Transit Advertising: At Age 57, a Start-Up
Name Change: Veritas to Vectramed
Corrections or additions?
These articles by Barbara Fox were prepared for the December 6,
2000 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Faithful & Gould — Chartered Surveyors
Land developers and owners often have good reason to
fret about costs and schedules: Can a hotel be built at a particular
spot within the nine-month deadline? Is the contractor working as
cost effectively as possible, they ask. In Great Britain, when
developers
question these aspects of construction, they call in a Chartered
Surveyor
with a "CS" degree.
If that term seems unusual, that’s because most Chartered Surveyors
are trained in Britain. Chartered Surveyors — who know
construction
technology, law, economics, construction management — have been
working in England for 500 years. Only just recently have they been
imported to work in North America.
One British company, Faithful & Gould, has set up a regional
headquarters
at 100 Canal Pointe. Founded in 1947, the firm has 120 workers in
North America and 1,600 worldwide. To lease its 4,000 square foot
space, it was represented by Warren Searles of Colliers Houston. Ten
people work here now but more are being added.
"We provide a service that embraces several different
functions,"
says Chris J. Taylor, the senior operations director. "We have
individuals knowledgeable across the broad sphere of commercial
management.
We promote ourselves on the basis that the cost savings will more
than likely pay for our services due to reduced construction costs,
adherence to schedule improvement, and improved efficiency."
"We are attorneys with accounting and contractual knowledge who
can go in and shake the tree on the owners’ behalf," says Jeff
Gendler, business development manager. "For real estate assets,
we are cost consultants, program consultants, and contract
consultants.
As the middleman between the owner and the contractor, we sit in the
construction company’s trailer."
Taylor denies that his firm has any direct competition. His actual
competition might come from the construction division of a Big Five
accounting firm such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the construction
management
division of an architectural firm such as Hillier, or a similar
division
at an engineering firm, such as URS O’Brien Kreitzberg on Scotch Road.
"There is a propensity in the market at the moment to go down
the route of One Stop Shop," says Taylor. "Our message rather
is that what we do is all we do. We stay true to our mission about
high quality service. In the current market where there is a shortage
of adequately skilled people we can prosper."
A native of northeast England, where his father was a freelance
graphic
designer and his mother a civil servant and store owner, he took
business
training at the University of North Umbria, has a diploma in quantity
surveying from Reading University, and attended law school at the
University of Teeside. At 40, he is married and has four children,
one in college.
He came to Minneapolis in 1993 to help Faithful & Gould fulfill a
contract for Pillsbury, then a British company. The company’s second
American opportunity came in 1996 when it began working with the oil
industry in Houston. Merck joined Faithful & Gould’s client list
because
its UK-division was using similar services. "Our first real
contact
with them," says Taylor, "was on a project where we provided
support in three locations — New Jersey, UK, and Singapore, and
we springboarded off that project to provide additional service."
Active on the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, he and another
director have opened an American branch and intend to approach a
number
of colleges to encourage them to add this specialty to the curriculum.
"It is a broad brush profession that allows you do a number of
things and travel a lot."
One difference between the UK and America, he says, is that most
Americans
in the construction business are positioned to be highly specialized.
"We come in if there is a high level concern about a possibly
unrealistic schedule — or as an independent auditor."
Taylor tries to explain why the profession of Chartered Surveyor had
a late start in America. After all, even as far back as the Great
Fire of London in the late 1600s, when Londoners were making a big
push to rebuild their churches, Chartered Surveyors were brought in
to keep the jobs within budget.
"In my experience the UK and other places have always been more
cost conscious than in America because of the shortage of money. More
clients in America now want greater value for their capital
expenditures,"
says Taylor. "Previously businesses haven’t been benchmarked on
competition in country competition and overseas competition. As global
economy spreads, more comparisons are being made between operations
in various parts of the world. That makes everyone more conscious
of what things cost."
— Barbara Fox
Suite 212, Princeton 08540. Chris J. Taylor, senior operations
director.
609-514-0900; fax, 609-514-9888. Home page: www.fgould.com.
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Transit Advertising: At Age 57, a Start-Up
Stephen E. Loewenthal has opened his own transit
advertising
company at Research Park, a David versus Goliath operation, with
Loewenthal
playing David. Transit advertising includes advertisements in buses,
on the sides of buses, in bus shelters, on the walls of train
stations,
and on kiosks.
"Our main business is outside the state of New Jersey. We go after
the smaller transit advertising authorities," says Loewenthal.
His current "David-sized" clients include the transit systems
for Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan; Attleboro, Massachusetts;
Margate, Florida; Wilmington, North Carolina; Florence, South
Carolina,
and TriRail, in Miami Beach.
He started the company two years ago in a home office, after being
vice president and general manager of a Pennsylvania-based outdoor
and transit advertising agency company, T&C Media. He has three
representatives
who are on salary plus commission, and he brokers the production of
the advertisements. "I found it to be a big profit center,"
he says. "We work with graphic artists and quote printing prices.
We find big printers out of state for less than the local merchants.
And we don’t need huge volume for a buy of from 3 to 20 buses."
One of his specialties is "wrapping," covering an entire bus
with see-through material for about $2,000 per month plus $8,000 to
produce the wrap that lasts up to two years. Two of the biggest
categories
for "wraps" are automobile dealers and local dotcoms, such
as search engines. Compared to a single ad for $200, "it’s a real
standout," says Loewenthal. "The truth is, it’s difficult
to sell the inside of the bus. Except for employment agencies,
there aren’t a lot of advertisers who target the bus rider."
Loewenthal went to evening school at Brooklyn College and is
celebrating
his 36th wedding anniversary this month; his wife, Rona, works at
Princeton Orthopedic Associates, and they have two children.
"I have recreated myself a number of times," says the
57-year-old
entrepreneur. "I was in the apparel business in operations for
many many years, but it was such a tough business, I realized
that I wasn’t having fun any more. I quit and went into real estate
to get selling experience, and I was very successful very quickly.
People had been telling me I should get into sales my whole life.
That success really launched me."
When he answered an ad in the New York Times for T&C Media, he was
offered the vice president’s position. "All my life experience
came together at one position. For the owner, I doubled the size of
the company. Then I thought, if I could do it for him, why not do
it for myself?"
Princeton
08540. Stephen E. Loewenthal, president and CEO. 609-683-8300; fax,
609-683-9669. Home page: www.princetonmedia.com.
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Name Change: Veritas to Vectramed
08540. James Pachence, president. 609-466-8712; fax, 609-720-0703.
Home page: www.vectramed.com.
James Pachence moved his biotech R&D company from shared office space
at HQ to another address within Forrestal Village. He changed the
name of the company from Veritas Medical Technologies to Vectramed
Inc. and also set up a website, www.vectramed.com. He is sharing with
Rick Maloy’s company, InsureHiTech, until he can get his own space.
The other five employees of Vectramed are working in labs at the
University
of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey.
"Vectra" means directional, and the name change to
"Vectramed"
reflects a new focus for the company, Pachence says. "The
technology
we have been developing is site directed drug delivery as opposed
to oral delivery or sustained drug release. It is directed to the
site of the disease itself."
Some of Pachence’s previous work had been in the sustained drug
release
field (U.S. 1, January 14, 1998). He grew up in coal mining country
in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where his father and his brothers "had
a number of different companies. He has an undergraduate degree (Class
of 1974) and a PhD in biophysics, both from Penn. After a stint as
associate professor at Columbia Presbyterian, Pachence worked with
a small company, Helitrex, in Princeton, which later became American
Biomaterials. Then he helped put together Medi-Matrix, which then
became Integra Life Sciences. He left that firm in 1994.
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Stock News
Windsor Business Park, Box 7528, Princeton 08543-7528. Robert V.
Tarantino,
president and CEO. 609-799-0071; fax, 609-936-1369.
Dataram is shipping a product that doubles memory bandwidth over the
current product while reducing power consumption. The new Double Data
Rate (DDR) chip architecture manages to use both edges of the memory
clock for sending and receiving data. The products are DDR SDRAM DIMM
modules with capacities of 128MB and 256 MB.
Suite 206, Princeton 08540. Donald L. Drakeman, president.
609-430-2880;
fax, 609-430-2850. Home page: www.medarex.com.
Data on a new Phase II clinical trial seems to indicate that a new
therapy can treat a common autoimmune disease, Idiopathic
Thrombocytopenia
Purpura. This therapy, a humanized monoclonal antibody, results from
an alliance between Medarex and Aventis Behring. About 100,000 people
in the U.S. suffer from ITP, a condition where white blood cells
destroy
platelets. Up to one-third of these patients may not react to current
treatments, but if the platelet deficiency leads to bleeding or
hemorrhage,
ITP can be life threatening.
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Management Moves
Princeton 08540. Richard F. Smith, CEO. 609-497-9622; fax,
609-497-9031.
Richard F. Smith, the new CEO of the Princeton YMCA, was most recently
the head of the Northeast Family YMCA in Pennsylvania, where he
finished
a $590,000 capital campaign and built a $1.4 million pool complex.
He also worked for YMCAs in Connecticut and Oregon. He has a degree
in commercial recreation from the University of Utah and lives in
Morrisville, Pennsylvania, with his wife; they have three children.
Smith succeeds Cecilia York, who will remain as chief financial
officer.
John Jorgensen, the previous CEO, retired in September.
Jamesburg
08831. Nancy Renehan, administrator. 732-656-1000; fax, 732-656-0081.
Nancy Renehan is the new director of the Residence at Forsgate, an
assisted living facility with 125 apartments. Formerly known as Kapson
Senior Quarters, this three-story 70,000-foot facility is managed
by Hal and Bud Peskin, developers of Monroe Village, and is adjacent
to Forsgate Country Club. Renehan has been administrator of the Arbors
in Spring Lake Heights and director of human resources at a hospice
in Linden.
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Leaving Town
Cranbury Plaza, Building C, Cranbury 08512. Thomas Palmisano,
647-9755.
714-957-8500. Www.alphamicro.com.
This hardware and software support center has closed and calls are
being taken from the California office. It offered telephone support
for diagnosis of unbranded products for hardware and software
problems.
512, Langhorne 19047. 215-702-9101; fax, 215-702-9110.
The national temporary agency closed an office at 600 Alexander Road
and calls are being taken from Langhorne.
Top Of Page
Deaths
with Morris Maple & Son Co. on Nassau Street.
columnist for the Times of Trenton.
assessing clerk for Lawrence Township.
business
analyst and auditor with Western Electric and AT&T.
Corrections or additions?
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— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
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