Companies ready to move into high-tech business center
By Keith Lawrence, Messenger-Inquirer
Published: Thursday, February 4, 2010 12:07 AM CST
Alisha Hardison and Kevin Humphrey are anxiously watching as construction crews turn an old tobacco warehouse at 1016 Allen St. into the high-tech Centre for Business and Research.
Hardison's bakery, Dalisha's Desserts, and Humphrey's Hollison Technologies LLC, a high-tech company, will be the building's first tenants, and both are hoping to begin moving in next month.
"We were supposed to be in last summer, and then it was December," Hardison said. "But I understand that it's construction and there are delays."
Last year, she won the first eMerging Ventures Business Challenge business plan competition, sponsored by the eMerging Ventures Center for Innovation, a division of the Greater Owensboro Economic Development Corp.
The prize included a $15,000 investment in her company and six months of free rent in the Centre for Business and Research.
"I plan to stay there as long as they'll have me," Hardison said. "That's really a convenient part of town with plenty of parking."
"Our office will be near the entrance, a little too close to the bakery," Humphrey said with a laugh. "Pastries are my weakness."
Hollison describes itself as a high-tech company whose product "enables continuous sampling of food commodities with state-of-the-art detection of contaminants ranging from chemical to biological and radiological. The technology also allows food producers to follow commodities through a Web-based software tracking capability."
"We're very much looking forward to moving in," Humphrey said. "I'm hearing 30 to 45 days."
The grand opening hasn't been scheduled yet, said Madison Silvert, EDC vice president and executive director of the eMerging Ventures Center.
"We want to get the wet labs open first," he said.
Wet labs are laboratories with water, direct ventilation and specialized piped utilities along with basic equipment. The U.S. Economic Development Administration is pumping $986,000 into the center to buy wet lab equipment.
"No startup company could afford some of the equipment we'll have in the wet labs," Silvert said. "Without this grant, they would have to go somewhere for the equipment."
"We'll need the wet labs," Humphrey said. "But we're just anxious to get office space. When we do, we'll have space to hire a couple of employees. I'm doing it all now by myself because we don't have space for anyone else."
He said he'll be hiring one or two people immediately, "and we'll add a lab tech when we get the wet labs."
Humphrey said he'll have between 1,000 and 1,200 square feet of office space. "It'll only take us a couple of days to move in," he said. "Our telephone system is Internet based. I can just move it myself and be operational the same day."
Hardison said Dalisha's Desserts will feature a dine-in bakery.
"People can sit down and have a cup of coffee or other drinks," she said. "We'll also be selling whole pies and cakes."
She'll continue her custom baking of specialty cakes as well.
"We'll have 1,400 square feet at the 11th Street entrance," Hardison said.
"I'll probably be hiring three part-time people, at least in the beginning," she said. "I'm expecting to be in my new kitchen by mid-March. But I'll have to train my staff before we open."
The bakery has a Facebook page where people can check on its progress.
"We're talking to another three companies," Silvert said. "We hope to have 10 companies in the building at the end of the first three years after we open. We'll probably have half of them by the end of this year.
"We're very close on two of them," he said. "We hope to have more announcements soon."
Plans for the center include a food lab that Silvert hopes will attract a restaurant to the location. "We have always planned to have a small restaurant," he said. "We really hope to have one, but we haven't signed any agreements for one yet."
Keith Lawrence, 691-7301, klawrence@messenger-inquirer.com
