VT BIZ
After earning their diplomas at UVM, many alumni are
proving that the state where they studied is also a great
place to build a business. A look at some of the alumni
helping to change Vermont’s economic landscape.
FUSE MARKETING
Issa Sawabini is making his case for the power of skateboard nation. Take me out to the ballgame, yeah, sure, but consider that there are thirteen million skateboarders in the United States. That’s two million more skateboarders than baseball players.
Those aiming to sell clothes, shoes, soft drinks, snacks, gear, and whatnot to some of this thirteen million are well-advised to listen to Sawabini and his colleagues at Fuse Marketing. And many of them do. The Vermont-based firm, of which Sawabini is one of three owners, has established itself among the nation’s go-to agencies for reaching the youth market (ages twelve to thirty-five) with special expertise in the action sports world.
Skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, wakeboarding, motocross, BMX, freeskiing. Sawabini rattles off the pursuits under the action sports tent with a familiarity born from frequently pitching clients, talking with media, and speaking at marketing seminars and conferences. All of the sports are defined by speed, daring, and a certain rebel cachet. Cool is part of the game, and few can match Fuse’s knowledge and experience when it comes to defining a product’s image while riding that fine line between cool and lame.
Sawabini, a thirty-two-year-old with a large presence, shaved head, and soul patch, exudes credibility, confidence, and, yes, cool that personify his firm’s ability to move with equal authority in the worlds of shaggy teenagers or button-down corporate types. He was recently included in Sports Business Journal’s annual “40 Under 40 Awards,” a list of the most influential young executives in the sporting world.
Fuse headquarters relocated this summer to the ground floor of an old, riverside mill building in Winooski, renovation still in progress. Sawabini shows it off with a walk around. Nineteenth-century brick and beams meet bold twenty-first-century colors on the walls; stubble-faced guys wearing large headphones and stiff baseball caps glance up from their computer screens; a few dogs meander.
Sawabini takes a detour into a raw, vast space at the building’s west end. It’s the size of a small school gym with a ceiling that soars up several stories. He describes plans to leave it open and rough, a sort of in-house playground with a skateboard ramp, basketball hoop, DJ equipment. “The people at Fuse have an ability to communicate with this younger audience because we live and breathe everything that they do,” Sawabini says. “We may be getting older, but I don’t think anyone here will ever give up their passion for snowboarding or skateboarding or whatever it might be.”
Pressed about that pesky “getting older” issue (Sawa-bini, after all, is just a few years shy of graduating from Fuse’s target demographic) he smiles and jokes, “This is Never Never Land, so we actually can’t get older.” While Fuse stays young and current through new talent and through the young-at-heart ethos of the place, they also accomplish it through long hours and homework, sheer diligence that is belied by the ’boarder vibe.
For Sawabini, that work included three weeks on the road last summer doing immersion research on the lives of teenagers. “We walk into their houses, sit down with them and their friends, talk about the stuff on their walls, talk about their favorite things, look in their closets, look in their kitchen, fire up their computers, and have them show us the movies they put on YouTube,” Sawabini says.
For Fuse and the clients they serve, keeping pace with pop culture’s quicksilver change is essential to thrive or even survive in a youth market that relishes exposing a phony. “When brands get it wrong, they’re actually hurting their brand more than they’re helping it,” Sawabini says. “With the Internet, this audience has such an ability to laugh at them in public. They just get dragged around.”
A recreation management major in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, Sawabini imagined his career before he lived it when he wrote a business plan in Dave Kaufman’s entrepreneurship class. Unaware that founding partners Bill Carter and Brett Smith were beginning to nurture such a firm right in Burlington, he essentially described Fuse, envisioning “an agency that would help companies connect with snowboarding and mountain biking and do these things correctly—because I, as a consumer, was seeing them all stumble over themselves and do some really terrible marketing.”
Beyond the classroom, Sawabini was involved in Student Association Concerts and founded UVM’s mountain bike club, activities that he credits for introducing him to event planning and rallying a group around sports.
Fuse was a much smaller business, a handful of employees, when Sawabini started an unpaid internship the day after his UVM graduation. He immediately dug into familiar territory from his college days as he helped organize a mountain bike festival. Over the course of the past ten years, that unpaid internship has evolved into paying job and eventually partnership in the firm, which has grown to a staff of forty-five in Burlington and a small New York City office.
Though Sawabini grew up in Buffalo, New York, he has a strong family connection to UVM and Vermont. Both of his parents, Wadi ’73 and Mary G’75, are alumni, and his grandfather was head of UVM’s erstwhile dental program. A return to those roots during college made sense for Issa Sawabini III, in part because of the recreational options of Burlington. A poster boy for the work hard/play hard ethos, Sawabini estimates he went snowboarding 100 days a year, yet never missed a class and graduated magna cum laude. “I was able to find a good balance, but I did spend a lot of time driving on 89,” he says.
Many of those same attractions that drew him to Vermont for college make the area a good fit for Fuse. It’s not only a hub for a number of action-sport related businesses, but it’s a place his staff loves to live and his clients love to visit. “It’s something special, I think, when we’re pitching business,” Sawabini says. “We’re not just another New York agency. We’re not just another Boston agency. We bring a different perspective, and I think we’re often remembered and we stand out because of it.”
Thomas Weaver
photo by Sally McCay
MYWEBGROCER
Given the business experience and competitive drive of the names heading up MyWebGrocer, it should come as no surprise that the ten-year-old Colchester-based company is already the nation’s leading resource for buying groceries online.
The Tarrant brothers—Jerry ’89, Rich ’90, and Brian ’93—have a history of running successful businesses together with each handling his respective area of expertise. A prime example is Amicus Healthcare, a group of assisted-living facilities built and managed by the Tarrants that ultimately employed 350 people, before being sold for multiple seven figures. Brian handled operations; Jerry focused on the development, financing, and construction; and Rich sat on the board but focused primarily on starting MyWebGrocer in New York.
Despite going their separate ways following graduation from UVM, where Rich and Brian were captains on the basketball team and Jerry was a star defenseman for the hockey Cats, they always knew they’d reunite in a work capacity somewhere down the line. That seemed unlikely given their first jobs. Jerry played semi-pro hockey after being drafted by the Calgary Flames; Rich went to Wall Street to trade treasury bills; and Brian moved to California to work at a retirement facility to gain an operational understanding of how healthcare facilities are run.
“We always knew that we would be entrepreneurial based on what we witnessed growing up,” says Rich, who recalls sitting around the kitchen table with his brothers listening to their father, Richard Tarrant, founder of IDX Systems Corp., talk about business and life. “Our father did a good job of warning us of the ‘dangers of partnerships and working with family’ and we heeded that advice. The first thing we always do before advancing our business ideas is to build out the operating agreement between partners that would cover every possible situation, including parameters for a partner exiting a business in the future if they decided. That way there were no arguments in the future if the situation changed. There are also huge advantages to working with people you trust implicitly, and who also have the same work ethic.”
As Amicus Healthcare was growing, the Tarrants launched MyWebGrocer, an operation of seventy-plus employees specializing in eCommerce and eMarketing solutions for the grocery and consumer packaged goods industries. Founded in 1999, MyWebGrocer (myweb grocer.com) is already the largest company of its kind with annual revenue in excess of $15 million and growing.
MyWebGrocer assists ShopRite, Lowes Food Stores, Food Lion and other major grocery chains in establishing websites and other mechanisms for their shoppers to purchase groceries online. The average online order is forty items totaling about $140—four times the average in-store purchase.
“We were sitting around a table discussing the Internet, and the power of the Internet,” says Rich, recalling a conversation with his brothers and sister-in-law. “And then someone asked: ‘Why can’t I order my groceries from the grocery store down the road?’ That’s when the basic idea for MyWebGrocer was born.”
The service allows shoppers to pick up their pre-bagged groceries at the store for a $5–10 fee or have them delivered. Rich, who serves as CEO, says MyWeb Grocer generates revenue from a transaction fee from each shopper’s purchase and from monthly service fees paid for by grocery stores for services such as Internet marketing and advertising.
The Tarrants chose to keep the headquarters of their national business close to home and say they often look to recent grads to build their staff. “We’re continuing to grow,” says Rich. “I hope this company can become a major employer in the state, but there are a lot of factors to consider when you scale out a company.”
Jon Reidel G’06
Photo by Sally McCay
C2 COMPETITIVE COMPUTING
Melissa and I have a very complementary relationship—when we’re not fighting,” says Carolyn Edwards ’72, president and CEO of Competitive Computing, now mostly known by edgier shorthand, C2. Edwards and vice president of engineering Melissa Dever ’75, G’82 laugh heartily, sisters in successful entrepreneurship born of passion and hard work. They are sitting in a chic fourth-floor conference room with a wall of glass that boasts one of the perks of doing business in Vermont: a postcard vista of lake and mountains. If long hours have meant viewing a lot of sunsets over the Adirondacks since launching their business technology consulting company in 1993, Dever, Edwards, and the two other principles are also having fun.
All four were laid off from Digital Equipment Corporation when its South Burlington facility closed, leaving them with respectable severance packages and a choice. Years of IT expertise could have taken them anywhere, but they stayed put. “That was part of our motivation,” Dever recalls. “Let’s do this and create our own destiny in Vermont.”
They started a frugal shop with about eleven employees, other entrepreneurial-minded former DECers. Now they employ fifty-five people with up to ten independent contractors. The core mission of C2, a Microsoft gold certified partner, is to turn technology into client profits.
Having spent much of their careers as road warriors, preparing for the next deal at 35,000 feet, Edwards and Dever say they were surprised by how much business they found in Vermont—banks and biotechs, industry leaders like NRG, Green Mountain Coffee, and Seventh Generation, which made Computerworld’s list of top green IT companies with systems created by C2. Local entities make up 60 to 70 percent of their client base.
“Here in Vermont,” says Edwards, “you’ve got just as sophisticated business models, you’ve got very forward-thinking companies, and you can really have an impact on what’s going on out there.” They work with high-end, small, and mid-level companies where they have access to decision makers. In turn, as a small firm, their clients work directly with seasoned professionals who have “dirt under their fingernails,” as Dever puts it.
Being tucked away in a small state is no longer the disadvantage it once was, according to Edwards, given cutting-edge virtual capabilities. They just landed an account, in fact, with a $2 billion company in Oakland, California. And the Vermont cachet is a draw for recruiting outstanding mid-level professionals from metropolitan areas looking for a family-friendly locale, a value Dever and Edwards understand having grown up and raised their own children in Vermont.
Dever, with her master’s in computer science from UVM, is steeped in the technology side, while Edwards leans toward business, but the overlap is deep—synergistic they say. Dever says she’s the one who’s more risk adverse. “But we’ve created a company that is built on taking risks, finding the new thing,” Edwards counters. Asked about their ratio of fighting to complementary efforts, Dever grins and says, “We’ll be escorting you to the door now.”
Lee Ann Cox
photo by Alison Alexander
HUBBARDTON FORGE
In early April 1973, George Chandler and Reed Hampton moved south. The near-grads—both self- professed city boys finishing up their work at UVM—traded life in Burlington for a rougher existence in Chandler’s great uncle’s home in Hubbardton, Vermont, a ninety-minute drive from the Queen City. On that abandoned property, with a house lacking electricity and plumbing, vacant since Chandler’s uncle’s death in 1962, the pair began the work of shoveling out the manure-filled barn to build a forge.
Having taken several art classes at UVM, where they’d met, Chandler and Hampton had developed an appreciation for tactile, aesthetic work. But their knowledge of forging metal was limited. “We really didn’t know anything,” Chandler admits. “You think you do, but it was almost five years of diving in and trying to figure it out.” The learning was rigorous, the conditions less than ideal. “If there was a thaw in the middle of winter, water would run through the walls of the barn and freeze under your feet, and you’d skate around,” Chandler remembers. “Your body was 150 degrees on the forge side, and on your back you could make ice cubes.”
During those years of “figuring it out,” they took construction jobs to pay the bills, helping farmers prop up falling silos, and other available gigs. “How we didn’t get killed doing it, I have no idea,” Chandler says. “But that paid for building the first shop.”
Today, Hubbardton Forge is an international business, with 225 employees, specializing in hand-forged, wrought-iron lighting and accessories. After outgrowing the barn, they relocated to a nearby Castleton facility, where they’ve since expanded nine times, from 10,000 to 120,000 square-feet. They produce 700 to 1,000 fixtures a day, from an available selection of nearly 460,000 different iterations.
Hampton and Chandler have grown this business for thirty-six years in Vermont, a state not especially known for its manufacturing jobs. Attracting talented manufacturing managers to small-town Castleton has been one of the biggest challenges. “We either have to develop them or bring them in,” Chandler says of management. “You can develop what you know, but as you grow, you need to be pulling in people who know more about where you need to go than you do.”
The state’s progressive environmental policy hasn’t been an issue for Hubbardton as they’ve expanded operations. “We’ve been through Act 250 many times,” Hampton says in reference to Vermont’s development and environmental regulation act. “I think it’s a good thing; it just takes time.”
While environmental regulations haven’t been a hindrance, reducing the business’s footprint has been a priority. The latest endeavor is a new cleaner, now in beta testing, that uses bio-remediation to scrub metal of oils and dirt before the finish is applied. If successful, they’ll be the first operation in the world to use this innovative and phosphate-free method. Their green business practices—and their treatment of employees—have been award-winners as frequently as their lighting designs. Hubbardton Forge is a multi-year recipient of the Governor’s Award for Environmental Excellence and a 2006 winner of the Best Places to Work in Vermont Award.
With days in the unheated barn and side construction jobs solidly behind them, Hampton and Chandler have their eyes on retirement. Their three-day-a-week schedules allow them to focus on bringing up the next generation to take the business over. It’s the culture of the company they hope lives on.
“We’ve got some good people on the leadership team,” Chandler says. “Hopefully you’re not transferring skills anymore; you’ve got people with the skills. You’re transferring objective, intent, culture, things that allow them to make the right decisions.”
Amanda Waite ’02 G’04
Photo by Alison Redlich
MICROSTRAIN
His business began with rats. More specifically, rats’ knees.
It was 1978, and UVM sophomore Steve Arms had landed a good work-study job in the department of orthopaedics and rehabilitation. “I’d take dead lab rats and prepare a specimen that was just the medial collateral ligament and the bones on either end,” says Arms, president and founder of MicroStrain, Inc., pointing his two index fingers together like a joint.
In the lab of Dr. Robert Johnson, Arms would load the specimen into a machine that would repeatedly flex the knee. “We were trying to figure out how the ligament was affected by cyclic loading. There was interest in the idea that ski injuries could be prevented this way,” he says.
Arms began to ask Johnson basic questions, like: “How do you know what strain level to set this machine to? What are the strains when people ski or walk?” he says, smiling broadly at the recollection. “I was a curious kid.”
“And the answer came back, ‘Well, we don’t really know!’” he says. “So I asked: how come you don’t know? ‘Because we don’t know how to measure it.’”
Arms decided to look for a solution. Over the next few years, he developed an innovative device to measure strain—“a tube with a magnetic sensor and teeny magnet,” he says—that became the first strain gauges ever implanted in the knee ligaments of a living human.
Since then, Arms and his company have gotten extraordinarily good at measuring motion: in 2003, when the Liberty Bell needed to be moved, the National Park Service called in MicroStrain to detect whether the bell’s famed crack was widening by even a hundredth of a hair’s width.
It wasn’t. But the company’s business has expanded beyond miniature strain gauges. In a conference room of his 19,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, Arms picks up a black plastic wafer about the size of a Lego. “In here are three gyroscopes, three magnetometers, and three accelerometers, on three axes—and a processor that reads all that,” he says, holding it aloft near one of the equation-covered white boards that line the walls.
“It knows its pitch, roll, and yaw,” he says and then slides it downward through the air like a toy plane, “and it knows how fast you accelerated. Combine that with some more math, and you can get a good estimate of location.”
Which can help rescuers find a downed firefighter in a burning building, or guide an unmanned aircraft, or help an oil company map a hole two miles deep.
Answering basic questions about how to measure movement, location, and force—in ever-smaller devices, harsher conditions, and with less power—has propelled Arms from a one-man business in his graduate student apartment on Park Street in Burlington, to a fifty-person company in Williston with $10 million in annual revenue.
“Our business is constantly innovating, so it’s really important to be near a university,” he says. “We hire lots of UVM students who have worked here as interns. Vermonters are very self-motivated.”
Today, MicroStrain builds a range of “microminiature” devices like wearable medical dataloggers, and thumbnail-length sensors that work in boiling hot oil or that wirelessly broadcast structural damage within a bridge.
“We’ve grown 30 to 40 percent every year for the last five years,” he says, “and a major reason for our success is that we take the time to find out what our customers’ problems are and what they really want.”
“Like this,” he says, and points to a helicopter mast, whipping around in his company’s test lab. It’s part of a contract MicroStrain made with the Navy to build a wireless system to monitor wear on rotating parts in helicopters—and that uses energy harvested from the helicopter’s own motion to power the sensors.
“One of my big areas of interest now is cyclic loading on metals and fatigue of mechanical parts, like these helicopter components,” Arms says, “My path has led me back to what I started doing with those rat knee specimens a long time ago.”
Joshua Brown
photo by Sally McCay
CREATIVE MICROSYSTEMS
Julie Parker and husband Bill Parker live in a different world from most of us. It’s the world of nanotechnology, where the components of the products they make are measured in nanometers (a billionth of a meter) and microns (a millionth of a meter), production happens in cleanrooms and laboratories, and the products have names like “ablation masks,” “diffractive optical elements,” “microfluidic devices,” and “nanorod arrays.”
The Parkers are co-founders of Creative MicroSystems Corporation (CMC) in Waitsfield, which has become one of Vermont’s growing number of high-tech business hubs. CMC has a twenty-year history of innovation for the telecommunications, biotech, micro-electronics, photonics, and other industries. The company is a spin-off from a firm called Diffraction LTD, which Julie founded in 1989.
Julie received her bachelor’s degree in physics and art at UVM—an unusual pairing that led her to discover the Holography Lab taught by John Perry in the Physics Department. She went on to earn a master’s degree from the Media Laboratory at MIT, where she met husband Bill. “The work that I did with John Perry was instrumental in getting me into the program at MIT,” she says. While at MIT, she had the opportunity to work with The Spatial Imaging Group founded by Steve Benton that focused on industrial holography or holography as applied to medical imaging, computer-aided design, and data visualization.
Bill received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT, holds several dozen patents, and is an advisor to many organizations in the areas of nanotechnology and advanced imaging. He’s also the creator of the “plasma ball,” that captivating globe that produces miniature, multi-colored lightning bolts at the touch of a hand. The couple settled on Vermont as the place to start their businesses because Julie’s tie to UVM and Bill having grown up in Milton and Duxbury made it a natural fit.
In the early years of Diffraction LTD, Julie’s work centered on producing holograms for clients ranging from artists to marketers to tourist attractions. Then she branched out and started taking on more industrial clients. Understanding the world of nanotechnology and microfabrication is a challenge. But she has a way of making it less of a mystery for the uninitiated. “We control light,” she says matter-of-factly. “If you know the physics behind it, you can control where you want light to go.”
One of the places the company makes light go is through their holographic ablation masks that are currently being developed for use in the fabrication of silicon chips. It’s a product that has the potential to change the entire chip fabrication industry because it significantly lowers manufacturing costs and doesn’t require the large quantities of water and toxic chemicals of the older technologies. “As green as it gets,” says Bill.
CMC has a number of ongoing ties to UVM. One of them is a collaboration with UVM scientists on the development of a new kind of microscale silicon rubber chip designed specifically for cancer research. They are working to develop miniature devices that can help cancer researchers analyze cellular movement and determine cellular level reaction to a variety of potential cancer treatments. The collaboration includes the UVM Department of Pharmacology, Vermont Cancer Center, and CMC staff.
Jay Goyette
