Basement Systems Inc. which recently opened a new 59,000 square foot building on its 50-acre site off Silvermine Road in Seymour, Connecticut was named one of the state's fastest-growing technology firms by the Connecticut Technology Council last month. The company designs and sells products and systems that either remove water and dampness from residential basements or prevent water from getting in. Selling its products through a network of independent basement waterproofing, basement finishing and crawl space repair contractors throughout the United States and Canada.
Basement Systems is an outgrowth of Connecticut Basement Systems Inc. a company founded in Milford, Connecticut by a young carpenter and contractor named Larry Janesky in 1987. The two companies together employ about 170 people at the Seymour campus. Janesky who started building houses immediately after graduating from high school in 1982, built 23 houses between 1982 and 1987. The last of those homes developed a small crack in a basement wall that triggered a water problem. Resolving that issue got Janesky interested in developing new solutions to a very old problem.
"These waterproofing problems have been around for hundreds of years, but no one before Larry had ever really sat down and designed and developed a modern approach to the problem using current technology," said Daniel F. Fitzgerald III, Basement Systems' Director of Marketing. Janesky, a Middlebury resident, has now been issued 24 patents for his waterproofing products and procedures, Fitzgerald said.
Until last year, the Seymour-based waterproofing company consisted of Basement Systems and Connecticut Basement Systems, a company that solves roughly 2,500 residential waterproofing problems per year for customers in Connecticut and New York. During the past year, the company introduced three new subsidiaries: Total Basement Finishing, a network of about 30 contractors who help customers convert basements into finished, livable spaces; Foundation Support Works, a network of about 30 contractors who specialize in repairing buckled or sinking foundations; and Relia-Serve, which provides business coaching services to small business owners in the contracting industry.
Though Janesky provides the members of this international network with extensive training, marketing materials, and motivational seminars, the independent contractors are not franchisees. They retain their independence and pay no royalties or fees. He prefers to regard the contractors who join his network as partners since his company only profits when the contractors use Basement Systems’ patented products and systems to solve their customers" waterproofing, crawl space, and foundation problems.
" The more successful our contractors are, the more products and supplies they purchase from us," Fitzgerald explained. " This way we all have a vested interest in each other's success."
