DeWITT — When Bryan Bowers was crafting a business plan for his new company, he envisioned hiring 25 employees over a five-year period.
He’s put that vision on the fast track.
Bowers is the president and sole owner of Asbestos & Environmental Consulting Corporation (AECC), a business he launched on Feb. 2, 2009 in a 2,000-square-foot space at 6296 Fly Road in DeWitt.
AECC does consulting work for clients that have issues with asbestos, lead paint, mold, indoor air quality, and contaminated soil or groundwater. His firm doesn’t handle material removal but supervises contractors that do, Bowers notes.
Since opening about 20 months ago, AECC has grown to employ 14 full-time and four part-time workers at the headquarters in DeWitt and two full-time employees at the firm’s office in Rochester, which opened last December.
Bowers also wants to hire six additional full-time employees in the next six months for the DeWitt office, about half of which will serve as senior project managers.
Besides AECC’s headquarters and Rochester office, Bowers’ original plan was to have a third location somewhere in New York.
“The third one is to be determined. We’re actually, right now, starting to look at other locations for that third potential office,” he says.
Landing projects in another area could help determine where the third location might be, Bowers says.
In addition, Bowers is also considering buying a building for a new headquarters to accommodate the company’s growth. He declined to be more specific about the plan.
AECC generated about $850,000 in revenue during 2009. Bowers is projecting that figure will more than double to nearly $2 million in 2010.
“When I put the business plan together, for year one, the revenues were pretty much exactly what I had predicted,” Bowers says.
AECC has “exceeded expectations” for the second year of business, he notes, and will likely generate a revenue figure about 40 percent higher than what Bowers had anticipated.
Bowers credits the experience of the people he’s hired at the firm for its rapid growth.
“In hiring some very good, key professionals, especially senior professionals, a large volume of work has followed those professionals from their previous companies to AECC,” he says.
In his past work experience in environmental consulting, Bowers says clients traditionally are either loyal to a company or loyal to an individual. He’s found that working in upstate New York, clients tend to develop the relationship with an individual instead of a firm.
“So, if that person ends up leaving another company, typically, the work follows them,” Bowers says.
AECC has worked with elementary and secondary schools, including those in the Syracuse City School District, municipal governments, and commercial clients in the manufacturing and industrial sectors.
The firm handles asbestos testing and monitoring for the State University of New York at Oswego and is the environmental-compliance officer for Cayuga County, Bowers says.
AECC competes with about a dozen area firms, including the DeWitt office of Los Angeles–based AECOM (NYSE: ACM), Barton & Loguidice, P.C. of Salina, O’Brien & Gere of Syracuse, and Environmental Compliance Management Corporation (ECMC) in Chittenango.
About the owner
Bowers, who graduated from Le Moyne College in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in biology, says owning his own business had always been “a lifelong dream.”
After his college graduation, the Sullivan County native worked as a field technician for Pearl River, N.Y.–based Lawler, Matusky & Skelly Engineers, LLP.
He later moved back to the Syracuse area and worked as a field technician for both AECOM and ECMC. He then joined Geomatrix of DeWitt as an industrial-hygiene project manager in the summer of 2006.
San Diego, Calif.–based Kleinfelder acquired the DeWitt office of Geomatrix in April 2007. Bowers remained with the company until January 2009 when he left to launch AECC.