Ivy Computer President George Pierce in his office on June 1. The software company is set to build a new headquarters on the space where the Waterbury Festival Playhouse tent now stands. Photos by Cory Dawson
by Cory Dawson, Waterbury Roundabout correspondent
A software and tech enterprise dubbed one of Vermont’s best workplaces is gearing up to build a new headquarters and add well over 100 jobs in the coming years.
Ivy Computer, the Waterbury-based maker of software that powers the efficient routing, accounting and operations of thousands of waste companies mainly in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is applying to build a new, $4 million, 22,000-square-foot office building where the tent for the now-defunct Waterbury Festival Playhouse stands, set back from Vermont Route 100 north of McNeil Road.
The new building will serve as the headquarters for the growing business, which plans to hire their way from 53 employees and four interns to just under 200 people in the coming years, said company president George Pierce, who also ran the playhouse with his wife, Ginger.
“It was a great theater. We did some wonderful shows,” Pierce said. “I miss it, I didn’t get tired of doing the theater. I got tired of running the theater.”
The playhouse tent and assets were recently sold, though Pierce said that the buyers don’t plan on reviving the theater. "Sadly the theater will not be continuing its life as a theater, and will have to live on with the memory of all the great shows that it saw," Pierce said.
During a recent Waterbury Development Review Board hearing, Pierce said they want the two-story headquarters to be as obscured from Route 100 as possible. “There is nothing to be gained for us to stand out,” he said.
The project calls for adding vegetation along the road, including planting new trees. The company operates on a net-zero basis thanks in part to a 110 kWh array of solar panels on site. The new building will include another 165 kWh on the roof, officials explained during the review hearing.
The DRB approved the application for the new headquarters at its June 1 meeting. Company officials said they have submitted an Act 250 application. Once that hurdle is clear, they aim for a summer groundbreaking with the goal of Ivy employees working in the new building in about a year.
Since ending operation in 2019, the Waterbury Festival Playhouse structure (featuring the familiar 'Thalia and Melpomene' masks) is used for storage for the adjacent Ivy Computer office on Route 100 in Waterbury. A buyer has been found for it, according to Ivy President George Pierce, who operated the playhouse with his wife, Ginger. “I didn’t get tired of doing the theater. I got tired of running the theater,” he said.
Notable benefits and the Ivy philosophy
For the past four years, Vermont’s “Best Places to Work” list has featured Ivy Computer, most recently for third place in the small business category. The rankings are made by the Vermont Chamber of Commerce and Vermont Business Magazine.
Pierce, who keeps one of the awards in his office overlooking the solar array and playhouse, said that on top of a good pay and benefits package, the company has some out-of-the-box perks and practices.
For example, Ivy will fully detail every employee’s car at least twice a year. It takes them about a month to get through the whole company. The idea came from an effort to differentiate themselves from other companies at the “Best Places to Work” competition, said Sales and Marketing Manager Dan Paradis.
“During the portion of the show when they list all the companies various benefits, we kept hearing about massage. Over and over: massage. We were like, ‘Why is everyone so stressed?’” Paradis recounted. “We wanted to be different.”
The cleaners come during the work day, so employees drive their dirty cars to work and head home in a clean ride. If an employee is working from home, the cleaners will come to them. “They did such a good job on mine,” Paradis said. “I felt like a new human being.”
Then there’s the philosophy. Most companies have going-away parties when employees leave for a new role — which was incentivizing something that Pierce said he didn’t want to happen. So they decided to throw the parties for new employees.
Any manager at Ivy also has to write and maintain a document they call an “operator’s manual” which lays out all the minutiae about how to work well together.
“It's all that stuff you learn after you've been in a business for a while,” Pierce said. “What do you do if you come to my door and it’s closed? Do you knock? Do you come back? Do you call? Do you send a message?”
He continued, “On day one, you can pull out my operating manual and look and read what it's going to be like to deal with me.”
Managers like Paradis who write the manuals for the people they work with say the process is often a revealing exercise — especially when colleagues suggest alterations.
“It’s an interesting tool to learn about yourself,” Paradis said. “Writing it is one part of it. And then when somebody first tells you that's not the way it really is — Well, tell me how it really is.”
The company will also pay for case-by-case health costs, including benefits like divorce counseling and therapy. “It doesn't get used much, it’s just nice to know it’s there if you need it,” Pierce said.
State incentive sweetens expansion
In December, Ivy won preliminary approval from the Vermont Economic Progress Council of about $2.5 million in state grant money under the Vermont Employee Growth Incentive. The program will pay out over several years as the company meets growth milestones.
The grants push companies to grow jobs faster than they would otherwise be able to — the hope for the state is an increase in tax revenue for the long term.
“They're saying, okay, well, if you were gonna hire them in five years, but now you can hire them in two years, the three-year difference is what's gonna matter to them,” Pierce said. “The fact that they will then develop and grow and will be being paid, more at the end of that five years, is what's going to be the benefit to the state.”
Ivy has until November to finalize its application for the award and receive final approval.
The state program last year also signed off on an incentive grant of just over $6 million to another tech company that’s looking to establish a regional office in Waterbury. The Texas-based IT firm MTX is still in the process of moving into offices in Waterbury Center formerly occupied by Keurig Dr. Pepper.
A cross-country history
Pierce founded Ivy Computer in 1985 in Ohio, but quickly made the decision to move to Vermont as he sought a “homey” place similar to where he grew up in northern New Jersey. The “Ivy” in the name comes from his alma mater Cornell University, a member of the Ivy League, he said.
The company’s current offices, in a renovated Hooker’s furniture store off Route 100 next to the playhouse tent, is the third location they have had in Vermont. It originally set up on farmland in Duxbury on River Road in a renovated barn, Pierce said. They then moved to the Pilgrim Park complex in downtown Waterbury before moving to the current 8-acre site which is large enough to accommodate the expansion project.
Ivy Computer’s main product, Trash Flow, has been around in some form since about 1989, Pierce said.
The idea was sparked when a trash hauler came to him as an early Ivy customer, who bemoaned their cumbersome current routing system and the companies they disliked dealing with in order to manage their routes.
“I’m looking at that and I’m going, this sounds like a business opportunity,” Pierce said.
At the time, installing software and managing it looked a lot different than it does now.
“We actually drove over to a place in a car. It was a neat concept,” Pierce said. “You carried boxes of diskettes.”
What Ivy Computer offers now is a complete trash-tracking system. Truck drivers have tablets in their vehicles with Ivy-supplied route-management and tracking software. The landfills where trash is dropped off uses the company’s software to keep track of drop-off receipts and management of the facility.
The software also underpins all the back-office management — invoicing, billing and marketing.
What’s next
Ivy has been building out its cohort of programmers, a challenging endeavor, Pierce said, since skilled programmers are difficult to come by and can take years — up to a decade — to train.
The company is now “programmer-heavy,” Pierce said, and the new space will be filled with not just the programmers but the sales staff, tech support, training and administrative roles they will soon need to hire to run their new products.
“When you start filling in, that's when the space becomes more critical,” he said.
Their next endeavor will be a Trash Flow-like system for the oil and gas industry, specifically for the small and medium-sized delivery companies that would move heating oil to homes or farms.
The industry has similar characteristics to the waste industry, Paradis said, and their software would introduce significant efficiencies like route optimization.
“We're always trying to save customers time, and make them more efficient. That's kind of what we do. Whether it's in their office or in their trucks,” Paradis said.