Eight Stories Built to Stay Cold

If you've come into downtown Buffalo on the I-190, you've seen it, even if you never knew its name. Eight stories of brick at 199 Scott Street, taller than anything else in the Cobblestone District, right where the highway swings past the waterfront.

It went up in 1920 for the Fairmont Creamery Company, and nobody built it to be admired. They built it to stay cold. This was before home freezers were a normal thing, before refrigerated trucks were running goods up and down the Thruway. A city the size of Buffalo needed somewhere to hold butter and cream and eggs so they didn't turn. So Fairmont put up a cold storage warehouse near the waterfront and the rail lines, thick walled and close to windowless, because windows let heat in and heat was the enemy.

Later the building kept doing the same work under a different name. The Arctic Freezer Company ran it as refrigerated storage for Rich Products Corporation, the Buffalo company that changed how the whole country thinks about frozen food. Rich's left the building in the 1990s.

The Lights Went Out, and One Man Turned Them Back On

The vacancy started in the mid 1990s and it did not end quickly. In 1996 a fire damaged the upper floors. The building sat open to the weather, and a Buffalo winter does not go easy on a structure with holes in it.

Ellicott Development bought the property in 2001 and gutted it in 2007 for a redevelopment that kept getting pushed. For years it was the biggest completely empty building downtown, and there was no hiding it, because it sits right on the highway where thousands of people pass it every single day. Plans came and went. Nothing happened.

Then Victor Liberatore Sr. walked through it in 2013 and sized it up. He was 81 years old, a concrete contractor by trade, and what he found inside was a mess of open floors that needed enormous amounts of new concrete. He told WGRZ that people had informed him it couldn't be done, and his response was, "They told me you can't do it. So I said leave me alone."

Work started that September. It ran $14.6 million and included a new roof, new windows and a rebuilt interior. The most striking piece was what they did to the walls. Crews cut whole banks of windows into surfaces that had been solid brick since 1920, because a building designed to keep light out was about to become a building where people lived and worked. Apartments went on floors three through five. Offices went up top. There's parking on site and a roof with a view of the whole city. The place runs about 123,000 square feet, and it goes by The Fairmont now.

By early 2016, Ellicott Development's CEO was calling the building 100 percent occupied.

The Bills and the Sabres Were Run Out of the Second Floor

Here's the part most people around here don't know.

Pegula Sports and Entertainment moved into the second floor of that old creamery. Suite 200. From those offices, Kim Pegula served as president and CEO of the company that held the Buffalo Bills, the Buffalo Sabres, the Buffalo Bandits, the Rochester Americans, the Rochester Knighthawks, LECOM Harborcenter, KeyBank Center and Black River Entertainment, the Nashville record label. If you mailed in a nomination for the Bills and M&T Bank Touchdown for Teachers contest in 2016, you addressed the envelope to 199 Scott Street, Suite 200.

A Buffalo News profile from 2015 caught what a day in there actually looked like. Kim Pegula moving fast through the offices with an iPhone in one hand and a plate of kettle chips in the other, calling it lunch with a shrug. She stopped at a video editing station to check on the progress of a music video for one of Black River's artists, a Kelsea Ballerini song, a project split between Buffalo and Nashville.

Think about that for a second. A warehouse built to keep butter from spoiling, sitting dark and burned for twenty years, and then a country music video and two professional sports franchises are being run out of the second floor of it. The building sits a short walk from KeyBank Center and Harborcenter, which is exactly why the location made sense.

PSE was established shortly after the Pegulas bought the Sabres in 2011, and they added the Bills in 2014. On August 28, 2023, Terry Pegula dissolved the company, with the Bills and Sabres to be run as separate organizations going forward.

A Lunch, a Handshake, and Two Guys with Decent Heads on Their Shoulders

Suite 210, on that same second floor, belongs to CareTeam Solutions.

Justin and Kyle Cuviello are brothers, and neither of them came up through recruiting. Justin spent a couple of years in pharmaceutical sales, then worked for a couple of startups, and he says he learned plenty from them, mostly what not to do. He was getting ready to head back into medical sales and had already started interviewing. Kyle's background was software sales.

What they had was a good friend, and that friend had an investor the brothers had gotten to know over lunches. One day the investor asked them out again and asked whether they wanted to start a healthcare staffing agency. He thought he had a contract he could bring over. He thought, as Justin tells it, that they were two young sales guys with decent heads on their shoulders who he could trust.

They said yes. It was the very end of 2014. The mentorship they expected didn't fully materialize, but the relationship stayed solid, and after roughly two years they bought him out. From there it was just Justin and Kyle.

Which meant it was all Justin and Kyle. Kyle describes the early stretch plainly. You have to get the contracts, you have to fill the contracts, you have to do the invoicing. Justin adds the part he remembers, doing the time cards. Every job in the company belonged to two people.

Kyle says the real shift came years later, once they'd hired enough people that somebody was always at his desk needing something. Part of him kept thinking the interruptions were pulling him away from his work. Then one day it clicked. Helping those people was the work now. He'd hired them to do the rest.

Up the Rollercoaster, Then Straight Off the Side

Anybody who lived through 2020 in Western New York knows what happened to nursing. Travel nurses became the most needed workers in the country, and companies like CareTeam grew fast.

Then came the correction, and it was brutal. Kyle says 2023 opened on an all time high, and when things started cooling they figured they could push through it. They had money in the bank. They could hire more recruiters and buy more resources and outrun the slowdown. That turned out not to be true.

The industry numbers from that stretch are ugly. The Staffing Industry Analysts figure that keeps getting cited is a median decline of roughly 37 percent for travel staffing firms. Justin says it took a while just to get past the shock of how fast it fell.

What they did next says something about them. A lot of agencies ran big layoffs. CareTeam mostly didn't, and Kyle will tell you flat out that in hindsight maybe they should have. Instead they went line by line through what they were spending on resources, cut what they didn't need, and spent months trying to train up the people they already had. Eventually they parted ways with the ones who couldn't get there, and they got a lot more careful about who they hired next.

A case study published by their referral software company put numbers to the outcome. CareTeam went from $13.5 million in revenue to a projected $16 million in 2024, doubled their referral placements, and picked up 12 percent growth inside a single 45 day stretch. In a market where flat counted as a win, that's a real result.

The Line That Explains the Whole Company

Ask most staffing agencies who the client is and they'll say the hospital. That's who signs the contract. That's who pays.

Kyle says it differently. The nurses are the clients. The company needs them, and everybody there is there to serve them, including the ones who are a pain in the neck on a given day, because the pain in the neck ones are people too.

Justin makes the same point from the other direction. He describes the moment a recruiter stops taking a difficult call personally, once you know that the nurse who was short with you is divorced, raising two young kids and working overnights. He says once you start coming at it from that angle, it makes everything easier, and not just the job.

There's a practical version of this too. Justin says nurses have left them over pay, because CareTeam usually pays well but isn't always top dollar. Some of those nurses kept sending referrals anyway, and some came back. His argument is that the extra hundred bucks a week costs you things that matter. At CareTeam the compliance contact isn't offshore. The nurse advocate is an RN who worked acute care at the level one and traveled herself, so she knows exactly what the person on the other end of the phone is dealing with. They keep a psychologist available for employee wellness, not as a lifelong therapist, but as somebody to talk to when a stretch gets hard.

Kyle has a way of describing what they want a nurse to say about her recruiter. Everybody's got a doctor or a mechanic they swear by and insist you have to use. That's what a recruiter should be. Somebody a nurse brags about in a hospital break room three states away.

Here's how you find out whether that's real or just something printed on a wall. A recruiter named Alec got mail from a traveling nurse he'd placed. Inside was a shark tooth and one of those little letterboards where you push the letters in. It read, "Alec is the best recruiter."

Another recruiter, Amad, had been talking with one of his nurses about his grandmother and the arthritis she deals with. A different nurse later called the office and left a message, because she had something for arthritis she wanted him to know about. Somebody up front took it down and passed it along like any other message, which at that company it more or less is.

And then there's the one Kyle tells. Alec came to him and asked if he could hop on Amazon and order a Buffalo Bills hat, because it was his nurse's son's 11th birthday. That's a recruiter who knows a kid's birthday and knows his team. You don't get that off a job board.

Justin's phrase for how it's supposed to work is a win, win, win. Take care of your own people in house, teach them to take care of the healthcare professionals, and the facilities you serve end up taken care of too. Everybody's covered.

Four Dogs, a Football, and a Monday in February

Kyle says they almost don't love bringing candidates into the office, because the office is a little too good. There are four dogs running around. There's a football flying over your head. There are couches. And then everybody who works there sits down and dials it in anyway.

Getting hired is not casual. Justin makes the first call himself, and he opens by telling people how hard the job can be, because plenty of applicants think recruiting means sitting at a job fair handing out pens. This is straight sales, a hundred calls to get one person on the phone.

Then he paints a picture any Western New Yorker will recognize on the spot. It's the end of February. It's still dark in the morning and still cold. Your dog threw up. You had to brush off the car. Two of your nurses canceled last week, and you're driving in to do it all again. What's motivating you?

The answer he's listening for isn't heroic. It's the person who mutters something unprintable, puts on a podcast, grabs a coffee, walks in, chats with a couple of coworkers and says okay, I'm ready to roll. That's the whole test.

After the call comes a personality assessment, and if a candidate doesn't finish it by the deadline, Justin doesn't chase them, no matter how good they looked. Then Kyle and Alec run interviews. Then there's a role play, a mock scenario where you basically have to get up and perform a little, with the review happening right after in the same room. They know it's nerve wracking. That's sort of the point.

The philosophy underneath it came from a University at Buffalo alumni learning session Kyle sat through years back. One line stuck. Everyone hires for experience and fires on character. He decided that was backwards, and they've run the company that way ever since.

Still on Scott Street

CareTeam has grown past travel nursing. They've moved into locum tenens work placing physicians in flexible roles, and into clinical research staffing, and Justin talks about that expansion the way somebody talks about a room they finally got around to finishing. The travel nurse side isn't slowing down for it. Kyle says the shortage isn't going anywhere and there's plenty of work for anybody willing to do it right.

They're readers, the two of them. They pass around books like Thanks for the Feedback and 10x Is Easier Than 2x, and Kyle admits the second one made him feel like he'd been doing everything wrong, which he counts as a compliment to the book.

The advice Justin gives anybody thinking about starting something is short. Nothing happens as fast as you think it will, business doesn't grow in a straight line, and the guy everyone thinks got lucky selling his company usually ground on it for twenty or thirty years first.

Which brings it back to the building. A creamery warehouse from 1920 held Buffalo's butter, then Buffalo's frozen food, then nothing at all for the better part of twenty years while people drove past and figured it was finished. An 81 year old contractor was told it couldn't be saved and told everybody to leave him alone. Then a football team, a hockey team and a Nashville record label ran out of the second floor. Now that same floor has four dogs, a football in the air, and two brothers calling nurses in Elmira and Plymouth and Mattoon.

Same city. Same stubbornness. Buffalo doesn't tear things down when it can help it, and that goes for buildings and people both.