On the Upswing
After several flat years, business is heating up for Ham Lake temperature sensor maker RTD Co.
BY DAN HEILMAN
While the rest of the world breathlessly awaited the debut of Apple’s iPhone, RTD Co. CEO Jim Sulciner saw the product’s big splash as an affirmation that his company was going in the right direction.
“Their diversification has launched them,” Sulciner says of Apple. “If you can cover markets that feed you similar kinds of customers, and you have the technology to get to those markets, your diversification will ride you through the highs and the lows.”
Diversification has become RTD’s hallmark. The Ham Lake-based company designs and makes custom temperature sensors. Since 2003, it has completely diversified its operation and quadrupled sales as a result.
RTD was purchased inmid-2001 by Sulciner, Brad Lesmeister, and Pete Bernier. All three are engineers and former RTD employees, and their know-how has enabled them to move the business into new product lines and new markets. Prior to the purchase, the company had fallen on hard times. Sales had fallen to less than $2 million per year, and management was cutting back on workers’ hours. It’s a different story today. RTD now makes sensors for medical devices, aeronautics products, and fluid and gas-flow applications such as oil and gas pipelines. It’s also gone international, establishing amanufacturing plant in Suzhou, China, and moving into the Mexican, Canadian, and South American markets, with Europe next in its sights.
When the trio bought RTD, recalls Sulciner, it was primarily serving two markets: makers of large electric motors and creators of systems that that apply adhesives during the manufacture of packaging products. Sulciner and company saw untapped potential in the operation, and set to work on rebuilding RTD using their combined experience and contacts. “My background, and the background of my two partners, was more in high-end temperature sensing,” he says. “We started to make that transition in 2003 — serving upper-end, higher-reliability, higher-stability, and higher-accuracy markets. From there, it just took off, and we opened up markets in the pharmaceutical, medical device, and process control industries. Those have blossomed for us.”
The result: Annual sales have jumped from $2million a decade ago to $9million now, with 2007 revenues projected to grow 27 percent. It’s also meant a move from a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Cambridge to a new 20,000-square-foot complex in Ham Lake.
For the future, Sulciner says, RTD wants to get into more high-end temperature sensing realms, including the semiconductor industry. It also wants to streamline its manufacturing segment overseas. “Our expansion strategy includes having our core technology in Ham Lake, but sending our high-volume manufacturing offshore,” he says.