Companies from NH, Mass., forge commerce connections during trade trip

A recent trade visit to Poland revealed promising business opportunities for companies in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Approximately 30 individuals embarked to Gdansk, Poland, in late September to learn about the business environment and economy in Pomerania, identified by the Milken Institute as one of Europe’s fastest-growing regions.

Over the course of a week, businesses — including Rokon International, a Rochester-based manufacturer of off-road motorcycles, and ArgenTech Solutions, a Newmarket-based drone integrator and service provider — met with government officials, university contacts and potential business partners. The week was capped by former Polish President and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Lech Walesa’s 80th birthday celebration at the European Solidarity Center, a museum honoring the anti- Communism movement he helped found.

Early on, Gov. Chris Sununu expressed his support for the trade mission, which was organized by New Hampshire real estate developer Steven Lewis, former New Hampshire trade director Dawn Wivell and Adam Dominski, Walesa’s son-in-law and chief of staff.

Ahead of the trip, Sununu exchanged letters with Dominski and the governor-equivalent of Pomerania, Marshal Mieczyslaw Struk, whose office coordinated presentations, custom meetings, an official dinner and tours of cultural sites. Sen. Regina Birdsell, R-Hampstead, traveled as New Hampshire’s emissary. Upon the trip’s completion, Sununu renewed the 1992 state-to-state agreement of cooperation between New Hampshire and Pomerania.

NH–Poland connection

The trade mission happened to take place 31 years after Wivell and Lewis led the first U.S. trade mission to Poland in 1992. At that time, Wivell served as the state trade director, and Lewis lived in Poland, working for the U.S. Department of Commerce, though he mainly served as a conduit between the U.S. government and newly formed Polish government in the post-communist era.

Lewis’s connection to Poland dates back to 1969 when, as a 19-year-old student at the University of New Hampshire, he got a chance to be one of 11 American foreign exchange students in Gdansk. Having learned Polish and developed close relationships with individuals who were entrenched in Poland’s Solidarity movement, he returned to Poland 20 years later as Communism collapsed. While living in Poland and later working for the U.S. government from 1991 to 1994, Lewis developed another set of important contacts.

For the next 30 years, Lewis returned to New Hampshire and focused on his real estate development business, occasionally visiting close friends in Poland.

Organizing a trade mission wasn’t on Lewis’s radar until a chance encounter last fall. Lewis was invited by fundraiser David Tille to accompany Granite United Way to Poland, where they distributed Ukrainian relief funds through the Lech Walesa Foundation. That’s when Dominski and Walesa approached Lewis with the idea.

“Adam said, ‘We’d like you to do a trade mission to Poland because we feel Poland is an equal partner, and now is an important time for American businesses to do business in Poland,’” recalled Lewis.

Lewis tapped into his Polish connections and enlisted the help of Wivell. To his delight, individuals he hadn’t contacted in nearly 30 years, such as Poland’s former secretary of state, Andrzej Kozakiewicz, were receptive to his requests for assistance with the mission.

“I’m very well connected with the existing political structure in Pomerania,” said Lewis, whose connections extend to Warsaw now, after Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition party won seats in Parliament in the Oct. 15 election and Tusk aims to become Poland’s prime minister.

“My former government contacts in Washington, D.C. (wrote me), ‘Steven, your friends are back in power,’” Lewis said. “What it means is the negotiations that occurred on the trade mission were done by pro-coalition people,” referring to Marshal Struk and the mayor of Gdansk, Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, among others. “They are now assured of being there for the next five years, and so the official government in Warsaw is going to reinforce what was started by us three weeks ago.”

Kozakiewicz told Lewis if the election had gone the other way, trade mission efforts would have still progressed, but it would have been more difficult.

Already the mission encountered resistance ahead of the election when the Port of Gdansk tour was canceled due to the mission’s affiliation with Walesa, who has been critical of Polish President Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice Party, which the Port answers to. The tour was reinstated after Lewis utilized multiple contacts. The group met with Baltic Hub, the largest container terminal at the port.

Business opportunities

That tour of the Port of Gdansk may prove to be invaluable for several American companies looking to be involved in the port’s 15-year development plan, or using it to ship their products worldwide.

“The economic strength of Gdansk, particularly through its port, provides a number of opportunities in the markets in which we operate,” said Brian Veroneau, CEO of ArgenTech Solutions, which supports the U.S. military unmanned aerial systems but has also expanded into commercial markets providing surveying, linear inspection and emergency response services worldwide.

“One of the more interesting conversations was with Baltic Hub,” agreed Noah Baker, head of referral and reseller partnerships at Boston-based software developer MOCA Systems, who traveled to Poland with MOCA Systems board member, Beverly Bruce, a former tech executive who lives in Dover.

MOCA’s general and specialty contractor collaboration platform, Touchplan, touts its ability to bring in projects on time and under budget, cutting construction planning meetings by 35%.

After the port tour, Baker got a chance to demo the software with a representative from Baltic Hub.

MOCA is also in talks with WSB Merito University in Gdansk to introduce its students to their software, and Baker is eyeing getting involved in the development of a corporate office park with housing and neighborhood amenities being built from the ground up in Rumia, Poland.

While in Poland, MOCA celebrated a handshake over forming a partnership with a construction consulting and services firm in Warsaw, after the CEO traveled more than three hours to Gdansk to meet with Baker.

“A common thread through these meetings was our commitment to going on this trip. It is what moved the needle,” Baker said.

Tom Blais, president of Rokon International, said he has four leads, one being Kozakiewicz, who had taken some soundings to see if the Polish military would be interested. Blais is targeting recreation, trail building, search and rescue, wildfire and border patrol applications.

“I think the contacts I made are great,” said Blais, who has attended New Hampshire trade missions for 30 years and sold his product in North America, Asia and the Middle East. He has considered the European market for years but hadn’t found the right partner yet.

“It’s a process. It doesn’t happen right away,” he said.

“They talk to people; people reflect on things. I have to stay in front of them. I’ve sent them all emails. I may have to go back in the spring.”

Rokon and ArgenTech tapped State Trade Expansion Program grants, federal funds available to small businesses through the New Hampshire Office of International Commerce. Blais will likely use a STEP grant to trim some of the $50,000 cost of a CE (Conformité Européenne) marking required to sell his product in Europe.

“My biggest barrier to entry is the certificate process,” said Blais, who first needs a distributor who understands his motorcycles and can even work on them.

Wivell and Lewis themselves are exploring importing transformers from Poland to relieve a shortage in the housing industry in New Hampshire and throughout the U.S. They’ve set up a company, Eurotech International, to manage this business as well as support ongoing trade missions between the U.S. and Poland.

“We are following through on our first trade mission in the 1990s,” Wivell said. “I can’t emphasize enough about how international trade is about your network and your contacts. It literally shortens your time to market if you know the right people.”

New Hampshire real estate developer Steven Lewis, who helped organize a trade trip to Gdansk, Poland, in September, meets with Lech Walsa, the country’s former president and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. (Photo by Liisa Rajala)

Emerging economy

Returning to Gdansk 31 years later, Wivell didn’t recognize it.

She recalled, during the 1992 trade mission, visiting one factory where the manager did not understand the concept of a profit margin because production quotas had always been set by the Communist government.

Fast forward to present, Gdansk had many corporate buildings, mainly owned by foreign companies, noted Davis Farmer, a biomedical investor and advisor who lives in East Kingston. Gdansk has attracted multinational companies such as Intel, Boeing and State Street Bank.

The unemployment rate in Poland is just 3.8%, so Ken Gudak, president of New Hampshire recruiting firm Techneeds, has shifted his plan from recruiting workers to move to the U.S. to instead explore finding workers with a software background to work for U.S. companies from their homes in Poland.

“I thought that everything seems to be modern and efficient,” Farmer said. “In the biotech space, they’re a long way from having a maturing industry. They have one medical school. They don’t have more than a handful of companies that I could see. If they want to establish a biomedical cluster somewhere, they’ve got to put some time and effort into it. Certainly, I think they’re smart enough.”

Farmer said he was interested in keeping in touch with two startups he met with, one of which has an interesting conceptual approach to imaging, but neither of which had enough data yet nor patent protections to compete in sophisticated marketplaces — a shortcoming he also encountered in Turkey.

Farmer noted the huge disparity in the exchange rate between the Zloty, Poland’s national currency, which exchanges at 24 cents to the American dollar, signals its status as an emerging economy. Despite being significantly cheaper than the euro, which is stronger than the American dollar, with 95 cents for every euro, one New Hampshire entrepreneur was irked by the lack of uniformity by European Union member states. Other European members that retained their national currency include Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Romania and Sweden.

“I was hoping to have a Polish headquarters and move West, but I’m just not convinced they have an international outlook. They have a domestic outlook,” said the entrepreneur, withholding his name since his company, The Home Curation Company, is in stealth mode. The southwestern New Hampshire company has developed an off-the-grid housing design that it plans to manufacture in Europe.

“I’ve concluded when I go to Poland, it will be for the Polish market, and when I go to Denmark, it’s for the Danish market. But the market in each country is still significant. It just means many mini headquarters versus one,” he said, admitting in his experience working abroad, each country in Europe preferred domestic partnerships — symbolic of the ongoing struggle within the European Union to collaborate as a continent rather than as nation states.

Many Poles were upfront that the country had benefitted enormously from EU infrastructure funds since joining in 2004. Its Oct. 15 parliamentary election favored candidates supportive of EU membership.

The lasting footprint of Poland’s history on its present-day business interactions became readily apparent to the American business leaders on the tour, who developed a deeper respect for and resonated with the Poles’ spirit.

“Given the things they we’re doing at the shipyard, I thought they had come an awful long way (in the 34 years since Communism fell),” said Kenneth Viscarello, attorney at Sheehan Phinney, which sponsored the trip. “But also, they had an enthusiasm that was refreshing — what their businesses and industries could accomplish.”

Lewis, a history major at UNH, notes Poland was a modern free market economy from 1921 until Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1939, followed by the U.S.S.R. Despite the long interim, that historical experience gave generations of Poles the gumption to push for democratic representation and a free market.

Baker, who was born into the generation after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., also became cognizant of this.

“It affected me in that this was recent to a lot of people over there. The importance to understand that and know that when interacting with people in Poland,” Baker said. “A common thread in what they believed was so necessary for the growth of the region, whether it was in business or construction, was innovation and technology.”

Baker did not immediately get excited by the business opportunities but instead the importance of their partnership. “(I thought) ‘Oh, I want to be part of that. Let us be part of that, to give you the tools that you have acknowledged to be some of the most important aspects of your progress.’” “It was evident that our Polish counterparts are eager to strengthen their ties to New England,” said Bruce, the Dover tech executive. “And we are equally committed to fostering these relations.”

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The economic strength of Gdansk offers economic opportunities for U.S. companies.