New Strategies Tried
For Business 'Incubator'
By M. D. Drysdale

Vermont Technical College is putting new resources and a new strategy into the struggling Vermont Tech Enterprise Center on Route 66, the business incubator space that was formerly the home of DuBois & King Engineers.

Carpenters are working throughout much of the 8250-square-foot upper building, restructuring a warren of small offices into two spacious suites and a conference room which will, it is hoped, be more inviting to small businesses.

The space had proven pretty much unrentable in its former condition, confirmed VTC Dean Jack Daniels.

"It just didn't work," he said last week.

So, more than three years after the college took possession of the building, with the help of a $750,000 federal grant from HUD, VTC came up with $40,000 more to renovate the building and bring it to code.

At the same time, the Vermont Small Business Development Center (VSBDC), a division of VTC which runs the Enterprise Center, has altered its approach to recruitment.

The terms of the federal grant specified as a goal that the business incubator project was supposed to create 38 new jobs in three years, but the grant was officially closed last week far short of that goal.

Recruitment had been in the hands of a part-time administrator, Laura Kent. However, Kent's job was eliminated last year.

Recruitment of business tenants will now be the job of VSBDC's 12 offices all over Vermont, according to Lenae Quillen-Blume, the state director, whose office is in the Enterprise Center.

The VSBDC's Heather Gonyaw is office manager of the Randolph office.

At those 12 offices statewide, experts give free counsel to start-up businesses in such matters as financing, business plans, marketing, accounting, and the like. The organization counsels 400 people a year, Quillen-Blume said.

Word-of-mouth and referrals by counsellors is the main recruitment strategy now, she said.

The committee which works with businesses has also been restructured to make faster decisions, she noted.

"It seems to be working," she declared in an interview last week.

In fact, VTC's Daniels said that recruitment has improved since Kent's departure which, he confirmed, was a cost-cutting measure because the Center hasn't covered costs.

The Center's board approved three applications last Friday, including one three-month test lease and a three-month business expanding to a full year.

Disappointing So Far

So far, the Enterprise Center's performance as a business incubator appears to have been even weaker than the official documents would indicate.

According to the Vermont Community Development Program, which administers the federal HUD grant, the incubator created 19 jobs, compared to the target of 38.

However, officials confirmed, many or most of the jobs claimed for the incubator were jobs that had moved there from other offices or from home businesses but were not created.

For instance, the "anchor tenant" in the 10,800-square-foot lower building is Endyne, Inc., whose jobs were "counted" in the 19. Endyne, though, is simply the new name for Scitest, Inc., a division of DuBois & King which had been in the buildng all along, so that the incubator did not create those jobs.

Quillen-Blume did note last week that Endyne has added four jobs to its original workforce.

Other companies, such as JumpStart Marketing and Fire Safety Marketing, simply moved their operations to the incubator; Fire Safety has subsequently moved out.

One of the major tenants, Locust Creek Graphics, moved to the center from Randolph Center but moved out last year.

The generous public financing for the Enterprise Center is a bit irksome to James Dwinell of JD Properties, owner of the former Ethan Allen plant on Hull Street.

Hull Street Success

While the publicly-funded incubator has struggled, Dwinell has had considerable success creating a privately-funded business incubator at the old plant.

"We don't create jobs; we rent space," he cautioned this week. Nevertheless, since he took over the huge (173,000 square foot) plant three years ago, Dwinell has managed to fill much of it with a variety of companies, several of which expanded. Some 40 people are employed in the building, he said, and a couple of other firms grew there and expanded elsewhere.

As of yesterday, the parking lot's 35 cars bespoke considerable activity.

JD Properties has so much space to offer that it makes a natural warehousing facility, and Dwinell's rent of $4.50 per square foot is attractive to that kind of use, in addition to offices and manufacturing.

The company with the most employees there is LED Dynamics, an innovative firm exploring new uses for LED lighting technology.

Dwinell noted that space at the old Ethan Allen plant is also being used by a robotics club and by RUHS for its baseball batting cage.

Back on Route 66, VTC Dean Daniels remains hopeful that the Enterprise Center can have some of the same success and says the trend is in the right direction.

He noted that theoretically the Enterprise Center is an excellent match for VTC. Faculty members and graduates looking to start small businesses have a great space right down the hill at the Center, for reasonable rates ($10 per square foot) with such amenities as broadband access through VTC's T1 line, and complimentary passes to SHAPE and library privileges.

However, he confirmed that business creation from VTC sources "hasn't happened yet. But maybe someday it will."