VOCATIONAL TRAINING CENTER INC. ST. LOUIS VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS
There is no other business on the INC. 500 quite like Marshall Laskey's Vocational Training Center (#287). VTC's eight locations range from a converted parochial school in the boarded-up heart of the St. Louis ghetto to a renovated church annex, which the center rents for just $1 a year. Its customers are the underclass -- high-school dropouts and the long-term unemployed. And at the top of this business organization is a 58-year-old chief executive officer and family patriarch who still sounds more like a social worker than the founder of one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.
"It doesn't take much to get me up on my soapbox," Lasky admits, grinning sheepishly. "My son says I'm a crusader, and I guess I am."
Lasky has never thought of VTC primarily as a business, regardless of the $9 million in 1985 revenues, up from $3 million the year before. Nor does he talk about profit margins, even though profits are up 15%, too. He prefers to talk about his duty, his mission, and the talk pours out in a torrent of infectious enthusiasm. What he's selling, he says, is the future.
There are 1,400 students in VTC classrooms today, training for such entry-level jobs as nurse's assistants and hotel cashiers, data-entry operators and day-care supervisors. Most are black, many are welfare mothers, and almost 90% receive some form of government assistance. For six months, they're taught work and life skills, how to write a resume and why to get to work on time. Then VTC's placement staff of seven will help them get a start in the work world, "getting them off welfare and making them taxpayers," Lasky says.
It's easy to be skeptical about vocational schools. Many are marginal operations, in business only a few years; the worst are get-rich scams preying on the vulnerable. But after 25 years as the director, head teacher, and inspiration behind VTC, Lasky has built impressive credentials and a dramatic record of achievement. Accredited at both the state and federal levels, VTC today boasts a staff of close to 300, with a teacher-training program designed by the director of the education department at St. Louis University. While only 28% of vocational students nationwide ever reach graduation, between 60% and 70% of VTC's students complete their training course. Last year, more than 1,000 of them went from VTC to the payrolls of such local employers as Century 21 Real Estate, Eastman Kodak, Holiday Inns, and K mart. They claim a placement rate of 70% to 75 within six months.
"VTC students are well qualified and well trained," says Mary Fitzgerald, director of operations of Med-Staff Inc., a new medical placement agency in St. Louis. In four months, Med-Staff was able to place 60 VTC students, "and we hear excellent reports on all of them."
Marshall Lasky knows what it's like to be poor. Growing up the son of a newspaper deliveryman, he wanted to be a major-league baseball player or, if not, a social worker who might touch the lives of others as the director of the local community center had touched his. After graduating from college, he opened his own TV-repair shop and began helping three other men learn the trade at night in the back room. Within a year, he founded VTC and was teaching TV-repair classes mornings, afternoons, and evenings. In five years, he was even making money at it.
From the start, VTC was a family operation, Marshall and his wife, Jeanette, working full-time, sons Steven and Edward when they could. But it wasn't until 1980, when Steven, then 23, gave up a high-school coaching job to become VTC's director of education that the company began its dramatic growth, increasing revenues 1,500% over six years.
When Steven arrived, VTC was still a TV- and appliance-repair school, with 250 students a year and a staff of 12, including both his parents. At $237,000 a year, sales were dropping, as Vietnam-era GI benefits expired and the school's traditional customer base -- unemployed blue-collar workers from the St. Louis auto plants -- were called back to work or moved away.
So Steven changed markets, targeting the high-risk customers of St. Louis's ghettos. Instead of repair classes, he reoriented the training to the city's current job opportunities -- teaching child-care workers to meet the growing demand for day care, for example, or training workers for the new hotels being built downtown. Rather than asking potential customers to come to VTC's one central location, he started opening schools right in the inner-city neighborhoods he hoped to serve. An aggressive marketing program blanketed each new neighborhood in posters and fliers, while telemarketers contacted students directly. "The smile of success looks great on everyone," proclaimed his newspaper ads.
Most of VTC's programs require no high-school diploma. What is required is hard work. Each of the eight schools runs two four-hour shifts a day, with each six-month course split between lectures and hands-on practice. The professional staff is also split: half are trained teachers and guidance counselors, the other half instructors who have a minimum of 4,000 hours experience in the field they teach. Tutoring is provided free.
A walk through one of the facilities reveals a mood that is relentlessly upbeat. Unlike at most public high schools, the students at VTC seem eager to be there, and their classrooms are a buzz of questions and discussions. Posters with school mottoes cover the walls: "Be all you can be" and "I am in charge of my life."
"Everybody has written these people off, and they need us!" Lasky says. "We have to help them break the cycle of poverty. It's our obligation to make sure they get a chance in life."
