BizStratBlog2

Proud of Rochester - Proud of Wegmans

On April 15th, 2007 the Food Network held their 2007 Food Network awards featuring chef Emeril Legasse.  Awards were handed out in many categories, but the one that touches closest to home was the SUPER Market award given to the best grocery market chain in the US.  The winner?  Who else could it be but Wegman's Supermarkets.  In Rochester we tend to dwell lately on our past - and how that's affected us to the negative.  But lets look for a moment towards the future.

Wegmans is without a doubt (and now backed up by a Food Channel Award to prove it) one of the best modern examples of how you can take a ho-hum industry (grocery stores) and turn it into a customer service experience.  And again, without a doubt, Wegmans is another Rochester home-grown success, just like Kodak, Xerox and Bausch and Lomb were in their days. 

I know for a fact that companies whose job it is to promote our region like Greater Rochester Enterprise tout this region as a hotbed of entrepreneurialism and list Wegmans as a great reason to relocate here.

So why don't we crow about ourselves more often? What is it about Rochesterians that seems to always concentrate on the downside of living in Rochester, rather than the numerous upsides?  We are a community that takes chances - and sometimes those chances succeed, and other times fail. 

We bought a ferry - it didn't work out, but we took the chance to see if it would. We have one of the worlds largest distributors of wine and liquor in our backyard (Canandaigua) - Constellation Brands. Do you think that could have been developed without a strong core of Rochester's entrepreneurs?  Richard Sands was raised in an environment where he firmly believed anything was possible - and he made it happen. We're currently dabbling in development of fuel cell technology, biomedical research, and other up and coming technologies.

We are a community that makes things work - despite the obstacles that NYS, or taxes, or downsizing businesses put in our way.

- Lee Drake, CEO, OS-Cubed

NYS Science Olympiad - the glory and the shame

My son recently had the opportunity to participate in the NYS Regional Competition for the National Science Olympiad.  It was the culmination of over 4 months of preparation and practice.  A team event-winning depended on all the kids working together as a whole.  The event was attended and eagerly participated in by regional schools, large and small, from the Rochester area.  Calvin participated at the "B Division" level - made up of grades 6-9 (essentially middle school kids).  When I say they worked hard - I really mean it.  The events these kids participate in range from building devices to passing tests on such diverse subjects as aquifers, oceanography and geology.  My son built a trebuchet (a kind of catapult) with his teammates.  They tossed a hacky sack over 15 meters across the St. John Fisher field house.  They had to resarch and build the device themselves, run all the tools to build it (with supervision of course) and also test fire and chart all the possible variations on weights of the payload and the counterweight (they didn't find out the weights of their payload and counterweight until they began the competition).