Inner City Snapshots

Four short profiles of companies from the 2000 Inner City 100, including one about brothers Vernon and Vincent Austin from the May cover of Inc.

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Inner-city snapshots

A work/life oasis
Three years ago Vernon Austin, founder of VA Construction (#25), bought a three-acre property, smack in the middle of Waterbury, Conn. There he built a compound where his employees could both live and work.

To make work pleasant, he built his dream office. To keep management together, he built homes for himself and four top staff members. To keep employees' families happy, he built a swimming pool, a basketball court, a golf driving range -- even a tree house, all of which he opened to the neighborhood kids.

The arrangement allows Austin and his staff to work the hours required by a booming construction business and still find time for family. Frequently, everyone ends the day with a game of pickup basketball or a communal lounge around the pool. Vincent, the founder's twin brother and the chief financial officer, calls those gatherings the "BS hour" and says they reflect the virtues of the housing projects in which the Austins grew up: the camaraderie, the activity, the sense of looking out for one another. "We came out of the projects, and we made it, and we stayed in," says Vincent. "We found a nice piece of property right in the hood." --Karen Dillon

Fare hiring
Leonardo DiCaprio found love on a ship. John Boyce finds employees on a bus.

Boyce is the cofounder of Janitron (#36), a janitorial-service company in St. Louis, a city in which unemployment hovers around 2.7%. The company tried all the conventional methods of recruiting workers for its night cleanup crews, "but it wasn't yielding anything," Boyce says. Then, in 1998, someone suggested advertising on the city's buses. But instead of having banners pasted on the sides of those metal monsters, Boyce sent his managers off to ride the line that passes in front of Janitron's building and chat with passengers. "If the people are going to work, the managers strike up a conversation about their job: 'Do you like it there? Are you getting paid well?" says Boyce. Managers then leave their business cards and applications with prospective candidates.

The practice also has the effect of prequalifying workers. Riders of that line have easy access to Janitron's offices, and morning commuters generally have day jobs like many on the company's night crew. Still, the process is labor-intensive. "It takes a lot of time to find hires that way," Boyce says. --Anne Marie Borrego

A European union
If you're seized by a craving for pierogis while wandering the streets of North Philadelphia, stop in at Tracey/Soltrace Inc. (#84), a manufacturer of customized office furniture. The company's Ukrainian and Polish employees often bring in homemade goodies to share with their colleagues. And those immigrants account for a quarter of Tracey/Soltrace's workforce.

CEO James Trachtenberg first plugged into the immigrant network five years ago, when he hired Lew Pyrih, the American-born son of Ukrainian parents. One day a Ukrainian immigrant applied for a job, and Pyrih was on hand to translate. The new employee was part of a tightly knit community whose heart is a Ukrainian Catholic cathedral three blocks away. When he told his friends about Tracey/ Soltrace, several applied.

Today the company employs 6 Ukrainians, and 15 more are waiting for jobs to open up. Every Friday after work the Ukrainian employees get together for beer and shots of Russian vodka. "Whenever someone has a saint's day during the week, that's who brings the bottle," says Pyrih. --Emily Barker

Rainy days and phone lines always get me down
Most people consider the sound of rainfall soothing. Gary Fails finds it really, really stressful.

Fails is president of City Theatrical (#43), a manufacturer of lighting accessories in the South Bronx. Like many inner-city company leaders, Fails must sometimes cope with less-than-optimum infrastructure. In City Theatrical's case, that means phone cables that quit when it rains. "When people call in, they just get a ringing phone, and they think no one's here," he says. "And we think no one's calling."

Although the problem has been there for years, neither Fails's telephone carrier nor the company that installed his phone system has been able to pinpoint its source. On the bright side, the situation generally resolves itself. "Usually, when the rain dries up, the phone starts working again," says Fails.

But even dry weather doesn't guarantee perfect reception. "Do you hear that sound?" Fails asks a reporter, whose ears are being assailed by faint, high-pitched static. "That's our welding machine. It puts this high-frequency noise on the phone lines." --E.B.

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