own delivery trucks.”

It’s a story BusinessWest heard repeatedly from local companies, which are often saddled with the double burden of their own rising energy costs and the additional costs being passed on to them from their suppliers. No one wants to increase the prices they charge customers, but when the resource that runs much of the American economy costs so much, they often have no choice.

Cost Drivers

The auto-sales business would seem to be on especially shaky ground these days, and Pion said it’s difficult to know how much buyer reluctance has to do with gas prices and how much is typical behavior in a softening economy. But car sales have actually been holding up fairly well, he noted — it’s recreational purchases that are being hit the hardest.

“I think the biggest impact we’ve seen is with the discretionary truck buyer, who doesn’t need to buy a truck, but likes trucks and wants to own one as a first or second family vehicle,” Pion explained. “That person isn’t buying right now, and truck and SUV sales have fallen off because of that.

“Now, the person who needs a truck for work, or they’re towing a boat or a camper, or need it to do some other job, that customer is still buying,” he added. “But it seems like the only people buying a truck or SUV right now are those people who need it for a specific purpose.”

Rising fuel costs have forced many businesses to rethink their energy use, and a large, regional supermarket chain like Big Y deals with the issue on multiple levels.

D’Amour said Big Y buys as many goods as it can with each shipment, “stocking up just as we would encourage customers to do.” And, in fact, she has already started to see changes in customer behavior brought on by higher gas and food prices, such as shopping less frequently, combining food shopping with other errands, and buying more generic brands.

When examining rising grocery prices, however, factors other than energy costs are at play, she said, including a decline in wheat production in the U.S. while demand for the grain rises worldwide. “Corn is a more lucrative product because you can make more things with it, including ethanol,” she explained. But the fact that consumers demand a wide variety of produce year-round makes the shipping surcharges a more central issue.

Big Y has taken steps over the years to reduce its energy costs, D’Amour noted, including efforts to fill its own trucks completely before transporting items, installing lighting regulators in stores to avoid peak brightness during less-trafficked times of the day, and reclaiming heat from the freezer generators to heat the stores.

“The older stores are also replacing equipment,” she told BusinessWest. “After awhile, it becomes cheaper in the long run to replace an older refrigerator case than to keep repairing it.”

Culture Change

Municipalities struggle with energy costs on an even larger scale than most businesses; for example, the city of Chicopee spends about $4 million per year on electricity and $750,000 on gasoline and other fuel, out of a total budget of $150 million. Mayor Michael Bissonnette said the city has been proactive in reducing those costs, including implementing a Texas-based conservation program called Energy Education in Chicopee schools — a program that will soon spread to other city departments.

“It’s not rocket science. Either you’re proactive, or you pay more for energy use,” said the mayor, whose city also benefits from its own electric department to keep costs down. “This program is designed to assess and then curtail the use of energy in buildings. We hired a full-time staff person to take all that data and apply it to reducing energy use. In the past 18 months, we’ve saved $920,000.”

Energy, Bissonnette said, is something that most municipal governments don’t keep a careful enough eye on, but it can be shocking to discover how many lights, heating systems, and computers are left running all night when offices and buildings are unoccupied.

Besides cutting down on that type of waste, Chicopee — which boasts a fleet of 225 vehicles, from passenger cars to heavy-duty trucks and police and emergency vehicles — has begun replacing its SUVs with hybrid models and its Crown Victorias with Tauruses, both changes offering better fuel economy. In addition, the routes driven by patrolling police officers and sanitation vehicles have been studied and altered to reduce miles driven.

“It’s really about changing the culture,” Bissonnette said of the efforts, which will allow him to avoid an increase in the energy budget next year, despite the rising cost of fuel — efforts, he said, that homeowners and businesses can replicate. “If every single household in America were to change from a regular lightbulb to one of those newfangled, funny-looking, energy-efficient lightbulbs — just one bulb per house — it would be the equivalent of taking 600,000 autos off the street in terms of reducing pollution and global warming.

“People are coming to accept that we can’t use energy the same old way,” he continued. “It’s like it was with recycling — it takes awhile for people to change their behavior and accept a new reality, but that’s what’s happening now.”

Reality Check

All industries are now getting an education in that reality.

“Gas prices are certainly affecting our business,” said Andrew Crane, president of A. Crane Construction in Chicopee. “Every time the trucks leave in the morning, we have to make sure the trips are efficient,” meaning combining trips in order to do the most work on the least miles. “We’re just starting a job in Sturbridge; I made that deal a year ago, and now I’m trying to stay within what I thought the budget would be. It costs me $30 a day, per truck, just to get there and back.

“How do you stay competitive?” he continued. “Every two months, I get letters from our suppliers saying costs have gone up 8% to 10%. So we have to pay more attention to how we’re managing jobs to make them efficient, and that takes time and energy.”

Desrosiers said the rising cost of paper, because of production and shipping costs, is unavoidable, but Hadley Printing is reluctant to pass along to customers its own rising energy costs — both from operating the heavy printing machinery and using its own trucks for transport. That makes energy conservation a must if profits are to remain steady.

“Paper costs more, and that’s figured into costs,” he said. “But for the smaller jobs, we really try to absorb those other increased costs through volume, and try to do more with less.

“We have to make some tough decisions because people, including our customers, are very sensitive to the way everything is going up,” Desrosiers continued. “This isn’t a nickel-and-dime type of business. I don’t put line items in for fuel charges. I find that to be a big turnoff to many people, and not a good business tactic.”

In addition, Hadley Printing has embarked upon efforts to win ‘green’ certification from the Forest Stewardship Council, an organization that promotes ethical, environmentally friendly, and economically viable business practices. “We hope that spurs some interest from people and gains us some new business from people looking to print with companies that are greener,” he said — another way to increase volume and lessen the impact of rising fuel and electricity costs.

Driving Home a Point

If business owners are finding it challenging to stay profitable in such an environment, gasoline costs often pose a more immediate threat to employees who commute long distances to work.

Meredith Wise, president of the Employers Assoc. of the Northeast, said members of that organization are sensitive to the fact that employees who live check-to-check can find the extra cost of commuting crippling — and even a reason to search for a different job. But they’re divided on what to do about it.

“We found a split,” Wise said. “There are some organizations that are saying, ‘you know, that’s just a part of life,’ and continue with business as usual, but there are a few companies doing some neat things — they’re actually looking at the regular commute people have and giving them a monthly fuel adjustment because the price of gas has gone up so much.”

Companies taking this route are calculating the benefit in different ways. Some are paying a set amount per mile, while at least one takes the total weekly miles commuted and multiplies that by the difference in gas prices between today and 12 months ago. “Others are pulling a number out of thin air,” Wise said.

“The important thing is, they’re doing it for the regular commute, and that’s not something they have to do,” she continued. “But they’re recognizing that they need to keep their people, some of whom might drive 30 or 40 miles each way to work. This is a way of saying, ‘we understand what you’re going through.’ I don’t know how long these programs will stay in place at companies that have rolled them out, but my expectation is at least for the remainder of this year, as long as gas prices stay high.”

Wise hasn’t seen a rise in telecommuting at companies that don’t already offer the option widely, but businesses are examining other options, from shifting toward leasing company vehicles to increasing the mileage reimbursement for salespeople and other employees who spend a lot of time on the road. The problem is, it’s difficult to relieve costs for employees and ownership, so companies are forced to walk a difficult tightrope.

Already, many are preparing for changes in consumer habits. Pion noted that trucks and SUVs actually get better mileage, on average, than they did five years ago, but they’re still a tough sell with gas prices so high. “I think people are being cautious in how they’re spending their money today,” he said.

“We’re riding it out,” D’Amour added. “It’s a little frightening, frankly.”

That’s a sentiment that business owners across Western Mass. — not to mention their customers — certainly share.

World of Opportunities

By
Sections Supplements
Training for ‘Green-collar’ Jobs Moves to the Forefront on Campuses and in Communities

As new opportunities present themselves in so-called ‘green industries,’ the need for a new workforce to fill these positions is building. The region could have a new economic stimulus in environment- and energy-based fields, and while these sectors are still a small part of the business landscape, they’re also a bright spot on the horizon in terms of the jobs of tomorrow.

Nancy Bair is currently focused on the opportunities she sees in the creation of what are called ‘green-collar jobs.’

“I did some research, and that phrase is being thrown around like crazy,” said Bair, director of the Office of Workforce Development at Greenfield Community College. “We’re at the very beginning of a new field, and it’s only going to grow and change, so that’s part of our job — to grow and change with it.”

GCC ramped up its sustainable- and renewable-energy curriculum last year to provide more training for these jobs, which range from the manufacture of wind turbines to installation of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to energy auditing, not to mention a growing number of more-traditional jobs being expanded with environmentally friendly components. The college has been helped along in part by a workforce-sustainability grant, which helped partner the college with dozens of other businesses and organizations across Western Mass., slowly making ‘green-collar’ a more recognized (and welcomed) term in the region.

In turn, jobs in environmentally based or sustainable-energy fields of service are under the watch of many as they emerge. Alexandra Risely Shroeder’s title alone speaks volumes about her work, for instance. She’s the ‘green jobs coach’ for the Franklin Hampshire Career Center and Regional Employment Board.

“We are looking at how to support the growth of renewable and sustainable practices, such as energy efficiency and green construction,” she said. “Sometimes, the economy grows, and a trained workforce doesn’t grow at the same time. We’re trying to synchronize this, and we also want to avoid training for a job that isn’t here.”

Meanwhile, Mike Kocsmiersky, vice president of research and development with SolarWrights Inc., a renewable-energy company that designs, sells, installs, and services renewable-energy systems across the Northeast, is paying close attention to the needs of his industry as it continues to evolve as an economic engine locally and across the nation.

“The industry is small, so right now there are only a handful of jobs compared to those in more-traditional fields like HVAC or plumbing,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we will prevail. It’s viable technology, it’s cost-effective, and energy conservation has an outstanding return on investment.”

The New Recruits

Despite their different views of the vast ‘green’ industry, all three of these professionals see the importance of finding, training, and employing the people who will populate the emerging green-collar workforce. It’s being culled from many different places; some are making a career change to green industries, while others are adding new skills to existing jobs. Construction outfits, for example, are looking to expand their services by recruiting employees with a background in green design and materials, while electricians and HVAC workers are learning how to properly wire solar-powered water heaters.

Still others still are choosing ‘green majors’ or certificate programs at community colleges, or learning about job opportunities as early as elementary school.

Schroeder said that, essentially, her job is to help residents in Western Mass. — and particularly in Franklin and Hampshire counties — identify career opportunities locally, thus stimulating the economy as well as creating important career ladders. She works with various literacy programs for adults, including those learning English as a second language; develops curricula for high-school and college courses to spread awareness of green economies; and also partners with the Franklin County House of Correction promoting new job opportunities.

However, much of her work as a ‘green’ careers coach is focused on younger populations, and developing a pipeline of trained workers to staff these emerging industries.

“I work with students from literacy programs, career centers, those who aren’t in school and perhaps are vulnerable,” said Schroeder. “I conduct youth workshops and have conversations with them about green careers, so they can explore their interests and skills to see if there’s a career match.”

She added that it’s an important part of the Franklin County REB’s overall economic development plan to create jobs that are available to high-school graduates, those who have earned a GED, and those holding associate degrees.

“One of the commitments of the REB is that, as we grow, the economy can create career pathways that are accessible at the entry level,” she explained. “That creates opportunities for advancement over time, and our vision is that the economy will be large enough to accommodate these over time, as well.”

The jobs Schroeder often explains to potential green-collar workers are wide-ranging, suggesting an industry that’s not relegated to any one type of training or work. They include solar-energy equipment installers, energy auditors, insulation installers, green construction workers, and a wide array of more-traditional jobs, such as in the fields of plumbing and home building, which can be augmented with an understanding of energy-efficient and environmentally friendly systems.

Looking ahead, Schroeder said she’s working with instructors at both the high-school and collegiate levels (including at GCC) to create a curriculum for teachers looking at some of the issues that are driving green-collar jobs forward, such as peak oil usage, fossil-fuel conservation, and the benefits of a green economy.

“The idea is to create an introductory awareness that relates to both the economy and the planet,” she said.

Sustainable Education

Bair said GCC is also in the midst of developing a comprehensive career-preparation program focused on sustainable and renewable energy and energy policy. The endeavor has been helped by a three-year, $373,000 grant from the Workforce Competitiveness Trust Fund (WCTF), an arm of the Commonwealth Corp., a nonprofit organization in Massachusetts focused on workforce development.

“We applied for the grant to develop a workforce around renewable energy — but we already had a sustainable-energy course in place when the grant opportunity came along,” said Bair, adding that the grant gave GCC a chance to build on an existing strength, as well as a jumping-off point to create new inroads to a greener economy in Franklin County. “We said, ‘let’s get local partners and start offering courses.’ That started a year ago, and people have been coming out of the woodwork to take these classes.”

In fact, the demand has been so great that Bair said GCC has already accounted for and exceeded the amount of the WCTF grant, but plans to move forward with green programming and make it a permanent part of the curriculum.

“We will figure out the last two years in a modified kind of way because we’re a little over, but we added courses due to demand,” she said. “GCC is expecting this to be an active program forever; the three-year grant should be just the beginning.”

GCC created a one-year certificate program in renewable energy and energy policy that is up and running now, and in two years, the college expects to launch a two-year degree program. Students now enrolled include those earning college credit as well as professionals looking to boost their skills through non-credit, professional-development classes, sometimes sponsored by employers.

Both groups attend classes together, creating an exchange of ideas and networking opportunities that are positive byproducts, Bair noted.

And partners have also come in abundance.

Bair said that because Franklin County is still a relatively rural area, there is no single, large company involved with the new green programming at GCC, but rather several smaller outfits ranging from nonprofits to community organizations to privately-owned businesses, and even a union: the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 108.

“We partner with contractors, plumbers, HVAC professionals, housing authorities, and they’re all from the local area,” she said. “We have several small partners, and they’re all the right people.”

These partnerships allow for assistance in teaching and planning courses, a pool of employees from which to draw, and a snapshot of what the needs of the region are in these industries, Bair added, especially in the area of energy conservation.

They’ve also been integral in illustrating just how broad the reach of green-collar jobs can be in the future, and that has been a learning experience for GCC as it unveils its new suite of courses catering to this employee set.

“We started figuring out what energy efficiency is, and what the demand is,” said Bair. “Photovoltaics, solar hot water, and energy audits are the biggest areas for us right now, but the job opportunities are seemingly endless.”

She explained that GCC has identified three categories of green-collar jobs that could all benefit from additional training at a collegiate level, for a degree or otherwise.

The first is a group of traditional jobs in new fields: store managers, sales and marketing professionals, Web designers, and even franchisees are all a burgeoning aspect of the green industry as new businesses are created in this arena. The second is trade jobs to which additional skills can be added, and the third is new jobs created as a part of the green movement. Policy leaders, biofuel chemists, certificate coordinators for green-building councils, and an increasing number of agricultural jobs are among these, in addition to those sustainable-energy jobs GCC has already recognized as an area of growth.

“We may need to continue to research these fields in the future to stay current, but our long-term goals are to create new jobs and necessitate new hires for those jobs,” said Bair, noting that, while GCC is only at the beginning of this process, some positive signs are already being seen, and recorded carefully.

“We’re at the beginning in terms of filling jobs, and it’s more complicated than just putting a person into an open spot,” she said. “Some of our students are unemployed, some are in different occupations, and some are taking on new responsibilities at existing jobs.

“We’re focused on creating pay increases as one byproduct we want to see across the board, and fostering more successful businesses is another,” she continued. “We’re hoping this training will start bringing in more money that is related to renewable energy, and we’re tracking business outcomes, and so far they’re looking good.”

It’s Not Easy Being Green

That said, the planning and design of courses to prepare a new green-collar workforce are ongoing tasks on many college campuses, which are navigating a fast-changing set of industries as they simultaneously devise the best academic approach to teaching green skills.

Kocsmiersky, who is the former owner of Kosmo Solar, bought by Rhode Island-based SolarWrights Inc. this past January, has been immersed in the solar trade (most specifically in the design and installation of photovoltaic systems, which serve as a conduit for solar power, and solar-heating systems) for more than a decade. He has maintained offices in Springfield, now serving as SolarWright’s Massachusetts branch, and has also been tapped by Springfield Technical Community College to assist in the development of its own green-collar curriculum.

When planning these courses, the needs of his industry are never far from Kocsmiersky’s mind. The paperwork alone, he said, is onerous for green businesses, which depend largely on state and federal tax credits and rebates to stem the costs associated with many of the products they sell and install, including PV systems.

He added that the skills necessary to thrive in this still-small yet growing sector are much more broad than learning how to install a solar panel on a roof. Rather, green-collar jobs like those in the photovoltaic industry draw from a number of disciplines, ranging from an understanding of building trades to legislative literacy.

“Presently, there seems to be a strong undercurrent at community colleges in the region trying to develop training programs,” said Kocsmiersky. “That’s where they’re running into difficulty, because very few have funding to develop classes. Curriculum developers are trying to consult people like me regarding what to teach.

“Another aspect of this ongoing conversation is asking ourselves what we should teach,” added Kocsmiersky, noting that he thinks courses should be broken into four categories.

These would include ‘solar principles’ — everything from looking at the effects the sun’s rays have on a property at different times of the day to solar thermal and electrical design; a designer’s class, examining the planning components necessary to install a wide array of green structures such as solar panels and wind generators; a practicum, offering experience in the hands-on aspects of green jobs, such as the proper way to mount solar panels to structures and wire systems, or how to prevent leaks; and, finally, an administrative track, designed to explain how complicated rebate programs work, how to process paperwork, and what legislation is driving the industry.

This last matter is a big, fundamental issue affecting green jobs, said Kocsmiersky — and employees at all levels in green industries must be charged with understanding the role politics plays now and will play later in the health of their sector.

“All things come back to political willpower,” he said. “The whole industry will continue to grow at the same numbers we’re seeing now, but if we start seeing a real commitment and less political football, there are huge opportunities for growth.”

Kocsmiersky also noted that tax credits are a big piece of this political puzzle.

“These are expensive systems, and that creates a need for green businesses to carry a certain amount of credit until rebates kick in,” he said. “People can’t a run business when they can’t get their cash flow under control or secure bank loans without certainty.”

He added that, on the other side of the coin, when rebates for homeowners and businesses installing energy-efficient electrical, cooling, or heating systems are reduced, they’ll be less likely to take the plunge.

“If you’re a business considering alternative energy, you might not get them installed until the following year, and that makes the lag in green industries, particularly the photovoltaic industry, even worse,” he said.

Time for Change

Still, Kocsmiersky said that main driver behind the green industry is the technology by which it’s defined, and the increasing acceptance of it, especially as electricity, oil, and gas prices soar.

“The industry is moving fast, and it’s sometimes hard to stay on top of it,” he said. “Six years ago, I knew everyone. Now, there are a lot of new players. The growth rate in my industry last year was about 60% in terms of gross sales — PV gets the lion’s share of the press, and is one of the more financially feasible, proven technologies for consumers. But at the end of the day, things like wind farms and geothermal technology will be even bigger industries — they’re just not talked about as much.

“We may be small,” Kocsmiersky concluded, “but the potential for big, a
nual growth is huge.”

And when that day comes, it’s hoped that a line of green-collar workers will be ready to punch their time cards.

Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]

The Quirks of Business

By
Sections Supplements
West Brookfield Wire Company Is a Model for Employee-owned Ventures

They call themselves ‘Quirkers.’
It’s just one way the employees at Quirk Wire — named (actually renamed) for its former owners, Harrison ‘Hoddy’ and Diane ‘Dee’ Quirk — take ownership of their work and show an appreciation for their jobs.

A hardbound volume created for the Quirks last year on the occasion of their retirement shows another, and proves that sometimes, this company loyalty knows no bounds. It includes a photo of employee Shaun Long with ‘Quirk Wire’ shaved into the back of his head.

Daredevil hair-cutting aside, Quirk Wire is a company with an intriguing business model, focused as much on its employees as it is on its contracts. From his second-floor office, Quirk’s current president, David Thibodeau, explained that, even though Dee and Hoddy Quirk said goodbye to the business last year, they left behind a legacy that explains why ‘Quirker’ pride is such a pervasive theme within the walls of this wire and cable manufacturer.

“I joined the company in 2000,” he began. “I jumped at the chance to work for someone who had built a business from scratch; I knew when he bought this company, his goal was to bring it back to life.”

Thibodeau said that Harrison Quirk achieved that goal and sustained it for nearly three decades before moving on at the age of 75. Today, the company specializes in short runs of specific types of wire and cabling, serving a wide range of customers in industries such as aerospace, oil exploration, and power generation. Healthy business within these sectors, coupled with Quirk’s focus on niche markets, has created a strong presence in the wire industry for this outfit, which serves a number of international clients in addition to domestic customers. Thibodeau said the company averages 15% growth in sales each year, and that pace has earned it some impressive accolades, including the ‘Business of the Year’ award from the Quaboag Valley Chamber of Commerce in 2007.

Awards undoubtedly add to the ‘Quirker’ spirit, but the company’s namesakes left more behind than goodwill and good business when they retired. Indeed, they left the entire company in the hands of its staff.

“They realized that selling the company to another owner would tear down the basic business model they’d worked so hard to create,” said Thibodeau, noting that Quirk Wire’s transformation into an ‘ESOP’ (employee stock ownership plan) began in 2003. “Now, the company is 100% owned by its employees, and the change from how it was managed for so many years to being an ESOP was not a big stretch. Mr. Quirk’s business philosophy was always a generous one.”

Wired for Success

Quirk Wire got its start as Wirecraft Products in 1956, in a basement not far from its current headquarters. Walter Poti, the company’s founder, began wrapping wire with Teflon, a then-new product (the unbranded name for the compound is polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE; DuPont trademarked it as Teflon in 1938.)

Teflon’s primary use in the wire business is to cover wire and cabling, thus making it more resilient and resistant to high temperatures. Poti recognized a potential niche, and was able to build the business gradually during the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he moved it from his home to its current location on Route 9.

While he had indeed hit upon a specialty that persists today, Poti became ill with rheumatoid arthritis in the mid-’60s and sold the company to another entrepreneur. However, soon after the sale, business began to decline, and the outfit closed its doors after only a year.

At this point, Thibodeau explained, Harrison Quirk, a veteran of Michigan’s paper mills, relocated to Western Mass. in search of new ventures. He began working at a paper plant in Ware, but three years later, he went looking for a business of his own.

“I don’t think he wanted to take orders from anyone — he wanted to run his own company his own way,” said Thibodeau. “He literally went looking for a business to buy, and an associate suggested the wire company.”

At the time, the facility housed little more than a few spare pieces of equipment and stock, but Thibodeau said Quirk’s unique skill set was well-suited to resurrect the company.

“Mr. Quirk is an unusually talented man,” he explained. “He is very mechanically adept, but also has a head for business. He rebuilt many of the machines himself at home, hired four people from the original company to help him understand the wire and cable business, and, in 1978, reopened the doors.”

Coiled Again

Since then, those doors have remained open, providing quality jobs for a number of area residents and also welcoming new opportunities for the region. There have been seven additions to the property to date, including a $750,000 expansion in 2001 that doubled the company’s production capacity.

Quirk also established an ‘open-book’ management policy, both figuratively and literally, that persists today.

“Every employee is aware of what business is coming in and going out,” said Thibodeau. “Mr. Quirk had a ledger on his desk that anyone could look at. My system is of course a little different, but the idea is the same.”

That’s just one aspect of a unique management structure at Quirk Wire that places great importance on the needs of its employees. In many ways, the company was ahead of its time in areas such as profit-sharing and flex time — Thibodeau said every employee has a key to the building, and they choose their own schedules. Some work a standard 9-to-5 workweek, but others come in during the early morning hours or in the afternoon, or work overtime hours on weekends.

“We don’t have supervisors on the floor — it’s a flat-management structure,” he added. “All of the employees are cross-trained, and we believe the freedom they have makes them self-motivated. People feel committed to doing the right thing.”

Further, the flexible work environment at Quirk is complemented by a long-held commitment on the part of its management to treat staff as the company’s most important commodity. For many years, said Thibodeau, between 20% and 30% of its profits were returned to the employee pool through profit-sharing, raises, and bonuses.

“That has created a big nest egg for the old-timers,” said Thibodeau, adding that many of Quirk’s 39 employees have been with the company for a decade or longer.

But it also set the stage for the next chapter in Quirk Wire’s story, as it morphed into an employee-owned company.

According to the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO), the ESOP is the most common form of employee ownership among companies in the U.S. (other options include worker cooperatives, through which every employee has an equal vote, and direct stock-purchasing plans).

Approximately 11,000 U.S. companies employing about 8 million people now qualify as ESOPs, and while press attention is often given to those firms that use the model as a takeover defense or to buy out a failing company, these situations apply to only 3% of ESOPs.

Instead, NCEO reports that ESOPs are usually created to provide a market for the shares of departing owners of successful closely held companies, and Thibodeau said Quirk Wire exemplifies this description.

“The jump from how he’d always managed the company to an ESOP was not great,” he said. “In fact, I think it was a natural fit. The better the business does, the better the employees do.”

Thibodeau explained that employees are allotted shares of the company based on their salaries, and when that employee retires, the stock is repurchased using funds from an account the company is required to maintain as part of the ESOP model. The value is determined by independent valuation companies; in the meantime, management remains ‘top-down’ at Quirk Wire; Thibodeau serves as president; Mary Falardeau, who’s been with the company since 1984, is its CFO; and Peter Schlichting, who started in 1982, is vice president of Sales and Marketing.

“It’s a lot of work for employers and employees,” Thibodeau said of the ESOP model. “There is a lot of learning, and a lot of questions to be both asked and answered. But the more information that is shared, the more engaged the employees are. It keeps them interested, but on task — our employees know we’re not in the business of being an ESOP. We’re in the business of wire and cable.”

Quirk Product

A board of directors made up of three internal employees and four community members, including Dee and Hoddy Quirk, rounds out the company structure and keeps tabs on Quirk Wire’s performance.

As the business moves forward, said Thibodeau, new opportunities are presenting themselves in the wire and cable sector, including the emerging area of energy conservation. Quirk Wire’s facilities sit on 14 acres in West Brookfield, and Thibodeau added that, if further expansions are desired or necessary, that footprint can accommodate them.

“Business is good, and this is a big industry,” he said. “We have a good cross-section of customers, and I don’t think we’re ever going to put all of our eggs in one basket.”

Indeed, there are many lines of business running in and out of Quirk Wire, and now more than ever, its employees are wearing many hats.

But those hats, and sometimes the hairstyles under them, are signs of a business moving full steam ahead. A letter included in the back of the hardcover book compiled for Dee and Hoddy Quirk probably says it best.

“We are both thankful for the great place that Quirk Wire has become and that we have been given the rare opportunity to share in its success,” it reads.

Signed, the Quirkers.

Meeting Expectations

By
Todd Greenwood
Sections Supplements
Cities Seek Strategies to Break Through in the Convention Market
Todd Greenwood

Todd Greenwood, vice president of convention center sales and marketing, says Springfield has what it takes to be a major player in the conventions market.

The convention business sector is slowly improving across the nation, returning to pre-9/11 levels of activity, according to those in the industry. This more-robust climate is creating opportunities for cities like Springfield and Hartford that have invested heavily in convention facilities, but competition is immense in this sector, with communities essentially fishing from the same pond. As in other industries, success in this one lies with effectively building a brand, which for Springfield is still a work in progress.

To publicize Greater Springfield as a destination for conventions, Mary Kay Wydra says that focusing on its small-market character can sometimes help distinguish the region and its convention facility, the MassMutual Center, from other, competing markets.

“If you bring your convention here, odds are you’ll own the building,” she said. “But we take it step further, and tell people that, for a few days, they can also own the region.”

To better illustrate that notion, Wydra, director of the Greater Springfield Convention & Visitors Bureau (GSCVB), cited a recent delegation — the Daughters of the Nile, a charitable organization that raises funds for Shriners Hospitals for Children nationwide. More than 2,500 members descended on the City of Homes last June. Dressed in colorful costumes that are one trademark of the group, members were visible, and their presence was noticed — with the group returning an estimated $1.6 million to the region in direct spending.

“They also had four front-page stories written about them in the time they were here,” said Wydra. “We want to showcase the conventions that choose Springfield — in larger cities, they’re not going to get that kind of press. We offer a small-town environment in a large city, and the front-line people know how to treat visitors well.”

Despite this ability, Springfield is finding the convention business a challenging one to enter, and the city somewhat of a tough sell nearly three years after the MassMutual Center opened its doors.

“The booking pace for the long term isn’t where we hoped it would be,” said Wydra, noting, however, that the GSCVB is working closely with the Mass. Convention Center Authority (MCCA) and other partners to boost those numbers. And officials here can take some inspiration from other Northeast cities, including Hartford and Providence, that had similar teething troubles while getting serious about the convention business.

Those cities learned that it takes time to establish a solid reputation in the industry and effectively build their brands, she said, noting that Springfield is making considerable progress with that assignment.

Todd Greenwood, the GSCVB’s recently appointed vice president of Convention Center Sales and Marketing, says the city has a lot to offer convention planners, including attractions, plenty of hotel rooms, and especially prices that are affordable, especially when compared to major metropolitan areas.

“Hotel rates, parking fees, restaurant bills, these are all going to be lower than in Boston or New York City,” he explained, “and that’s especially important on ‘expense report day,’ when planners start breaking down how expensive it is to hold a convention in a given area.”

In this issue, BusinessWest looks at the highly competitive convention business, and what cities have done, and are doing, to put themselves on the map.

The States of the Industry

H. Scott Phelps, president of the Greater Hartford Convention and Visitors Bureau (GHCVB), said he remembers similarly lean times for that city not so long ago.

He told BusinessWest that Hartford, like Springfield, continues to build momentum after opening a new facility — the Connecticut Convention Center — in 2005. It has done so by paying attention to activity in the hospitality sector to ensure that an adequate number of well-appointed, updated hotel rooms and other convention-related facilities are available to delegates of all kinds.

“We can’t just book any time,” he said. “We have to make sure we have the rooms, and hotels have been an issue.”

Phelps explained that before the Connecticut Convention Center, which carried a $270 million price tag, opened, the city was “under-facilitied,” and thus had difficulties drawing meetings and conventions. But now, the opposite problem exists — keeping up with the demand for convention space in four diverse venues.

“We’re overcoming that,” said Phelps. “We added 409 rooms with a new Marriott; the Goodwin Hotel is completing a multi-million renovation; the Hilton was closed prior to opening the convention center to become a brand-new, upscale, trendy hotel; and the Crowne Plaza is also completing renovations now. In short, the hotels have proved their products.”

In Rhode Island, Neil Schriever, vice president of Sales and Marketing for the Providence-Warwick Convention and Visitors Bureau (PWCVB), which oversees bookings at the Rhode Island Convention Center and the adjacent Dunkin’ Donuts Center, said the recent addition of new hotel rooms in the capital city has also raised Providence’s convention business profile.

“We are finding that in Providence, changes to our rooms packages in the last eight months enables us to be considered for groups that would have overlooked us before,” said Schriever, noting that the bulk of major convention business is done in Providence, with smaller meetings often welcomed elsewhere in the state. “We added 500 new hotel rooms in the community, 200 of which are at our anchor hotel, the Westin, connected to the convention center.

We’ve increased the city’s walkability for convention attendees, and we’re seeing great signs of success for future business.”

While the Rhode Island Convention Center, which focuses on meetings, and the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, which includes expansive arena space, are not new buildings, both have undergone renovations in the last decade, and just last month, the two buildings were connected by a covered walkway.

“The Dunkin’ Donuts Center is also in the midst of a three-phase renovation due to be completed next fall,” said Schriever, noting that the project amounts to a complete overhaul of the center’s interior and façade.

To continue to build on that momentum, Schriever added that the PWCVB is working to identify meetings and events that can utilize both buildings in the coming years.

“We’ve really put a bigger focus on our convention services division, working to promote the destination and boost attendance,” he offered. “For instance, we may go to a conference the year before it’s scheduled to come to Rhode Island, put up a booth, and work to get attendees excited about the coming year.

“We have a good brand,” he continued, “but there is still increased competition regionally and nationally, and we must maintain our presence on a national level. Not having enough availability — of convention space or rooms — is another challenge.”

Conventional Thinking

The GHCVB has also instituted programs with similar goals, including a hospitality task force that meets every month to discuss new programming options and improvements to the existing model, and a free shuttle service that runs from the Convention Center to downtown Hartford six days a week, every 12 minutes. Phelps said it’s a Connecticut Transit Authority program that directly connects convention delegates with the dining and entertainment options in the area.

“The restaurants are doing a plethora of new things on their own that we can now better introduce to new audiences,” he said. “The convention center has been a catalyst for other things happening. It’s what we hoped for, and what the center’s supporters anticipated.”

Wydra said she expects that Springfield will follow that same script, but knows that the road ahead is paved with challenges — and expectations that will be difficult to meet.

The $71 million renovation/new construction project that created the MassMutual Center set the stage for some specific booking goals; in 2005, MCCA executive director Jim Rooney told BusinessWest he hoped to reach a rate of 65% of the year — 237 out of 365 days. The city is well behind that pace, but making progress, said Wydra.

She noted that, like Hartford and other cities, Springfield must endure a considerable ramp-up period in the convention sector. Many organizations plan their conventions as many as five years ahead of time, and often rotate between a handful of different venues; as such, the MassMutual Center could easily need another two to four years to reach what Wydra calls “a steady diet” of convention business.

She explained further that, due to the lengthy construction period for the building, it was essentially removed from most meeting planners’ radar screens for a considerable time, and now, the GSCVB must work to re-enter the picture.

“The civic center was offline for five years,” she said. “I think the hotels in the area have gotten used to not having a convention center from which to draw business, and now part of our job is to change that mindset and attract more business.”

Greenwood said the Greater Springfield area has the convention-sector pieces in place to do just that. Hotel capacity in the region, which includes access to more than 50 facilities in Western Mass. and Connecticut, is generally solid, he said, creating a healthy base from which to grow.

“This area has all of the critical components,” he said. “We have the facility itself and the hotel capacity. This city is affordable, but not cheap.”

Greenwood, who comes to his new position most recently from the Indianapolis Convention and Visitors Association, returned to that region-wide marketing effort currently being used by the GSCVB to sell Western Mass. along with the MassMutual Center, adding that, while Springfield may not offer the largest market, it does offer a number of positives that are attractive to meeting planners, including those affordable prices.

Greenwood said the GSCVB is also enlisting the help of the region’s citizens to promote the MassMutual Center and its home base as a viable convention venue through a program called Pioneer Valley Pride, which charges local residents who belong to regional, state, or national associations to provide the bureau with the names of those who run those organizations.

Raising Reservations

And if the emerging success stories in Hartford and Providence are any indication, skies could be clearing here over the next few years.

Schriever said he’s beginning to see some positive trends affecting the Providence market, such as the emergence of a new, short-term demand for mid-sized meetings, which can help to bridge the gap between periods of wooing and waiting and those of bargaining and booking.

“We’re still getting calls for 1,000-person meetings within a 12-month window,” he said. “Right now, with the state of economy as it is, we might see a slowdown in this area, but we’re not anticipating one.”

Further, Schriever said, while convention bureaus across New England are often ladling from the same pot of stew, collaboration in this region of the country is more robust than in most, and this helps move everyone forward in the long run.

“As much as we all compete, we work together to target trade shows on a national level,” he said, noting that this work is often done through the New England Society of Convention and Visitors Bureaus, a membership organization. “We collaborate to sell the whole destination, and it’s important work, because it gets people to New England. If one of us brings in a conference, it’s possible that they will want to return to another venue in New England in the future.”

Indeed, the Hartford, Providence, and Springfield convention markets are very different in many respects; both Hartford’s operating budget and convention facility footprint, for instance, are much larger, and its venues more diverse, than in the City of Homes.

However, convention bureaus across the nation share similar strengths and weaknesses, and the industry itself is experiencing an upswing.

“The industry has seen growth over the past five years; we’ve caught up to pre-9/11 numbers, and there are no signs of a slowdown,” said Greenwood.

Hartford is also a year or two ahead of the GSCVB in terms of construction of a new facility and the subsequent development programs that follow.

Phelps said business was good for all of the city’s convention spaces last year — the Connecticut Expo Center, the Hartford Civic Center, the Connecticut Convention Center, and Rentschler Field.

“We had an outstanding 2007,” he said, noting that, on average, a delegate at a Connecticut convention will stay in the area for an average of 3.6 days and spend about $300. “Part of the reason we had a successful year was because we hosted large conventions, some with up to 10,000 delegates, and also hosted some for up to five days. The economic impact was that much greater, and we utilized a terrific number of hotels. We spread groups out among our hotels, and that created a spread across the city.”

To capitalize on the growth now being seen in the convention industry, Phelps said the GHCVB is focusing on a few key elements of the convention-planning process in 2008. The first is selling Hartford’s convenient locale, close to major thoroughfares including interstates 91 and 84, as well as its affordability as a smaller city. As in Springfield, Connecticut’s small size as a state can be a draw rather than a hindrance, added Phelps.

“Connecticut could fit into many metropolitan areas, such as Houston or Atlanta,” he said. “The diversity of experiences that creates within an hour’s drive is attractive to a lot of people, including those who come from those big cities.

“Here, they can see the bigger region, including the casinos, Mystic Seaport, the college town of New Haven, and the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. These are especially attractive for offsite meetings and spouse programs.”

One Fish, Two Fish

Greenwood agreed that when it comes to convention planning, no market, no matter how big or small, can rely on any one strength to pull new audiences in.

“You can’t hang your hat on one thing, but if we we’re going to boil it down to one major effort, it’s concentrating on how to get attendees excited. The city is very capable of doing this.”

And, he said, the GSCVB and Greater Springfield as a whole will continue to reach out to all types of delegates, not only because the region needs the traffic, but because it wants to be a gracious host.

“It’s no secret that many convention bureaus are fishing from the same pond,” he said, “but the hard part is getting people here. Once we do, we think they’re impressed; the ‘big fish’ mentality appeals to them.”

Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]

Save the Earth— and Some Cash

By
The photovoltaic roof on the new Food Bank of Western Mass. is already producing significant energy savings over a traditional roof.
Sections Supplements
Green Building Can Benefit the Environment and the Bottom Line
The photovoltaic roof on the new Food Bank of Western Mass. is already producing significant energy savings over a traditional roof.

The photovoltaic roof on the new Food Bank of Western Mass. is already producing significant energy savings over a traditional roof.

It’s called ‘green,’ or ‘sustainable,’ building, the practice of incorporating environmentally friendly concepts into design and materials. It’s not exactly a recent phenomenon, but it’s gaining greater acceptance as home and business owners and developers realize that the practice is not simply the right thing to do — it can also help on the bottom line.

A recent expansion of the Food Bank of Western Mass. doubled the space at the Hatfield facility from 17,000 to 35,000 square feet. The facility, which once could store 2 million to 3 million pounds of food at any given time, can now stockpile up to 9 million pounds.

It’s a recipe for electric bill sticker shock, right? Well, not exactly.

Thanks to a new photovoltaic roof, which features panels that harness solar power, the Food Bank saves some $5,000 in electricity costs annually; in fact, the cutting-edge roof generates some 10% of the building’s total energy.

“This way, we’re able to experience a 35%-per-square-foot reduction in energy costs,” said Andrew Morehouse, executive director of the Food Bank. “So while our total energy costs have increased because of the new space and new freezers, our per-square-foot energy costs have been greatly reduced.”

Morehouse said the Food Bank’s interest in incorporating what is known as ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ design in its expansion project eventually led to a $250,000 grant from the Kresge Foundation to install the energy-saving roof. Recently, the U.S. Green Building Council awarded the facility its gold certification, one step below the highest level, platinum, for its efforts.

“We’re a food bank; we rescue food from the food industry and are able to turn that around with very little waste,” Morehouse explained. “The way we look at it is, if we minimize our overhead costs, that plays right into our mission, helps us be stewards of the environment, and sets an example for other businesses in the Pioneer Valley.”

It’s an example that others are already taking seriously. In this issue, BusinessWest examines why a combination of cost savings and environmental stewardship is convincing state agencies and construction leaders that sustainable design has a clear future in the Bay State.

Crunching the Numbers

In 2005, the Mass. Sustainable Design Roundtable, a public-private partnership of more than 70 professionals involved in design and construction of buildings in Massachusetts, was convened under the direction of the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA) and the Division of Capital Asset Management (DCAM), and funded by the Mass. Technology Collaborative.

The group examined sustainable-design concepts — which consider site selection, waste minimization, energy efficiency, water conservation, indoor environmental quality, and other environmental and health factors in construction — with the goal of fostering dialogue about green-building issues among public and private design and construction professionals and other experts.

The roundtable also examined barriers to sustainable design and discussed ways to promote widespread incorporation of sustainable design practices and technologies into all state government construction. It eventually determined that, like the Food Bank found, the initial investment in such practices is often followed by long-term cost savings.

“Across the country, initial experience with both public- and private-sector buildings that incorporate sustainable design principles is demonstrating that operating-cost savings provided by green buildings are considerably greater than any additional upfront or ‘first’ costs,” wrote Robert Golledge Jr., secretary of the EOEA, and David Perini, commissioner of the DCAM. “First-cost premiums, if present, generally do not exceed 4% and commonly have simple payback periods of as little as three or four years.”

In fact, the roundtable cited one comprehensive study of green buildings claiming that an average cost premium of $3 to $5 per square foot produced direct operational savings of about $15 per square foot over 20 years. Recent efforts to use such practices on Massachusetts public schools showed an even greater rate of return, the Roundtable claimed, with average cost premiums of 3% to 4% resulting in long-term savings of at least six times that amount.

“Although the most advanced green buildings have been operational for only a short period of time, initial evidence of their improved performance is highly compelling, most notably energy cost savings of at least 20% and up to 50% compared to baseline,” Golledge and Perini reported. “At a time when energy costs are high and getting higher, the ability to reduce energy consumption and gain significant financial savings is perhaps the single most significant benefit that green buildings provide” — savings that offset the extra up-front costs that green building often requires.

Green buildings also help to protect and conserve water resources, they continued, as well as providing a market for recycled and environmentally preferable products, and creating improved working and learning environments for building occupants.

None of that surprises Jeff Hayden, executive director of the Kittredge Business Center at Holyoke Community College, which opened in 2006 with a ‘green roof’ covering 2,500 square feet of its fourth-floor roof.

“A portion of the fourth-floor roof is a green roof,” Hayden said. “It essentially takes care of itself in that there’s very limited maintenance that needs to be done on it. That was part of the design — the fact that it would operate on its own. Essentially, it’s the first public building in the Commonwealth to have a green roof, and it’s part of our effort to look at these issues.”

The roof has been populated with native ground cover, grasses, and plants — a modern design concept that students in the environmental science program may eventually incorporate into their program of study. HCC officials intended for the roof to attract some of the birds and insects native to the area, as well as reducing water runoff from the building and lessening the environmental impact on a neighboring brook — one way the campus could preserve some of the rural, woodland feel of its surroundings.

“As a matter of fact, one of our college priorities for the coming year is to add a plan around sustainable development here on campus,” Hayden noted. “We’re looking at education in relation to the carbon footprint that we make, and to implement green policies that will help with more environmentally sensitive development of the college as we go forward.”

Easy Being Green?

That, in a nutshell, is why green building has become an attractive option for some developers; they see it as a crossroads of two desirable outcomes, cost savings and environmental impact. In a state as progressive as Massachusetts, these are no small concerns.

Take the Food Bank, for instance, which didn’t stop at the photovoltaic roof; it also replaced its inefficient diesel refrigeration units with ozone-friendly refrigerators and freezers, and used more natural light in its offices to cut down on fluorescent lighting.

“The features of this building are low-ozone-generating and low-toxicity,” Morehouse said, adding that any unusable food is donated to local farms as animal feed, and all paper products are recycled to generate additional revenue.

“To receive this top-of-the-line green building certification is an extremely difficult and complicated road,” said Peter Wood, vice president of sales and marketing at Associated Builders in South Hadley, which worked with the Food Bank on the project. “It’s called sustainable building because it’s developed from a green concept but is also sustainable in the business market.”

The U.S. Green Building Council certified the Food Bank through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, which provides a set of standards for environmentally sustainable construction.

Most recent and current LEED-certified projects in Massachusetts are located in the eastern part of the state, but there are several in Western Mass., including the Mount Holyoke College Science Center in South Hadley, as well as an addition and renovation to the college’s Blanchard Campus Center; the Koch Center at Deerfield Academy; and the North Adams Public Library.

The roundtable, for its part, has called for the adoption of minimum green building standards for all new construction and major renovation projects overseen by designated state agencies — standards that take into account both environmental impact and long-term operating costs.

Considering that buildings in the U.S. account for 40% of total energy consumption and 70% of total electricity consumption, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, as well as using more than 12% of fresh-water supplies and generating 25% of all solid waste, these are no small goals.

“Buildings have a significant impact on our budgets,” said Golledge and Perini. “The Commonwealth already commits more than $1 billion of public money each year to building construction and renovation projects. The state constructs a range of buildings for a variety of uses, from schools, hospitals, offices, and courthouses to colleges, prisons, park facilities, and affordable housing.”

But public-sector activity isn’t enough, Morehouse said, which is why the economic benefits of sustainable design must be effectively communicated. “The bottom line,” he asserted, “is that it’s going to take government support to convince the private sector to invest in green technologies to reduce costs for businesses and households alike. This is common in other countries; we’re behind the curve.”

As for Holyoke Community College, “I think it’s very important for us to do what we can to maintain and enhance our environment, especially since we are a community campus and have a lot of people driving cars here,” said Hayden. “We need to provide an example to our students and the community.”

It’s an example some are shouting from the rooftops — be they shingled, covered with grass, or powered by the sun.

Joseph Bednar can be reached at[email protected]

2007 Top Entrepreneur

By
January 7, 2008 Cover
Cover Story Sections Top Entrepreneur
John Maybury : Driven to Succeed
January 7, 2008 Cover

January 7, 2008 Cover

John Maybury was only a few months out of high school when he embarked on what started out as another in a series of odd jobs, but would eventually become a career and very successful entrepreneurial venture. He began selling workbenches, shelving, and industrial stools, but soon partnered with his father to start a diversified business in the competitive field of material handling. Today, the company reflects Maybury’s passion for technology, commitment to excellence, and drive to continuously improve. His success — and methods for achieving it — have earned him BusinessWest’s Top Entrepreneur Award for 2007.

John Maybury says that for him to get involved with something, there usually has to be some element of danger.

He’s an avid snowmobiler and skier, and he’s scuba dived, skydived, and flown planes (he doesn’t so much anymore). “If it has a motor, then I’m interested in it,” he said, noting that he probably had 20 cars before his 18th birthday. The only time you’ll find him on a golf course is for a charity tournament, and he’s taken part in many. He has to drive the cart, and he’ll invariably tinker with it to get it to go faster than the club pro might like.

He approaches all these danger-spiced activities with a philosophy, or thought process: to know and understand the risks, push the envelope — but not too far, and have fun. And this is the approach he takes to business and Maybury Material Handling, a venture he started while attending Western New England College 32 years ago, and trying to figure out just what to do with his life.

He took a cue, of sorts, from his father, who worked for many years as a salesperson then sales manager, specializing in, among other things, items in a field known as material handling — meaning equipment used to move, store, retrieve, and catalog inventory, records, parts, and other items.

The Younger Maybury started off as a free agent, selling various product lines to companies like American Bosch, Moore Drop Forge (later known as Danaher Tool), and other large manufacturers, using mostly contacts from his father to get his foot in those doors. He enjoyed enough early success to inspire his father to take a leave of absence from the company join him a venture that would put the Maybury name on letterhead, if not over the door — they started out as a home-based operation, but quickly outgrew those facilities.

Over the past three decades, Maybury has grown his venture into a highly diversified operation now specializing in sales, service, rentals, and training for equipment ranging from forklifts to work stations; from mezzanines to modular offices. The company has expanded and moved several times, the latest step being construction of a 42,000-square-foot building on Denslow Road in East Longmeadow, not far from where he and his father built the company’s first home on the site of an old tobacco barn.

But it is not merely what Maybury has accomplished that has earned him BusinessWest’s Top Entrepreneur for 2007 award. Rather, it’s also the how that has made him this year’s honoree.

To say that this is a company that reflects the character and drive of its owner would be a real understatement. It is, like Maybury, technology-focused, employing the latest hardware and software to enable employees to do work better, faster, and cheaper. It’s also excellence-driven; it was among the early winners of the Pioneer Valley Excellence Award, and Maybury has his sights set on a Mass Excellence Award, and has the ambitious goal of earning the coveted Malcolm Baldridge award within the next decade.

And this company is people-oriented, with an emphasis on fun. At the 2007 All Associates Year End Gathering, for example, staffers were broken into teams for a spirited contest of ‘Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?’ featuring several special guests from nearby Mapleshade Elementary School.

The teams were formed with the goal of breaking down departmental barriers and inspiring people in different capacities to work together toward a common goal — in this case, triumphing over the other teams and winning some cash ($4,000 was put on the table).

This philosophy of working together is at the heart of the company’s success, said Maybury, noting that he stresses teamwork in every facet of the operation, and it has yielded steady sales growth, cutting-edge continuous-improvement practices, and a workplace that attracts and retains top talent.

In this issue, BusinessWest examines what drives Maybury — literally and figuratively — in his quest for excellence, and why his story of entrepreneurial daring is an uplifting, and ongoing, saga.

A Real Spark Plug

As he gave BusinessWest a tour of the new plant and posed for a few pictures, Maybury displayed some of that passion he has for all things motorized.

He jumped onto one of the newest and most versatile fork truck models, showed all that it can do, and then maneuvered it in out of some tight spaces. “I can handle these better than most people who drive them for a living,” he said, noting that he’s fluent with every piece of equipment on his showroom floor, and needs to be if he is to properly serve his clients.

Maybury got his first practice on a forklift back in the fall of 1975. He was a freshman at WNEC and also working several part-time jobs to help pay his tuition. One of them was at Milton Bradley — now known as Hasbro Games — and its East Longmeadow plant. He worked in what was known then as Department 26, moving around pallets of games like Monopoly, Life, and Chutes and Ladders, for loading onto boxes that would be packed into freight cars for transport on a rail line that no longer exits.

When Maybury returns to Department 26 these days — he’s made several visits over the years and still runs into people he worked with three decades ago — it is to help Hasbro stay on the cutting edge of material-handling equipment and processes. The toy maker is just one name on a long and distinguished client list. Others include regional and national manufacturers, distributors, and retailers including Friendly’s, Big Y, Lenox, J Polep, JCPenney, Macy’s Target, Wal-Mart, and even Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.

Maybury supplies racks and shelving, conveyors, forklifts, and other equipment to the casinos to move and store money and chips. It also played a lead role in helping Mohegan Sun set a record a few years ago — with an 18-foot-tall, seven-tiered wedding cake weighing 15,032 pounds, or 7.5 tons. Maybury engineers created the huge platforms, or cake separators that the cake rested on (they were supported with steel pipes made by the company and painted to match a frosting sample) and also positioned massive, 30,000-pound-capacity scales in order to give the casino the exact weight.

The current, ever-growing client list and show of diversity and imagination put on display at Mohegan Sun provide evidence of just how far this company has come from its humble beginnings. How Maybury has orchestrated this evolution and progression is a story of entrepreneurial drive, vision, and ample doses of both luck and determination — mostly the latter.

Recalling how things got started, Maybury said that in addition to his forklift adventures at Milton Bradley, he also worked at Big Y, SIS (now TD Banknorth), and other area companies while trying to choose a career path. Instead, one chose him.

Growing up, he recalled, the conversations around the dinner table often revolved around his father’s work in material-handling equipment, and he eventually gravitated toward it himself.

“I grew up with it, and was kind of fascinated by it,” he said, re-emphasizing his childhood interest in all things mechanical, which manifested itself in early exploits in snowmobiling, mini-bike and motorcycle riding, and an endless parade of cars. “I would go into where my father was employed, go out back, and see all that equipment; it was something that really interested me.”

That company was Stanley Handling Equipment Co., later to be called StanLift, in Agawam. It was sold while Maybury’s father was executive vice president, and he then left and did consulting work for a similar venture based in Boston.

“It was at the supper table one night … I asked my father if he thought I could sell the things he used to sell,” Maybury recalled. “He said, ‘let’s give it a try,’ and we did.”

He started as an independent agent of sorts representing dealers trying to penetrate the Western Mass., market, selling workbenches, industrial stools, shelving, pushcarts, and other items needed by manufacturers that didn’t require help with installation, and was helped considerably by some of his father’s contacts.

“I’m 18, 19 years old … these people basically adopted me like a son or a grandson, because I was so young,” he explained. “I would go in, show them the book, show them the prices, tell them how much I needed to make, and they were cutting me orders.

“If I had any questions, I would go and ask my father,” he continued, adding that as the orders started rolling in, the father-and-son team saw a business opportunity unfolding before him. With a $25,000 loan from what was known then as First Bank — “they enjoyed the signature of the 40-year-old father much more than the 19-year-old son,” said Maybury — they were off and running.

Hitting on All Cylinders

Beyond the changes in street address over the years, the company was also in a constant state of change and diversification, said Maybury, patterns that have made it unique in the material-handling sector.

After starting with benching, shelving, and stools, the company moved into larger shelving installations, and two-story installations, including some work for Subaru of America. These installations would require lift trucks, he noted, adding that in the beginning the company would rent such equipment for jobs, but later purchased a fleet of the vehicles to ensure it could get a job done — and on time.

These ‘installs,’ as they were called, were usually done over a weekend, when a plant was shut down, he continued, adding that the mechanics hired to do these jobs often had little to do during the week, so the company started subbing them out to other businesses.

This was the beginning of Maybury’s power equipment division, which sells, leases, and maintains forklifts, scrubbers, sweepers, and other pieces of equipment and accounts for roughly 50% of total revenues.

Maybury remembers when the fleet consisted of one van (he still keeps a picture of it his files) and five hand trucks. Today, it’s 30 vans and more than 300 left trucks serving an area that stretches east to Worcester and south into Northern Conn., but Maybury says the company goes wherever its customers want.

It’s done work in Pennsylvania for Friendly’s, for example, and also in Nebraska, Texas, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere for other clients.

This constant evolution has yielded a company that Maybury describes as a “solution provider,” and one that has no across-the-board competition.

“Our competitors are silo businesses,” he explained. “We have lift truck competitors, shelving and rack competitors, conveyor competitors, and mezzanine competitors, for example, but there aren’t any real solution providers that can address the full scope of material handling like we do.”

Summing up what his company does, and simplifying matters as he does so, Maybury says his team of 100 employees helps clients become more efficient, thus making them more profitable and competitive in the face of increasingly global competition. And throughout its existence, the company has essentially practiced what it has preached — using technology, processes, and teamwork to simplify and streamline operations and provide new opportunities for growth.

“We’re about as paperless as a company like this can get,” said Maybury, citing just one example of how the company works to take time and waste from its processes, while also serving customers more efficiently. The company has used self-directed work teams, the Kaizen process, and other strategies to reduce process times and reduce errors.

These efforts were rewarded with a Pioneer Valley Excellence Award in 2005, what Maybury calls the first step in an aggressive drive to winning a Baldridge within the next decade. Established in 1988, and named after former Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldridge, a strong proponent of quality management, the award is given to companies to large and small judged to be outstanding in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; human resource focus; process management; and results.

Maybury said that while his goal is on winning the award, his focus is on doing the things necessary to achieve that end, which means not achieving results, but sustaining them, which is the key to not merely filling a lobby with plaques and trophies, but also taking a company to desired heights in terms of efficiency and profits.

And for this, Maybury returns to the subject of teamwork, specifically a team of ‘Level 5 leaders’ as defined by business writer Jim Collins, author Good to Great.

“I have a human resources manager, a controller, a power equipment division manager, a material handling division manager, and a sales and marketing manager, and those positions support our strategy and our goals,” he explained, “and our initiatives and action steps are carried out by that group of people.

“Into everything we do over the course of a year we come up with some critical impact factors that will impact our business either in a positive or negative way, and then we develop strategies and action steps and come up with goals and plans so we deploy a common theme,” he continued. “If it’s self-managed teams, then it’s self-managed teams until we get it; if it’s paperless, it’s paperless until we get it; if it’s proper deployment of technology, it’s that until we get it; we don’t just say ‘let’s do this,’ and then it never happens.”

Gasket Case

There has been considerable deployment of communications technology over the years, said Maybury, adding that the progression of steps, such as the outfitting of service technicians with tablet PCs to eliminate all use of paper, is consumer- and service-driven.

“We don’t have technology just to have technology — we have technology to be the accelerator for our processes,” he said, noting that the use of the tablet PCs and aircards that provide Internet access eliminate the need for everything from paper receipts to repair manuals.

Which is significant, because each technician needs vast amounts of information at his or her disposal to maintain or repair the wide range of equipment sold and serviced by the company.

“With the technology and advancements, our technicians now have the ability to go online,” he said, “and go to the manufacturers’ sites, get their technical service bulletins, get schematics, get parts resources, and communicate by E-mail with the supplier so we can get all the information we need without having any books on the trucks.”

There are countless other examples of putting technology to work to streamline processes, allow people to do more work in less time, and even save a few trees, he continued, noting that technology is just half the equation; the other is the people who use it, and the company is careful to invest heavily in them, as well.

This strong focus on people was on display at the All Associates Year End Gathering, a tradition at Maybury for nearly 20 years now.

As the name implies, everyone who works for the company (and they’re called associates, not employees) is required to attend. In recent years, the date was moved from just before Christmas to the middle of the month to make it easier to fit into the holiday schedule.

As in prior years, this day-long program had a packed agenda, starting with a welcome from Maybury, a quick review of the safety record (169 days without a lost-time accident by Dec. 14), and then a comprehens
ve review of the company’s 401(k) program delivered by Charles Epstein, president of Epstein Financial Services.

“This is a good time to be a having a review,” said Maybury, noting the stock market’s rocky third and fourth quarters and the questions it would generate. “This is a time when people need information about their money and what to do with it to make it grow.”

The agenda continued with reviews of the health and dental plans, a look back at the accomplishments of 2007 and a glance ahead to the goals for ’08, a celebration of anniversaries (there was a 25th and two 20ths, among others) and new associates, a question-and-answer period, and that spirited round of ‘Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.’

The associates’ day, and the specific parts of the program, are reflective of Maybury’s desire to make his a people-oriented company, one focused on helping employees balance work and life.

Finding that balance is something Maybury has had to work at himself, noting that, over the years, he’s managed to make time for his family, community activities, chamber of commerce duties (he was president of the East Longmeadow chamber for two years), work on boards such as the one at Baystate Health he’s a member of, and even some snowmobiling.

“When I balance my family with my business and the community, that makes me feel better,” he said. “I could probably lock myself in here for several more hours a day, but I wouldn’t have the same self-satisfaction. And I like to learn — I’m a constant learner … I don’t think I’ve every stopped.”

Growth Engine

The Maybury company may be essentially paperless, by its president proudly hangs on to an item that could have been recycled years ago.

It’s a placemat from the Fort restaurant in Springfield, on which Maybury scribbled the preliminary business plan for a subsidiary, or sister business, he started with a partner in 2005 called Atlantic Handling Systems. Based in the New Jersey community of Ho-Ho-Kus, it offers entry into a new, large market, and provides new opportunities for growth.

There was and is that requisite amount of danger with the Atlantic venture, he explained, adding quickly that this latest endeavor, called ‘Baby Maybury’ by some, amounts to a calculated risk, one that has worked out very well and holds considerable promise for the future.

And getting it off the ground has been fun, which, like that element of danger, must be part and parcel to everything that intrigues our Top Entrepreneur for 2007.

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

By
Departments

Dr. Michael J. Spink has joined the practice of Facial Cosmetic & Maxillofacial Surgery, P.C., and the office of Dr. Richard J. Fraziero in East Longmeadow.

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Karen Desjeans has been appointed Staff Assistant to Holyoke Community College President William Messner; she will serve alongside fellow Staff Assistant Colleen Cameron.

•••••

Ace Fire & Water Restoration Inc. in West Springfield has announced the following:
• Nicole M. Sorel has been appointed head of its newly formed Cleaning and Packout Department, and
• Linda M. St. Marie has been named Office Manager.

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The American Tree Farm System, along with BASF Corp., has named Cinda Jones of Cowls Land and Lumber Co. in North Amherst as the winner of the BASF Outstanding Achievements in Sustainable Forestry Award for 2007.

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Human Resources Unlimited Inc. announced the following:
• Patrick Leary, Partner of Moriarty & Primack, P.C., has been named to its Board of Directors;
• Joel Morse, Sales and Marketing Manager of Marcus Printing, has been named to its Board of Directors, and
• Charlene Smolkowicz, Commercial Credit Analyst of Bank of Western Massachusetts, has been named to its Board of Directors.

•••••

Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture announced the following:
• Jessica Cook has joined the staff as a Program Coordinator. She will oversee CISA’s efforts to study and develop salad greens and meat-processing options that will help more local farmers to get their products to market, and
• Allison Neher has joined the staff as a Program Assistant.

•••••

Cooley Dickinson Hospital-affiliated surgeons Drs. Christopher Marvelli, Holly Michaelson, and Timothy O’Brien have created a new name for their general surgery practice — Hampshire Surgical Care at 76A Carlon Dr. Marvelli, Michaelson, and O’Brien are all board-certified general surgeons, and specialize in advanced minimally invasive and robotic surgery, including surgeries of the colon and gastrointestinal tract as well as breast surgery.

•••••

Leonard Pansa, Vice President of Human Resources for the Sisters of Providence Health System, has met the criteria to advance to Fellow status at the American College of Healthcare Executives and is board-certified in health care management. Pansa received Fellow status as a result of his continued achievement in meeting high standards of professional development, excellence, and leadership as a health care executive.

•••••

Joel Anderson has joined Viega, LLC, a Kansas-based plumbing and radiant heating supplier, as District Sales Manager for Western Mass. In his new role, Anderson will be the face of Viega to area commercial contractors, architects, engineers, and plumbers.

•••••


Clara M. Elliot

Clara M. Elliot has been named Dean of Human Resources at Holyoke Community College.

•••••

Greater Springfield Habitat for Humanity announced the following staff appointments:
• Jennifer Schimmel has been named Executive Director;
• Sean T. Mitchell has been named Director of Development, and
• Lise M. LeTellier has been named Volunteer Coordinator.

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Ric Skinner has joined Tighe & Bond in Westfield as Director of Geographic Information Systems. He is a certified GIS professional with 20 years of experience.

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Anna Brandenburg has been named Program Coordinator and Training Librarian for the Springfield City Library.

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Adam Novitt has been named Director of Pelham Library. He also works at the Forbes Library in Northampton.

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Hope Kelley, head professional at The Ranch Golf Club in Southwick, has been named the 2007 PGA Merchandiser of the Year at a Public Golf Course by the Connecticut Section of the PGA of America. The award recognizes excellence in business and merchandising at private, public, and resort golf facilities. Kelley is a 12-year member of the PGA and has overseen the golf operations at the Ranch since 2004.

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Gary F. O’Grady has joined Berkshire Hills Bancorp, Inc. as Municipal Banking Officer. He has offices at 24 North St., Pittsfield, and 31 Court St., Westfield. O’Grady will oversee the Government Banking Department, which specializes in banking services for municipalities and other governmental entities and agencies.

•••••

Motivational speaker, educator, and humorist Dr. Steve Sobel has been asked to address 100 top student-athletes at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., on Feb. 3. He will speak on “Leadership, Motivation, and Teambuilding.” Sobel’s practice is based in Longmeadow.

By
Departments

Panera Bread Opens in Chicopee

CHICOPEE — Panera Bread opened its 4,500-square-foot bakery/café on Memorial Drive on Nov. 23, featuring intimate seating areas, comfortable chairs, a fireplace, a community table, and free WiFi Internet access. Panera Bread offers a variety of artisan breads and other specialty breads, along with bagels, pastries, baked goods, and hot and cold espresso beverages. Chicopee’s site is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, offering hand-tossed salads, signature sandwiches, and hearty soups served in edible sourdough bread bowls. Panera Bread also operates bakery/cafés in West Springfield, Hadley, and East Longmeadow.

Big Y Celebrates Grand Opening

NORTHAMPTON — The D’Amour family celebrated the grand-opening celebration of its Big Y World Class Market on North King Street on Nov. 8 with a cake-cutting ceremony.

HCC Recognized By National Council

HOLYOKE — Region I of the National Council for Marketing & Public Relations recently announced that Holyoke Community College (HCC) has been chosen to receive five first-place (Gold) and two third-place (Bronze) Medallion Awards for its public-relations efforts. HCC was recognized for its success in feature and news story placement, writing, event and publication marketing, transportation advertising, and publication design. The National Council for Marketing & Public Relations represents marketing and PR professionals at 600 community and technical colleges in the United States, Canada, and Scotland.

Hatch Mott MacDonald Relocates

HOLYOKE — Hatch Mott MacDonald, a consulting engineering firm, has moved its offices to 150 Lower Westfield Road. The firm provides engineering services in the transportation, tunnels, water, wastewater, environmental, pipeline, and utility markets.

Researcher Awarded $737,000 NIH Grant

SPRINGFIELD — Alan Schneyer, a scientist at the Pioneer Valley Life Sciences Institute (PVLSI), has been awarded a research grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. The grant, titled “Physiologic Roles of Activin and Myostatin Antagonists,” provides Schneyer with $737,000 to conduct research into diabetes over the next three years. He recently joined PVLSI from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Schneyer noted that his research will focus on looking for hormones that “lead to more and better-functioning insulin-producing cells.” In particular, the grant will fund studies on a protein called Follistatin, which plays an important role in normal development and appears to cause proliferation of insulin-producing cells.

Bay Path Receives Foundation Grant

LONGMEADOW — Bay Path College is the recipient of a $30,000 grant from the Berkshire Bank Foundation – Pioneer Valley, which establishes an endowed scholarship fund to support adult women who are earning their college degree through Bay Path’s One-day-a-week Saturday program. Michael Oleksak, president of the Berkshire Bank Foundation – Pioneer Valley, noted that it chose Bay Path’s innovative program since education is one of its main priorities.

Square One Adds Go FIT Program to Curriculum

SPRINGFIELD — Square One, formerly Springfield Day Nursery, recently announced the incorporation of the Go FIT program into its curriculum. Square One operates day-care and after-school programs in several locations serving more than 1,000 children daily in Greater Springfield and Holyoke. The ultimate goal of the collaboration, which includes partners like Springfield College, Partners for a Healthier Community, and the Food Bank of Western Mass., is to improve the overall health and well-being of families and children in the local communities.

Berkshire Hills Assets Climb

PITTSFIELD — Berkshire Hills Bancorp, parent company of Berkshire Bank, recently reported 2007 third-quarter core income of $4.4 million. Core income increased by $0.01 per share before one-time items and Berkshire’s investment in new branches. Third-quarter core 2006 income was $4.7 million. Last year’s results included a $0.03 per-share one-time catch-up dividend received from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. Berkshire’s investment in de novo branches increased expenses by $0.03 per share to $0.07 per share in this year’s third quarter, compared to $0.04 per share in 2006 (all per-share numbers are after-tax).

MassMutual Has Record Payout

SPRINGFIELD — MassMutual recently announced it has approved the payment of about $1.38 billion in dividends to eligible participating policyholders in 2008 — an 11.2% increase over the approved payout for 2007 and the largest ever for the company since it was founded in 1851. The total approved payout for 2008 reflects a dividend interest rate of 7.9% on most of its eligible participating policies, the company’s highest rate in five years. The previous record amount was the 2007 approved dividend payout of $1.25 billion.

City Contractor Achieves Firestone Award

SPRINGFIELD — Firestone Building Products Company recently named Morris Roofing & Sheet Metal Corp. a recipient of the 2007 Partner in Quality Award. The award recognizes the company for its commitment to installing quality roofing systems. The award recognizes contractors who installed a minimum of four warranteed Firestone roofs in each of the past five years, maintained at least 1 million square feet of Firestone roofs under warranty, and achieved an annual Quality Incidence Rating (QIR) of 2.0 or less. The Firestone QIR measures each contractor’s quality performance based on warranty repair incidences per million square feet under warranty.

Stuff a Stocking Receives Help From Baystate Rug

CHICOPEE — Stuff a Stocking’s campaign is underway, and Baystate Rug and Flooring has made a corporate donation to the local organization to kick off the holiday season. Stuff a Stocking tries to contribute at least two or three toys and food certificates to needy families in the city during the holidays. Stuff a Stocking organizers will host a breakfast buffet on Dec. 9 from 8 a.m. to noon at the Moose Family Center on Fuller Road to raise funds for its cause. For more information, contact Jorge Morgado at (413) 237-5316.

Business Weaving with Bread Bags

SPRINGFIELD — Valley Vogue Collections, a small business based in Indian Orchard Mills, has introduced a new series of bags that are woven from bread bags collected from Palmer’s Converse Middle School cafeteria. Dubbed the “Bread Bag,” the lunch bag is not only strong and durable, but can be rinsed and dried in time for the following day. Valley Vogue Collections plans to debut the lunch bag at a series of fairs and shows this holiday season.

All About You, LLC Debuts

WESTFIELD — Marge Pietras and Holly Proulx have opened All About You, LLC, a professional home-care company servicing clients and families in Hampden and Hampshire counties. The company specializes in case management, personal care, home management, and skilled nursing services. Both women are professional nurses who, combined, have more than 50 years of skilled nursing and administrative experience.

W.F. Young Purchases S.C. Firm

EAST LONGMEADOW — W. F. Young Inc. recently announced the acquisition of Equine America Inc., a South Carolina company that sells horse care products. Equine America product lines’ sales and marketing will be headquartered here. Tyler Young, president of W. F. Young, noted that the purchase of Equine America represents a significant step to broaden its product line and expand its market share within the equine health care industry. W. F. Young is best known for its Absorbine line of horse care products and the Absorbine Jr. line of consumer health care products.

The Competition is Building

By
Kerry Dietz
Sections Supplements
As the Market Slows, More Firms Are Bidding for Less Work
Kerry Dietz

Architect Kerry Dietz says she seeing and hearing some “hunger” in the construction market.

Many in the construction sector are starting to see more signs that the market is tightening up. There are more companies bidding on projects — no less than 16 firms vied for rights to build the new clubhouse at the Ledges Golf Club in South Hadley, a comparatively small project — and more companies from outside the region are joining the fray. These indicators point toward continuation of a relatively flat period for most builders, but there is considerable optimism that there will be enough work to go around in 2008.

Joe Marois has noticed some bigger crowds lately at the so-called ‘walk-throughs,’ at which construction companies can get a feel for a specific project before deciding whether, and how much, to bid on it.

“At some of them, there’s enough people at the walk-through to do the job,” joked Marois, president of the South Hadley-based construction company that bears his name, noting quickly that this is not a laughing matter for most of the players in this sector.

The big turnouts mean that many companies are looking for work, at least in part because there’s less of it to find, and some of those outfits are coming from outside of this area code. The heightened competition brings the bid prices down, he continued, which is good for the customers, but not necessarily for the company winning the bid, which is ultimately looking at a smaller profit margin or, in some cases, just breaking even.

“We’re working hard to keep the lights on … we’ve had to work twice as hard for about half as much, it seems,” said Marois, exaggerating to make a point — that his firm has been successful in finding plenty of work, although many of the projects are smaller in size than what it usually pursues. He sees an abundance of projects for the balance of ’07 and the looming spring building season, but admits there is some apprehension in the industry about what lies ahead.

‘Flat’ is the term he and others used to describe the current state of the local construction market, and there are concerns for the year ahead about everything from the prices of steel and other building materials to the subprime lending mess and perceptions of same.

“The subprime housing situation hasn’t had an impact on the commercial market,” said Peter Wood, vice president of Sales and Marketing for Associated Builders in Southampton. “But what may impact the commercial segment is the lack of discretionary income after we get through a winter of continually rising commodities prices.”

Wood agreed that there is heightened competition touching many segments of the market, some more than others. There has been less overall impact in Associated’s specialty, design-build work, he noted, adding that the company has remained busy, has a number of projects on the books for next spring, and hasn’t seen a pronounced decline in margins.

“We’re still seeing opportunities to sell our product and without having to discount it,” he said. “That’s because we’re not really in a bid market, we’re in a service market.”

Kerry Dietz, owner of Dietz & Co. Architects, said her sector has also seen a surge in the number of companies bidding on projects, and also some firms from well outside this region vying for work in the 413 area code. There are several factors contributing to this, she said, including some general uncertainty about the economy, which may be prompting some business owners to err on the side of caution when it comes to building projects.

But also, some public initiatives have been slower in developing than many in this sector had expected, she said, noting that state funding of school projects — renewed after several years when the pipeline was closed off — has been slower than anticipated (the new Putnam High School in Springfield is the first project). This has no doubt forced companies specializing in school work to continue looking elsewhere, she continued, adding that funds for another state initiative involving public housing have started to trickle in.

In this issue, BusinessWest examines the state of the construction sector, and what looms ahead for an industry that is often a good predictor of the economy as a whole.

Board Feat

As he talked with BusinessWest about the general state of the building sector, Wood clicked his way to a story in the local paper about the bidding for the contract to erect a new clubhouse at the Ledges Golf Club in South Hadley.

“It says that 16 contractors — that’s a lot, that’s huge — had taken out documents to bid on what will be about a $700,000 project,” he said, noting that the clubhouse work accurately reflects what is happening within the local market, especially the publicly funded projects “Clearly some of those companies are not from around here — that’s what happens when the economy goes south for builders; that’s good for the club because it will get a good price, but it’s not good for the people trying to do business in this area.

“What happens when the market gets tight is that prices get lower in the bid process,” he said. “But you can’t swap a dollar for a dollar to stay in business; you still have to be allowed to make a profit in the business sector.”

The Ledges bidding war provides an effective backdrop for Q4, and may be a harbinger of what’s ahead, said Wood, noting that as 2007 winds down, many in this sector are still doing well, but all players are watching the landscape closely in search of clues for what might happen in the short and long term.

People like Tim Pelletier. “I’m just lying in the weeds watching to see what happens,” said Pelletier, president of Ludlow-based Houle Construction. Like others, he sees the heightened competition for jobs as a clear sign that companies are hungry for work, sometimes just to keep crews busy so they don’t lose valued employees.

“When you see people that you haven’t seen before, and when you see people start to come up from Connecticut, that tells you that things are getting tighter,” he said.

There are several theories as to why. First, the residential market has slowed down (although not as much here as elsewhere), forcing some companies that specialize in that work to veer toward commercial projects until the housing skies brighten, said Pelletier.

Meanwhile, there are more concerns about the economy — again, more nationally than regionally — and other factors that are contributing to some hesitancy in the building market.

“I’m hearing some hunger, and seeing it,” said Dietz, noting that the architectural community is often among the first sectors to note turns or trends in the economy. “Some of the sub-trades haven’t quite felt the pinch yet because they’re still working, so they think there’s plenty of work coming afterwards. They’re not at the beginning of the food chain, they’re more toward the end, so they’re not seeing it as much, but I suspect they will.”

Overall, Dietz expects more flat times ahead before the picture improves.

“I think the beginning of 2008 will be on the slow side for everybody,” she said, “but by the end of the year we’ll see some action as the housing controversy will settle down and people will get over it.”

Dietz said that at the moment, her firm is ‘slammingly’ busy — there were four proposals submitted during one recent week — but, as is typical is this business, she can’t really project more than a few months out.

Like others we spoke with, she said the perception that the economy may be slowing down may be a bigger factor in what happens across this sector than reality. Overall, she said, the problems with the housing market, and the economy in general, are not as bad as many of the headlines make it appear.

“Housing goes up like 80,000%, and then goes down a tiny fraction of that and everyone talks about the burst bubble,” she said. “I think we’ve lost our perspective on the economy in a lot of ways.”

Marois said his firm is also busy, albeit with projects it might not have pursued if times were better.

“We’ve had a lot of small jobs, and we’re going after things we normally wouldn’t go after,” he said. “But I’m noticing that there’s a lot out there to bid on … things are ramping up a little bit, and that’s unusual for this time of year.”

Finishing Work

Summing up the state of the market, Marois said that few if any companies are in panic mode. But these are times when firms must focus on the bottom line, be alert to opportunities, and do what’s necessary to ride out the storm.

“You have to really pay attention to survive right now,” he explained. “You have to watch what you’re doing, stay lean, and just be careful.”

And also expect those large crowds at the bid walk-throughs — at least for the time being.

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

Past Life Experiences

By
Norma Probst
Sections Supplements
‘Historic Hotels’ Status Offers Marketing Oomph to its Western Mass. Landmarks
Norma Probst

Norma Probst, director of sales and marketing at Cranwell Resort, Spa and Golf Club, said HHA helps brand historic hotels as a group.

From vintage furnishings to modern-day amenities, the region’s historic hotels have much to offer travelers from around the world. However, one thing that’s long been lacking for these mostly privately-owned, single-location establishments has been the marketing machines that power the Hiltons, Westins, and Marriotts of the nation — and by telling their members’ stories, Historic Hotels of America is looking to change that.

The Porches Inn at MassMoCA in North Adams was recently named one of the world’s “coolest hotels” by Condé Nast Traveller, among other honors. It earned the distinction for its wide range of amenities and whimsical style, which includes complimentary breakfast delivered in a vintage lunch pail.

Down the road in Lenox, the Cranwell Resort, Spa and Golf Club recently garnered AAA’s Four Diamond rating for the sixth consecutive year and continues to hone its reputation as one of the best golf resorts in the country.

The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge has welcomed travelers for more than two centuries, and is now making a new name for itself as a champion of sustainable agriculture in the Berkshires.

And Hotel Northampton in Hampshire County, with its newly renovated rooms and grand ballroom, is positioning itself as the area’s premier spot for luxury accommodations.

Each establishment has its own claims to fame that make it a unique destination in Western Mass. At first glance, the hotels have little in common. But they share one common theme: all are members of the Historic Hotels of America, a national organization that serves historic hotels and the travelers who love them, and, as such, affords a unique set of benefits that calls attention to the properties’ individuality, while at the same time binding them together as part of a whole.

Mary Billingsley, director of public relations for Historic Hotels of America, or HHA, explained that the group is a program of the National Trust of Historic Hotels for Preservation, which was formed in 1989 as a means of reaching out to the traveling public.

“We had certain people in mind,” she said. “Those who may not consider themselves preservationists, but appreciate history, and the experience of staying in a hotel that has a past, a tradition, and a sense of place in its community.”

The organization started with 32 charter members, and today, that number has risen to 213, spread across the contiguous United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Porches, the Red Lion, Hotel Northampton, and Cranwell are the region’s only HHA hotels, and four of 15 in the Commonwealth. Others include the Boston Park Plaza and Towers, Chatham Bars Inn on Cape Cod, and the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem.

Billingsley said that to be considered for inclusion, a hotel must be included on the National Register of Historic Places and housed in a building that is at least 50 years old, though many establishments in the network are new uses of older properties, including former apartment buildings, mills, and private homes.

“There is a wide range of properties that have been converted into hotels, from cotton warehouses to bottling plants,” she said, adding that HHA is not a luxury organization; while each property has its own unique draws, HHA hotels fall within a number of price points and welcome all types of travelers. “We’re defined by history, and that’s something we let consumers know,” she said.

The Best of the West

Billingsley noted that the four hotels within Western Mass. are a good representation of HHA’s overall mission and identity as a travel organization.

“Western Mass. as a destination is so desirable,” she said, “and these four hotels showcase the diversity of our group. The Red Lion Inn is so picturesque; Cranwell is an internationally-known resort; Porches is an adapted-use of a property dating back to the 1890s; and Hotel Northampton has a more modern flair.”

Still, Billingsley explained that while the strengths HHA hotels possess — a strong sense of history, a rich collection of stories, and often a unique set of amenities that blend the intrigue of the past with the creature comforts of today — can also be a weakness for such destinations. While these features set them apart from modern-day hotels, she said, they can also isolate them. Most historic hotels are privately owned, and as such don’t have the same marketing strength as larger, corporate-owned outfits.

Addressing this has become the primary goal of HHA; it’s a member-driven marketing association, collecting dues from participating hotels and, in turn, promoting them as part of a group with increasing prestige.

The representatives from the HHA hotels of Western Mass. who spoke with BusinessWest returned frequently to the topic of branding, and how HHA has provided a much-needed shot in the arm in terms of creating a collective identity for a varied set of properties.

Michael Kolesar, director of sales and marketing for Hotel Northampton, took his post at the local landmark just this year, after a long career working within corporate-owned hotels. He said HHA does the work that smaller outfits often cannot, forging an identity for privately owned destinations.

“It’s a wonderful marketing tool, utilizing history, that markets individual properties through a lot of great programs that create brand association,” he said. “They allow us to work with what we have at our own pace, and we gain exposure outside of the local market — something that, as a privately owned establishment, is not easy for us to do.”

Carol Bosco Baumann, director of Communications and Marketing for the Red Lion Inn and the Porches Inn, said the Red Lion, first opened in 1773 to serve as a stagecoach stop, is one of HHA’s charter members, and Porches is still viewed as a relatively new member, having joined in the past decade. From both points of view, Baumann said she’s seen firsthand the growth within the organization.

“The HHA helps establish us as a brand by allowing us to be a part of an umbrella organization,” she said. “It’s an interesting position to be in, having two properties that scream individuality be part of the same brand.

“But it’s all about preservation and historic standards that alone are a benefit,” Baumann continued, “and the HHA publicity efforts only help us more. People understand that when they plan a trip to an HHA hotel, they’re going to feel a genuine sense of place. More than anything else, history provides that.”

Norma Probst, director of Sales and Marketing for the Cranwell Resort and a member of HHA’s national sales committee, said that she anticipates that the organization will only continue to flourish, aiding its member properties all the more.

“Cultural travel is one of the largest-growing segments of the industry,” she said, “and the HHA is doing very well as an organization because of the efforts it has undertaken with regard to public relations. Those have fostered a very willing, active membership base that understands the importance of promoting HHA as well as themselves; I see it becoming more well-known as a group in the future.”

At Any Rate

The various programs sponsored by HHA are developed to be pliable, so member hotels can develop promotions that make sense for them, while at the same time taking advantage of HHA’s international publicity. Members can choose whether or not to participate in a given program, and if they choose to sign on, can do so at virtually any level.

Currently, for instance, the Western Mass. HHA properties are gearing up for the ‘Fall Back in Time’ program, which will offer special rates and packages coinciding with the new, later time change on Nov. 4 (clocks are turned back one hour a week later this year, due to the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005). Sponsored by American Express, the program offers an extra draw for AmEx users, awarding a complimentary one-year membership to the National Trust for Historic Preservation when a trip is booked.

More than 75 packages have been developed by participating hotels across the country, ranging from special rates that reflect the year an establishment was built, to more elaborate promotions.

Kolesar said he’s currently developing a program for Hotel Northampton that will likely include a discounted rate or added-value component, and Cranwell is offering a second-night rate of $18.94 when one night is booked, celebrating the year the Sloane family, the resort’s second owners, built the Gilded-Age Wyndhurst Mansion on the property. Probst said quite a few rooms have already been reserved through that promotion.

Similarly, Baumann has developed ‘Fall Back’ promotions for both the Red Lion and Porches; the former will offer an overnight package including a country breakfast in bed and a commemorative gift for $177.30, while the latter will afford guests with a one-night stay with breakfast for two and a $20 gift certificate to the inn’s eclectic gift shop, all for $189, signifying the 1890s, when the Porches property was first built. Baumann said she tries to participate in HHA programs whenever possible, as they help to boost occupancy during slower times.

“The perception is that the Berkshires are a place for summer travel,” she said, “when in fact there is beauty and things to do year-round.”

Essentially, the affiliation with HHA, and its regularly released press materials and seasonal promotions, allows inns like the Red Lion and Porches to tout their amenities and special events continuously, and Baumann said this also helps translate the reality that not all historic hotels are Spartan in their accommodations. Rather, many have a large cadre of modern draws that, without regular, brisk marketing, can fall under the radar.

In addition to its lunch-pail breakfast service and claw-foot tubs, Porches, for instance, offers an outdoor heated pool, a hot tub, a bonfire pit surrounded by 10,000 different varieties of native plants, rain water shower heads, and outdoor adventure packages such as geocaching trips.

Probst said the HHA’s marketing assistance has been particularly beneficial in promoting the Cranwell’s 35,000-square-foot, $7.5 million spa, which blends well with its historic mansions.

“Promoting the spa through packages allows us to maintain an identity,” she said, “while still translating that we have the modern amenities travelers today are seeking.

“There are a lot of economies of scale one doesn’t have when connected to a large hotel,” she added, “but we’ve been marketing our spa packages rigorously through HHA, and since we began, we have yet to drop below 50% occupancy in the winter.”

Tell Me a Tale

Other benefits of HHA include reservation services, which allow both individuals and groups to book stays though the organization and its Web site, and a comprehensive, annually updated directory. All of the HHA hotels are also listed on the group’s Web site, historichotels.org, which is geared toward consumers with pages detailing various types of trips, from golf outings to spa retreats to business meetings.

The backbone of nearly all of HHA’s marketing programs, however, is story-telling, as it speaks to the personality that distinguishes historic hotels from their modern-day counterparts.

These can be small anecdotes regarding a visit from a celebrity, or a recipe that originated in an establishment’s kitchen, and also grand yarns, detailing how one guest house weathered prohibition, or how another played a part during WWII. The Hotel del Coronado in Coronado, Calif., another HHA member, often touts its distinction as the backdrop for the Marilyn Monroe film Some Like It Hot.

“We try to think about different topics in different areas and have our hotels share their stories,” said Billingsley. “We’ll cover everything from presidents’ visits to ghost stories to recipes and housekeeping tips. We’ve found looking to the past has been very helpful.”

Of all topics, ghost stories tend to draw particular interest. “We promote those on a yearly basis, and we’re on our 14th year,” said Billingsley. “People really like them, and hotels definitely have stories to tell.”

Kolesar noted that, while Hotel Northampton has yet to identify any spectral visitors, it benefits by promoting the stories of Wiggins Tavern, built in 1796 in New Hampshire and moved to the hotel in 1936 as part of a surge in Colonial-revival architecture and design, and by touting its long list of celebrity guests, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Hillary Clinton.

“A lot of people have skeletons in the closet, so to speak, but we really don’t,” he said, looking momentarily crestfallen. “That’s just one example of promoting history on a lighter note, though. We cater more to ‘star-gazers’ who care about who’s been here among the living.”

Travel tips have been another big win for HHA. Periodically, the organization will zero in on a particular topic — how to travel healthier, for instance, or a selection of team-building exercises for corporate travelers — and ask member hotels to contribute an idea.

“There’s great interest, and it allows us to put together fresh stories more frequently,” said Billingsley, adding that the topic doesn’t have to be complicated to generate interest. “Our housekeeping tips release was successful because I think people know how hard housekeepers work, and that the tips they’d have to offer would be real — things people could do themselves that weren’t difficult challenges. One woman, we heard, hung our press release up in her broom closet.”

Check Us Out

It’s a comprehensive marketing model that continues to gain momentum, assisting the historic hotels of the country as they, in turn, bolster the organization.

As for those establishments in the region taking their historical significance to a new level, Probst, standing halfway between Cranwell’s opulent mansion-cum-lobby and its contemporary spa and fitness center, perhaps said it best.

“We’re fortunate to be in Western Mass.,” she said. “It’s a fantastic destination that many people love. But to be placed on a national stage makes a world of difference.”

Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]

Scoring Opportunities

By
Gail Sherman and Doris Ransford
Sections Supplements
Commerce Show Organizers Want Some Net Results at the Hall
Gail Sherman and Doris Ransford

Commerce ’07 organizers Gail Sherman, right, president of the Chicopee Chamber of Commerce, and Doris Ransford, president of the Greater Holyoke Chamber.

In 2006, organizers of the Commerce trade show took their game up a notch by relocating the annual fall event to the Basketball Hall of Fame. The change of venue, coupled with some different programs, generated some new excitement for the show. Seizing on that momentum, planners have brought the show back to the Hall, but with some new wrinkles to the game plan designed to bring more value to exhibitors and visitors alike.

‘Elevate Your Game.’

That’s the theme for Commerce 2007, the 17th edition of the annual fall trade show staged by the Chicopee and Greater Holyoke Chambers of Commerce, slated for Nov. 1. It was chosen to draw a strong connection between the event and its new home, the Basketball Hall of Fame, to which the show was first taken last year; the event’s brochure is replete with double entendres covering both sports and business. But it also speaks to business owners about the opportunities that show organizers believe the event offers for companies to take their marketing efforts to a higher plane.

Indeed, there are several new wrinkles to the traditional trade show format designed to give participants more exposure. These include a ‘star exhibitor status’ package, which gives vendors more visibility, both on the show floor and in marketing materials for the event. Meanwhile, companies can also sign on as ‘playmakers,’ an upgraded ‘star status’ product tailored toward companies that plan to offer demonstrations or mini-seminars at their booths.

But ‘elevating the game’ also refers to what show organizers, especially Chicopee Chamber President Gail Sherman and her counterpart in Holyoke, Doris Ransford, have been trying to do with their trade show. The move to the Hall of Fame energized some long-time participants and sparked enough curiosity to attract several newcomers last fall, said Sherman, noting that the chambers want to seize on that momentum and make the show an even more attractive marketing option for business owners.

To that end, they have created the new initiatives aimed at exposure, while also tweaking the show layout and some of the programs — all in an effort to add value. Last year, booths were spread out over several levels of the Hall and many different rooms, which many attendees found inconvenient; this year, all the booths are on one floor, but over a broader area. Last year, breakfast was in the Hall’s auditorium, with people essentially eating out of their laps; this year, a buffet-style restaurant will be staged in Pazzo’s restaurant in the Hall complex.

Meanwhile, show attendees will also be given free entrance to the Hall of Fame’s exhibits, as they were last year, and visitors and exhibitors alike can mix their time at the show with a visit to one of three restaurants located within the complex.

“We think it’s a very attractive package of programs and opportunities for networking,” said Ransford, adding that show organizers are expecting to at least match last year’s turnout, a considerable feat considering an ongoing trend of declining participation in trade shows, coupled with an economic outlook now featuring many question marks.

In this issue, BusinessWest previews Commerce ’07, a show that promises exhibitors some real scoring opportunities.

Hook Shots

Flashing back to 1991, Ransford said the Commerce Show was launched to provide area companies, many of them smaller businesses with limited marketing budgets, a chance to gain some important exposure at a time when they needed it — the start of a prolonged recession — and when most couldn’t afford to market themselves extensively, or thought they couldn’t.

The Western Mass. landscape has changed considerably since then, and the economy is obviously much improved, although there are some concerns about the future and more frequent references to the dreaded ‘R’ word, said Ransford. But the basic mission of this trade show hasn’t changed — it remains an opportunity for companies to gain some cost-effective exposure and gain some potentially valuable leads.

“These days, it seems that there’s far less human interaction when it comes to sales and marketing, and technology has a lot to do with that,” said Ransford. “Today, people use E-mail and voice mail to communicate. But there’s no substitute for face-to-face contact, and the show gives people a chance to reconnect.”

Since the beginning, the challenge has been to keep the show fresh and make it well worth it for business owners and managers to devote a day, some expense, and considerable energy to the event.

“Business owners make a big investment in the show in terms of their time, their employees’ time, and the cost of exhibiting,” said Sherman. “We want to make this a prudent investment for everyone, and we do that by providing a lot of bang for the buck in terms of exposure to decision-makers.”

The Commerce Show has been well-traveled throughout its history. It started out at what is now the Plantation Inn in Chicopee, and later spent a number of years operating out of one of the large hangars at Westover Air Reserve Base. The events of 9/11 made those facilities unavailable, so organizers took the show to the Big E, where it remained until the MassMutual Center opened in the fall of 2005.

That year’s Commerce Show was one of the first events staged at the downtown Springfield facility, and it went well, said Sherman, but there were some glitches. Parking was a problem, either real or perceived, she explained, and there were some other logistical and practical concerns; organizers tried a shuttle bus from downtown parking lots, but it didn’t prove popular.

Weighing the pros and cons of that location, Commerce organizers considered other venues, and gave the Hall of Fame a hard look. The uniqueness of the facility, the potential to collaborate and co-market with the Hall, and acres of free parking made the site an attractive alternative.

What the Hall provided was a clean break from the look and feel provided by the traditional, large exhibition hall, said Sherman, noting that in year one at the Hall of Fame, organizers had booths and tables spread out on each of the shrine’s many levels. Such an arrangement looked good on paper, but didn’t work out as well as hoped, she told BusinessWest, adding that for year 2, the show will be on one level, utilizing the Hall’s Center Court area, the hallway outside it, the food court, and a now vacant Adidas storefront. In the promotional brochure for the event, these areas are called the ‘Front Court,’ ‘Back Court,’ etc., in keeping with the general theme.

Beyond the changes in layout for the show — designed to add convenience while still providing a non-traditional trade show experience — there are some new wrinkles designed to provide more value for exhibitors, said Ransford.
The ‘Star Exhibitor’ designation provides added exposure in several forms, including everything from links on the show’s Web site to mentions in all press releases to passes to the Star Exhibitor luncheon at Pazzo’s. Meanwhile, the so-called Playmakers, get those benefits plus announcements on the loudspeaker system prior to their demonstrations, postings of those demonstration and seminars on the Web site, and even discounts on booth prices.

“Thus far, the new packages are proving to be popular,” said Ransford. “They’re something new, and what we expect will be effective ways for companies to get more exposure and more people to their booths.”

Transition Game

Beyond the many imaginative plays on words now available to those marketing the Commerce Show, its current home provides something else — that different look and feel that organizers have long desired to make their show stand out.

Capitalizing on the venue, but also adding more value whenever and wherever possible is the simple game plan for the ’07 show. Early forecasts project that for this event, exhibitors should expect nothing but net.

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

By
Departments

Designs on a Career

Christopher Zarlengo, vice president of Marketing for STCU Credit Union, and Amy McNeil, an intern from Springfield Technical Community College’s Graphic Arts Technology program, check proofs of the credit union’s annual report. McNeil, who recently graduated from STCC in the Commercial Arts program, was responsible for the design of the credit union’s annual report.


Open for Business

Owners of the newly opened Courtyard by Marriott hotel on Route 9 in Hadley recently staged a get-together for staff, contractors who built the facility, and friends of those involved with the venture. Above are many of the principals in the Hampshire Hospitality Group, which made the Marriott the latest addition to its roster of area hotels and inns: from left, Grazyna Vincunas, Ken Vincunas, Lynn Travers, Curt Shumway, COO of the Hampshire Hospitality Group, Bob Shumway and Ed O’Leary.

At right, from left, Ed Newalu, director of Food and Beverage for the Hampshire Hospitality Group; Sherri Willey, special projects coordinator for HHG; Sean Welch, general manager of the Courtyard by Marriott; and Michelle Boudreau, director of Sales and Marketing for HHG.

Groundbreaking Developments

A groundbreaking ceremony was on May 29 to signal the beginning of construction at Rivers Landing, a combination health club, entertainment, and dining venue that will be located at the site of the former Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The complex will feature L.A. Fitness, and is being developed by Springfield natives Peter Pappas, a real estate developer, and Dr. Michael Spagnoli, a chiropractor. From left to right are: Rivers Landing project consultant James Langone; State Rep. Rosemarie Sandlin (D-Agawam); Clerk of Courts Brian Lees; U.S. Rep. Richard Neal; Bill Horner, senior vice president of L.A. Fitness; Springfield Economic Development Director David Panagore; Pappas; Springfield Mayor Charles Ryan; Spagnoli; John Doleva, president and CEO of the Basketball Hall of Fame; Gary Magnuson, an officer with Citizens Bank, which is financing the project; and Paul McDonald, chairman of the Springfield Riverfront Development Corp.

Ware-based FamilyFirst Bank recently broke ground for a new office on Route 9 in East Brookfield. The branch will offer a full range of banking products and services to families and businesses in Western Worcester County. On hand for the groundbreaking ceremony were members of the bank’s board of directors and executives. From left are, Michael Audette, president; Gail A. Piatek, chairman of the board; Charlie Miller, project manager of NES Group; Claire Bothwell and Louis Masse, directors of FamilyFirst Bank.

Craig Swimm

By
Cover Story
Age 39. Director of Sales, WMAS AM/FM Citadel Broadcasting

Craig Swimm didn’t see it as a step backward.

Well, OK, from an immediate salary standpoint it certainly was, but not, in his mind, from a career development viewpoint or from the perspective of what was best for his family — although he was more than a little worried about what his wife, Sigrun, would say or do when he told her the news: he was leaving a position as a warehouse supervisor, delivering refrigerators for the old Lechmere store in Springfield, to do sales and marketing for radio station WARE.

He recalls her saying, “what have you done?!!” or something to that effect.

By Swimm’s estimations, he was taking a $25,000 pay cut to do something he’d never done before. But he was nothing if not confident — and adventurous. And he never looked back. Nor, apparently, did Sigrun, an Icelander whom Swimm met while stationed at Keflavik Air Force Base during Operation Desert Storm.

The Swimms and their daughter, Sonja, make at least one trip to Iceland a year — Christmas, Easter, or both. This year, it was Easter, a trip Swimm was looking forward to after another hectic year balancing his duties as sales director of WMAS AM and FM and community work that includes work on the boards for FutureWorks and the Salvation Army.

He told BusinessWest that he enjoys sales, and that when it comes to selling media, he gets an education in how businesses across virtually every sector operate, and how advertising helps them get their message across. And in the ‘life-is-ironic’ category, he remembers applying for a job selling vacuum cleaners at Lechmere, but being told that he didn’t have the personality for sales.

When asked about Iceland, Swimm said it’s a place everyone should put on their ‘must-visit-someday’ list. “It’s a wonderful country,” he said. “It’s extremely clean … there’s no pollution, and the people are incredibly friendly.”

That said, he advises visitors to be aware — and maybe wary — of one of that country’s traditions: an offering to a houseguest of a little vodka (from the freezer) and a large bite of shark meat.

“The vodka’s OK,” he said, “but the shark is the most horrible-tasting thing you can possibly imagine.”

Pitching Coach

By
Sections Supplements
Meet J. Sheldon Snodgrass — He Can Help with Your Delivery

J. Sheldon Snodgrass worked in sales and marketing for many years and was, by all accounts, quite good at it. He took that expertise, and some long-undeveloped entrepreneurial drive, and created the Steady Sales Group, a venture that helps clients of all types and sizes effectively market and sell what they do well. There are many aspects to this all-important business function, he says, but it all boils down to finding a good fit between what one is selling and what the potential client needs.

It was early fall 2001. J. Sheldon Snodgrass was an account executive for the local satellite office of a technology consulting company — and stressing about his quarterly numbers. Again.

So much so that, this time, a friend got in his face and prompted a reality check that would change the course of his career track in a seismic way.

“He asked me, ‘do you own this company?’” Snodgrass recalled. “I said, ‘no.’” He then asked if I was going to own the company soon, or if there was any chance that I would ever own it. And I kept saying ‘no.’

“Then he said, ‘Sheldon, why are you carrying so much anxiety when you have so little stake in the company?’” he continued, adding that his friend made it clear that if one is to get so worked up about sales numbers, they might as well do so for a company they own.

And that, to make a long story somewhat short, is how the Steady Sales Group was started. It’s a venture Snodgrass launched out of his Williamsburg home that focuses on how people and companies can improve their sales. Actually, there are several facets to this entrepreneurial gambit; Snodgrass is a sales coach, guerilla marketing expert, and sales consultant.

He has appeared at a number of seminars and networking events locally, telling people how to improve their bottom line, while making impressions that will hopefully boost his own.

His client list has been growing slowly but surely, and now includes everything from a financial services company to a sporting goods distributor to the local nonprofit Human Resources Unlimited. In most, but not all, cases, including that of HRU, which places clients with physical and mental disabilities in employment situations, the product or service being sold is somewhat non-traditional and often quite challenging, said Snodgrass.

“That’s a hard sell,” he said of HRU’s service, but added quickly that, to some, all sales are difficult. His work, in a nutshell, is to simplify the process and help people get a message across.

His own message? That selling isn’t an art and it isn’t a science. It’s a skill that, like all other skills, must be learned and continually honed. This thought process is reflected in a quote from Aristotle that Snodgrass includes in all of his own marketing materials: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”

Beyond habits, there are nuances in sales, many of them small but all of them important, he said before offering a small sampling of what he imparts.

“When I teach phone-scripting, I say that some the first words out of your mouth should be, ‘if I’ve caught you at an opportune time, can we take a moment now or perhaps schedule a phone appointment to explore a fit between what I do and what you need,” he explained. “But most salespeople will ask, ‘have I caught you at a good time?’ What’s the inevitable answer to that? ‘No.’

“So now, you’re either forced to hang up or essentially ignore what you’ve just heard and proceed anyway,” he continued, “which isn’t a good way to start toward a successful conclusion.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Snodgrass talks about nuances, sales and how to improve them, and why he believes he’s found a unique, potentially lucrative business niche.

A Quick Hook

When asked about his own sales goals and whether he was meeting them, Snodgrass was direct, honest, and said, simply, “no.”

He then clarified and expanded upon that statement, noting that there can in fact be good reasons for being slightly behind (three months or so, in his case) on one’s projections. And he thinks he has one — specifically devotion of time and energy to other aspects of the business, including those that should eventually drive better sales numbers.

That’s how Snodgrass described his efforts to ramp up his Web site, www.steadysales.com, a time-consuming initiative that is starting to yield some real results. Those who visit that site will find a breakdown of his products and services, a quick rundown of his credentials, and some testimonials for obviously satisfied clients. And these success stories are arguably his best sales pitch, because they get right to the heart of the matter — the bottom line.

“I don’t want or need people saying, ‘Sheldon Snodgrass was a pleasure to work with,’” he explained. “I want them to say I got results.”

Helping clients identify their best method of approach is at the heart of the Steady Sales Group, a venture that has evolved since Snodgrass’s friend held up a mirror and compelled the entrepreneur-in-waiting to take a good look at himself.

The path to that moment was certainly a circuitous one, said Snodgrass, noting that before taking a succession of jobs in sales, sales training, or both, he spent three years in the Army Transportation Corps, worked for several non-profit groups, and did a stint at a resort in Mexico.

His introduction to the world of sales came after he answered a small want ad for a commission-only sales job at a Boston-area-based corporate travel company called Uniglobe.

“It was a job knocking on doors or, as they say, dialing for dollars, and I was so naïve about what it took,” he recalled. “The ad said, ‘love travel? … $100,000 commission potential … come to this seminar.’

“So I went and listened to this spiel to recruit people to sell for the agencies that are part of this regional franchise,” he continued. “And I raised my hand and said, ‘does this involve cold-calling?’ She just chuckled and said, ‘yes.’”

Despite that awkward start, he did well with the company, and was eventually promoted to sales trainer. After relocating to Western Mass., he took a job as marketing coordinator for Northeast Utilities’ Corporate Challenge Program, where he developed and spearheaded a sales and marketing strategy to provide leadership development and team-training programs to corporate clients, among other assignments. Later, he was a marketing and sales associate with REMI (Regional Economic Models Inc.) in Amherst, and then an account executive with Convansys, where, after two years of selling, he got his wake-up call.

Since launching the Steady Sales Group only two months after 9/11, Snodgrass has assembled a lengthy and somewhat eclectic client list. It includes Epstein Financial Services and Camfour, the Westfield-based distributor of sporting arms and other products, but also a molecular biologist who approached him recently about helping her sell one of her services — three-dimensional renderings of molecules.

The list also includes several non-profits, a neurosurgeon who wants to gain work as a consultant to health care providers, and several technology companies created by and staffed with individuals who may know how to design software but probably don’t know how to sell or market it.

Getting the Calls

Each case, and each assignment, is different, said Snodgrass, noting that for some clients he works to develop sales techniques and specific pitches for banks of telemarketers, while for others, including the many sole proprietors he’s helped, the mission is simply to get them on whatever radar screen they want to get on.

There are some common denominators with each project, he said, adding that these include identification of clearly defined markets, crafting a message and devising strategies to deliver it, and, in broad terms, finding ways to “flush the game,” as he called it, borrowing a hunting metaphor, and then, more importantly, plucking that game.

Helping clients do so is a fairly unique niche, said Snodgrass, adding that, while there are a number of ventures focused on helping clients market themselves effectively, there are few that specialize in sales. This adds up to what could be a lucrative market, because every company, regardless of what it makes or does, has to sell those products and services.

And there is another constant in the business world: no matter how good sales are, business owners want them to be better.

This simple fact has brought many people to Snodgrass’ door, his Web site, or the seminars he delivers. The messages differ, but there are some basic thoughts that he imparts.

First and foremost, he says sales are all about creating a good fit. If there isn’t one, he continued, there can’t be, or shouldn’t be, a sale.

“I have a very clear methodology for teaching sales, but it’s about finding a fit with someone and then finding good, concise, precise questions to ask in order to explore that fit,” he explained. “And when you ask for that fit, you ask for a close, and here’s a big mistake people make.

“When you close, you’re not always closing for the check, or the transaction,” he continued. “You’re agreeing to some next step in the process.”

Other, more specific forms of instruction include everything from tips on crafting an effective voice mail message to leave with prospective customers to steps to take when that person doesn’t call back — which is most of the time.

“It starts with the message; that’s marketing 101,” he explained. “It tells people why you’re different, what makes you special, and why people should give you money.

“But after you’ve left that perfect message, whose job is it call back?” he continued. “The client’s? No, it’s your job.”

Returning, again, to his own business and its sales volume, Snodgrass said many people are calling him back, or not waiting for him to call, because of the obvious importance of sales.

“It’s almost easier to write an ad campaign or come up with some clever marketing scheme than it is to think about how to have a sales conversation and follow up, follow up, follow up until it comes to some conclusion,” he said. “And that conclusion may be only an agreement to a phone appointment or permission to continue the conversation.”

Closing the Deal

When asked how he was enjoying life as an entrepreneur, Snodgrass said, in not so many words, that he wonders why he waited so long.

“I only experienced anxiety when I was trying to meet quotas for other people,” he explained, adding quickly that he is still driven to succeed, but doesn’t lose sleep at night worrying about numbers.

That’s because, generally speaking, he practices what he preaches — about identifying a specific audience, shaping a message to deliver to that constituency, and then delivering for those clients. In short, making a good fit. When anyone, or any business, can do that, he told BusinessWest, the numbers should take care of themselves.

But they can always be better, so Snodgrass should see his own sales numbers continue to climb.

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

Surgical Precision

By
Brad Rosenkranz
Sections Supplements
Medical Manufacturing Gains a Solid Foothold in the Valley
Brad Rosenkranz

Brad Rosenkranz of Marox Corp., one of the region’s leading medical device manufacturers.

Medical device manufacturing is a healthy and growing niche in the Western Mass. economy, with several companies providing precision machining for companies that design medical products. But some say the region has the potential to move beyond contract manufacturing into more design and development work. The challenge is drawing such companies to the Pioneer Valley — and retaining the engineering talent now looking for work elsewhere.

Spine and joint surgery have come a long way over the past decade or two. So has the technology necessary to turn raw plastic and metal into precision surgical components.

Take Marox Corp. in Holyoke, which performs precision machining for a number of companies that design and distribute implants and instruments for the spine, hips, and knees, from anterior cervical plates and titanium screws used in spinal fusion to devices that drill into the knee and hip during joint replacement surgery.

“The most recent emerging technology is motion preservation,” said Brad Rosenkranz, vice president of sales and marketing for the second-generation family business, referring to technology that allows smoother, low-friction movement between titanium and plastic implants and the natural bone of the spine and joints — technology that would be useless without the skilled, high-precision manufacturing process that Marox specializes in.

“Other companies do the design and ultimately market these products to hospitals and surgeons, but they come to us for the production,” said Rosenkranz. “The larger companies — Medtronic, Zimmer, Johnson & Johnson — do their own in-house machining and precision, but the vast majority outsource those things, and that’s where we come into play.

“We work closely with our customers to determine the next products to come down the pipeline, and we work with them at the earliest stages to get involved with emerging technology,” he continued. “That’s important because technology is always changing, and we want to be at the forefront of it.”

Marox is only one of several companies in the region performing such work. Consider Texcel in East Longmeadow, which also boasts a far-flung roster of clients who would rather focus on engineering new products without the burden of actually mass-producing them.

“The focus at Texcel is to be the strategic manufacturing partner for emerging medical device companies,” said Larry Derose, the company’s founder and CEO, adding that Texcel’s specific expertise is in implantable medical devices such as neural stimulators, drug-infusion devices, and orthopedic implants.

“Our mission is to fulfill the needs of these companies that are seeking a source to manufacture their complete device all the way through final packaging,” he added.

That, in a nutshell, is the most common model in the Pioneer Valley’s healthy and growing medical manufacturing sector, one that has seen many companies become contractors for regional, national, and international firms that design and engineer such equipment. “These are companies that don’t have that manufacturing capability,” Derose said, “and don’t want to have it.”

In this issue, BusinessWest examines this niche that is blossoming in Western Mass. — and why some people feel that the region could someday be known for creating medical devices as much as for manufacturing the creations of others.

Local Partnerships

Blackstone Medical is a rare local example of a firm that designs medical products and supplies a steady flow of machining work to area manufacturers. The Springfield company develops implants and instruments for spinal surgery, but partners with companies such as Marox and Accellent in Brimfield for the actual machining.

“We decided we would take a step up in the food chain and create a company that actually develops products and markets them to the end user, but outsources manufacturing needs to local machine shops and contract manufacturers that specialize in medical devices,” said Blackstone co-founder Bill Lyons.

When Lyons and his brothers launched Blackstone 11 years ago, spinal surgery was just beginning a remarkable wave of innovation that hasn’t abated, meaning companies that design such products, as well as those that manufacture them, are looking at bright futures. But for now, the Pioneer Valley is dominated by the latter group.

“There’s a fairly significant divide in Western Mass. today” between plentiful manufacturers and scarce engineers, said Lyons. “Hopefully, we might someday see a group of companies that develop, engineer, and design their own products, sell them using their own marketing capabilities, and either manufacture them in-house or contract them out to local machine shops.”

The regional disconnect between the ability to manufacture products and the ability to design and develop them partly explains why Blackstone is virtually alone in engineering products for market; it also explains why Blackstone’s design component is primarily based in New Jersey, which Lyons called a “hotbed” for orthopedic engineering.

Ellen Bemben, president of the Regional Technology Corp. based in Springfield, admits there’s a skills gap in Western Mass. when it comes to engineering medical products, but she added that the RTC has the situation on its radar, recognizing the potential of cultivating such an industry in the region.

“I’ve heard from our medical device manufacturers, and they’re very concerned about having experienced design engineers available to them,” said Bemben.

Even though we have students coming out of our universities as top-notch engineers, they’re not experienced, and a number of companies have had to import help.”

She noted that one company in the area currently has 15 employees but six job openings — that is, six high-paying engineering jobs — that it is unable to fill. “People say there aren’t any jobs here, but there are actually a lot of jobs. It’s a matter of getting the word out and coordinating the workforce.”

The problem is a classic chicken-and-egg scenario. Theoretically, a healthy supply of companies that design medical devices could draw young talent to the region and retain local engineering graduates; meanwhile, such companies would be persuaded to locate here if they recognized a skilled workforce — but each potential trend seems to be waiting on the other.

“There’s a growing supply out there,” said Bemben. “We’re well aware of the workforce requirements, and we’re also trying to develop a profile of exactly what kind of workforce a medical device manufacturing company needs.”

Choosing a Path

When people — including economic planners — talk about biotechnology, said Lyons, they often have no idea of the breadth of the industry, which includes life sciences, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, software development, and other niches. He maintains that medical device manufacturing is the facet with the most potential to become a hub based in Western Mass.

“There’s a myriad of industries that fall under the term ‘biotechnology,’” he said. “We have to pick one of those industries and go after it. We have to be specific and look at what the skill basis is regionally to support it.

“How can we support a pharmaceutical initiative if we don’t have that skill basis?” he continued. “But we do have a long, storied history of manufacturing things made of metal and plastic. Efforts to create a base for biotechnology in this area should be strictly focused on medical devices, which utilizes an existing skill base.”

Derose said such companies would already have the non-engineering resources they need, noting that Texcel provides key services beyond simple manufacturing.

“We produce not only the product, but the documentation the customer needs to support its application to the FDA for market approval,” he said.

In addition, “we get involved early on with a client to assist in what we call ‘design for manufacturability’; that means helping the client bridge the gap from the early concept to a design that can be manufactured in volume. That’s all based on our resources and understanding of the technologies needed to build some of these devices in higher volumes. Our goal is to be a manufacturing partner for companies that have no interest in manufacturing for themselves.”

Proponents of the industry say the sky’s the limit when it comes to new technology, too. “We’re building sophisticated devices like implantable neural stimulators for stroke recovery, hypertension, and gastric disorders,” Derose said of his 20-year-old company.

Still, if Western Mass. wants to grow this industry, time is of the essence, said Bemben, noting that Bristol Myers Squibb is building a facility in Fort Devens in Eastern Mass., and Advanced Micro Devices is building in Saratoga, N.Y., projects that could conceivably draw talent from Western Mass. “I’m not panicked,” she said. “It’s just a matter of getting things coordinated here.”

“The challenge for Western Mass. is to get one or two companies like Blackstone to develop a core of experienced medical devices professionals, and then spin off that with entrepreneurial startups,” said Lyons. “We have the manufacturing expertise; what we don’t have is the design and development expertise. We have graduates coming from UMass and other colleges, but we don’t have the companies in place to get them over the finish line.

“We need a champion,” he concluded, “someone willing to bet on this region and start to create those opportunities and make it easy for people to remain here.”
A company, in other words, with a little spine.

Joseph Bednar can be reached at[email protected]

By
Departments

Joel Morse has joined Marcus Printing in Holyoke as Sales and Marketing Manager. He will be in charge of all sales and marketing functions for the third-generation commercial printing company.

•••••

 


Carole Parlengas

United Personnel Services Inc. in Springfield has promoted Carole Parlengas to Vice President/Chief Financial Officer. She joined the firm last year as the Chief Financial Officer.

 

•••••

The Western Mass. Pharmacists Assoc. announced the following officers and directors for 2007:
Officers are:
• H. John Mailhot, President;
• Eugene Cantor, Vice President;
• Robert Castelli, Recording Secretary;
• Norman Halperin, Treasurer;
• George J. Couchiaftis, Corresponding/Financial Secretary, and
• Stanley Derezinski, Sergeant-at-Arms.
Directors are: John Canninc, Robert Dobeck, Richard Garvin, Daniel Hayes, Christine Masciardelli, Clark Matthews, and Andrea Reid.

•••••

Walter E. Drenen of Drenen Financial Services Inc. in Southwick has been accepted into the National Assoc. of Enrolled Agents.

•••••

Amy Pinney has joined Carlson GMAC Real Estate’s Westfield office as a Sales Agent.

•••••

Sarah Kelley has joined the Northampton office of Countrywide Home Loans Inc. as a Home Loan Consultant.

•••••

Ilkwan Kim has joined Keller Williams Realty and will work at its Longmeadow Market Center office.

•••••

James Goodwin has been named President and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Human Development Inc. Goodwin joined the organization in 1980 and most recently served as interim president.

•••••

Ida Tassinari has joined Park Square Realty in Westfield and will work out of its Feeding Hills office as a Sales Associate.

•••••

Michael M. Lefebvre has been promoted to Senior Vice President in the Commercial Lending Division at TD Banknorth Massachusetts in Springfield.

•••••

 

  

Tonya Plante has become a Sales Associate in the Agawam office of Carlson GMAC Real Estate.

•••••

Amy S. Leitl has joined Phillips Insurance Agency Inc. as head of the Life & Benefits Division.

•••••

The region’s largest local union of U.S. Postal Service Letter Carriers has elected officers for a three-year term as follows:
• Tina M. Richard, President;
• Michael Harazmus, Vice President;
• Richard Micelotta, Upper Valley Vice President;
• David Lamontagne, Secretary;
• Patricia Rogers, Treasurer;
• Chris Burrage, Health Benefits/MBA Representative;
• Laura Parenteau, Trustee;
• James Graham, Trustee;
• Bonita Berselli, Trustee, and
• William Gelinas, Sergeant-at-Arms.
Twenty-five stewards were also chosen in the recent election.

•••••

Tom Martucci has been appointed Vice President for the Momentum Group. He will provide business development, marketing and product development programs.

•••••

Marie Phillips has been named Human Resources Director at the Elms College, Chicopee.

•••••

Hampden Bank has announced that Glenn S. Welch has been named Executive Vice President. In this new position, Welch will oversee all of the organization’s lending and retail functions.

•••••

Human Resources Unlimited has appointed Debra Marvell as Program Director.

•••••

Vicky Applebee has joined Mass Match as its Director of Marketing and Sales. She is trained as a certified matchmaker from the Matchmaking Institute and is a member of the National Board of Certified Matchmakers.

•••••

Victoria A. White has announced that her Northampton-based Internet services business, eclecTechs, will be managed by David Flaherty, owner of Springfield-based Ashton Services. eclecTechs will retain its name, staff, services and product line.

•••••

Brenda Cuoco of the Wilbraham Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage has achieved the International Sterling Society Award for 2006. Cuoco earned more than $6 million in sales with 30 homes sold. She has also placed 52 out of 1,845 realtors in the Realtor Association of Pioneer Valley.

Ground Game

By
Chicopee Comprehensive High School
Sections Supplements
For General Contractors, It’s a Tale of Two Sectors — Public and Private
Chicopee Comprehensive High School

The new Chicopee Comprehensive High School is one of the few school projects currently underway in the Greater Springfield area.

“Sluggish with a capital S.”

That’s the phraseology Dave Fontaine summoned when asked to offer his view of the current construction market. His choice is understandable given the fact that his firm, Springfield-based Fontaine Bros., specializes in public sector work — and there is very little of that currently in the pipeline.

Spending on new public schools was frozen by the state three years ago, he explained, and it looks like it will remain frozen for at least another six months or more. “But it’s not just schools,” he continued. “It’s all kinds of municipal buildings — police and fire stations, senior housing, just about everything, and I’m not really sure why.

“In short,” he continued, referring to his firm, “we’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

But others would say they’re in the right place at the right time. People like Peter Wood.

He’s the vice president of Sales and Marketing for South Hadley-based Associated Builders, and he already has more work on the books for next spring than he expected to have, and he’s still getting calls from people who would like to see if they can get added to the list.

“There’s quite a bit of interest out there,” he said, noting that factors ranging from the comparatively low price of gas to uncharacteristically warm December weather have companies and institutions, at least those in the private sector, thinking about building. “A lot of people are still in a ‘geez, I should build a building’ mode.”

The wide discrepancy in these takes on the construction market helps explain the current, and somewhat complicated, state of the building sector. Many general contractors would tend to side with Fontaine and see the glass as half-empty — at best. The market has been down for some time, and several firms between Worcester and Boston did not survive the slide. But for others, meaning those in a position to capitalize on private-sector work fueled by still relatively cheap money and strong competition for jobs that is yielding some attractive bids, times are good, and the glass is more than half-full.

“You were either extremely busy last year, or you were very slow,” said Fontaine. “It was hard to be in the middle.”

But that’s about where The O’Leary Company in South Hadley found itself. Tom Zabel, its president, offered cautious optimism for 2007 after a year that was “decent,” but not spectacular by his estimation.

“We had what I would consider a good year, not a great year,” he said, adding that for ’07, he is projecting more of the same. Like Wood, he said the bulk of the work currently available is in the private sector, and there should be a healthy amount available in the year ahead if business owners remain confident enough in the state of the economy to move forward with expansions and new building. “Overall, I think there will be enough work to go around.”

This issue, BusinessWest looks at the state of the construction sector, its prospects for the future, both short and long term, and what current conditions mean for area firms.

Interest-building

For Fontaine Bros., the depressed public sector market means expanding that firm’s reach — in terms of both geography and the nature of the projects on which it will bid.

The company is finishing a school-building project in Lawrence for one of those aforementioned firms that recently went under, for example, and has chased work in Waltham, the Berkshires, and New York state, areas generally beyond the radius within which it prefers to operate. Meanwhile, to keep its many project managers busy, Fontaine has taken on work it might not have considered years ago — like the installation of a synthetic athletic field at Westfield State College.

“There’s a lot more to it than simply rolling out the carpet,” Fontaine said of the WSC job. “We’re chasing things that we wouldn’t normally be going after, because that’s what’s out there; we have a lot of field supervisors looking for a place to go.”

That’s because the company spent most of 2006 finishing up a number of projects it started in 2005, but not putting many new ones in the pipeline for 2007. There are still some projects to finish in the year ahead, including the new women’s correctional facility in Chicopee; the new Chicopee Comprehensive High School, one of the few school-building projects ongoing in the Pioneer Valley; and a new prison in Greenfield. But Fontaine says he’s working hard to fill in the slate with new work.

And he says the bidding activity on some recent, and comparatively small, projects would indicate that he’s not alone.

“There were 12 bids for a small Town Hall renovation project in Stockbridge,” he explained, “and a lot of companies bidding on some physical plant work at UMass. That’s indicative of what we’re seeing.”

But the view is not the same for all general contractors.

Wood said there is still considerable interest in building among many businesses and private institutions, enough for him to project that ’07 might even be an improvement on a year that would be described as solid.

Indeed, Associated, which specializes in design-build work, has a number of projects in progress, including an addition to Senior Aerospace in Enfield, an expansion at High Tech Mold & Tool in Pittsfield, the first building in an new office complex in East Longmeadow, a new ‘freezer building’ for J. Polep Distribution Services in Chicopee, the retrofitting of space in the Agawam Industrial Park into a 50,000-square-foot facility for Diana’s Bakery in Agawam, and a 15,000-square-foot headquarters facility and light assembly plant for DieCast Connections in Chicopee.

For ’07, the queue is nearly full for the spring, prompting an optimistic outlook. “Based on the inquiries we’ve received, it looks like another solid year for us,” Wood said.

But he acknowledges that such optimism does not pervade the industry, because of a general slowdown — one that comes after years of general prosperity for the sector fueled by modest economic expansion and attractive interest rates — especially in public-sector building.

“Industry-wide, things aren’t exactly rosy,” he said, “but there is still a lot of interest in building, and we see it across the board — manufacturing, health care, distribution, almost every sector.”

Zabel, who acquired The O’Leary Company about 20 months ago, agreed.

“There’s plenty of activity out there; money is still relatively cheap, and people are looking at projects,” he said. “Things are in the planning stages in many sectors — commercial, industrial, financial services, office space … people are still building.”

There is, however, greater competition for the work that comes on the market, he said, noting that, when times get tougher in other sectors, like public projects, or in other geographic areas, like the Eastern part of the state, contractors will cast a wider net in search of work.

The O’Leary Company is currently working on several projects, said Zabel, listing everything from interior fit-out work for Innovative Mold in Chicopee to an addition for Able Machine in Agawam; from parking lot work for Bridgeport Bindery in Agawam to an expansion at Australis Aquaculture in Turner Falls, which needs space for additional tanks to farm more of its popular barramundi species of table fish.

Gauging the year ahead, Zabel says O’Leary, which also specializes in design-build work, has several projects on the books, ranging from airplane hangars to recycling facilities. It’s shaping up as another decent year, with its overall quality to be determined by overall confidence in the economy.

Looking forward, Fontaine said his company, like most that live primarily off public-sector projects, will have more scrambling to do for another year and perhaps longer.

He anticipates that it will be at least that long before the spigot is turned back on for school building initiatives and individual projects to move through the design stage and into actual construction.

“It could be 18 months before the public-sector market puts people to work,” he said, adding that the pace and extent of recovery depends largely on Gov. Deval Patrick and the degree to which he loosens the budget reins. “There’s nothing that brings an economy back quite like spending money.”

Finishing Work

Speaking from experience, Fontaine said the current downturn for the construction industry is part of another cycle, the type that firms like his must ride out while waiting for conditions to improve.

“This isn’t the first one of these we’ve seen, and it certainly won’t be the last,” he said. “What we’re going though is part of the cyclical nature of the business; you just have to be ready. You hope to get your people through the slower times and be poised and ready to work when it’s your turn.”

The area’s general contractors hope their turn comes soon.

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

By
Departments


Karen Volpe

PeoplesBank has announced the promotion of Karen Volpe to Assistant Vice President of the Fairview office located at 1936 Memorial Drive in Chicopee.

•••••

The Springfield Business Improvement District (BID) has announced the promotion of Jeffrey K. Keck to Executive Director. BID is an affiliate of the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts. Prior to his promotion, Keck served as operations manager at the BID for more than seven years. In his new position, Keck will continue to work closely with BID property owners, businesses, government, and the general public. He will also be responsible for coordinating special events and programs that will enhance the downtown business district with a focus on real estate.

•••••

Carlson GMAC Real Estate announced the following:
• Barbara Robinson has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Wilbraham office;
• Deborah Lenz has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Wilbraham office;
• Gisele Meunier has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Wilbraham office;
• Christine L. Swanson has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Longmeadow office;
• Sheila Clapprood has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Longmeadow office;
• Judith S. Cohen has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Longmeadow office;
• Suzanne W. Carter has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Holyoke office;
• Amy Meo has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Holyoke office;
• Jennifer Fleury has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Agawam office, and
• Chris J. Hall has joined the firm as a Sales Agent in the Palmer office.

•••••

Lamson & Goodnow of Greenfield has hired Coreen Foote, CPA, as Chief Financial Officer.

•••••

Ryan W. Crosby has joined the Palmer office of Carlson GMAC Real Estate.

•••••

Eric A. Marsh has joined Greenfield Co-operative Bank as Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer.

•••••

Gina C. Birchall has been named Vice President of Underwriting at Berkshire Life Insurance Co. of America, headquartered in Pittsfield. Birchall will be responsible for evaluating the effectiveness of current underwriting processes and engaging with Berkshire Life’s reinsurers on a strategic basis related to risk retention.

•••••

United Personnel Services Inc. announced the following:
• Lauren Mendoza has been named a Staffing Consultant in the Springfield office, and
• Rebecca Freeman has joined the Hartford office as a Staffing Consultant.

•••••

William P. Chase II, President and Owner of Hi-Tech Window and Siding Installations Inc. of Haverhill, has been appointed to the Westfield State College Board of Trustees by Gov. W. Mitt Romney. Chase is a 1991 alumnus of the college.

•••••


Sheryl J. Sadler-Twyon

Sheryl J. Sadler-Twyon has been named Vice President for the Information Technology Department of Florence Savings Bank.

•••••

The Cancer House of Hope, with locations in Westfield and Springfield, announced the following:
• Parker Hodgman has been named a member of the Board of Trustees for the 2007 fiscal year;
• Jenn Cohen has been named a member of the Board of Trustees for the 2007 fiscal year, and
• Jennifer DeMoe has been named a member of the Board of Trustees for the 2007 fiscal year.

•••••

Century 21 Pioneer Valley Associates announced the following:
• Arthur Haskins III, a Sales Associate, has successfully completed the CREATE 21® New Agent Training Program;
• Terry Bartus, a Sales Associate, has successfully completed the CREATE 21® New Agent Training Program, and
• Erica Burns, a Sales Associate, has successfully completed the CREATE 21® New Agent Training Program.

•••••

Dave Boisselle has been promoted to Vice President of Operations at J. Polep Distributions Services in Chicopee. Prior to his promotion, Boisselle served as director of operations for 18 years.

•••••

  

The Greater Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau (GSCVB) has appointed Alicia M. Szenda to Group Tour Coordinator. Her responsibilities will include working closely with the GSCVB’s Group Tour Committee to develop initiatives to increase motor coach visitation to the Pioneer Valley. She will also represent the region at industry-related trade shows and conventions.

•••••


Lyn Yarmesky

Lynn Yarmesky has been named Vice President of Lending at the STCU Credit Union, with offices in Springfield and Westfield.

•••••

 

Tighe & Bond, Inc., based in Westfield, announced the following:
• Alfred Mascia Jr., P.E. has joined the firm. Mascia is a civil engineering manager and licensed professional engineer with more than 28 years of experience in the design, planning, management, and construction administration for a diverse mix of site-development projects;
• Christopher O. Granatini, P.E., has joined the firm. A registered professional engineer, he brings more than 10 years of experience in various aspects of transportation and traffic engineering;
• Daniel P. Rukokoski, PWS, RSS, has joined the firm. He is a senior environmental scientist with more than 11 years of experience in wetland delineation; municipal, state, and federal permitting; remedial investigations; Phase I, II, and III environmental site assessments; and environmental health and safety, and
• Craig S. French, P.E. has joined the firm. A registered professional engineer in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, French adds a decade of structural engineering experience to the firm. As manager of the structural department, he will be responsible for structural engineering and architectural design, with involvement from the conceptual phase and planning through final design and construction.

•••••

OMG Inc. in Agawam announced the following:
• Brian Wroblesky is now the Midwest Regional Manager for Roofing Products Sales;
• Stephen Trites has been named Southeast Regional Manager;
• Sean Kelly is now in charge of the Northeast region;
• Joe DiSanto has been named Customer Service Manager for Roofing Products;
• Andy Cleveland is transitioning within Roofing Products from National Accounts to Product Management. He will be responsible for the sales and marketing of the OlyBond program;
• Brent Kreutzer has been named National Accounts Manager, and
• Corey Rohland has been promoted to Western Regional Manager.

•••••


Adam Lesko

Adam Lesko, a board certified Microbial Consultant, has formed Green Environmental Consulting in Northampton. His firm specializes in industrial hygiene, indoor environmental quality, and mold consulting services. In addition, his company develops and maintains custom database solutions for managing asbestos and other environmental data.

 

•••••


Michael T. Moriarty

Michael T. Moriarty has joined the staff at United Bank as a Senior Vice President in the Commercial Banking Department. He will be based out of the main office on Elm Street in West Springfield, and will work with commercial clients throughout the bank’s market area.

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Madeline Claudio

Madeline Claudio has been promoted to Business Development & Sales Manager in the TD Banknorth branch at 958 State St., Springfield. In her new role, she will focus on growing and developing business in the branch serving customers throughout the region.

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Denise Eldred

Denise Eldred has joined the Office of Development and Alumni Relations as Coordinator of the Annual Fund at American International College (AIC) in Springfield. In her new position, Eldred will serve as Phonathon Director. She will also work with AIC donors, and will be involved in planning alumni events.

In the First Place …

By
The brothers Dinn: Bill, Paul, and Michael.
Sections Supplements
Dinn Bros. Marks 50 Years of Awards — and Rewards
The brothers Dinn: Bill, Paul, and Michael.

The brothers Dinn: Bill, Paul, and Michael.

Dinn Bros. Trophies was founded in 1956, and 50 years later it continues to evolve and change with the times. Change is constant in a business that may seem simple, but features immense competition and never-ending deadlines, and requires investments in new technology and strong relationship-building capabilities. By meeting all these challenges, Dinn Bros. has etched its name in Pioneer Valley business lore.

Bill Dinn remembers how it all started.

It was the summer of 1956, and one of Springfield’s amateur baseball leagues was in trouble and looking for help. The company it had hired to create trophies for that season’s top finishers failed to deliver, and at the 11th hour the league turned to Dinn’s brother Paul, an engraver, to fill the order. Bill stepped in to help, and a company was born.

A half-century later, many things have changed. The technology used to create plaques, trophies, and recognition items has improved exponentially; where once the company created three pieces a day using a hand engraver, it now completes three a minute with state-of-the-art computer systems and laser engravers. Meanwhile, orders are now taken via the Internet and a Web site that is enabling the company to expand its reach across the country and into Canada.

But many things haven’t changed.

Most orders still come in at the 11th hour, if not later, and the company’s specific promise to its many types of clients remains the same: “We won’t embarrass you,” said Bill Dinn, who is now retired but remains a visible force at the company, after years of serving as its head salesman.

“We had a particularly good showing in a pickle,” Dinn said of the company’s first order, adding that while that idea of avoiding embarrassment may seem strange, it has always been the crux of good business at a firm that manufactures and sells awards of all types.

“Imagine you’re at a banquet, everyone is there, you’re giving a speech, and you have to give an award to an important person … and the plaque isn’t there,” he explained. “That’s a big deal.”

He went on to note that, in many cases, the award — the actual hardware used to recognize the accomplishments of another — is the last thing people think of when planning a ceremony of any size.

“We’re always working against time,” he said, adding that it’s not uncommon for a large order due for a weekend event to come in on Thursday evening.

But tapping his forefinger definitively on the table before him, Dinn said no job is too big or too small. “It doesn’t matter if it’s one trophy for $6.95 or an order for 900 plaques that will cost thousands … it will be there.”

The Gold Standard

That guarantee is echoed by Dinn Bros. current senior management, Dinn’s three sons — Bill Jr., Paul, and Michael — who say that as a niche business, the company meets with a number of unique challenges, as well as many that all companies, especially those with both retail and manufacturing components, face.

Dinn Bros. offers plaques, trophies, medals, ribbons, pins, and other awards for various sporting organizations and events, as well as a wide array of corporate awards and other tokens of appreciation, such as desk sets and engraveable bowls and trays. All products are assembled and engraved on site at the company’s West Springfield headquarters, and sold via the Internet and through three showrooms in West Springfield, New Haven, Conn., and Stoneham, Mass.

Sports awards have remained the largest single product line offered by Dinn Bros., representing about 70% of sales, though corporate business is growing, in part due to a concerted effort on the part of the company.

And with the sports market comes a number of challenges that few not in this business could appreciate, according to Paul Dinn, president.

“Retention of contracts is a big challenge,” he said. “It’s not like we’re a paper company dealing with a business. In that case, if we were doing a good job and our prices were competitive, the company we were serving would probably stick with us.”

But sports programs and teams, especially those for children, often have a new person handling awards ceremonies each year, said Dinn, and tournaments, road races, and other charity events are hard to track; many are not established enough to have a Web site, or even a formal mailing address, let alone a contact person.

“There are a lot of volunteers and a lot of turnover,” he explained. “The Internet helps us with research, and every business has to build relationships. But we have to build them over and over again.”

In addition to the matter of maintaining repeat business under those conditions, educating the public about its products is another challenge, said Bill Dinn Jr., who oversees production at the company.

“Showing people just how to use the products is a bigger concern than many might think,” he said. “That’s because it’s not an everyday type of thing, ordering and giving an award. You don’t think about it until you have to do it. It’s up to us to educate the consumer on everything from appropriate wording to how to work awards into tight budgets.”

Its also a business with both peaks and valleys in terms of volume, and those busy periods don’t fall during what might be considered traditional peak periods. The holidays, for instance, are deadly quiet, while the spring months usually necessitate adding seasonal employees to the firm’s core of 100 employees.

Certificate of Participation

But to address those challenges, Dinn Bros. has moved ahead aggressively with a wide set of recent initiatives, all aimed at streamlining the manufacturing process, expanding the company’s reach both nationally and internationally, and upgrading technology in order to stay competitive against similar outfits, Internet-based companies, and sporting goods stores that create trophy subsidiaries.

Many of those changes have been instituted or highlighted this year, as the company celebrates its 50th year in business. Its Web site was redesigned, new catalogs were created to boost corporate business, and several new laser engravers were purchased and installed to expedite and streamline the assembly and personalization processes.

“We’re adapting to the modern age in order to drive business,” said Michael Dinn, vice president of sales and marketing. “Electronically, we’re better than ever, and that helps streamline the process and allows us to prep as much as we can for orders that have yet to come in.”

He noted that the company’s Web site, which pulls in roughly a third of all business and is still growing, once lagged behind the firm’s phone center, which employs customer service representatives to take orders from across the country. But over the past year in particular, Web-based sales have eclipsed phone transactions and have pulled in business from new areas, including the mid-Atlantic states, Alaska, and, most recently, Canada, where the company is making its first earnest foray into the international market.

“Our site allows for convenience in ordering, but it also assures people that we’re not a fly by night operation, or a little rinky-dink trophy shop,” said Dinn, who added that Internet sales have also been augmented by offering live assistance online for customers, a service that was put in place two years ago. Customers can send instant messages to a Dinn Bros. representative during specified times to ask questions, and are also notified when a product order is received and shipped, along with a tracking number. “That way, we’re never out of reach.”

Web sales have also helped in promoting corporate-recognition products, as has a new catalog devoted solely to those lines, in response to a growing business-to-business market.

“Many people think this is a business that stays the same year after year, but the industry does change,” said Paul Dinn, “and one change of late has been our role in the increase of corporate recognition programs. People are holding more organized events and seeing recognition as an important tool for morale and retention.”

Many of the services offered through some new technological upgrades are geared toward that burgeoning market, allowing for the etching or four-color printing of company logos and for products that best serve the corporate sector, such as desk sets and retirement gifts.

An Amazing Race

But Dinn added that while Internet sales allow for quicker processing and a smaller margin of error on all orders — all copy to be engraved can now be downloaded directly to a central computer system — awards of all types still intrinsically have ‘last-minute’ components at the assembly level.

Engraving recipients’ names is the most obvious, but figureheads for trophies — everything from the traditional runner, golfer, or bowler to a gold-plated foot, used as a gag during staged productions of the Monty Python-inspired Broadway play Spamalot — are attached to the base as orders are received, and customers sometimes have special requests for logo engraving or printing that differ from order to order.

“No matter how efficiently we take the order, we must still identify the deadline and work backwards,” he said. “To that end, we’ve invested in the equipment we need to keep us on the cutting edge, and the technology makes our work much easier than it ever has been before. Every year, we keep investing in better technology — our equipment parallels the personal computer market, in that it becomes obsolete easily.”

Those investments include state-of-the-art computer systems and laser engravers, such as the six Xenetech machines that now do the work that a large, bulky hand engraver did years ago.

Still, even with all of the changes at Dinn Bros., some things remain the same as they did 50 years ago. That heavy hand engraver sits in the main production area, right next to one of the new laser stations, serving as a reminder of how much the times have changed.

That amateur baseball league that reached out to Paul Dinn 50 years ago is no more, but it’s likely that some of the Dinn trophies awarded to players still exist, somewhere.

Like the company that produced them, they’ve managed to stand the test of time.

Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]

Executing a Game Plan

By
From left, Greg Caldicott, Tom Murphy, and Bill Zierolf, the new leadership team at EstateWorks.
Sections Supplements
New Leadership Charts a Course for Estate Settlement Solutions Company
From left, Greg Caldicott, Tom Murphy, and Bill Zierolf, the new leadership team at EstateWorks.

From left, Greg Caldicott, Tom Murphy, and Bill Zierolf, the new leadership team at EstateWorks.

Greg Caldicott has developed a strong track record for taking emerging products, introducing them to the marketplace, and building strong sales organizations around them.

He did it at Wellesley-based XFormx, a Web conferencing and collaboration company, where he led the launch of an entry-level product built on an innovative, low-cost ‘desktop-to-browser’ architecture; it was eventually named PC Magazine’s best new product of 2004.

He handled a similar assignment at Boston-based Radio Active Media Partners (now Next Radio Solutions), where he was recruited by the chief executive officer to lead the growth of the company, considered a pioneer in Internet radio services, to portal partners like Bellsouth and Barnes & Noble. He quickly increased the number of monthly listener hours from 150,000 to 1 million by signing new affiliate partners and improving the quality of service.

It was numbers like these that prompted local attorney Tom Murphy to tab Caldicott for the assignment that will form the next line on his resume — taking the company Murphy started, EstateWorks Inc., developer of a Web-based on-demand estate settlement and planning product, to the proverbial next level in terms of sales and market expansion.

Actually, Caldicott represents one half of a new leadership team assembled for EstateWorks, a Maynard-based company backed with investments from several Western Mass. business leaders. The other half is Bill Zierolf, who brings with him to the job of ‘executive chairman’ more than 25 years of experience with information services, software, and Internet companies.

His most recent stop, for example, was at Southboro, Mass.-based True Advantage, a maker of on-demand lead-generation software. There, he directed a successful turnaround, during which he led the roll-out of new software and database products, restructured the organization, hired a new management team, improved renewals from 20% to 70%, and closed deals with several new customers, including IBM, Yahoo, and Herman Miller.

Together, Caldicott and Zierolf are tasked with taking a venture that has always looked good on paper — its products streamline and simplify the often-complex estate settlement and estate planning processes, issues that touch millions of individuals and the professionals handling their affairs — but has thus far not seen the results expected from Murphy and its primary investors.

“I think we’re just barely scratching the surface in terms of this market,” said Caldicott. “We have some great, very prestigious customers, we just need more of them; we’re at the point now where the product is developed and it’s time to gear up sales and marketing, and we have pretty high expectations for growth.”

Zierolf agreed, and said those expectations are based on the size and potential of the market, as well as some quick and effective steps planned to address several matters, including focused marketing and efforts to raise the value proposition for a product that is already in demand.

“This product has a very focused market; we’re in a defined space, and we know exactly who we’re selling to — estate and settlement attorneys and banks,” he said. “One problem some companies have is that they build a mousetrap and then they search for a market. It’s hard to create a market, and we didn’t have to; it’s there.”

Taxing Situation

As he talked about the challenge ahead for himself and Zierolf, Caldicott found himself referencing a recent Monday Night Football game — the one during which the Arizona Cardinals blew a huge third-quarter lead through a series of blunders and wound up losing to the Chicago Bears.

That staggering collapse is not in any way comparable to what has happened at EstateWorks, he said, but it does hit upon one of the clear parallels between sport and business.

“More than 80% of games are won on execution, not the game plan,” he explained, noting that the Cardinals obviously had a good game plan, as evidenced by the large, early lead, but didn’t execute well, or did but not for the entire game. “Usually, it’s not how you draw it up, but how you execute.”

EstateWorks has been drawn up very well, he continued, adding that better execution is at the heart of Murphy’s efforts to assemble a new leadership team and undertake what would be a third round of financing. Both were designed to provide the resources needed to take the company and its product to its next projected phase of significant market explansion.

EstateWorks has already established itself as a leader in Web-based estate-settlement matters for law firms and financial services companies, said Murphy, and it has amassed a star-studded client list that includes Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Branch Banking & Trust Co., Ropes & Gray, and the law firm Choate, Hall & Stewart. The next step is to become a major force in the trusts and estates market, thus moving the venture from startup to growth company.

Caldicott was hired this summer in a consulting capacity to help shape the strategy for meeting that goal, and saw enough potential in the product and its future to become a candidate when Murphy launched an intense, five-month-long search for a new CEO last spring. Zierolf also became a candidate, and Murphy was impressed enough to add the new position of executive chairman and make him part of the team.

What Caldicott saw was a product already in demand, but one to be much more so as the Baby Boom generation, which has created and inherited great amounts of wealth, moves to retirement and beyond.

“We’re talking about a product that focuses on death and taxes, two of the constants in life,” he said. “They aren’t going anywhere; the market for this is huge, and it will only grow as the Baby Boomers age.”

It was this potentially vast market that Murphy, a partner with the Springfield-based law firm Murphy, McCoubrey & Auth LLP, envisioned when, in 2001, he laid the groundwork for the venture that would eventually become EstateWorks.

He was actually inspired in some ways when he encountered the complexities and frustrations of estate settlement after the death of his father. After discovering that many important documents were missing and difficult to assemble, he started thinking about a system that streamlined the process and put the important information and documents where people could get their hands on them. The resulting product was something called FamilyFiles

The initial target audience was individuals, said Murphy, adding that he and his investment partners soon switched their focus to the accounting firms, banks, law firms, and other institutions that handle estate planning and estate settlement.

Web of Intrigue

After years of R&D, the company created a Web-based product grounded in risk-reduction and greater efficiency. Among other things, it can:

  • Store client data, including contracts, documents, and assets;
  • Automate routine, manual data processes;
  • Provide detailed checklists, customized to a particular bank, law firm, or accounting firm;
  • Track due dates to ensure timely completion of tasks; and
  • Facilitate data sharing in documents, forms, and external systems.

The product was introduced at a convention of estate-planning and settlement professionals in late 2002, and soon thereafter, the company got a call from Goldman-Sachs and its New York office, which validated the EstateWorks solution and value proposition after a Web demonstration conducted from Maynard. The client list soon included several smaller law firms, but also national and international financial services giants such as Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.

The mission for Caldicott and Zierolf, which they’ve decided to accept, is to take the apparently strong demand for the EstateWorks product, as well as its solid foundation of clients, and build on them. In other words, they want to match the current quality of customers with far greater quantity.

Which brings Caldicott back to that word execution.

He considers it one of the many legs to the table supporting such a business venture, with others including a quality product, strong value proposition, capital, market (demand), and leadership. “We have all the pieces in place,” he said. “Now we have to go execute; and that’s why we’re really excited about this company and where we can take it.”

Specific tasks for the months ahead include bulking up and energizing the sales staff, creating stronger market-wide awareness of the product and its many benefits, and enhancing that product to create more value for customers, said Zierolf, who has experience with many of these assignments in his various turn-around projects.

“We want to enhance the product with more features and functions, and adding more professional services to our offering,” he said. “By doing so, we’re not just selling software, we’re selling a solution that can be implemented and add value right away.

“One of the worst things about the software industry 10 or 20 years ago is that people would just sell software; they’d sell a CD, and the client would have to install it,” he continued. “On-demand software is a service, it’s a completely different model; we help them get trained on the software and get it loaded. The key is that we’re not selling software licenses; we’re selling solutions.

Caldicott told BusinessWest that he, Zierolf, and other members of the leadership team are preparing a strategic plan and identifying financial goals. Specific revenue numbers were not revealed, but the leadership team does anticipate that 30% to 40% annual growth is certainly achievable.

The reason? The amount of the market that remains untapped.

“We have about 50 customers,” he explained. “There are 8,000 banks in the U.S. and several thousand law firms out there. That’s why we think we’re barely touching the surface.”

Going on Offense

Caldicott was wary about drawing too many parallels between business and sports — and specifically that bizarre MNF tilt.

But there are some similarities, he continued, including teamwork, leadership, having the right game plan, and, of course, execution.

That’s what he wants to help bring to this company that would appear to have all the other ingredients in place to go where Murphy wants it to go.

In short, he has no intention of losing this third-quarter lead.

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

Maria Goncalves

By
Sections Supplements
Commercial Lender’s Career Has Been a Learning Experience

Maria Goncalves says she got into banking, and specifically commercial lending, pretty much by accident.

Finding herself unemployed after studying psychology and social work in college, the Ludlow native sought to capitalize on two summers of work as a bank teller at the now-defunct Ludlow Savings Bank. She responded to a Shawmut Bank help-wanted ad detailing two opportunities for trainees — one in retail, the other in commercial lending.

“When I was offered a position, I thought it was the retail job,” she told BusinessWest. “But it wasn’t. And when I looked at the two gentlemen across the table from me, I said ‘with all due respect, why would you want to hire me when I only took one economics course in college and really know nothing about business?’
“They said, ‘you have the skill set we look for in commercial lenders,’” she continued. “They told me I had the science background, which meant I had analytical ability, and that I had the people skills, which is the other half of the equation. They said, ‘ don’t worry about the rest, we’ll teach you.’”

They did — the bank financed her MBA at UMass — and more than 20 years later, the pupil is now the teacher.

That’s one of her many responsibilities as senior vice president, Commercial Loans, for TD Banknorth Massachusetts. She currently manages a large portfolio of public and private companies operating in several industries, and also mentors junior lenders and is a team leader responsible for coordinating sales and marketing initiatives.

It’s certainly not the career she envisioned while studying psychology, biology, and social work in college, but in some ways it makes sense. Indeed, when asked about her career choice and success in the commercial lending field, Goncalves said those Shawmut bank managers who interviewed her had it right; while the technical aspects of this profession are certainly important, commercial lending is a blend of people skills and analytical thinking.

“You have to be able to communicate and listen,” she said of the former, putting heavy emphasis on that second verb. “And you have to be able to talk to all kinds of people — from the CEO on down to the bookkeeper and the marketing person.

“You also need to have an analytical mind,” she continued, “and be able to read through and understand business plans and numbers, and be willing to learn about different kinds of businesses; you have to be a person who’s curious by nature — and I am.”

Points of Interest

Indeed, when asked what she enjoyed about her work in commercial lending, Goncalves repeatedly came back to the word diversity.

She used it to describe the many types of transactions that come across her desk, the circumstances of the companies or non-profits involved, and the wide variety of business sectors she has worked with.

Elaborating, she borrowed and effectively modified the old cliché ‘jack of all trades, master of none.’

“I know a little about nearly every kind of business,” she explained. “I don’t know everything about any of them, but I’ve learned a little about a lot of industries.”
The process of learning about businesses — and the art and science of commercial lending — began with an extensive, two-year training program with Shawmut. When completed, she started her career in banking as a credit analyst and eventually progressed to commercial lending.

She worked in Shawmut’s Holyoke office, focusing on small-business lending, and later in its Springfield facility with a portfolio that included mostly larger companies. In late 1991, she left to take a similar position with Bay Bank, and was then caught up in the wave of mergers and acquisitions that swept the industry. Bay Bank was bought by Bank of Boston, which was then acquired by Fleet, and Goncalves was part of the divestiture of some Fleet operations to Sovereign Bank.

She handled commercial lending there until early 2001, when she got a phone call from Frank Barrett — then regional president of Banknorth and one of those Shawmut managers who interviewed her all those years ago — and eventually accepted an invitation to join the team at Banknorth.

Today, her portfolio of clients is diverse, but includes mostly larger, mature businesses with extensive banking needs.

When asked to describe her work, Goncalves said commercial lending is an exercise in analyzing risk, one that involves crunching numbers — often very large numbers — but also assessing people and their ability to carry out what’s on the pages of a business plan.

The role commercial lenders assume, she told BusinessWest, is a blend of business analyst and devil’s advocate.

“You want to be supportive, but you’re not a ‘yes’ person,” she explained, adding that often, her work doesn’t come down to simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, but rather finding often-imaginative ways to meet a client’s needs.

In the process of doing so, Goncalves said she’s met a number of interesting people and been witness to — and in some ways part of — some intriguing business success stories.

Indeed Goncalves told BusinessWest that one of the many rewards from her work is being part of business growth and economic development in the Pioneer Valley. The financial solutions she helps devise for companies often enable them to expand and add jobs.

“That’s one of the more exciting aspects of this work,” she said. “Watching businesses take that next step — be it adding some new equipment or acquiring another company — is very rewarding.”

While being part of the process to grow and strengthen the region’s business community, Goncalves is also active with a number of area organizations and non-profit agencies. And she brings to that work a blend of her background in financial services and her passion for social services.

She acts as treasurer of the Center for Human Development, for example, and also serves as president of Microtek, a Chicopee-based agency that employs developmentally disabled individuals to conduct cable assembly.

Recently, she was named to the Board of Directors for Springfield Technical Community College, an assignment that brings a new and different challenge she looks forward to.

“I’ve never done anything in higher education, so this will be good for me,” she explained. “And based on my first Finance Committee meeting, I’ve got a lot to learn.”

Extra Credit

Learning has been something Goncalves has been doing ever since she entered the banking field — by accident.

She’s learned how to do her job, while also coming to understand how thousands across their region do their jobs — while often devising financial solutions to help them do it better.

In that respect, she my indeed be a jack of all trades, but by all accounts, she’s certainly mastered one.

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

By
Departments

Open House

MassMutual recently staged an open house and reception to showcase a $45 million expansion and renovation project at its Springfield home office. The project consisted of a new 80,000-square-foot document-management building and a renovation of a major building wing first constructed in 1965, including a complete overhaul and expansion of its employee cafeteria.

 

Peter Wood, director of sales and marketing for Associated Builders, general contractor for the document-management building, looks at a photo display of the project.

MassMutual President and CEO Stu Reese chats with state Rep. Gale Candaras.

Breakfast of Champions

Go FIT, the local non-profit group focused on educating women and children about exercise, fitness, and nutrition, recently staged its Breakfast of Champions, a fund-raising event held at Bay Path College.

The guest speaker was pro football quarterback Doug Flutie, most recently with the New England Patriots. He is seen here with Go FIT founder Susan J. Kaplan.t.

Silent Auction

Laurie Normandeau, right, a veteran mountain climber who ascended Mount Kilimanjaro in 2004 as part of the Climb to Fight Breast Cancer, a program initiated by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, will be part of another climb this summer — rugged Mount Elbrus in Russia. As part of that effort, she must raise $5,000 for cancer research, and recently staged a silent auction in Northampton’s Look Park as part of that process. Here, she poses with bidder Janet Eggleston, owner of the Northampton Brewery.

Janet Eggleston & Laurie Normandeau

Fresh Roast

Celebrating their 10-year anniversary as the morning team on WAQY Rock 102.1 FM, Bax and O’Brien (Mike Baxendale, and John O’Brien) were roasted earlier this month by a wide range of media personalities and community leaders at the MassMutual Center.

Mike Baxendale


John O’Brien


Roasters Sarah Ryan, WAQY’s morning news director, Holyoke Police Chief Anthony Scott, ABC Sports’ Jack Arute, and Chicopee Mayor Mike Bissonnette wait for their chance to zing the duo. Acclaimed comedienne Lisa Lampanelli headlined the event, which was hosted by WGGB ABC 40’s chief investigative reporter, Jim Polito.

Ribbon Cutting

Westfield mayor Westfield Mayor Richard K. Sullivan Jr. cuts the ribbon to open PeoplesBank’s new office located 281 East Main St. in Westfield. The branch opened for business on April 7.

Seen with Sullivan are, from left, state Rep. Donald F. Humason Jr., Sue Wilson, assistant vice president, Marketing at PeoplesBank, Joseph D. LoBello, President and CEO of PeoplesBank, Joyce A. O’Connor, assistant vice president and branch manager, state Sen. Michael R. Knapik, and Greg Sheehan, assistant vice president for PeoplesFinancial.

Staying Power

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Uncategorized

What is now the Hampshire Hospitality Group started small, with a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge on Route 9 in Hadley. It has grown over the past 40 years into one of the largest hotel groups in the region with six — soon to be seven — properties and nearly 500 rooms. The philosophy guiding the company now is the same one employed in 1966 — smart, conservative growth.

Curt Shumway says the Hampshire Hospitality Group has owned the parcel on the south side of Route 9 in Hadley — home over the years to a driving range, restaurant, tire outlet, and the Hangar nightclub — for more than 20 years.

Since acquiring the parcel, the group’s plan has always been to put a higher-end hotel there, Shumway, HHG’s chief operating officer, told BusinessWest. “But whenever we asked ourselves if the local economy was ready for something like that, the answer was always ‘not quite.’”

In his view, that’s still the answer, but HHG is moving ahead anyway with plans for a 96-room Courtyard by Marriott, the seventh property in the group’s inventory and in many ways its most intriguing venture, and calculated risk, to date.

“We just decided that since there would be never be a perfect time to do this, we might as well do it now,” said Shumway, adding that ground was broken for the project last week, and the new hotel should open its doors for business in about a year — a time chosen to coincide with commencement at the area’s colleges.

When the Courtyard does open, the HHG will have more than 500 rooms at a collection of sites in Northampton, Hadley, and Amherst, a corridor that includes the Five Colleges, a number of cultural and tourist attractions — and a highly competitive hospitality sector.

The portfolio includes a Clarion Hotel and Autumn Inn in Northampton, a Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites, Econo Lodge, and Howard Johnson’s hotel in Hadley, and the University Lodge in Amherst.

The breadth and depth of that stable of facilities gives HHG a competitive edge in that in that it has virtually all segments of the market covered, providing options for corporate and leisure customers, Shumway explained. And an edge is needed, because while there has been some growth in the region’s tourism sector, the business market has remained fairly stagnant and a number of new hotels have come onto the market over the past several years.

“I would say the Springfield market is over-saturated and the Hampshire County market is nearly saturated,” said Shumway, who left a career in banking to join the venture started by his father, Robert, and two other partners in 1994. “It’s very competitive out there right now.”

In such an environment, companies looking to continued growth must be aggressive and entrepreneurial, said Shumway, noting that HHG is doing so in several ways, including the new Marriott, but also the recent hiring of Michelle Boudreau, most recently director of convention center sales for the Greater Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau, to a position as director of Sales and Marketing.

In that capacity, she will lead a team tasked not only with filling hotel rooms and booking meeting and banquet room dates for the Marriott, but positioning the entire roster of HHG properties for continued growth, said Shumway.

“This was a real coup for us,” he told BusinessWest. “She’s knows this market and the players in it, and she’s going to help us get where we want to go.”

BusinessWest looks this issue at how the HHG continues to expand its portfolio and succeed in a challenging hospitality market by responding intelligently to the laws of supply and demand.

Pillow Talk

Shumway told BusinessWest that the Marriott has long been intrigued by Hampshire County, and specifically the stretch of Route 9 that connects the bustling college communities of Amherst and Hadley.

But the company has long adhered to strict guidelines about the look of its hotels, and didn’t want to acquiesce to Hadley officials’ insistence on an old New England/Colonial look that defines many of the properties in the old farming community. Eventually, however, the promise of the Amherst-Northampton market, coupled with HHG’s prodding, compelled Marriott to “bend,” as Shumway put it.

Thus, the Maryland-based chain’s flag will soon fly over a Courtyard hotel depicted in a large sign erected in what was the parking lot of the former night spot/restaurant/driving range.

As he talked about the Marriott and the decision to bring more rooms into what most consider to be a saturated market, Shumway said the decision-making process was influenced by the same principles that guided his father, Ray Vincunas (now deceased) and Ed O’Leary, when they built a 60-room Howard Johnson’s motor lodge on Route 9 in Hadley in 1966.

“Each project has to make sound business sense,” he said, adding that the partners certainly thought their first acquisition fit that criteria. Likewise with their next venture, purchase of the 20-room University Lodge on North Pleasant Street in Amherst in the early ’70s, and with a 40-room expansion of the Howard Johnson’s in 1994.

A year later, the partners rolled the dice on a tired property off I-91 in Northampton known then as the Quality Inn. Originally a Hilton, the facility had deteriorated to the point where it lost its franchise, said Shumway, who joined the company just prior to that acquisition.

The partners gave the property a new name, the Inn at Northampton, undertook extensive renovations, and eventually became part of the Clarion chain of hotels in 2002.
“It’s still a challenging property,” said Shumway, adding that it has seen several renovations over the past several years, and has been a solid performer with room nights, banquets, and meetings.

The growth process continued with the construction of a 100-room Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites on Route 9 in Hadley in 2000, and the purchase of the 32-room Autumn Inn in Northampton (what Shumway described as a cross between a large bed & breakfast and a small hotel) in 2001.
By this point, the company decided an umbrella group to properly manage the growing collection of properties was needed, and thus the Hampshire Hospitality Group was created.

That entity continued its expansion initiatives with the purchase of the Country Bell hotel on Route 9 in Hadley in 2002. That property was then torn down and replaced with a 63-room Econo-Lodge in 2003, giving HHG more than 430 rooms, a variety of banquet and meeting facilities, and locations near all five colleges in the area.

No Reservations

But there was room for additional expansion, said Shumway, noting that the decision to add the Marriott Courtyard also fits the basic tenet of ‘making sense,’ although some say the Route 9 corridor was already packed with hotels — a 90-room Hampton Inn was opened on Bay Road in early 2005, making it the latest addition to the inventory.

There was, and is, a need in the marketplace for a higher-end room, a small step over the Holiday Inn, he explained, noting that the Marriott name is very popular among travelers and business people alike.

“We thought there was a small gap in the market that we could fill — we had many people calling us looking for a nicer hotel,” he told BusinessWest. “My first reponse to that has been that the Holiday Inn is a much nicer hotel. Some agreed and said they really like that brand, but there were continued comments to the effect that they wanted something even nicer. I think the Marriott flag will be very popular.

“I’ve heard some people say we’re growing too fast and moving too quickly,” he continued. “Actually, we’re being fairly conservative and growing in a controlled fashion.”
With the addition of the Marriott, HHG could attract more banquets and meetings, especially from the colleges in the area, he said, and also take better advantage, from a room nights perspective, of the seven-month season (May to November) when all area hotels must make hay.

And the group can do so without taking business away from its other properties, he said.

“We believe we’re going to be generating new business with the Marriott, while also giving people more options for their stay here,” he explained. “The market is a little saturated, and we know we’ll be pushing the limit with the Marriott, but we see an opportunity for growth and we’re definitely thinking long term.”

He told BusinessWest that most hotels in the Pioneer Valley are averaging occupancy rates of about 60% to 70% annually (they go higher in peak periods) and that HHG’s properties are right in that ballpark and won’t trend downward with the addition of the Marriott.

Boudreau agreed. She said she left the GSCVB and a position selling the new convention center because she was impressed with HHG’s track record and aggressive approach to further growth.

“It’s an exciting company, and this is a great opportunity for me,” she told BusinessWest, adding that in her newly created position she hopes to create more awareness of HHG and its various facilities — and then move those products.

In the Marriott, she sees a vehicle for seizing more of the opportunities presented by area businesses and colleges.

“Many of the colleges have meetings and conduct professional-development programs off-campus,” she said, adding that the Marriott will have a number of function rooms to handle such events. “And there are many businesses in this area that do a lot of business in Amherst and Hadley and just haven’t had the facility in this part of Hampshire County to conduct meetings and events.

“Our goal is to fill every facility within the hotel, from the sleeping rooms to the meeting rooms to the banquet hall,” she continued. “And we have an exciting game plan to do that.”

Staying the Course

Reflecting on the fact that it took what is now HHG two decades to move ahead with its plans for a hotel on the former Hangar sight, Shumway returned to the laws of supply and demand in the hospitality industry.

“The time just never seemed right to do it — and it’s still not really right,” he explained. “But we know this market better than anyone, and we decided that this time was as good — or bad — as any other.

“I’ll let you know if we made the right decision in a few years,” he told BusinessWest with a laugh. “In this business, you do your homework, gauge the market, and make what you believe are smart choices.”

That’s a game plan has served HHG well for its first 40 years in business.

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

New Game Plan

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Executive coaching is hardly a recent phenomenon, but it is gaining growing acceptance within the business community as a way to help managers improve everything from time management to public speaking to delegation skills.

Professionals are forever searching for ways to maximize everything from their time to their profits, all the while struggling to remain true to their beliefs, their values, and the reasons they got into their career of choice in the first place.

The savvy ones realized long ago that a fan base telling them how great their last decision was isn’t going to get them very far. They don’t want scores of fans in the bleachers and a team of cheerleaders boosting their spirits at every turn.

A coach, however, is a different story.

Executive coaches, also known as personal coaches and business coaches, hail from a diverse set of backgrounds and employ a number of different tactics to help their clients. However, coaches all have one common goal: to help individuals achieve their personal bests in corporate arenas.

They also face a common set of challenges, especially a lack of familiarity with the concept of executive coaches among many business owners and managers, and little understanding of exactly what this new breed of professional does.

Lynn Turner, a coach and president of the Ironweed Business Alliance based in Palmer, recalled a client who rose from his desk when she entered his office, only to move to the side of the room, under the impression that Turner had been hired to organize his desk.

This lack of understanding is complicated by the many different approaches coaches take to their work. Most specialize in specific areas of performance development, among them entrepreneurship, media relations, time management, revenue growth, employer/employee relations, work/life balance, sales, leadership, and countless others.

Coaches are quick to note that their job is not to hand-hold or offer quick fixes, nor is the process disruptive to normal routines. In the interest of maximizing time with clients, much of the coaching process takes place over the phone. Guidance and feedback are given in real time, as problems or questions arise, and that is part of the appeal to major national corporations utilizing the coaching process.

But with the majority of U.S. businesses employing fewer than 50 people, translating the value of business coaching to new audiences is still a hurdle that coaches must clear before going any further with their work.

“Part of our job becomes educating the general public on what a coach is and how we differ from consultants and even therapists,” Turner said. “Consultants are hired to answer the ‘what’ — to answer questions and provide solutions. Often, a consultant will make a series of recommendations, and nothing is ever done.”

She said coaches attempt to eliminate that end point, at which many executives lose their way.

“Coaches work with clients to find various ways that lead to solutions,” she said. “We ensure that their business decisions, everything from hiring new staff to making a career change, fit within their core value system. We break down potential barriers and pull the answers out of the individual. That way, people are more apt to follow through, with the understanding that recommendations from corporate training exercises that are not applied translate into wasted dollars.”

Drafting the Play

The practice of using coaches to improve productivity, work ethic, or the bottom line is becoming increasingly accepted in the national marketplace. Ravi Kulkarni, a business coach and engineer, explained that it’s a phenomenon that has filtered down from some of the largest and most successful companies in the country.

“Large corporations have embraced coaching simply because it’s effective,” he said. “They’ve seen the statistics and the proof, and now others are following suit.”

That proof includes a study completed through the Harvard Business School, which reported that businesses with so-called ‘performance-enhanced cultures’ spurred substantial growth in revenue, employment, stock price, and net income when compared to those with no such enhancements. The study, conducted in 1992, reported, for instance, a 756% improvement in net income growth in performance-enhanced workplaces over those with no such interventions in place.

Some major corporations even have coaches on staff or long-term retainer; IBM, for instance, employs more than 60 executive coaches.

That alone lends credibility to the practice of coaching, which differs from other types of consultancy in that it takes a one-on-one approach to promoting change, whether coaches are hired independently by an individual or by a company to work with its employees.

It also helps to disprove the myth that coaches are used primarily to help poorly-performing managers or work with individuals who perceive themselves to be lagging behind on their career paths. On the contrary, says Kulkarni.

“I often coach people who have been enormously successful, and they have reached a plateau or are stretched so thin that they’re spinning their wheels,” he said. “When they reach a certain level in their careers, they recognize the need to try something new in order to move forward, and that’s where coaching often comes in.”
Kulkarni, an entrepreneur himself who built a manufacturing business in his native India 29 years ago and then moved to the U.S. to do the same, added that he often works with company founders and presidents who are three to 10 years into their business and looking to move to the next level in terms of size, reach, services, or financial goals.

He said he employs a four-step process to assist his clients, which begins with clarification — essentially, nailing down where a client is professionally, and where he or she wants to go. Second, Kulkarni moves on to simplification, which focuses on eliminating tasks that don’t effectively contribute to the overall mission of a company and the goals of the client. Third, that base becomes the jumping off point for maximization, which helps an individual identify his or her core talents and use them to achieve objectives and improve their overall work experience. And finally, clients are urged to move on to networking — sharing their talents with others and capitalizing on those of others.

“I work with people to help them discover what the real issues are within themselves and their businesses, to create benchmarks, and to help them think outside of the box,” Kulkarni said. “But essentially, we’re working toward what they really want, and that’s to make money and keep money.”
One of Kulkarni’s clients, Walt Shanaman, owner of Home Helpers and Direct Link, a home-based assisted living company based in Connecticut, spoke to the results he’s gleaned from his coaching experience.

“I have substantial business and management experience,” he said. “However, the one piece of the business puzzle I was missing was sales and marketing. Coaching guided me through the process with instructions and ideas, yet made me do the ‘heavy lifting’ rather than just giving me the answers.”

Shanaman added that in addition to addressing the issues he saw as slowing his company’s growth, he also made what he termed some “personal breakthroughs” through coaching.

“I feared cold calling, and public speaking made my voice crack,” he said. “Now, I look forward to public speaking. Cold calling is still not something that I look forward to, but I don’t need to fear it, and I am able to compartmentalize frequent rejection into the ‘they just don’t need my services now’ box. And I am able to move forward.”

Go Team

Turner, who works frequently with women in leadership positions and clients hoping to improve work/life balance, agreed that coaching reinforces positive behaviors, rather than dwelling on the negative. She added that coaching doesn’t only help people look inward to promote change, but also helps managers and business owners cultivate strengths within their employees, with the same emphasis on the positive aspects thereof.

“There is a misconception that managers should look at those employees who aren’t doing well first, but leaders need to focus on the people who are thriving, because they’re the producers,” Turner explained. “There’s a good deal of positive psychology involved; the process is generally focused on what is right, not wrong, and instead of dealing with the past, coaching tends to focus on the present and the future.”

Susan Bellows, president of Susan Bellows and Assoc., based in Hampden, said coaching also lends itself to that trickle-down effect because clients tend to be high-level executives or hold management positions.

“Those are the people who get it first,” she said. “The really smart executives have been using coaching for years.”

Bellows specializes in improving time management and work satisfaction, often working with clients with extreme constraints on their time or those who have identified unorganized work habits as a primary obstacle, including people with attention deficit disorder. She said that, regardless of their specific barriers, successful professionals are generally more ‘coachable,’ meaning they’re receptive to feedback, change, or new approaches to business development. Conversely, those who are more coachable are more likely to succeed.

“There are plenty of people who have some real performance or behavior issues that should be addressed, but if they’re not going to hear or accept what you have to say, it’s just not going to work,” she said. “There needs to be enough pain involved that they want to do something to change their current habits or the habits of their employees, and there needs to be a willingness to expend time and money to do so.”

Private Practice

Further, coaching is a personal experience that must be entered wholeheartedly by both the coach and the client. There are three terms that consistently come up in discussions about the business of executive coaching — accountability, rapport, and confidentiality — and it becomes the responsibility of a coach to ensure that a match can be made with a potential client through an initial consultation.

“Accountability between the coach and the client is a key factor that must be built in,” Bellows said. “Most people would rather complain about problems than act on them, and most don’t have strong personal accountability — they’re more likely to follow through with something if it will negatively affect someone else if they do not. A coach takes on that role, and a set of consequences and rewards for making changes is put into place.”

In many ways, that personal relationship is what defines coaching as a career and sets it apart from other types of consultancy, added Turner.

“People come to us for all types of leadership development,” she said, “and even if I’m hired for something specific, we touch on other things. Everyone wears many different hats, and coaches are accountable for each.

“Inevitably,” she added, “that leads to some personal things being discussed, and confidentiality, trust, and rapport become paramount. At times, people are telling me things their spouses don’t even know. For those reasons, coaches can’t brag about their successes with clients in the same way that people in other professions can.”

That’s just one hurdle coaches need to clear as self-employed practitioners. Because they can’t market their successes in the same ways other consultants can, coaches must be diligent in getting their name out in the appropriate circles while constantly educating the public on their profession.

Turner and Kulkarni, along with Nina Berman and Gail Sterner, founded the Western Mass. Business Alliance, which not only helps get the word out regarding coaching’s role in corporate development, but also assists the coaches in referring clients amongst themselves, depending on the clients’ needs.

Similarly, Bellows said she relies heavily on referrals from clients and networking opportunities to spread the business coaching message.

“At the beginning, I would go to the opening of an envelope,” she joked, noting that a natural momentum has begun to build as a greater number of people become aware of coaching and of the measurable benefits it can create.

The End Zone

“People learn through experience,” Bellows said, “and as more people realize that we’re not trying to give them the answers, just the tools and guidance necessary to find them on their own, the more they are seeing the value.”

And the proponents of business coaching say it indeed has helped to put them at the top of their game. At the very least, they’re no longer standing on the sidelines.

Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]

Ready to Launch

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Uncategorized

Pedro Caceres says today’s businesses are — or should be — in a constant state of transformation.

“There is no time to rest,” said Caceres, vice president of Operations for East Longmeadow-based Hasbro Games. “That’s because the competition doesn’t just come from the company across town, but from companies around the world.”

This state of heightened competition, and the need for companies to respond to it, provided ample motivation for Caceres to step forward and assume a lead role with what is being called the Division of Business Excellence within the Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield.

The DOBE, as it’s also called, is a mostly volunteer-led agency and the successor group to a membership-based organization known as the Springfield Area Council for Excellence. SPACE, as it was called, operated for more than a dozen years before ceasing operations last spring in favor of the new model for a business excellence division.

The ensuing months have been spent putting together a product and an operating strategy, said DOBE Executive Director and ACCGS Vice President Deb Boronski, who told BusinessWest that the group will roll out its ambitious plans at the chamber’s annual spring trade show on April 5 at the MassMutual Center.

Offering a preview, Boronski, Caceres, DOBE’s chairman, and other members of the group’s advisory board, said the new business excellence division will endeavor to fill the large void left by the demise of SPACE and, in so doing, help companies effectively compete in an increasingly global marketplace.

“There is a definite need for an organization that will promote business excellence and provide resources for area companies,” said Jeff Glaze, president of Westfield-based Decorated Products, who will lead the DOBE’s Business Process Improvement Team. “That’s why we came together … to address that need.”

John Maybury, president of East Longmeadow-based Maybury Material Handling and leader of DOBE’s Business Transformation team, agreed. He told BusinessWest that SPACE was created to help area businesses — and the region as a whole — remain competitive. It carried out that assignment through roundtables, assistance with implementation of specific excellence programs such as Kaizen, Six Sigma, and others, and creation of the Business Excellence Award, which provided a platform from which to promote excellence and show how area companies were achieving it.

The DOBE wants to do all that, said Maybury, but in a different format, one designed to reach a much broader audience.

Indeed, while SPACE tended mostly to its members — which numbered over 100 at its height — the DOBE will provide services and referrals for every company in the region, he said.

“We need to figure out how the Pioneer Valley and the Northeast as a region can stay competitive as we face wage issues, insurance issues, energy issues, and pressure from competition around the world,” he said. “We can do that by collaborating and working together to solve common problems.”

BusinessWest looks this issue at how the DOBE will carry out that challenging assignment.

Business Plan

Caceres told BusinessWest that after he attended an early meeting staged to outline what the new business excellence division would do and how it would do it, he came away impressed with the chamber’s intentions and desire to continue the work carried out by SPACE.

But he thought the DOBE lacked needed structure, and he set out to provide some. He was joined by Maybury and Glaze, also long-term SPACE members, and, working with Boronski, they have spent the past several months setting a tone and an agenda for the division.

The first step was creation of an advisory board, which includes several area business leaders. That group then went about generating a portfolio of events and activities that would enable the DOBE to meet its primary goal — becoming an effective resource for business owners who recognize the need for continuous improvement and need help to achieve it.

The DOBE will provide that help on a number of levels, said Maybury. First, it will conduct informational programs on specific issues and products in the broad realm of continuous improvement. It will also work to create an environment in which companies can share knowledge and experience in ways that make the region as a whole more competitive. The excellence division will also link business owners with consultants who will provide assistance on a fee-for-service basis.

Prospective consultants were being interviewed by the advisory board earlier this month, said Boronski, noting that a list of “excellence associates,” as they will be called, will soon be finalized. These individuals will provide direct support for implementation of a number of business excellence strategies, including lean manufacturing, Kaizen, the Japanese continuous improvement model, Six Sigma, various customer-satisfaction-improvement efforts, and others.

Lastly, the group will work to reintroduce and reinvigorate the Pioneer Valley Business Excellence Award, which was last awarded in 2004. Maybury, whose company won in the manufacturing category in 2002, described the process of applying for the award as a valuable learning experience.

“It helped make us a better company because we learned a lot about ourselves,” he said, referring to the review process carried out by a team of judges. “It was an awesome experience for everyone involved. We want more companies to benefit as we did.”

Entries for the award had dwindled in recent years, perhaps because of the time-consuming nature of the process, said Boronski, adding that organizers will seek to simplify it in an effort to prompt greater participation.

Re-establishing the PVBEA will be one of the duties assigned to the DOBE’s Business Transformation unit. That branch will have a number of sub-teams, including ones focused on small businesses, research, development, and innovation, and strategic sales and marketing. The Business Improvement Unit, meanwhile, will have teams focusing on lean enterprise, quality systems, “people development,” and top management.

The broad mission for all the teams is to promote the sharing of resources, said Glaze, noting that this is a key ingredient in efforts to enable the region to remain competitive.

“Sharing experiences and collective knowledge is important — that’s how all of us can get better at what we do, whether we’re in manufacturing or the service industry,” he explained. “The whole, in this case our combined knowledge, is truly greater than the sum of the parts.”

A long-time SPACE member, Glaze said that group was instrumental in helping his company, which produces nameplates, decals, and other promotional products, to incorporate continuous improvement programs and thus more effectively compete with competitors in China and elsewhere. But he said the membership fees charged by the group often served as a barrier, especially for small companies.

“What we’re doing is removing that barrier,’ he said, “and, in the process, creating opportunities to make programs available to all chamber members.”

Getting in Gear

Reflecting on the work performed by SPACE, Caceres said it was invaluable in helping companies operate in that state of continuous transformation he described.

“SPACE may be gone, but the need is still there and it’s real,” he said, explaining his commitment to the DOBE. “Comp-anies are in permanent need to re-examine how to improve, and it’s our mission to help them do it.”

For information on the Division of Business Excellence, contact Boronski at (413) 755-1309, or[email protected]

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

By
Departments

Paul A. Tierney

United Bank announced the following:
• Paul A. Tierney has been promoted to Senior Vice President, Commercial Banking. He specializes in commercial real estate lending;

Doug Bourbeau

• Doug Bourbeau has been promoted to Vice President, Commercial Banking. He is responsible for generating new commercial loans and specializes in equipment financing;

• Dena M. Hall has been promoted to Vice President, Marketing and Communication Relations. She has overall responsibility for the bank’s marketing and community relations efforts and manages the Investor Relations program for United Financial Bancorp, a publicly owned corporation and the holding company for United Bank, which is traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol UBNK. She also serves as Vice President of the United Charitable Foundation.

Joanne Sheedy

• Joanne Sheedy has been promoted to Assistant Vice President, Credit Department. She manages the credit department and ensures the bank’s high standards for credit quality are met and maintained.

Steve Piubeni

• Steve Piubeni has been promoted to Assistant Vice President, Management Information Systems (MIS). He has overall responsibility for the Information Systems Department, designing and maintaining the bank’s computer networks and plays a key role in the implementation of the bank’s technology plan.

Kim Merritt

• Kim Merritt has been promoted to assistant vice president, Operations. She is responsible for managing the operations staff including loan and deposit operations and the bank’s call center.

Kim Merritt

A. Rima Dael has been named the Administrative Director for the Woronoco Savings Charitable Foundation, based in Westfield. She will be responsible for administering the grants program of the Foundation. The Foundation supports education and youth development, health and human services, cultural activities, humanities, and public and civic projects.

•••••

Lynn F. Boscher, owner of the Travel Bureau in Westfield for more than 30 years, was recently appointed Executive Director/Affiliate Coordinator for the Greater Westfield Chamber of Commerce. He is responsible for managing the Chamber, and supporting and enhancing the economic health of the Westfield business community. A resident of Westfield since 1967, Boscher is a former city councilor, and served as president of the Westfield Rotary Club, Boys and Girls Club of Greater Westfield, and St. Mary’s PTO. He has also played an active role with the Westfield Area Drug Council, Westfield Community Development Corporation, and City of Westfield’s Planning Board.

•••••

Michael P. D’Amour has been named Fresh Foods Director for Big Y Foods, Inc. in Springfield. The position was created to further the company’s emphasis on high quality fresh products. D’Amour will be responsible for sales and marketing for the produce, floral, deli, bakery, food service, seafood and meat departments. In addition to developing a long-term fresh food strategy for the company, he will be responsible for all aspects related to these departments including financials, training and development, merchandising and advertising.

•••••

Meyers Brothers Kalicka, P.C. of Holyoke and Greenfield announced the following:
• Kelly A. Druzisky has completed the requirements to obtain her Certified Public Accountants (CPA) license. She has also been promoted to Senior Associate;
• Deb Kaylor, CPA, has been promoted to Senior Manager;
• Yong No, CPA, has been promoted to Senior Manager;
• Kristi Reale, CPA, has been promoted to Manager;
• Catherine West, CPA, has been promoted to Manager;
• Jamie Naughton has been promoted to Senior Associate;
• Maureen M. Hogarty has joined the firm as an Associate;
• Emily S. Bassett has begun a 10-week internship at the firm, and
• Karen Cheng has begun a 10-week internship at the firm.

•••••

Sue Rheaume of Landmark Realtors in Hampden has earned the designation of Graduate Realtor Institute by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

•••••

Matthew B. Hedenberg has been named Informational Technology Manager for OFS in Sturbridge.

•••••

Benefits Consulting Group, LLC in Holyoke announced the following:
• Susan R. Retchin has completed the certification process through the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries to earn her designation of Qualified 401(K) Administrator (QKA), and
• Steve C. Vernale has completed the certification process through the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries to earn his designation of Qualified 401(K) Administrator (QKA).

•••••

James A. Russell, Chief Executive of American Exterminating Co. of Springfield, will receive the Barlett W. Eldridge Award from the New England Pest Management Association. Russell’s grandfather, Abraham Russell, started the company in 1913. His father, Mathew Russell, also operated the business and now his son, Robert Russell, is active in the daily operations.

Getting Down to Business

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Features
As he goes about the task of righting the fiscal ship in Springfield, Mayor Charles Ryan will solicit the help of the city’s business community. Specifically, he wants to tap into the competitive nature of business leaders and their focus on customer service.

Charlie Ryan stressed that the city of Springfield is not Ford Motor Co. "We’re not making cars, or widgets, or anything else," he told BusinessWest. "We’re educating children, we’re providing public safety, and we’re offering basic services. That’s not the same as running a company; some of the rules that apply to business don’t apply to a municipality."

That said, Ryan, the city’s 76-year-old mayor who returned to City Hall in January 36 years after he left it following three terms as Springfield’s top executive, believes his administration can, indeed, borrow lessons from the corporate world.

At the very least, it can benefit from its expertise and competitive nature, said Ryan, who has embarked on an intriguing initiative to involve members of region’s business community in his multi-faceted effort to return the city to sound fiscal health and, in general, enable it to operate more efficiently.

"The business community consists of men and women who are, out of necessity, competitive," he said. "They wouldn’t survive if they weren’t successful in beating the competition. Whatever attributes make them competitive — persistence, tenacity, imagination, and others — are very rare indeed.

"To whatever extent these individuals turn their attention to our problems," he continued, "we’re going to benefit."

Specifics of the plan are still coming together, and ordinances for the program must be drafted and approved by the City Council. But what is known is that Ryan wants to tap the talents of area business leaders to address some of the city’s many ills — and he believes that free assistance is crucial to the city’s efforts to right its financial ship.

For starters, Ryan intends to make use of three individuals from MassMutual in what he calls a "loaned-executive program." These volunteers will be reviewing various city departments with an eye toward creating efficiencies.

Once the 90-day review process is completed, the next, still-evolving stage of the process will take place.

Russell Denver, president of the Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield, told BusinessWest that Ryan approached the Chamber and the Springfield Business Development Council after last fall’s election and asked about the recruitment of business volunteers to work on projects within City Hall. Denver said that to date, he has enlisted more than 100 such individuals who are willing to offer some form of assistance in project-specific situations.

"This is a great opportunity for the city to take advantage of some free consulting," he said, noting that, while that word consulting is the one being tossed around by those involved with this initiative, he prefers to say that business leaders would be partnering with city department heads and other employees.

But will this work? Can the private sector and public sector come together and achieve progress? Some city councilors have questioned whether department heads will feel threatened by the intrusion of business leaders, while others have expressed concern about chain-of-command and collective-bargaining issues.

But both Ryan and Denver believe there will be collaboration, not intrusion, and that the business community’s help is needed to fix the city’s bottom line and enable departments to provide better service to residents.

"Fundamental things are not being done, or not done as well as they could be," said the mayor of day-to-day activities at City Hall. "And this is everywhere I look."

Executive Decisions

Ryan acknowledged that his plans to enlist the business community are unusual and rather extraordinary — but those are some of the same words he would use to describe the city’s current situation.

Springfield is getting plenty of ink these days, and most of it isn’t good. The headline on the cover of the winter issue of Commonwealth magazine, put out by the Mass. Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassInc.), screams, ’Springfield: Has It Hit Bottom?’

Without directly answering that question, Ryan said the city’s fiscal state is precarious to say the least. He told BusinessWest that the city can generate about $3 million in new tax revenues this year under the guidelines of Proposition 2 1/2, but he’s already looking at an additional $6 million in debt service and $6 million to $7 million in additional health insurance expenses. "We just continue to lose ground."

During last fall’s campaign, Ryan dared to utter the R-word — receivership — and was accused by rival Linda Melconian of trying to scare voters and greatly exaggerating the problem.

He insists that he was doing neither, and a month after taking office, he is using the same language.

"I don’t know if we can head this off," he said, referring to the prospect of receivership. "I’d like to say that we can, but I just don’t know — the news keeps getting worse."

Indeed, in the budget he outlined late last month, Gov. Mitt Romney calls for level funding of aid to cities and towns, this at a time when Ryan is begging for a real increase.

The mayor said some people understand and appreciate the bind Springfield finds itself in, but many don’t. "When we end a contract or don’t fund a certain position, there still seems to be a lack of understanding as to why those things are happening," he said. "The answer is simple; we can’t afford those things anymore."

Using a decidedly somber tone, Ryan described a collective bargaining session that occurred just prior to his meeting with BusinessWest. Most City Hall employees are overdue for raises, said the mayor, noting that the city simply doesn’t have the $4 million needed to pay for contracted pay hikes. "In a few months, we’re going to be starting a new fiscal year," he noted. "And unless a miracle happens, we’re not going to have the $3 million to $4 million to pay for the next round of increases. The IOUs keep piling up."

Ryan isn’t looking for miracles from the business community. He is, however, looking for some good advice, the kind of consulting that the city couldn’t afford if it had to pay for it.

Denver believes the business community can provide that brand of help, and wants to, because it understands that a healthy Springfield is vital to the prospects of further economic development in the Pioneer Valley.

"They know how important it is for Springfield to turn itself around," he said. "That’s why you’re seeing so many people come forward and volunteer their services."

In Good Company

Ryan told BusinessWest that he had several discussions last fall with MassMutual CEO Robert O’Connell about ways the financial services giant might assist the city. One byproduct of those discussions is the planned loaned-executive program, which could commence over the next several weeks.

Plans — subject to approval by the council — call for MassMutual’s involvement to be led by Theresa H. Forde, senior vice president of sales and marketing, and John F. Abbott, vice president of state government relations and policy holder relations. They will meet with department heads and other employees to review operations and identify areas where changes can be made and improvement realized.

Ryan, who stressed to the City Council that the project was not a witch hunt, said that the MassMutual executives will be working with him in what he called a "dynamic process that will identify better ways for us to carry out our business.

"It’s fundamental that people understand that this is not a study by the MassMutual people that will be presented to me at the end of 90 days," he explained. "They will work, day by day, in concert with me, as together we make this very necessary analysis and identify the strengths and weaknesses of our city operation."

The hope is that the department-by-department review will yield strategies that do not involve additional personnel or other expenditures.

"We want to focus on remedies that are practical and affordable," Ryan said. "I’m sure there will be some where they say, ’you could do a better job if you had 30 more police officers.’ Well, right now, that’s not an option — we don’t have the money to hire 30 more police officers.

"What we have to do is look at what our economic capacity is and, within those significant constraints, try and improve our effectiveness," he continued. "And I’m sure there will be a lot that we can do, even with our empty pocketbook."

Once individual remedies have been identified, the city could call on some of the companies the Chamber has enlisted to take on specific projects. For example, area banks could assist with cash-flow or debt-refinancing issues, said Denver, while property-management companies may be able to identify economies of scale or other means of reducing costs.

Law firms may offer pro-bono services in a number of areas, said Denver, including the collection of overdue property taxes or the taking of properties. Meanwhile, accounting firms, marketing agencies, staffing companies, and the area’s colleges have services they can offer.

Even retail outlets can be of assistance, he explained, noting that such businesses know a lot about inventory control and customer service.

Denver told BusinessWest that, in early discussions with the mayor on the subject of business volunteers, Ryan focused on the broad subject of productivity.

"In our local economy, the numbers are improving, but unemployment is not, because companies are increasing productivity — that’s why they’re calling this a jobless recovery," said Denver. "Companies are doing more with the same number of people, or fewer, and this is what intrigues the mayor."

While he acknowledged that there are vast differences in how a company and a municipality are managed, Denver said he thought area business leaders can make whatever adjustments are necessary and make some solid contributions to the kind of progress the mayor is seeking.

"You’ve already seen a number of companies lend practical assistance to the School Department and to individual schools," said Denver, listing MassMutual, American Saw & Mfg., and other businesses in the same category. "This is the same thing, but on a much larger scale.

"Besides," he continued, "a number of business people have served on boards or commissions in the communities they live in, and some have held elected office; they know how a municipality operates."

When asked to what extent he will utilize the business community, Ryan said, "in whatever legitimate and responsible ways I can."

He told BusinessWest that it is as important for business leaders to help as it is for the city to seek their assistance.

"They have a lot at stake," he said. "It is intolerable that the main city in Western Mass. continues to limp; we need a strong, vital central city."

View Toward Progress

Gesturing to the thick layer of crud on the outside of the windows of his second-floor office in City Wall, one that appeared to be years in the making, Ryan joked that he wouldn’t mind if the Chamber could get a window-cleaning company to do some "consulting" work.

If those business executives who do contribute some time and energy to the city’s management can help devise strategies to improve services and make progress in the quest for better fiscal health, then Ryan might enjoy the view out the windows in both a literal and figurative sense.

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

A Different Spin

By
Features

Bob Penicka, the new president and COO of Top-Flite Golf Company, has a difficult assignment: reversing the company’s fortunes at a time when golf equipment sales are declining and industry analysts don’t know when they’ll bounce back. He believes that by refocusing some marketing efforts and tweaking already-efficient manufacturing processes, the company can drive higher sales — and profits.

Bob Penicka says the building blocks are in place for a turnaround at the Top-Flite Golf Company.

They have been for some time, said Penicka, 41, who was introduced last month as the new president and COO of the Chicopee-based institution. But some of these blocks — including winning brand names, state-of-the-art technology, and a versatile workforce — haven’t always been structured properly or utilized to their full potential, he told BusinessWest, adding that it will be his job to reverse that trend.

This won’t be an easy assignment, given the ongoing sluggishness in the golf industry and forecasts for more of the same, as well as growing competition across all lines of equipment — balls, putters, irons, and woods.

However, Penicka, who has spent the past several years working his way up the ladder at Top-Flite’s new parent company, Carlsbad, Calif.-based Callaway Golf, firmly believes that, with better utilization of the company’s assets, a return to profitability is possible — and sooner than many people think is possible.

He says that a combination of solid products and efficient manufacturing processes (foundations that have been in place), coupled with a debt-free existence as well as the pressures and incentives that come with being a publicly held company, should be a winning formula for Top-Flite.

"We’re a large enough wholly owned subsidiary to have our own P & L posted separately every quarter," he said. "You will find that having that public scorecard coming out every 90 days is a huge motivator to run your business effectively."

Saddled with heavy debt in recent years, Top-Flite, formerly Spalding, was placed under a great deal of pressure when it introduced new products and brands, said Penicka, adding that the company was forced, in effect, to try and hit home runs. Under the umbrella of Callaway, now the largest golf equipment company in the world, Top-Flite can score with doubles and even singles.

"Without the huge debt load that we’ve had for the past several years, this company doesn’t have to worry about hitting a grand slam every time it steps up and does something," he said. "Our goal is to build on a number of smaller successes, and not try to hit the jackpot with one franchise-winning or franchise-establishing product.

"Callaway Golf is in this for the long term," he continued. "We don’t have to return to profitability in one year to make this a go. That’s a goal of mine — I would like to achieve a profit next year — but we have a longer-term vision."

In a wide-ranging interview, Penicka talked with BusinessWest about Top-Flite, the golf market and its future, and his challenging assignment — to reverse the fortunes of a company that has been underachieving for several years.

Course of Action

Penicka says the Top-Flite name remains one of the most respected in the golf industry — especially within the golf-ball market — and he told BusinessWest that it’s his mission to use that name to drive profits, not merely sales.

To achieve that end, he’s putting together a multi-pronged strategy that will involve everything from revamped marketing to new product development to changes on the factory floor.

He’ll also make full use of a varied business background, one that is grounded in science, not sports, and manufacturing processes, not sales and marketing.

Indeed, upon graduating from Ohio State University in 1984 with a degree in chemical engineering, Penicka went to work for General Electric and its lighting division, where he held a number of engineering and management positions. From there, he went to Harman International Industries in Indianapolis, a maker of branded audiophile equipment, where he served as vice president of Manufacturing for the Automotive OEM Division.

He then joined Chicago-based putter maker Odyssey Golf in 1996, and was serving that company as vice president of Manufacturing when it was acquired by Callaway in 1997. He was subsequently promoted within Callaway to vice president of Manufacturing Technology, senior vice president of Golf Club Manufacturing, and, in 2001, executive vice president of Manufacturing in the golf club and golf ball operations.

He was serving in that capacity when Callaway began its pursuit of Top-Flite this past summer. Penicka told BusinessWest that he understood early on that if Callaway survived the bidding war for Top-Flite, he would be packing his bags for Chicopee.

And as the bidding process for the company continued, Penicka started to scrutinize the company he had watched from 3,000 miles away. While he was not able to talk directly with employees and managers at Top-Flite until the deal actually closed on Sept. 15, he was able to make observations and begin the process of plotting a new course of action.

One thing he and others at Callaway noted was that Top-Flite needed to refocus some marketing dollars. In recent years, Penicka explained, the company invested heavily in marketing its Strata lines of golf balls and its Ben Hogan lines of irons, at the expense of what has historically been the company’s bread and butter — the value-priced Top-Flite golf ball models.

"The Strata and Ben Hogan brands are important to this company, but so is Top-Flite, and it has been getting the short end of the stick recently," he said. "I believe that if we spend some money on that brand, we’ll see an impressive return on that investment."

By focusing more marketing dollars on Top-Flite products, the company will likely regain some of the market share in the value-priced segment of the market that has been lost to a host of new competitors, including Nike, Titleist, Maxfli, and Callaway itself.

Top-Flite once owned about a quarter of the value-priced ball market, and has seen that share erode to about 15%, said Penicka, adding that the company can regain some of what it lost by pushing the brands that put it on the map.

Aggressive marketing will be necessary, he said, because the golf market is not growing at present — Callaway and other companies have created programs in an effort to involve more people in the sport for the long term — and that means equipment makers will have to take a bigger piece of the existing pie if they want to grow.

"I think stagnant would be a generous term to describe what’s been happening in the golf market," he said, adding that sales have been declining for several years for a number of reasons, including everything from the prolonged economic slump to the fact that many young people simply don’t have the time for a game that takes five or six hours to play.

While re-directing some marketing dollars, Penicka will also look to streamline some of the production processes, with the goal of making the company more flexible overall. He described the Chicopee plant as efficient and certainly current with new technology, but he believes there is capacity that is not being utilized.

"Top-Flite is the low-cost producer in the United States, and I think it can compete with some of the golf ball manufacturers in Asia that have very low labor costs," he said. "But there are some opportunities we can take advantage of."

Specifically, he believes the company needs to become more responsive and reduce its lead times.

"We’ve got a large, high-volume factory that is set up to run in big batches; the factory evolved over the years and wasn’t laid out with a lot of flexibility in mind," he explained. "Our product mix has become more complex, and our customer base has become more complex — and demanding. I think there’s some opportunity to go to smaller, batch-type production to where we can be much more responsive to our customers than I think we have been in the past."

Top-Flite has placed a great deal of emphasis in recent years on the quantity of golf balls it produces at its plants in Chicopee and Gloversville, N.Y. — about 1 million a day, according to recent counts — but in the future, more focus will be put on profitability, not sheer volume.

"That will be our priority," he said. "We’ll be happy if, in some categories, we have to sell less product, but can spend less against it and make it more profitable than it’s been. We need to stress profits, not sales."

Looking for a Bounce

Penicka joked to BusinessWest that there are some things about California he won’t miss — including the insanity of the gubernatorial recall vote. "I’m coming to a state where people don’t have to face the prospect of seeing an actor on the ballot," he said.

In making that move, however, he’s taking on a huge challenge, one he believes the entire company is up for.

"I see building blocks here that we can use as the foundation to return to profitability," he said. "There is a great workforce of knowledgeable, motivated people who are hungry right now.

"They want to build on their success and restore the image of the Top-Flite company to what it once was," he continued. "I don’t think it will take us too long to do that."

Blazing a Trail

By
Sections Supplements

C2C Systems, a Reading, England-based company with an American subsidiary based in Springfield, recently added NASA to its client list. The space administration was looking for help trying to track a flow of E-mails among engineers in the days before and after the Columbia disaster. C2C is making a name for itself in this emerging technology field, and that reputation is leading to dramatic growth.

Jon Brown follows the scandals closely.

Enron. Tyco. ImClone and Martha Stewart. Worldcom. Even the demise of the Space Shuttle Columbia. As those stories broke, he waited for his phone to ring. Usually, it did, because where there’s scandal, there’s usually a paper trail or, in this day and age, an electronic trail. And Brown’s company, C2C Systems, can help a client uncover that trail or, if the customer so chooses, make it disappear.

C2C Systems Inc., the American subsidiary of Reading, England-based C2C Systems, Ltd., is headquartered in the Springfield Enterprise Center (SEC) in the STCC Technology Park. The local company sells and services software programs that help companies, government agencies, and other entities manage their E-mail. And that word manage can take on a number of definitions, said Brown, director of the Springfield operation. Sometimes it means capacity management or archiving. It can also mean controlling E-mail, everything from identifying and eradicating inappropriate or unauthorized E-mailing to tracking down specific correspondences.

And it can also mean deleting E-mail — and when Brown says delete, he means DELETE.

"We provide people with the tools to discover the mail and, when appropriate, to destroy it," he told BusinessWest. "People want us to help them find mail and in some cases delete it. And when they say delete, they don’t mean mark it for deletion; they mean ’make it go away.’

"We make some proprietary technology that goes deep into the bowels of an exchange to get rid of the mail," he said, opting not to be more specific about exactly how the software works. "We can make it so it’s nearly impossible to find."

NASA called on C2C not long after the Columbia disaster because it wanted to track some of the E-mail correspondences between engineers after the shuttle went down, said Brown, adding only that the agency apparently found what it was looking for.

The space administration contract wasn’t large — maybe $10,000 — but having NASA as a client brings benefits beyond the check, said Brown, who told BusinessWest that there have been some discussions with the agency about using it in some promotional material.

If those endorsements do come to fruition, they will likely help the company as it enters what Brown believes will be a strong growth phase. C2C will soon expand within the SEC, effectively doubling its space and adding several new employees as it does so. And Brown believes the venture can move from its current $2 million in sales to $10 million and beyond with more aggressive sales and marketing and new product development.

Indeed, he said work with companies with scandal problems constitutes a very small percentage of sales. Real growth is expected to come in the wake of new regulations regarding when entities must keep and destroy documents, as well as a new global focus on IT security.

Meanwhile, virtually every company and government agency is struggling to keep its E-mail under control, said C2C President David Hunt.

"Capacity has become a huge issue … companies are struggling to find ways to reduce their volume of E-mail," he told BusinessWest from the company’s headquarters in England. "But E-mail is becoming the center of the knowledge flow, or information flow, of a company, so people can’t really be expected to reduce the amount of E-mail; what they have to do is develop a better form of management of it, and that’s where we come in."

Virtual Reality

Brown refers to this niche as the developing specialty of "E-mail life-cycle management." In short, the company helps clients keep their E-mail legal and affordable through a variety of tools and consulting help to implement those tools.

Its products fall into two main categories, said Brown: compliance and discovery — specifically, compliance with laws and corporate policies regarding retention and other issues, and discovery of items that are lost or deleted — and mailbox-size management. This latter series of products helps mid- and large-sized companies deal with the volume of E-mail.

Specific products include, on the capacity side of the ledger, Archive One Capacity, an E-mail archiving and capacity-management solution for Microsoft Exchange; and MaX Compression Enterprise, a family of products that transparently zips and unzips attachments sent and received with Microsoft Outlook, thus saving bandwidth and storage space.

On the E-mail risk-control side of the operation, the company’s main products include Active Folders Content Manager, which controls content and protects an organization from legal liability; and Exchange Security Risk Auditor, a tool that keeps unauthorized individuals from reading one’s E-mails.

The company has provided software to some 3 million users at more than 3,000 organizations worldwide, including national and multi-national corporations and government offices, and believes it is only scratching the surface of the industry’s vast potential.

"I think we’ve carved out a good niche for ourselves in the marketplace," said Brown. "Our goal is to expand that niche and grow the company."

How Brown came to run C2C’s American operation is an intriguing story. A biology and Spanish major at Amherst College, he joked that it wasn’t those courses of study that prepared him for a career in telecommunications. "Instead of a car, my parents bought me an IBM PC, and I locked myself in my room for a month trying to learn how to do something with it," he explained.

He was tending bar at an Amherst alumni party and wound up pouring scotch for an executive with a top-10 software company called Pansophic. "He offered me a job, and I went off to Chicago, without knowing anything about the company or what I was going to do with it."

Brown wound up becoming a product manager for the firm, but was squeezed out after the company was bought by Computer Associates. He then went into sales for System Software Associates (SSA) in Chicago, but left at 25 to pursue an MBA at UMass.

His first stop after earning his degree was a New Hampshire start-up called Tally Systems, where he was a "product manager with no products." But he helped develop one after witnessing a shouting fit by the company’s controller.

"She was screaming about the E-mail bill because, at that time, you had to pay 10 cents a message for MCI to deliver your E-mail over the Internet," he said. "And our E-mail had gone from $300 a month to $1,000 a month in no time.

"I sat outside her office and thought, ’if we’re this little 40- to 50-person company and we’re having this problem, then big companies must be having a huge problem with this,’" he continued. "I went out and talked to about 100 companies, big ones and small ones, and came up with some specs for a product that would help them manage their growing E-mail volume."

Brown put together a company, which became a subsidiary of Tally, and raised $3 million in venture capital to start an operation that essentially allowed companies to put in place an E-mail charge-back and reporting process, similar to what is done with long-distance phone calls.

The company did well, but it was never a core function for Tally, which saw its fortunes plummet when the Y2K craze ended, and eventually gave Brown’s company the axe in a cost-cutting move in early 2000.

That’s when Brown approached C2C, a maker of similar E-mail management software products that was then his largest distributor in Europe, and asked if that growing company would like to fund his venture. Instead, C2C asked Brown to direct its American subsidiary and become a partner in the parent company. "They said, ’you bring us to America.’"

Net Results

For the past three years, Brown has been doing just that.

He ran C2C Inc. out of his home for a while before being introduced in late 2000 to the Springfield Enterprise Center, the recently opened small-business incubator that was housing a number of startup ventures.

"It was a really nice fit for us," he said. "We were looking for a place in which to get settled and commence the growth process, and that’s just what we’ve done."

Brown said his obvious mission is to grow sales of C2C products in North and South America, and to do that he must raise awareness of E-mail capacity and risk issues, and then sell businesses and government agencies on the company’s various solutions to those problems.

And while the scandals that have dominated the business pages in recent years have led to some high-profile clients, Brown and Hunt both stressed that everyday capacity and security issues will drive most of the growth for the company.

When he first opened C2C’s American subsidiary, Brown identified 22,000 potential target customers, which he described as businesses or agencies that use Microsoft Exchange, have 500 or more employees, and have three or more locations.

That number probably hasn’t changed much in the past three years, he said, but there are now certainly more reasons why those potential customers should be interested in C2C products — starting with capacity.

"That’s becoming an issue for everyone," said Brown. "The volume keeps growing every month as more and more people make E-mail their preferred method of communicating information. Companies are going to need ways to keep that volume under control."

Meanwhile, on the risk-control side of the equation, there are a number of new laws regulating the dissemination, safe storage, and ultimate destruction of information, said Hunt. He cited HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which regulates information about patients and ensures that such data remains private, as one example of greater regulatory control of information — including E-mails. Similar measures are, or soon will be, in place for the financial services industry and other business groups.

"There are new laws requiring entities to retain E-mails for a certain period of time," he said. "This could be two years or seven years after an employee leaves, for example. And there are also more regulations about what is to be kept — or not kept, as the case may be — and companies are going to have to deal with them."

All this will add up to new opportunities for C2C Inc., which Brown believes can double or triple in size in each of the next several years. And in anticipation of a bulked-up sales and marketing initiative, the company will double its space in the SEC and remain there as a tenant for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, Hunt anticipates expanding C2C’s American operation and adding more offices over the next few years. The headquarters will remain in Springfield, however.

Tracking Growth

Brown told BusinessWest he was somewhat surprised C2C didn’t get a call when the ImClone scandal broke last year. "That’s one we missed," he said.

There haven’t been many such incidents in that category, thanks to a growing reputation for helping companies and agencies find what they are looking for.

What C2C is looking for is additional growth — on both sides of the Atlantic — and it would certainly seem to be on the right track — literally and figuratively.

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