PERC Shares Stories of Business Success

By Andy McKeeveriBerkshires Staff
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PERC held their annual meeting Thursday morning at Berkshire Community College.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — When Rachael Troxell was treating her breast cancer, doctors made her wear a compression sleeve on her arm that was just ugly.

So she went and designed and developed one that is much more fashionable and founded the company LympheDivas.

In 2008, she died from the disease and her father took over to keep the business alive. Then in 2010, her brother Josh Levin took over. But his life didn't allow him to be at the Philadelphia office; he needed to find a location that worked for him.

Pittsfield proved to be that location, but there was a problem. He needed architectural work on his new North Street office; he needed to hire and train a new workforce and he needed improved information technology — all adding to the burden of moving a business hundreds of miles away.

"Obviously moving is expensive. Not just with the moving costs but the costs of employee training and having to outfit a new building," Levin said, as one of six presenters at the Pittsfield Economic Revitalization Agency's annual meeting Thursday morning.

PERC provides technical assistant to small businesses in the county looking to grow, provides low-interest loans through the city's Community Development Block Grant funding, manages the city's small-business fund, and a brownfields revolving loan fund with Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, and heads the city's Westwood Center industrial park off Barker Road.

Thursday featured a time to share some of their success stories.

Levin is one of those successes. He was awarded $4,062 from PERC to help move his company to the Berkshires.

"PERC really stepped up and helped us with those costs," he said.

The help and consultations smoothed the transition for Levin and now that he is settled, he is looking to bring his  manufacturing arm to the city, too, with the development of a new product.

"We really got a foothold and comfortable without having really to do it all ourselves. It really assisted us in getting going," Levin said, adding that the organization linked him with other agencies — like the Mass Broadband Institute — that provided advice. "It's really been wonderful to be here and PERC really helped us feel welcomed and our business welcomed and helping us grow."

Klara Sotonova inherited her grandmother's cookie recipes and with her husband, Jefferson Diller, started selling them to local stores. They'd bake out of their kitchen and then distribute to their customers. Quickly after starting, they moved to a commercial space in Lee.

In 2012, they entered and won a contest for a "packaging makeover" through a magazine and things started to take off.

"It was a huge opportunity," said Diller, adding sales jumped 30 percent with the new packaging.

They needed to open up more markets for their products, about the time PERC received $150,000 through the Mass Broadband Institute to help companies do just that. The Lee business was awarded $1,181 to revamp its website to open up for retail.

"We were able to revamp our website which resulted in holiday sales, online sales," Diller said. "We've found ourselves at a place where we can grow again."

Now they've grown so quick that they've had to open up a warehouse and will soon be looking to upgrade their facility as they look to take yet another step.

John Gigliotti has already taken a step with his business. Whole Life Pet Products was founded in 2007 as mostly a marketing company that outsourced manufacturing. The company makes high-quality pet treats based on all-natural ingredients and it took off for bit. Then it got stuck in a rut.

"We were kind of stuck as a company. We had our first reflection point. We had to outsource our manufacturing process because the equipment is enormously expensive and we weren't ready. But we really knew that if we wanted to take the business to the next level, we had to have the whole process in house," Gigliotti said.

As he reeled in his manufacturing and brought it under his control, he needed to rebrand the company as a wholesale manufacturer instead of just a marketing arm, meaning he needed a whole new business plan.


"One of missing pieces of puzzle for us at that time was there is a big transition to go from small boutiques to larger accounts to grocery chains to online to big-box stores and it was well beyond my knowledge," he said. "I needed to find a company with the knowledge and expertise to develop a brand and plan."

PERC awarded him $15,000 to hire a consultant to set a plan in motion to become a major player in the pet food market. Now, Gigliotti's products are starting to hit the shelves in supermarkets, PetCo and PetSmart.

"From that plan, we got into grocery chains. We had a massive expansion in online sales. We started looking at a number of channels and exporting our products. We took the building to about 1,000 stores," he said.

Top: Josh Levin of LympheDivas and Jennifer Moriarty of Boyd Technologies.

Center: Jefferson Diller of Klara's Gourmet Cookies.

Bottom: John Gigliotti of Whole Life Pet Products and Scott Kirchner of Mad Macs.

When Stephen Boyd took over his family business, things weren't looking so good. From 2006 to 2010, Boyd Technologies' saw its customers struggling and buying less and less. The paper company dropped from 120 employees down to just 50.

"We had a pretty big struggle," said Jennifer Moriarty, the company's human resources director.

Boyd saw an opportunity to tap into a new market. He invested $1.5 million in his Lee facility to create products for biopharmaceutical filtration, wound care and power storage and delivery products. But with all that money wrapped into the needed equipment, Boyd found there was a shortage of employees trained to the level needed for the medical industry.

"At the same time we made that investment, we needed to invest in people, too. It is so great to have the equipment and great to have the facility but if your people aren't ready to work in these very precise, demanding markets ... " Moriarty said.

Moriarty scrambled to talk with Berkshire Community College about what skills were needed, which then pointed her to PERC.

The company was awarded $2,700 to undertake a state manufacturing assessment helping it sort out the details of the new vision, provide training and plans. Now, the company is seeking a workforce training grant to grow employees' skill even more.

Scott Kirchner start his Mad Macs out of his car. He knew Apple products and drove around fixing other people's products. Without anyone else in the area specializing in that, his business took off and he opened a small storefront.

Customers started asking him to sell the products, but that meant entering the retail business and growing the service business as well. He needed to added employees and give them the same expertise he had from all of those years working out of his car.

"We needed employees, we needed to get them trained and train them effectively. We used some of the money we had was not only to get training for our employees but to train ourselves. We joined a national organization of Apple specialists, flew down to Texas and we spent about a week working with Apple directly," Kirchner said. "We retrained ourselves in a way that we can effectively use that education for our employees."

He was awarded $45,000 from the Pittsfield Small Business Fund that allowed him to train employees, manage finances and increase his inventory. He opened his first full store on North Street and just this year opened his second in Williamstown.

"That really increased our cash flow," Kirchner said. "Cash flow was something we really need to maintain. This money help us build the financial base so we could build off of it. We could bring more employees in and get them trained in an effective way."

These are some examples of what PERC, a quasi-public agency, does in the economic development field.

This year, they received $150,000 from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute to help bridge the "digital divide" between businesses and the state's expansion of broadband. And this year, they commissioned an advanced manufacturing study for the county with the University of Massachusetts.

"It's been a pretty busy year. The real key for us is that we have an all-volunteer board of directors," PERC President Jay Anderson said.

 


Tags: business development,   PERC,   

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Community Hero of the Month: Officer Joshua Tracy

By Sabrina DammsiBerkshires Staff
LEE, Mass.—Lee Police Department patrolman Joshua Tracy has been selected for the February Community Hero of the Month. 
 
The Community Hero of the Month series runs for the next 9 months in partnership with Haddad Auto. Nominated community members and organizations have gone above and beyond to make a positive impact on their community. 
 
Tracy has been an officer in the Berkshires for seven years, working for multiple departments including North Adams, Pittsfield, and as of approximately 5 months ago, Lee. 
 
Prior to being an officer, Tracy served 12 years in the Army National Guard. He became an officer when he left the service because it not only allowed him to help others, which he knew he enjoyed, but allowed him to utilize his military training. 
 
When on a call, Tracy knows he is likely walking into someone's worst day, which is why he strives to be a dependable person for the people out in the community, he said. 
 
"I think the thing that I think about the most of making an impact is showing up on these calls that we go on and de-escalating and calming the situation down," Tracy said. 
 
"You know, most of the time when we show up, it's because someone's having one of their worst days or just a really bad day."
 
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