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BrandYourself plans next steps
SYRACUSE — BrandYourself.com has been using $1.2 million in new funding to refine its product, which publicly launched March 8. The company, based in the Tech Garden in downtown Syracuse, closed the financing round last May and spent the next several months working on its Web-based platform. The product allows users to manage their own […]
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SYRACUSE — BrandYourself.com has been using $1.2 million in new funding to refine its product, which publicly launched March 8.
The company, based in the Tech Garden in downtown Syracuse, closed the financing round last May and spent the next several months working on its Web-based platform. The product allows users to manage their own search results.
Investors in the financing round include Zelkova Ventures of New York City, which has invested in startups like Klout and Foodspotting; Barney Pell, former head search strategist at Microsoft; and Carl Shramm, former CEO of the Kauffman Foundation.
Earlier versions of the BrandYourself product focused on numerous aspects of online reputation management, although search results were always a key component. The tighter focus emerged as company leaders discussed users’ biggest needs and where they saw the best opportunities, CEO Patrick Ambron says.
Everyone is being searched and what shows up matters, Ambron notes. Potential employers can be easily scared off by negative or incorrect information.
Pete Kistler, co-founder of BrandYourself, had the idea for the company when he was mistaken in search results for a drug dealer with the same name.
BrandYourself also sees the chance to take market share from existing reputation-management firms by offering its basic product for free, Ambron says. A service like Reputation.com, for example, can cost hundreds, or even thousands, per year.
BrandYourself has also focused on allowing users to manage their results themselves, Ambron says. Other services, he says, manage the process for users.
The BrandYourself product guides individuals through building a simple website, adding content, improving profiles on social networks like Facebook, and cross-linking to improve visibility in search engines. The idea, Ambron says, is for a user to create positive content and push it higher in search results.
The basic product allows a user to build a simple website and submit three links, like a Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, news article, or blog post, for tracking and boosting. The free product also provides a search score and monitoring of the first page of a
user’s Google search results.
“For more people, that’s enough,” Ambron says.
Premium users can pay more to track and boost unlimited content. Those users also get other side benefits like improved
intelligence and the ability to track results on other search engines.
Premium packages start at $4 a month, Ambron says. The company expects most users to stick with the basic product, he adds.
Its goal is to convert 2 percent of its users to paying customers.
“This product is meant to be a high-volume product,” Ambron says.
The company is expecting thousands, perhaps millions, of users in the coming years, he adds. Firm leaders saw high demand while testing earlier versions of their platform.
“A lot of people want this ability,” Ambron says. “We can scale this.”
BrandYourself incubated in the Tech Garden as part of the Student Sandbox program in 2009 and is now a regular tenant. The
firm won the $200,000 grand prize in the 2011 Creative Core Emerging Business Competition.
The company employs 10 people full time and expects to add two to five more this year.
The time the firm spent refining its product should start paying off in the next few months, Ambron notes.
“The focus is the really important thing,” he says. “The hyper focus on solving that one problem and solving that problem very easily and simply.”
O’Brien & Gere relocates growing manufacturing unit
CLAY — O’Brien & Gere may be best known locally as an engineering firm, but the company’s manufacturing operations account for 10 percent of its revenue and sales in that business are growing. O’Brien & Gere produces industrial furnaces and other heat-treating systems used in industries like aerospace, defense, automotive, energy, and health care. The
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CLAY — O’Brien & Gere may be best known locally as an engineering firm, but the company’s manufacturing operations account for 10 percent of its revenue and sales in that business are growing.
O’Brien & Gere produces industrial furnaces and other heat-treating systems used in industries like aerospace, defense, automotive, energy, and health care. The firm relocated its manufacturing unit from a site in Fayetteville to a 160,000-square-foot location in the town of Clay late last year.
The new space is actually slightly smaller than the old building, but the floor plan is wide open and flexible. O’Brien & Gere also added overhead cranes, a paint booth, and other upgrades that will allow it to handle the growth it sees ahead in manufacturing, says Stephen Palin, senior vice president for O’Brien & Gere’s Denton TSI brand of furnace and heat treating-systems.
Manufacturing sales rose 40 percent in 2011 and are projected to jump 50 percent this year, Palin says. O’Brien & Gere spent about $3 million of its own money on upgrading the new manufacturing space, he adds, and received no government incentives or other aid for the project.
The Clay site is a better location for much of the facility’s work force, Palin says. Many of the employees in the manufacturing unit come from the North Country, so it’s an easier drive than Fayetteville. About 80 people work at the Clay plant, which is located on Morgan Road and formerly was the home of Rollway Bearing.
O’Brien & Gere employs another 320 people at its headquarters in downtown Syracuse. The firm, which generated
$200 million in revenue in 2011, has 850 employees at 30 offices nationwide.
“We see this as one of the fastest growing parts of our business,” O’Brien & Gere CEO James Fox says of manufacturing. “It’s a differentiator for us.”
That’s because O’Brien & Gere provides the electronics that control its furnaces and material-handling technologies that load
them as well. The company gives its customers a complete system, rather than just pieces, Fox notes.
Much of the work involves crafting highly customized equipment to deal with specific metals at high temperatures, he adds.
The firm’s customers use its equipment to manufacture items like bearings, wind- turbine blades, and even replacement hips. The manufacturing unit also produces air quality products and the new facility includes a lab for testing wastewater treatment technologies.
Manufacturing projects range in size from $300,000 to $10 million, Palin says.
O’Brien & Gere’s manufacturing business has traditionally been focused on the Northeast, but that’s changed with the addition of a national sales manager, Palin says. O’Brien & Gere is now pushing its products into Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and California.
And the industries the company serves are here for the long haul, Fox adds. High-value work in sectors like aerospace seems to be returning to the U.S., he says.
Customers for the manufacturing unit include firms like GE and Pratt & Whitney.
O’Brien & Gere’s manufacturing business began in 1994 when it acquired Denton Refractory.
The company relocated its headquarters to downtown Syracuse from suburban DeWitt in 2010. It occupies three floors of the six-story Washington Station building at 333 W. Washington St.
Mohawk Global adds to Buffalo presence
SYRACUSE — Mohawk Global Logistics is expanding its Buffalo sales office into a full-service branch. The shipping-logistics firm has added four new employees to the location with the expansion. Previously, Mohawk Global had two salespeople in that office. The site will now offer local import and export businesses a complete set of logistics services, including
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SYRACUSE — Mohawk Global Logistics is expanding its Buffalo sales office into a full-service branch.
The shipping-logistics firm has added four new employees to the location with the expansion. Previously, Mohawk Global had two salespeople in that office.
The site will now offer local import and export businesses a complete set of logistics services, including customs brokerage, international and domestic transportation, warehousing and distribution, and trade consulting. Mohawk Global, based in Syracuse, has additional offices in the Rochester, Albany, and Chicago areas.
The company employs more than 85 people, including 55 in Syracuse.
Demand from clients drove the expansion to a full Buffalo branch, says Sherie Cuddy, the regional manager for Mohawk Global who is overseeing that location. The company sees strong growth potential in the Buffalo market and expects to add more people to the office in the future, she adds.
In addition to the sales office, the company has been offering free global trade seminars in Buffalo for the past three years to help educate the business community on issues related to import and export compliance.
Mohawk Global opened its Buffalo sales office in 2008. It already had a customer base in the market, even before opening there.
The market was a good one for the firm since it is close to Toronto, a major gateway for international shipping, according to the company.
Buffalo was the final piece to Mohawk Global’s upstate New York footprint. The firm began expanding outside New York last year with the opening of a Chicago office.
The company already had clients outside the region, but Chicago was its first physical location outside the state. The city is a strategic gateway to the Midwest, according to Mohawk Global.
Major rail connections run through Chicago and it’s a hub for air freight as well. The location will allow Mohawk Global to reach further into cities like Milwaukee and Minneapolis as well, according to the company.
Mohawk Global relocated to a new headquarters at 123 Air Cargo Road earlier this year. The firm is now located in the former US Air reservation center on the Syracuse Hancock International Airport property.
The company had been based in 10,000 square feet of space at 152 Air Cargo Road. Mohawk Global currently occupies about 60 percent of the new building’s 26,000 square feet of space.
The city of Syracuse acquired the building after US Airways shut down its reservation center in Syracuse after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The center was one of several the airline closed nationwide after the attacks.
Mohawk Global announced a lease-to-own agreement with the city on the building in January 2011.
Manufacturers’ business conditions continue upswing in March
General business conditions improved for New York manufacturers for the fifth straight month in March, according to a survey released this morning by the Federal
SKANEATELES FALLS — A longtime Welch Allyn executive will succeed current President and CEO Julie Shimer in April. Shimer said in January she planned to
‘Check your gut’ before starting a business, speaker tells veterans
SYRACUSE — Brian Bluff told a room full of military veterans that they’d better be ready for challenges if they want to start their own business. “Check your gut,” said Bluff, who was the keynote speaker at the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) 2012 Veterans Business Conference at Onondaga Community College (OCC) on March 13.
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SYRACUSE — Brian Bluff told a room full of military veterans that they’d better be ready for challenges if they want to start their own business.
“Check your gut,” said Bluff, who was the keynote speaker at the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) 2012 Veterans Business Conference at Onondaga Community College (OCC) on March 13. “If you don’t like to work weekends, if you don’t like to work nights, then this is not the right thing for you.”
Bluff is a veteran of the U.S. Navy. He is also the president and co-founder of Site-Seeker, Inc., an Internet-marketing firm based in New Hartford that has 22 employees in New York, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Virginia. He started Site-Seeker in 2003 and had previously started another Internet-marketing firm, TCO Inc., in 2000.
“If you like a challenge, if you want to bury yourself in your work and do something important, something you feel good about, then [starting a business] is really cool,” he told the veterans. “It’s a good time.”
This is the fifth year the SBA’s Syracuse district office has organized its business conference for veterans, which is titled “Operation: Start Up & Grow.” This year’s conference drew 120 military veterans and about 60 exhibitors, representing more than 30 organizations.
Veterans who attended chose between workshops on social media, financing, and government contracting. Other workshops addressed marketing plans and selling to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Bluff drew from his experiences in the Navy in his keynote speech. He recounted being on the USS Conyngham when a fire broke out at the front of the ship.
That fire killed one man and damaged the ship so badly that it had to be decommissioned. Bluff said he was a damage-control assistant on the vessel when the fire happened, and that he suffered injuries and burns.
“Our mission was to fight the ship,” he said. “As you prepare to begin your business, you’ve got to understand that your mission is profitability.”
Bluff advised veterans to plan for the worst and look as far into the future as possible when starting their businesses. And he recommended keeping as much cash on hand as possible.
He also said business owners should be prepared to take action quickly if their business encounters trouble.
“You need to take evasive action early,” he said. “Lay it out and then make a decision.”
Veterans should be willing to enlist organizations like the SBA, Syracuse SCORE, and the Small Business Development Center at OCC when starting their business, according to Bluff.
“There is no award for figuring it out yourself,” he said. “Take all the help you can get.”
Helping veterans find assistance as they think about starting their own business is one of the reasons the Syracuse SBA holds a business conference for veterans, according to Cathy Pokines, the director of marketing and communications at the SBA’s Syracuse district office. Attending the conference gives veterans access to a wide range of organizations, rather than having to choose from telephone numbers on a list, she says.
The conference typically attracts between 100 and 140 veterans, Pokines says. She estimated that more than 600 different veterans have attended since the Syracuse SBA first held the conference in 2008.
Veterans are good candidates to start a small business because of their military training, Pokines adds. They have discipline, courage under fire, and the ability to take calculated risks, she says.
“The hallmark characteristic of small-business owners is taking risks,” she says. “Because they’re risking their savings, they’re risking their employees’ financial wherewithal, and they’re putting their ego on the line.”
Veterans could qualify for various forms of SBA assistance, including the Patriot Express loan program, according to the SBA. That program is for members of the military community who want to start or expand a small business. The Syracuse district has processed 119 loans under the program since 2007.
AG files suit against cigarette vendor in DeWitt
The state attorney general has filed a federal lawsuit against a DeWitt business, accusing it of evading cigarette taxes while allowing customers to roll their
Economic development forum scheduled at Cazenovia College
CAZENOVIA — Central New York’s Regional Economic Development Council will hold a forum Thursday March 22 at Cazenovia College. The event, which starts at 5:30
OSHA cites Chobani maker for violations
SYRACUSE — The U.S Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited the manufacturer of Chobani Greek Yogurt for alleged violations of
Small-business optimism rises slightly in February
The level of optimism among small-business owners crept up incrementally for the second consecutive month in February, according to the monthly Small Business Optimism Index
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