Victor manufacturer extends reach to beat recession
The Rochester Top 100, which annually recognizes the fastest-growing privately held companies in the nine-county region, is sponsored by the Rochester Business Alliance and KPMG.
Here is an interview with Jerry Valentine, president of Surmotech Inc.
What do you do here at Surmotech?
We build circuit boards for the medical, military and industrial industries. We either do what they call a turnkey process, in which case they supply schematics and a bill of material, and we go out and buy it, assemble it, test it, and give it to them; or we do some consignment work where they purchase all the material and send it in to us as a kit and then we create it.
How did the company get started?
I had worked for Eastman Kodak for about five years, and during that session, Eastman Kodak was spinning off venture companies. I joined a company called Sayett Technology and we developed the first liquid crystal display unit to project computer images.
The first year, we developed and sold about 30,000 units, and Kodak was impressed with that performance and decided they were going to roll us back into the red and yellow umbrella. So we went back to work for Kodak for about another five years, but they were struggling to make the product work, so they sold it to some private investors and the management team.
The team decided to diversify and get into other areas, and Surmotech was one of those spinoffs. So I did marketing and engineering for the company and eventually was their general manager, but then they decided to get out of this business and that’s when I decided to purchase it from them.
I always tell everybody that I didn’t envision myself as a business owner and never had aspirations of becoming a business owner. It was just an opportunity that presented itself.
That being the case, was it scary for you early on?
It was definitely scary. You find you have a huge responsibility to your employees, and you’re taking along a lot of financial debt responsibilities. It was a little nerve-wracking at times. Every month I’d take a look at the financials and make sure, “OK, we can continue. We can stay open for the next month.”
Manufacturing has been hit hard by the recession. How is Surmotech holding up?
Manufacturing in general is a tough industry and a tough business to build, and more and more manufacturing is leaving the state, which leaves us in a hole because there aren’t new companies starting up to replace them.
So we’re expanding our marketing range. We’ve added on manufacturers’ reps and we cover all the way to Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and we go as far east as the Boston area in Massachusetts and Virginia and Maryland.
We’ve also used the Internet to expand our market. We have customers that we’ve picked up from Montana, California and Oklahoma through Internet sales.
If you’re a company looking to outsource your manufacturing, what’s the benefit to keeping it domestic?
The benefit is there are a lot of cultural and language barriers that you don’t have to deal with. There’s also the transportation and time differences that create a difficulty if you have a young product that needs some babysitting.
And a lot of the time, the domestic is just as competitive cost-wise for smaller volumes. When you go to China or Mexico, they’re used to doing cell phones where they mass produce them.
And what makes Surmotech different from other domestic manufacturers?
We have a lot of services that we offer that a relatively similar-sized company couldn’t. We actually offer a lot of the same services that the $100 million contract manufacturers do. So you can either go to a bigger manufacturer and get lost, or you can come to someone our size where we feel that all our customers are the heartbeat of our business.
You mentioned that a lot of manufacturers are leaving the area. Ever think of moving Surmotech?
You could always look at it that way, but I founded this company on the people that work with me.
I have a huge responsibility to that work force, so we’ll stay here and we’ll make it work.
SDOBBIN@DemocratandChronicle.com
SURMOTECH INC. No. 28
Surmotech Inc.: Electronic component supply.
Year founded: 1990.
Location: 7676 Netlink Drive, Victor.
Executives: Jerry Valentine, president, 54, of Penfield; Tim Harmon, director of operations, of Newark; Andrea Boylin, director of sales and marketing, of Greece.
Employees: 50.
Web: www.surmotech.com.
