Westchester County Business Journal Arc of triumph
Arc of triumph
Agency to use profits from start-up to aid underfunded programs
Keeping pace with the digital age and a growing entrepreneurial trend among nonprofits, officials at Westchester Arc have launched a for-profit business that provides electronic scanning services to public entities and private firms and jobs for persons with developmental disabilities and other county residents.
Arc officials plan to channel future profits from their start-up business, eDocNY, into the nonprofit agency’s programs that are either underfunded or receive no public funding. With headquarters in White Plains, the agency has more than 600 employees and serves more than 1,600 children and adults with disabilities and their families.
Since launching its document management business a year ago, Arc already has more than two dozen government agencies and corporations on its client list. They include the City of New Rochelle; Dutchess County Surrogate Court; Nassau County District and Surrogate’s courts; Westchester County Medical Center; state Division of Housing and Community Renewal and MasterCard International.
“That’s our marketplace, the tri-state area,” said Kevin Hansan, acting director of eDocNy. The business, though does not yet have New Jersey clients. “Give us a year,” he said.
“Our biggest challenge is getting the service known in the geographic here,” said Hansan, owner of Imagework in White Plains. “We don’t advertise right now. It’s mostly word of mouth. It’s sort of going after the low-hanging fruit first.”
The agency’s digital imaging service expands upon its long-established contract work in microfilming and complements its records storage and document destruction services at facilities in Mount Kisco and Millwood. Westchester Arc’s micrographics department, which employs 22 people and is equipped with 17 cameras, billed $166,000 last year, said Linda Warner, Arc director of career development and business opportunities. Its record storage business billed $148,000.
Since its May start-up, eDocNY billed almost $77,000 in services last year, Warner said. In the first quarter this year, the business already has billed $56,500, she said.
With $410,000 in projected expenses this year, eDoc is still in the red. Warner said the business should show a profit in three years.
Three years ago, Warner said, Arc’s board president urged vocational services staff to develop a new, profit-making business within the agency. The document-scanning service, whereby Arc workers would capture and digitize printed information for retrieval on clients’ computer systems, was the result of that initiative.
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