A Small Wall Crack

Basement Systems Inc. which recently opened a new 59,000 square foot building on its 50-acre site off of Silvermine Road in Seymour, was named one of the state's fastest-growing technology firms by the Connecticut Technology Council last month. It designs and sells products and systems that either remove water and dampness from residential basements or prevents water from getting in. It sells its products through a network of 350 independent basement waterproofing, basement finishing and crawl space repair contractors throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Basement Systems is an outgrowth of Connecticut Basement Systems Inc. a company founded in Milford by a young carpenter and contractor named Larry Janesky in 1987. The two companies combined 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 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.

Janesky's Seymour-based waterproofing empire consisted of Connecticut Basement Systems- a company that solves roughly 2,500 residental waterproofing problems per year for customers in Connceticut, New York, and Massachusetts- and Basement Systems, until it introduced three new subsidiaries during the past year. The new divisions are: 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 international contractors who specialize in repairing buckling 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 and outings, the 350 independent contractors are not franchisees. They retain thier 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 return to their hometowns and use Janesky's 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 sucess."