The first time John Janeczek was laid off — from a marketing job at Pittsfield giant General Electric — he scoured the want ads, fired off resumes and landed a new position in a couple of months. But when the marketing department at paper machinery manufacturer Beloit Corp. folded a few weeks later and he was laid off again, Janeczek gave up on big business.
“I looked around and I just decided that I wasn’t going to go for three times, so maybe I ought to start a business on my own,” he recalled recently. “The way the economy was looking around here, if I wanted a really good job, we would have had to move out of the area.”
Janeczek, who had worked for G.E.’s defense division, had little small business experience in 1989. But he had the bug. And he learned the rest at Berkshire Enterprises.
The 12-week training program for would-be entrepreneurs taught Janeczek everything he needed to know about starting his own company, from finding customers to managing cash flow. Today he is one of the Pittsfield program’s greatest success stories. He created Cleaner Environment Technologies with a $5,000 loan, and now installs water treatment and air filtration systems in homes and offices all over the Berkshires. A savvy businessman, he won’t divulge details, but says he’s made a profit for six years.
More than 1,600 dislocated workers have graduated from similar entrepreneurial training programs in Massachusetts. More than 1,000 have started businesses, of which almost 700 are still up and running, says Beth Badger, who oversees the federally funded programs for the state’s quasi-public Corporation for Business, Work, and Learning. They range from the far out — a North Shore woman who lost her job at an architectural firm and launched the Hamilton Horse Cookie Co. — to the familiar — the dozens of people who run consulting, construction or graphic arts companies out of their homes.
The idea for Berkshire Enterprises came from Pittsfield-area officials who wanted to try something different with federal job-training money. Usually the U.S. Department of Labor pays for people to be retrained for new work with existing employers. The problem in Berkshire County in the late 1980s was there weren’t many places to apply. General Electric closed its transformer division after losing $25 million in 1986, and soon started shrinking its defense operation. Paper mills cut back. Thousands of people lost jobs, and the impact was felt from dry cleaners to car dealers around the region, says Berkshire Enterprises co-founder Vicky Singer.
The Donahue Institute at UMass-Amherst won the bid to run the program, which is now considered one of the institute’s projects. Today it boasts more than 500 graduates and 300 business starts. All but a few dozen of the new ventures have survived, Singer says. You can find several in downtown Pittsfield, not far from the converted train station where Berkshire Enterprises holds classes. BerkshireNet, an Internet service provider, set up shop across the street. A children’s play center called Blue Skies & Rainbows opened around the corner. Outside the city are restaurants, inns, galleries and gift shops, signs of the services that have replaced manufacturing as the region’s major industry.
Of course, a few new start-ups can’t measurably improve the economy. Though some have employed a dozen people, most provide jobs to one or two. Many new business owners, like Janeczek, who runs the water treatment company from his dining room table in rural Lanesboro, are on their own. But considered together, the new businesses nurtured by Berkshire Enterprises contribute more than $20 million to the area each year, Singer estimates. “Within this community, we’re one of the bright spots,” she adds. “It’s a very positive force to turn out people who are going to stay in the Berkshires and create business.” Claudine Chavanne of the regional chamber of commerce agrees the program “fills a critical need in the county.”
Ironically, the founders learned quickly that there were not as many Janeczeks as they expected. They hoped the program would generate enough small manufacturing companies to make up for the big ones that were leaving, but many of the engineers and managers left, too. Instead many clients were blue-collar workers or home-makers who wanted to turn hobbies like furniture-making into a new career.
John Ciccarelli, who runs the state’s Small Business Development Center Network, warns that entrepreneurial training will never be the answer to downsizing. “It’s a very difficult thing to run a business….It’s not for everyone,” he says. “There’s still a debate that needs to happen as to whether self-employment is really the new jobs program.”
This year the federal government is giving Massachusetts $1.5 million — the most ever — for entrepreneurial training. The Corporation for Business, Work, and Learning sent $309,000 to Pittsfield, and funds other programs in Easthampton, Hyannis and Fall River. The agency also runs its own programs in Wilmington, Westboro and Quincy, where the first group graduated on Halloween.
Meanwhile, the Berkshires are bracing for more layoffs. General Dynamics, which bought G.E.’s defense facility from Lockheed-Martin, expects to let go another 650 people by summer. Vicky Singer doesn’t expect to see all of them. But she’s already had some calls.
