UTICA — Howard Potter started A&P Master Images as a hobby with his wife Amanda Potter, and grew it into a full-time business so he could keep a promise to his daughter.

At 3 years old, she was ill and hospitalized, he recalls in a phone interview, and “I promised I’d always be by her side.”

His job as a spare caster at Revere Copper Products in Rome made keeping that pledge complicated due to his skill set, so the college-trained graphic artist grew his home-based graphic arts business from a hobby to a company he could work for full-time by 2006.

It wasn’t easy to convince his wife that entrepreneurship was the answer for their family. “I really didn’t want to do it at all,” Amanda Potter says in a video on the company website. “There were lots of nights and lots of fights.”

Despite her doubts, Amanda was always his “No. 1 champion,” Howard says. She would work at the business after working at her day job — and taking care of their two children. By 2009, the business was running well enough that Amanda was able to leave her other job and join A&P full-time. 

Last year, A&P’s revenue rose by $250,000 to $1.9 million on sales of custom screen printing, embroidery, promotional materials, and vinyl graphics. 

Amanda and Howard Potter are two of the company’s 18 full-time employees, serving customers in 15 states and five countries, he explains. Amanda owns 51 percent of A&P Master Images, making it a woman-owned business enterprise.

Clients include area retailers, car dealers, not-for-profits, and associations. Some clients have online “stores” where employees can go to order work uniforms and other custom apparel from A&P.

The company has also won business in other states, and Howard Potter credits local colleges for that. Students who worked with A&P on projects for their college clubs or programs while at school in the Mohawk Valley or nearby, remember the company after they graduate and go to work elsewhere — and recommend it to their employers. “We’ve gotten a lot of business that way,” he says.

When traveling, the Potters are ready should an opportunity arise. Howard says he wears branded apparel and “we always have business cards on us.”

To keep faraway customers, he says A&P makes an extra effort. “You have to be more cognizant of being personable to your client.” He says they sometimes video conference with distant clients to keep the relationship close “so you can be face to face.”

Howard Potter says the company has many guidelines to keep quality at the level that keeps customers coming back. A&P has built good relationships with quality vendors — only ones rated highly by an industry group. That’s particularly important, he adds, when more than 30 percent of A&P’s business is comprised of rush orders. 

The company’s success has required some creative thinking when it comes to space. Five years ago, A&P moved into a 5,500-square-foot building on Water Street in Utica. “Eight months (later) and we grew out of the space,” he says. 

Rather than move, the company has managed. Howard says the space is neat, clean, and very well organized — “it’s ergonomically laid out.” Just 400 square feet is dedicated to the showroom where customers can see some of the array of products the company sells. 

Rather than add onto the building, the Potters have brought in trailers to store material on the two-acre site. They have four trailers ranging from 6-feet to 53-feet long. They have considered expanding the building or constructing another one, but the site is on a flood plain and the cost of mandated flood insurance has them wondering if there may be a better option.

Where to grow may be a question, but whether to grow is not. Howard Potter says he expects annual revenue growth to continue at a 12 percent to 15 percent clip.

And that daughter? She’s 15 now and when she’s not at school or involved in activities, her father says she works part-time at A&P Master Images.       

SALINA — Less than three years after startup and four months after opening its first office, Drive Research’s revenue growth is speeding up and the market-research firm is expanding its staff.

George Kuhn started Drive Research in June 2016 as a solo proprietorship, working from his home in Baldwinsville. The business focuses on voice-of-customer and customer-experience research using surveys, phone interviews, focus groups, and other research methods to obtain data. Kuhn previously worked in market research for more than 10 years at other local market-research firms including KS&R and Research & Marketing Strategies (RMS), before working for Advance Media New York (formerly Syracuse Media Group) as its research director.

Drive Research has grown to a team of nine people — four full-time employees (including Kuhn) and five part-time workers to help with research projects.

This past October, Drive Research opened its first office in an 1,800-square-foot space in the Sherwood Office Park on Buckley Road in the town of Salina. It includes office space and a fully equipped focus-group facility.

“All data pointed to us needing to grow our team and our capabilities here in Syracuse to support the additional project requests,” Kuhn, sole owner and president of Drive Research, says regarding the need to open an office after operating as a virtual company for more than two years. “It was time.”

Revenue at Drive Research doubled in 2018 compared to 2017, Kuhn tells CNYBJ. Since opening its new office, the company’s growth has accelerated. 

Through the first three weeks of 2019, Drive Research was “halfway to how much we made in all of 2018 in revenue. So, we are growing fast after we [opened] this office,” Kuhn says. “We closed a government contract…doing the math we’re hoping to have a real good year,” he adds.

The new contract is with the Education Development Center in New York City. This specific market-research study is being done for PBS, according to Kuhn. Other Drive Research clients include the New York State Fair, Syracuse University, VIP Structures, NBT Bank, and Advance Media New York. It has also worked with national and international clients like Google, T-Mobile, and Clorox.

Kuhn says that Drive Research will soon grow to a staff of six full-time workers. 

“We’ve got two positions we’re looking for right now. We’re looking for kind of a facility/office manager — someone who can help book the facility, manage a team of part-time recruiters, and also manage the front office here for us,” he says. The firm is also seeking to hire a marketing coordinator.

New office details

Kuhn says he looked for a new office over a 12-month period, including several downtown Syracuse properties. 

“We wanted to be downtown. We obviously knew we wanted to do a [focus group] facility. We had a lot of clients requesting that. The issues with downtown, obviously the parking, the accessibility… it was rough,” says Kuhn. 

“So, this spot being really close to downtown, highway access…you know, you can see 81 and the Thruway right there,” he says, looking out the window of his office. “Parking is free on-site, which was huge for us… and the fact that we’re still really close to downtown, really close to the airport was huge for our clients.”

Drive Research signed a seven-year lease for its space at 6702 Buckley Road, which it moved into in late October. Kuhn says his landlord is Mufale Partners of Fayetteville. Onondaga County property records list the owner as Sherwood Office Park LLC, but describe the property as Mufale Office Lots.

As part of the custom office build-out, Drive Research offers a focus-group facility that includes a one-way mirror for clients to watch participants engage with each other about key topics like brand sentiment, customer satisfaction, and new product development.

“I’ve rented a countless number of focus group facilities across the country over the past decade. I wanted to make sure we offered some of this latest cutting-edge technology here in Syracuse,” Kuhn says. 

Drive Research randomly selects and recruits participants to come to the facility to include them in its research. It often includes 90-minute to 2-hour group discussions with a moderator leading the group. Participants are paid for their time and feedback, usually ranging from $75 to $250, depending on the project.

The company previously used local partners’ conference rooms and hotel conference/event centers to host these focus-group discussions, which it can now do at its own facility.

When asked how critical the focus-group facility is to his business, Kuhn says, “Pretty critical. We have a lot of clients who do qualitative research. We have a mix of national clients and local clients … If they want to do qualitative work, having an official facility is key. It’s really nice to have all the systems and equipment, where they can record it and it can be official and they can watch from a different room.”

In addition to the focus-group facility, Kuhn says having office space where the firm can meet with clients and prospects helps his company’s standing. “I think [having the office] adds a certain level of credibility. I wasn’t naïve to think that we probably lost some business that we weren’t aware of because we didn’t have a physical location,” he says.

Kuhn says he still intends to eventually open a downtown Syracuse office. But when he does, Drive Research will keep its Salina office for its focus-group work. 

SYRACUSE — The six companies that participated in the second round of Genius NY at the Tech Garden in 2018 continue maintaining operations in the facility.

Genius NY — which stands for Growing ENtrepreneurs & Innovators in UpState New York — is a business-accelerator program. 

At the same time, the five finalist companies selected for this year’s third round of Genius NY have started their work at the Tech Garden.

The startup drone companies will participate in the year-long program and will compete for a total of $3 million in direct investment, with one grand prize of up to $1 million and four $500,000 awards.

2018 startups remaining

The Genius NY finalists from 2018 have all decided to continue their operations in Syracuse. They are Fotokite, the $1 million grand-prize winner, Dropcopter, Quantifly, Prevision (formerly Precision Vision), TruWeather Solutions, and UsPLM, according to a Jan. 8 news release on the Genius NY website.

“Of last year’s group, all six have decided to have an office in the Tech Garden,” says Jon Parry, director of the Genius NY program. “[For] some of them, it’s a portion of their team. Others, it’s their entire team.”

They’ve stayed “for a number of reasons,” he adds. The companies have hired employees here or are working with other service providers to which they’ve been connected in the past 12 months. Plus, the cost of living and operating a business is “significantly lower” in a medium-sized city like Syracuse. 

“They’re only required to stay for the one year that they’re actively participating in the Genius NY program,” says Parry. “It’s our goal to show them that there’s value to staying.”

Fotokite combines aerial and ground-based robotics with flight control algorithms to create a kite-like tethered drone system that can fly fully autonomously for 24 hours.

“We’re building up sales, business development and customer support in Syracuse this year,” Chris McCall, CEO of Fotokite, said in the Genius NY release. “We’re also looking to expand some aspects of manufacturing and software engineering here. We’re looking for the right resources and want to build on the very special team we have built up already.”

The company is focused on “scaling into the [U.S.]” in 2019 making a product for firefighting and public-safety applications.

Dropcopter became the “first [unmanned aerial system] company in the world” to pollinate apple orchards via drones with its effort Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards in LaFayette. Dropcopter plans to continue the relationship with Beak & Skiff as well as other orchards and farms across New York moving into 2019. It has also started training new pilots and hopes to hire further qualified operators this year.

Quantifly uses aerial imagery, computer vision, and analytics to automate the observation, measurement, and analysis of change in cities. Its potential vertical markets can be applied to urban planning, civil engineering, retail, economic development and real estate development.

In 2019, Quantifly will be making its shift from product development to marketing and customer discovery.

Prevision (formerly Precision Vision) creates image-processing technology that makes real-time precision imaging affordable. Its technology and manufacturing operations are located in New Mexico, but its sales, business development, and marketing departments remain at the Tech Garden.

TruWeather Solutions is building a service to improve the precision, accuracy, and communication of weather intelligence. The company plans to move its weather operations center to the Tech Garden, hire additional staff, and raise additional capital.

UsPLM’s two founders are first-time entrepreneurs who transferred from the academic world to the business world to launch their company last January. The company works to develop, test, deploy, and safely operate a single or a fleet of unmanned aerial systems. 

In 2019, it plans to launch its beta product, which focuses on asset tracking, forensic analysis and mission risk management. 

Round three

The five finalist companies in this year’s round of Genius NY moved into the Tech Garden in January to begin competing for the prize awards. The companies were selected from a pool of more than 350 submissions. Finalists include teams with international and regional representation.

The program uses the first three months to work through a model used at the Tech Garden called the integrated business-planning process, says Parry.

It helps the company create a strategy with a business case, a pitch presentation, and a financial model. That strategy will be the focus after the pitch night in April once the program awards investment funding.

“In the first three months, we’re working them on the basics of refining their business plan and setting up a strategy for their use of funds later on,” Parry tells CNYBJ.

The Genius NY finals night is set for April 9 at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown. 

2019 finalists 

The five finalists in the third round of Genius NY include ResilienX of Syracuse. The company is focused on improving safety in the “autonomous traffic-management ecosystem,” CenterState CEO said. Its products will “increase system resilience and operational uptime by automating fault detection and contingency management, benefiting adopters through decreased expenditures in operations, regression testing, and maintenance.”

EagleHawk of Buffalo is a drone-powered technology company “revolutionizing” the way commercial roofs are inspected and managed. “In just two years,” EagleHawk has inspected more than 500 buildings and 11 million square-feet of rooftop. It is helping customers detect unknown issues, mitigate risk, and reduce roof-maintenance costs.

Vermeer of Brooklyn is an “augmented reality drone solution” that enables anyone to capture aerial photos, videos, and data. Users can now design their aerial shot in an “augmented reality environment” and then send it to a drone to execute autonomously in the real world.

Civdrone of Israel says it develops “fast, reliable and autonomous-marking solutions” on enterprise drones for the construction industry. Digitalizing and automating land-surveying services will “increase productivity and shorten time of construction while lowering its costs,” it promises.

Sentient Blue of Italy says it develops “efficient, more environmentally friendly” micro gas turbine-based power plants for use in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to increase flight endurance.

BINGHAMTON — Durham, North Carolina–based Semiconductor Research Corp. recently selected a team of researchers from both Binghamton University and Purdue University to lead a new multimillion-dollar research center. 

The Center for Heterogeneous Integration Research in Packaging, or CHIRP, will help to “define the future of electronics packaging in the United States and globally for the next decade,” Binghamton University contended in a news release.

CHIRP will enable the Binghamton and Purdue researchers to expand their existing work, much of which has been federally funded, into products and applications.

Semiconductor Research Corp., a technology research consortium, promotes collaborations among universities, technology companies, and government agencies. It will provide $1.8 million to the center in the first four years. An additional $1.8 million will come from the campuses, the State University of New York, and other sources.

Binghamton and Purdue have a history of collaboration that stretches back nearly two decades. About one dozen faculty members in engineering and computer science at the two universities will participate in the center’s research. The center expects to expand in faculty participation as Semiconductor Research Corp. initiates additional projects.

Kwok Ng, senior director at Semiconductor Research, said he’s excited to partner with the Purdue-Binghamton team. 

“They have a successful track record of working with the semiconductor industry,” he said. “CHIRP will capitalize on this heritage and will partner with [Semiconductor Research] to address industry needs.”

The founding members of Semiconductor Research Corp.’s CHIRP are United Kingdom–based ARM; Armonk, New York–based IBM (NYSE: IBM); Santa Clara, California–based Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC); Eindhoven, Netherlands–based NXP (NASDAQ: NXPI); Dallas, Texas–based Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN); and Seoul, South Korea–based Samsung, which will guide the research at Binghamton and Purdue.

CHIRP’s work

In explaining the work that CHIRP will do, Binghamton University points to Moore’s Law, “the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years.” It held steady for 50 years, the school said. 

However, due to increased integration, along the way, consumers became accustomed to steady reductions in the cost of computing. That trend cannot continue without some significant changes in thinking; transistors simply can’t get much smaller than they already are.

That’s where CHIRP comes in, the school noted.

Bahgat Sammakia, VP for research and a professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton, developed the winning proposal with Kanad Ghose, professor of computer science at Binghamton, and Ganesh Subbarayan, professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue. 

Sammakia and Subbarayan will serve as co-directors of the center, whose research will address issues in global interconnects, efficient power delivery, system design, thermal management, novel materials, reliability and other topics.

Heterogeneous integration of many microchips into single packages will be “essential” to technology ranging from cell phones to mainframe computers for at least the next decade, Sammakia said.

“Anywhere you have chips that benefit from small transistors, we’re heading toward heterogeneous integration,” he explained. “It’s really the only solution available for the next five to 10 years. There’s an increasing challenge to shrink transistors much further. Other approaches, like quantum computing, are at least a decade away.”