For Medico, work started early

Tom Medico’s business career began like many others, with a paper route.

“I always had my own little business when I was growing up,” he said Tuesday, two days before accepting the Entrepreneur of the Year award from Junior Achievement of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

At age 11, Medico delivered his hometown paper, the Sunday Dispatch. Later, when he was 16, he set up a business removing ashes from homes. Not long after, like his brothers and cousins, he began to get a taste of working at the family business, Medico Industries.

Tom Medico has followed the footsteps of his father, Philip, and four brothers who started the business in 1937. His uncle, William, was the president, the role Tom Medico has filled since 1990.

“He was a giant of a person,” Medico said, starting a tradition of service to the community that has carried through to the present. Tom Medico has held voluntary leadership positions with church, health care, civic and educational organizations and currently is a board member at Geisinger South Wilkes-Barre and Luzerne County Community College.

After taking care of families’ basic needs, the main focus of the founding brothers was education. “The primary requirement was that you went to college for at least four years,” Medico said. He earned a business management degree at the University of Scranton before coming to work full time.

Today’s budding entrepreneurs don’t have to throw papers to get a hands-on feel for business. The Junior Achievement Mericle Family Center for Enterprise Education in Pittston provides opportunities to learn and practice business and finance skills in a realistic atmosphere.

“I am so impressed with that facility,” Medico said. But there’s more to success than making good decisions, he observed.

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