Son returns to keep MDA Consulting Engineers in the family

By JOHN BARTIMOLE

Special to Olean Times Herald | November 22, 2025

(Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series of eight articles spotlighting the businesses making up the 2025 Laine Business Accelerator cohort.)

ELLICOTTVILLE — Jake Alianello came home and is staying home.

For many years prior to the “Come Home, Stay Home” campaign from the Olean Business Development Corp., and its efforts to bring expats back to the Olean area to stay, he, in fact, has been living it.

Alianello, a partner in the firm of MDA Consulting Engineers, PLLC, in Ellicottville, with his former college roommate, Caleb Henning, faced a life-altering decision several years after graduating from college.

“We were living in North Carolina at the time,” he said. “My wife was finishing her degree and life was good. At the same time, my dad, Mark, who had founded the company years before, was considering a purchase offer on the company.

“But, before he did that, he wanted to make sure that I definitely didn’t want to come back home to the area and to the company. That was certainly his preference!”

Alianello said he and his wife considered moving to Annapolis, where she was from, but decided that the cost of even entry-level housing there was prohibitive.

“I’ve always been close to my family and enjoyed my time with them,” he said. “My wife and I talked it over, and we decided—from both a practical and professional perspective, it made sense to go back to the Ellicottville area and to the company.”

So, in 2009, Alianello joined his father full time, and he talked Henning into joining him, too.

“I never wanted to run the company alone,” he said. “We deal a lot with municipal and town boards, and that means making presentations to them, typically at evening meetings. During the worst weeks when my father was running the company, he would be gone many nights during the week, meeting with the boards.

“Caleb is almost like another son to my father,” he said. “I talked with him about having Caleb join us. In 2014, after having achieved our professional licensure, Caleb and I joined my father in ownership roles, and, over a number of years, we purchased the business from him. My father retired at the beginning of 2021.”

The two partners made some strategic changes to the company. Whereas his father would engineer/design houses and decks as well as the more complex projects, Alianello focused the company more so on municipal clients and land development projects.

“We have worked with towns and villages across western New York on many public water systems and wastewater systems,” he said. “For example, we designed the wastewater system for the Lime Lake area in Machias and for the Yorkshire area. Both of them feed into the Arcade wastewater plant, and the income Arcade is realizing from those projects is helping them by providing resources to improve their system.”

The firm specializes in working with smaller municipalities “that are our predominant clients. We seek to apply our company motto—“Knowledge and thoroughness”—to our work on every project.”

His relationship with the Laine Business Accelerator came out of a desire to “improve our business proficiency to bring excellence to our work,” he said. “We hope to become even more effective at keeping the communities throughout western New York aware of our firm and our past work, so that they consider us whenever they encounter a need for a local, well-qualified civil engineer.”

He said the LBA is helping to teach them how to balance both sides of the business—the engineering side and the business side. “The experience has exceeded my expectations,” he said. “Just the camaraderie and the informal talks are so important. We’re all there to succeed and to help lift the economies in our area.

“Cattaraugus County is a wonderful place to live, and we enjoy raising our families here,” he said. “We are excited to be a part of revitalizing our corner of New York State by providing excellent professional services that address such important needs in our communities.”

And those communities are enriched because he decided to come home … and stay home.