Page 36 - BusinessWest March 18, 2024

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Ames Electrical Consulting Drives Efforts to Automate
ing technology program at Springfield Technical Community College.
The next chapters would see him put that degree to work in jobs for sev- eral different companies in the region — from Elm Electrical in Westfield to Kellogg Brush in Easthampton — while also earning a degree in electrical engi- neering at Wentworth Institute of Tech- nology in Boston on weekends (“three years of Saturdays,” as he called it), and also doing a little of what he described as “moonlighting.”
Specifically, he was developing and installing systems to help businesses automate various operations and processes.
Eventually, and with some real incentive after he was pink-slipped by
a downsizing Kellogg Brush, his work with automation evolved from moon- lighting into a risk-laden entrepreneur- ial venture, one that somehow man- aged to survive the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, when OEMs that made
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
[email protected]
As he talked with BusinessWest, Randy Ames gestured out the win- dow of his tiny office to the traffic on Greenfield Street just a few dozen feet away.
He guessed that several thousand cars pass that spot every day, and further speculated that few, if any, of those travel- ers would have any idea at all what goes on inside the small, nondescript building that has been home to his business for the past 15 years.
That’s a pretty safe bet, actually. In
fact, it’s easy to drive right by Ames Elec- trical Consulting without knowing it’s there. And soon, it won’t be there.
Indeed, as he talked, Ames noted that he was in the very early stages of packing up for a move to much larger quarters
in Greenfield Industrial Park, just a few miles away. That move is a big part of an exciting next chapter in one of the more intriguing, and still evolving, business sto- ries in Franklin County.
The first chapter saw Ames abandon a career, if it could be called that, as a chef — because he needed something more financially rewarding as he started a fam- ily — and enroll in an electrical engineer-
Ames
Continued on page 34
“Manufacturers can’t find people to
work — and
it’s not just manufacturers, it’s everyone.”
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MARCH 18, 2024
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Randy Ames says robotics will be the main focus of the next chapter in the intriguing Ames story.