Entrepreneurship Runs In The Family
Photo/Edd Cote
The Training Associates, 287 Turnpike Road, Suite 300, Westborough 01581
Victor Melfa and his daughter Maria (pictured) say working together helps balance out their individual strengths and weaknesses.
Vic and Maria Melfa love building businesses.
The father and daughter team are the CEO and President (respectively) of The Training Associates, a successful training firm in Westborough with a unique business model.
This isn’t their first company. Together with Judith Melfa (Vic’s wife and Maria’s mother) the team worked together in leading Vitronix Corp., founded by Vic with his son Victor Jr. The Melfa family built Vitronix from nothing into the largest regional value-added computer hardware distributor in New England in the course of about 10 years. When Vitronix reached $75 million in sales, the Melfas sold it to a large company. Then they started all over again.
A Helping Hand
The Training Associates connects technology and business-skills instructors to a wide variety of organizations that provide training: training and outsourcing firms, software and hardware firms, services providers, universities, staffing companies, and the government.
For example, when the “Cash for Clunkers” program was launched, it was Training Associates that helped make it happen.
“They needed to hire hundreds of people overnight and train them to answer the questions,” Vic said. “We were here on the weekend scrambling to find the people for Monday morning.”
The firm has had steady growth over its 16-year history.
“There was a dip in ‘01, and in ‘08 and ‘09,” said Vic, “but we’re back up this year and it looks like next year we’ll be at our highest ever.”
Why now? “Outsourcing tends to thrive in a down economy,” said Maria, adding that training is one of the first departments to go when times are hard. When things pick up, companies tend to use contractors first, if they can, before hiring full time employees.
These cycles work to increase the trend toward outsourcing, according to Vic. “It turns out that with every cycle of the economy, outsourcing becomes more popular,” he said.
The trend toward outsourcing allows firms to focus on their core competencies. “More and more people are realizing their core competency is really their customer contact,” said Vic.
Maria points out that another driver of the outsourcing trend is the pace of technology change.
“We get requirements every week for new technology that we were not trained on last week,” she said. “When we started the company 16 years ago we were just training on Novell [brand software]. Then about a year later we started training on Microsoft, and then Lotus, and that was 90 percent of our business for the first three to five years. Then everything exploded, so now we’re training in hundreds, actually thousands, of different technologies.”
The Training Associates works directly with end-user customers like Pacific Gas and Electric as well as indirectly with big trainers like IBM and Accenture. Trainers sign up with the firm via its website (300 - 400 new trainers register every month). More than 20,000 trainers are available to the firm, which uses a complex, proprietary database used to keep track of and manage the people.
“There’s a tremendous amount of intellectual property in the database,” said Vic, who has spent a good deal of his time developing it.
The Training Associates is still the only company of its kind. Vic had the vision to see that this new service would be needed because he understands the nature of business.
“As an industry matures, it develops a supply chain,” he said. “We are a supplier to the training companies and they are suppliers to the firms that need training. When we decided to do this, nobody was in the staffing business for trainers, because technical training was a new thing.”
Vic sees his role has the strategic thinker, while his daughter is in charge of implementation.
Maria does acknowledge that working with family does get intense.
“I’ve quit probably 5 times in 16 years,” she said. “But never for more than a day.”
But the family ties provide advantages as well as challenges.
“The loyalty and trust are stronger,” said Vic. “An owner works for his people as well as for himself; you want your people to grow. When your employee is your child, there’s even more motivation to work hard for the business to succeed.”
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