UMass Dartmouth to launch biz-plan contest

IN CONTROL: Aquabotix Technology Corp. President and CEO Durval Tavares, right, with engineer Courtney LeBlanc and engineer intern Michael Montee at the company, which makes remotely operated vehicles for use underwater and under ice. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
IN CONTROL: Aquabotix Technology Corp. President and CEO Durval Tavares, right, with engineer Courtney LeBlanc and engineer intern Michael Montee at the company, which makes remotely operated vehicles for use underwater and under ice. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Durval Tavares’ business, launched in 2011 through the Advanced Technology & Manufacturing Center at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has just experienced its first year of profitability.
Tavares, 55, is president and CEO of Aquabotix Technology Corp., based in Fall River, which makes remotely operated vehicles for use underwater and under ice. A byproduct of the center, which is an incubator, the company stayed local, keeping its research and development division in New Bedford and outsourcing manufacturing of its products to a firm in Hudson, Mass., Tavares said.
Tavares and Aquabotix are the model for the type of budding entrepreneur the center wants to attract to a new business-plan competition modeled on the popular television program “Shark Tank” and set to launch in fall or early winter.
Aquabotix “developed [its] technology in a relatively small amount of time and achieved this sustainability, and that’s the key thing,” said Louis Goodman, interim vice chancellor for research and economic development at UMass Dartmouth. “We maintain a relationship with them, so they’re an archetype for how a technology venture company would function.”
Tavares had no funding assistance when he was launching Aquabotix, and would have loved to participate in the kind of competition the university is now fostering.
“Anything that fertilizes the entrepreneurial spirit is worthwhile to do,” he said. “You just can’t give up. You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing and be persistent.”
In “Shark Tank,” budding entrepreneurs try to entice a panel of savvy, experienced investors to invest in their startups. Similarly, judges will award money to youths whose business plans are viable and demonstrate other key qualities of entrepreneurship, Goodman said.
“We would like to see some detail in the plan, marketing, product, sales – all the kinds of things in a first-class business plan,” Goodman said.
Goodman, who is also interim director of the center, has $50,000 – half from his office and half from the university’s Charlton College of Business to use for the entire competition, including some stipends for judges. Angappa “Guna” Gunasekaran, dean of the Charlton College of Business, is also co-chairman of UMass Dartmouth’s task force on “fostering entrepreneurship and creating entrepreneurial culture on campus.” The business-plan competition is part of the university’s Transform 2020 strategic plan. Chancellor Divina Grossman supports creating a culture of entrepreneurship on campus, he said.
“Most of our students, when they get to campus, go through four years of course work and graduate and work for someone [else],” said Gunasekaran. “We want to change the mindset [of students], because the south coast of Massachusetts, like the rest of the U.S., needs more jobs. We want to create entrepreneurial skills in students. Rather than working for someone, why not be an entrepreneur?”
In a statement, Grossman said, “We want companies, built on ideas born in the laboratories of UMass Dartmouth and in the garages of the SouthCoast, to take root at the ATMC and graduate into the community within three years.”
The competition will identify promising business ideas and internships for UMass Dartmouth, Bristol Community College, Durfee High School and Diman Regional Vocational School students. The business school, College of Engineering and School of Law also will be involved, Goodman said.
The competition would start out focused on the Massachusetts South Coast region between New Bedford and Fall River, and could extend beyond that depending on how the program grows, Goodman said.
The center opened 13 years ago in a 60,000-square-foot building that currently houses 12 of the 41 companies it has hosted over the years. A total of 17 startups have “graduated” from the center, creating 160 jobs, Goodman said.
The business school has done limited versions of the business-plan competition and some capstone projects have involved business plans, he added, but this contest is a first for the university. With seven months in, he is relatively new to his post, and recently traveled to Florida, where he saw comparable contests. Along with other UMass officials, Goodman traveled to the Sid Martin Biotechnology Center and Incubation Hub at the University of Florida, one of the top business incubators in the nation, to examine best practices.
“We have a new strategic plan, and a very high priority is [to] teach entrepreneurship and do something that might impact the local community,” Goodman said. “I’d like to have about 300 people applying [for the business-plan competition]: A lot of these will not be viable.”
In addition to the competition, an internship program will be designed to identify promising talent being educated in the region and encourage those individuals to build businesses here.
For Tavares, there were no business competitions or funding to help him start building a company based on his passion for robotics, after 20 years working for the Naval labs in Newport and 10 years after that working at Fidelity Investments.
Still, he came up with a business plan because he had “this … drive inside … that just wants to make it happen.”
He worked on his plan at the center for about six months before deciding to “branch off and do our own thing,” he said, but the incubator “provided the infrastructure for the business, access to talent, interns and professors.”
With startup costs of more than $1 million, profitability has only come in the past year, Tavares said.
While he declined to disclose annual sales, he said he has sold more than 250 ROVs in the last two years and more than 600 AquaLens products, which allow a remote view underwater in place of using divers.
Tavares has 10 employees but is focused on research and development and outsources manufacturing, which was part of his business plan.
“At the end of the day, we’re more of a technology company than a manufacturing company,” he said. “We let our customer base drive us to what they need: We figure out what the unmet need is of our customers and market for them.” •

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