BRUNSWICK, Maine — Coastal Enterprises Inc. in Brunswick is a nonprofit that aims to help small businesses thrive.
As part of its efforts, the company started a Weatherization Business Lab in April.
"Part of the goal of this lab is to really increase the weatherization contractors in the more rural parts of our state where there are less contractors available," Emily Wood, Program Director of Climate Justice and Environmental Resilience at CEI, said.
Weatherization can be described as taking steps to protect your home or a building from the elements and improve energy efficiency. A few examples include using air-sealing insulation and doing energy audits.
Wood said the lab offers training to bolster business knowledge for folks already involved in or looking to get into weatherization fields.
"Like the marketing and hiring and payroll and kind of all of those skills were really kind of needed in Maine," Wood said.
Ben Titcomb from Wayne has his own carpentry handyman business. He graduated from the Weatherization Business Lab and said it was eye-opening.
"Learning about the marketing aspect of the business and how that's an area that could definitely improve upon and then looking at not underselling the importance of the management and human resources component of a business like this," Titcomb said. "It's not something I really had on my radar as someone who works like with one or two people."
The business lab is able to be offered for free at CEI thanks to a grant from the governor's energy office. To make the program even more accessible, especially to those in rural areas, the program is offered virtually once a week for seven weeks.
"Just being a little bit of a drive up here in Wayne from a lot of the kind of center points, it made it easy to just work into my workday and come home for an hour and attend class and, and then get back to work," Titcomb said.
When someone finishes the program, Wood explained they receive a $3,000 grant to help cover some business-related costs.
"One of the big barriers in entering the weatherization space is kind of cost for equipment but also getting that initial training done to be a weatherization contractor," Wood said.
Wood added that grant funding to cover another year was awarded for the Weatherization Business Lab. 14 people have graduated from the program since it started in April.
If you're interested in applying, there is a short interest form to fill out, which you can find by clicking here.