Highlighting Innovative Manufacturers
Colorado is home to unique and innovative companies making a new generation of products in a wide variety of industries. Through a partnership with Company Week we’ve asked Colorado manufacturers to share what makes them unique. Below are a few profiles of Colorado companies who are making quality products using innovative technology and techniques.
Circle Graphics
Colorado Malting Company
Visser Precision Cast
Atmel Corporation
Research Electro Optics
Community Power Corporation
Faustson Tool Company
Aqua-Hot Heating Systems, Inc
Circle Graphics
by Eric Peterson on May 7, 2015
Longmont, Colorado
Founded: 2000
Privately owned
Employees: 750 (480 in Colorado)
CEO Andrew Cousin has helped the company capture two-thirds of the U.S. billboard market — and now he’s eying another massive opportunity.
Hank Ridless brought billboard printers an idea for a tech upgrade in the late 1990s: go digital. None of them bit.
Like any innovative entrepreneur, Ridless saw the rejection as an opportunity to do it himself.
Spanning about a half-million signs on the American roadside, the billboard industry hadn’t seen much change since it moved from hand-painted to mechanically printed.
When Ridless’ digitally printed billboards hit the market in the early 2000s, they were half the price of their analog counterparts.
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Colorado Malting Company
by Eric Peterson on March 29, 2015
Alamosa, Colorado
Founded: 2009
Privately owned
Employees: 10
The Cody family has been growing barley in the San Luis Valley for generations. Formerly farming for Coors, now they’ve gone their own way to supply Colorado’s craft beer industry.
The Cody family has been growing barley in the San Luis Valley for generations. Formerly farming for Coors, now they’ve gone their own way to supply Colorado’s craft beer industry.
Jason Cody’s late grandfather (Bob) and father (Wayne) grew barley for Coors in southwestern Colorado for about 50 years before the business plan changed in the 2000s. They stopped growing Coors’ proprietary barley varieties and took to the open market for other strains of grain they could market to smaller breweries.
“We just started thinking outside of the box,” says Jason, Colorado Malting Company’s president. “We thought we could add some value.” And the shoe fits: “We’re all big German guys who like to drink beer.” Jason says Dave Thomas, a former Coors employee, was his malting mentor. “He took me under his wing,” Jason says.
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Visser Precision Cast
by Eric Peterson on November 10, 2014
Denver
Founded: 2011
Privately owned
Employees: 17
A former NASCAR crew chief, President Ryan Coniam is pushing advanced materials into defense and other markets.
Visser Precision Cast is focused on bringing amorphous metal casting — or AMC — into the lexicon of engineers worldwide.
Developed at the California Institute of Technology in the 1990s, AMC initially generated a lot of excitement, but that proved to be a false start. “One thing led to another and the technology did not advance,” says Coniam.
Visser has a license from Liquidmetal Technologies in Rancho Santa Margarita and is pushing AMC into a number of markets, primarily defense.
Despite its name, AMC does not involve metal. “To be clear, it’s a glass,” says Coniam. “It’s super hard, with near net shape, and it’s super, super strong — it’s 1.5 the strength-to-weight of titanium.” In the rare case of failure, he adds, it fails like glass. “It just shatters, but it can actually bend a ton before it fails.”
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Atmel Corporation
by Becky Hurley on October 19, 2014
Colorado Springs (fabrication facility); San Jose, Calif. (headquarters)
Founded: 1984
Publicly traded (NASDAQ:ATML)
Employees: 5,100 worldwide / 1,000-plus in Colorado
A global leader in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers and semiconductors, Atmel is the wizard behind today’s wireless technology curtain.
Founded in 1984 as the manufacturer of NVM (nonvolatile memory) semiconductor chips, the then-$100 million San Jose-based company bought a former Southern Colorado Honeywell chip manufacturing plant in 1995. Today the operation generates 50 percent of Atmel’s total output.
Vice President, Global Wafer Operations and Colorado Springs site manager Dan Malinaric estimates that by the end of 2014 his operation will have produced its 19 billionth chip. And billions more are on the way.
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Research Electro Optics
by Eric Peterson on October 13, 2014
Boulder
Founded: 1980; spun off from Particle Measuring Systems in 1993
Privately owned
Employees: 230
From Boulder’s optics mecca, CEO Paul Kelly is spearheading an international expansion, manufacturing best-in-class optics for lasers of every stripe.
After launching Particle Measuring Systems in Boulder, Dr. Robert Knollenberg started Research Electro-Optics (REO) to make high-performance optics for the company’s particle counters.
The now-separate companies still enjoy a close partnership, says Kelly. “We’re right next door to each other,” he says. “They’re still a customer of ours.”
REO supplies high-end mirrors, prisms, lenses, beamsplitters and other optics to a wide range of military, industrial, medical, and research applications. The company’s products are in everything from Mars rovers to Predator drones to semiconductor test equipment, as well as heavy-duty lasers used in manufacturing and surgery.
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Community Power Corporation
by Eric Peterson on October 3, 2014
Englewood, Colorado
Founded: 1995
Owned by Afognak Native Corporation (Alaska)
Employees: 19
VP Bill Cetti is pushing the manufacturer of biomass gasification systems into a wide range of industrial markets.
Originally founded by ex-employees of Westinghouse’s shuttered renewable division. Community Power Corporation (CPC) was a government grant-driven company until 2011, when Afognak Native Corporation acquired it to commercialize its gasification technology.
CPC’s proprietary BioMax Gasification System takes feedstocks of carbon-rich biomass and creates syngas with roughly 15 percent the energy potential of natural gas. The syngas can be used to run electrical generators or boilers or blend with propane or diesel for less expensive electrical generation and other applications. The modular system repurposes 20-foot shipping containers for drying, gasification, gas-blending, and other custom applications.
“It takes biomass materials like wood chips, nutshells, and in some cases cardboard or paper, and converts it into a gas,” says Bill Cetti, vice president of CPC’s bioenergy division. “It’s really designed for where the customer has waste or feedstock available.”
BioMax is in most cases a more reliable play than solar. “Solar only works when the sun shines,” says Cetti. “Gas fires 24 hours a day, regardless of weather.”
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Faustson Tool
by Eric Peterson on August 28, 2014
Arvada, Colorado
Founded: 1981
Privately owned
Employees: 20
With blue-chip clients like Ball Aerospace, Colorado’s first production-scale 3D metal printing operation is on the horizon for Faustson’s pioneering pair.
Faustson Tool is a contract manufacturer with such blue-chip clients as Ball Aerospace and Woodward. It’s stayed ahead of the technological curve for more than 30 years, and has no intention of falling behind anytime soon.
“We continuously try to pioneer a new industry,” says Alicia Svaldi, Faustson’s founder and president. “We were the first one to master EDM [electrical discharge manufacturing] in the 1990s. In the 2000s, we were one of the first companies to go into five-axis milling. We’re now excited to get into 3D metal printing.”
Faustson will become the first manufacturer in the state to dive headfirst into 3D metal printing when it buys a pair of million-dollar machines later this year. There’s a lot of anticipation, to say the least. “We looked at a machine in Chicago recently,” says Svaldi. “It literally gave my machinist chills.”
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Aqua-Hot Heating Systems, Inc.
by Tamara O’Delle on August 18, 2014
Location: Frederick, CO
Founded: 1984
Employees: 39
Ownership: Paul Harter & Community Foundation of Northern Colorado (Donor Advised Fund)
Paul Harter left Chrysler to lead northern Colorado’s Aqua-Hot, where market-leading products are manufactured with community in mind.
For Paul Harter, President/ CEO of Aqua-Hot Heating Systems, a sense of community is everything. “In a nutshell, we build specialty heating products for heavy vehicles, RV’s and off-road vehicles.’ he says. “But, we are truly about community and family. What we really do is provide folks a great place to work and provide our customers with great solutions to their problems.”
In 2006, Harter was burning-out working as an executive for the Chrysler Corporation in Rockford, IL. Needing a change, he contacted an executive recruiter specializing in manufacturing and offered specific instructions. “I wanted to find a manufacturing company in Colorado where the owner is ready to retire and I can come in as a GM and eventually buy the company.”
