SYRACUSE — The Madden School of Business at Le Moyne College is home to programs that focus on helping young entrepreneurs and the area’s family businesses.

The Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship, Creativity, and Innovation is one of three “centers of excellence” within the business school, according to Le Moyne.

The Keenan Center includes the Family Business Center (FBC). Founded in 2009, the FBC entered into a partnership with the Madden School in the fall of 2013.

No one agrees on a concrete definition of the term “entrepreneur,” says John Liddy, who has served as interim director of the Keenan Center since last November.

He has also served as the school’s entrepreneur-in-residence since late 2012.

In his mind, the word entrepreneur represents three elements. “It’s innovation. It’s business management, and it’s new venture creation,” he says.

The Keenan Center focuses on five areas to help Le Moyne students who are interested in entrepreneurship and pursuing the idea of starting a business.

The areas include a focus on curriculum so students understand the role innovation plays in entrepreneurship, says Liddy.

They also include involvement with co-curricular activities, including clubs and visiting local organizations.

The Keenan Center is also home to business-related programs, such as the Family Business Center; StartFast Venture Accelerator, LLC, a mentorship-based program for seed-stage software, mobile and Internet companies; and on-campus events such as those organized through the nonprofit Famous Entrepreneurs Series, Inc.

Established in 2006, the Famous Entrepreneur Series incorporated into the Madden School last fall.

Keenan Center activities also involve entrepreneurship coaching and mentoring of any student that might say “Hey, I have an idea. I want to consider moving it forward,” says Liddy.

When asked the most important advice any entrepreneur should follow in building a business, Liddy says, “Know what you know. Know what you don’t know, and that which you don’t know, go out and seek assistance to get that done.”

Liddy is a “big believer” in team work. In class, he says groups need to have “the hacker, hustler, and the hipster.”

“You have to have the subject-matter expertise. You’ve got to have the business expertise, and you have to have someone who’s going to design it so that the customers are going to want it,” says Liddy.

Ideas, he adds, are “worthless” without the execution.

Business plans are essential to understanding all the elements of what an entrepreneur has to accomplish, but the execution of that plan is “what’s going to matter.”

Liddy has 20 years of experience as an operations executive, most recently serving as general manager of Suburban Propane, a company serving the oil and energy industry.

His areas of expertise include strategic planning, operational efficiency, profit and loss management, financial analysis, and organizational development.

He began his professional life as an entrepreneur, helping develop and launch multiple start-up businesses and “transforming them into successful, profitable operations,” according to Le Moyne.

In addition to his work at Le Moyne, Liddy serves as director of the Student Sandbox at the Tech Garden in Syracuse, which helps young entrepreneurs put their ideas into practice.

The U.S. Small Business Administration also selected Liddy as an instructor for the organization’s se200 executive education program.

The center is named in honor of Kathleen Keenan, who graduated from Le Moyne in 1981, and her husband, Timothy Keenan. The Keenan Family Foundation’s $1 million gift in 2013 established the center.

Family Business Center
Founded in 2009, the Family Business Center (FBC) moved to Le Moyne in September 2013 after functioning as a stand-alone organization in the Tech Garden.

“Moving to Le Moyne made a lot of sense for the infrastructure, for the name recognition, and for the ability to collaborate with students and faculty,” says Tracy Cuoto, who became the FBC director in July.

Family businesses comprise between 80 percent and 90 percent of the national economy, and the FBC caters to the “unique” needs of a family business, says Cuoto.

The FBC offers programs to help family businesses deal with their business needs, but that’s not all.

“We [also] offer programming to help family businesses navigate the terrain of working with … your father or your son or your mother or your spouse … all of the different generations,” she adds.

The FBC views its emerging-generation peer group and a senior-generation peer group, both roundtable discussions, as the center’s “signature programs.”

“It’s safe space, a confidential space for members of that generation to come to talk about the issues that they’re having with their businesses with their families and for others to offer support and to ask some strategic questions to help them solve their problems,” says Cuoto.

The FBC has 35 member businesses, each of which averages between 20 and 100 employees and are “very well known companies within the region,” says Cuoto.

“Our biggest member is Welch Allyn, Inc.,” she adds.

Cuoto, who serves in a part-time capacity as the FBC director, also works as a grant writer in the Division of Institutional Advancement at Le Moyne and she continues in that role.

Cuoto is the daughter of Jack Webb, the former chairman and CEO of Alliance Financial Corp. before it merged with Norwich–based NBT Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NBTB).

Webb now serves as an executive vice president with NBT Bank.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com

DeWITT, N.Y. — Development of the local workforce is part of the “critical mission” of a community college.

“… to make sure that [we’re] training students for the kinds of jobs they can get here right at home,” said Casey Crabill, president of Onondaga Community College (OCC).

OCC is among the community colleges of the State University of New York (SUNY) that have applied for federal funding to provide training for mechatronics.

The office of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D–N.Y.) describes mechatronics as a “multidisciplinary field that incorporates engineering, mechanics, electronics, and other technical work.”

Crabill spoke Sept. 22 at the Byrne Dairy pasteurization plant in DeWitt, where Schumer offered his support for the SUNY application.

 SUNY contends the field of mechatronics is “rapidly growing,” and Central New York could create more than 2,800 jobs in the industry by 2020.

But the region doesn’t have enough people trained in this field to make these potential jobs “a reality,” according to Schumer’s office.

The senator spoke at the Byrne Dairy pasteurization plant, a business he said could hire people with training in mechatronics.

“We have two things going on. On the one hand, here in Central New York, we literally have hundreds of jobs that don’t [get] filled because the people don’t have the skills for them. But second, we have lots of unemployed people, particularly our veterans, who are looking for work,” Schumer said in addressing reporters outside the Byrne Dairy plant.

TAACCCT funding
OCC is one of the 30 SUNY schools across New York that are collectively submitting an application for $15 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program, Schumer explained.

The schools would use the TAACCCT program funding to establish a systemwide program that would train veterans and the unemployed in the mechatronics field.

Specifically, OCC would receive more than $517,000 in funding to start up the program on its campus, according to Schumer’s office.

OCC and other SUNY schools would then have the funding to train more than 1,200 eligible upstate New York workers in two-year programs to prepare them for careers in mechatronics and advanced manufacturing, Schumer said.

“The grant would buy them the equipment they need to train the people and pay for some of the teachers and professors to train the people, but they’d be training for jobs that were available and that were needed at Byrne [Dairy] and other places,” said Schumer.

Potential fields for these workers include maintenance and repair workers, industrial-machinery mechanics, technical-sales representatives, electrical and electronics-industry technicians; and inspectors, testers, sorters, and weighers.

These jobs can pay up to $34 an hour in some cases, according to Schumer’s office.

It’s not the first time OCC has pursued funding from the TAACCCT grant program.

The school also used a $1.2 million grant from the same program to develop a one-year, advanced manufacturing — machining program, which the New York State Department of Education approved in June, according to a June 25 news release from OCC.

If the U.S. Department of Labor awards the funding, OCC and 30 other SUNY schools would be able to partner with more than 70 employers in the advanced-manufacturing industry that are looking to hire workers in this “highly-skilled” career field, Schumer’s office said.

The other Central New York community colleges that are a part of the consortium include Cayuga County Community College, Herkimer County Community College, and Mohawk Valley Community College.

The more than 70 employers that SUNY has lined up as local-business partners are aiming to expand their workforces, Schumer’s office said. They want to hire employees with the mechatronics skills and certifications that the program will provide.

Some of the employers that OCC will be partnering with are Byrne Dairy in DeWitt, Corso’s Cookies in Geddes, Gear Motions in Solvay, and DeWitt–based Morse Manufacturing Co., Inc.

Each of these companies has indicated a willingness to help develop the program, train students, and hire qualified graduates, according to Schumer’s office.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com