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DemocratandChronicle Page3E Lauren Burns Company: ER Select. New job: Vice president of business development. Previous job: ADP. Home: Canandaigua. Barbara Zappia Company: Greater Rochester Health Foundation.

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Stephen DeLucia Company: Insero Co CPAs. New job: Supervisor in the Audit Department. Previous job: Staff accountant. Home: Rochester. On the move To submit your new hires or promotions, use our form at http://on.rocne.ws/OTMove It seemed like a good deal for Market, the Ohio-based grocer wooed last year to monolithic College Town project.

Thousands of hungry University of Rochester students live a few blocks away, thousands more people go to work at Strong Memorial Hospital and thousands more live near the Mt. Hope and Elmwood Avenue areas. So if roughly 35,000 people live, work or go to school in the area, why not get them a grocery store? It makes sense until you fill your tummy and really start to think about it. Remember how in 2003 Wegmans Food Markets decided to close its Mt. Hope Avenue store located just a hundred feet or so from roughly space? And would all those students actually abandon their meal plans and hop over a cemetery to get to a full-service market? How many of those nurses, doctors and visitors at Strong would skip the hospital cafeteria for a soda and some soup a few blocks away? Who would rather grab a bite at the Mt.

Hope Family Diner, or one of the many other area restaurants, for some hot roasted chicken or prepared pasta at a grocery store? Would people really stumble upon a grocery store essentially isolated from traffic by a hotel and other businesses and apartments now on top of what was an empty parking lot for years? are enclosed. We kind of referred to it as, the castle We got a five-story hotel right there and we are surrounded completely on four sides. There is no said Jason Myers, manager of the store. were probably only doing about 25 percent of what we should have. August too moved into College Town last spring, backed by a roughly $750,000 federal loan managed by Action for a Better Community Inc.with the idea that the area was a and that many jobs would be filled by low-income applicants.

Now many of those people are out of work after shut down its Rochester location Saturday. Many of those workers declined to comment for this story, but Myers said some of them have already secured employment. One is going to work at the bakery of a in Cleveland. Someone else had plans to open his own restaurant. Others got jobs at the new Dave Busters at Marketplace mall in Henrietta, Myers said.

The University of Rochester sent its own human resource professionals to TINA PHOTOGRAPHER Market, located in College Town, closed less than a year after it opened. The last day was Saturday. Kurt Oechsle, chef for prepared foods, and Jeff Sheehan, produce manager, move products to close gaps on the shelves. says it was a victim of poor vision TODD CLAUSEN WORK LIFE Business ConNextions Success stories and solutions for small businesss Apollo Optical Systems was founded in 2003, but founder Michael Morris learned a lot from its previous incarnations, dating back to 1989. Morris was a professor at the Insti- ute of Optics at the University of Rochester at the time, where he began Rochester Photonics Corporation.

The comp any was acquired by Corning in 1999, but after Corning stocks plummeted, Morris managed a buyout, resulting in A pollo Optical Systems. lesson learned from the ac- uisition and subsequent buyout, and something he carried with him into Apoll Optical Systems, was the idea of divers ification. opposed to working in one partic- lar area, telecom, we diversified it to upply optical components to a wide variety of markets. Currently, consume electronics, commercial products, def ense, medical systems and solid-state LED lighting. Maybe not everything is oing up at the same time, but at least you reduce the volatility in the business by doing said Morris, 63.

Key growth areas for the company, which designs and manufactures optical components and subsystems used in end products, are gesture recognition, 3-D imaging, virtual reality, as ell as LED lighting and medical illumi- nation. With gesture recognition in things like Kinect system, for example, Apollo Optical creates optical components that shape a laser beam, which sensors pick up to determine where the user is in the room. recently spoke with Morris, a Pe- rinton resident, about upcoming photon- ics programs in Rochester, waiting for he phone to ring and more. Making room: making significant investment into capital equipment. hired additional people to hit requirements for customer demands.

Also, had some additional space, so building out manufacturing space to be a ble to accommodate demand. utting in the infrastructure, adding additional molding machines, adding addi- ional assembly stations. Our predict ions are that should last us through the end of 2017. Then we have to either build look for more anaging growth: is fun and exciting, but you have to manage it. ou have to be very careful not to get too far leveraged out with equipment.

Access to low-cost capital is a challenge, and then to grow the business, access to additional marketing and sales distribution channels, those are the things really exploring actively right On a of ave regular company meetings. Com- munication is very important in any company, but particularly in a small company. We try very hard to keep all the employees informed of opportunities that are coming along and particularly how they can participate in growing the company. all in this togeth- r. I have employees that have been with me for 20 years through these different Waiting for the phone to ring: really have a sales and distribution network.

The three principals of the company, myself and Dan McGarry and Claude Tribastone, are sort of the sales eam. We go to one tradeshow a year, but people are finding us because of word of mouth and Web presence. We kind of sit a round and wait for the phone to ring, but we wait very long! Where going next is to add in a broader sales and arketing distribution channel, and that can help it grow even n-the-job training programs: looking forward to the photonics pro- rams that have been announced, the pstate Revitalization Initiative. There are components of those that have on- he-job training programs. A lot of peo- le have families, mortgages and car payments.

They just go back to chool for two years, so being able to ave some programs to facilitate on-the- job training is a way to get people into ew career paths. I think that will be an important part of our For more information: Apollo Optical Systems, 925 John W. Henrietta, NY 14586. Call (585) 272-6170 or go to ApolloOptical.com. Jinelle Shengulette is a Rochester- a rea freelance writer.

CATCHING UP WITH Michael Morris of Apollo Optical Systems JINELLE SHENGULETTE JEFF Michael Morris of Apollo Optical Systems.