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Invotec engineers steady growth

INVOTEC Engineering Inc. is processing substantial growth.

The Springboro-based company (with a Miamisburg mailing address) completed a $1.8 million, 34,000-square-foot expansion project this year that more than doubled its facility to 62,000 square feet. That includes new manufacturing space, an overhead crane bay, three new labs and a conference room.

Owners John Hanna, president, and Daryl Greywitt, COO, launched the company in 1993, offering just design services. Today, it has more than 50 employees and has grown to include making assembly and test systems for manufacturers.

Design and Manufacturing: (Right to left) John Hanna is co-owner and president of Springboro-based Invotec, and Daryl Greywitt is co-owner and COO. the company grew 30 percent last year and completed a $1.8 million expansion project in 2013.

The duo expects to pull the trigger on another construction project sometime in the near future that would reconfigure the building to add more office space, conference rooms and other working areas. Invotec posted 30 percent growth in revenue in 2012 and Hanna expects it to post solid numbers again in 2013.

Hanna recently talked about the state of manufacturing and coming through the recession in relatively good shape.

Q: What would you do, typically, for a manufacturer?

A: We work exclusively on their assembly and test equipment. So any kind of any issue they would have with production — want more capacity, want to make a new product, address a quality issue — we would design and manufacture a solution for them. It could be a brand new system or a change to one that they have, or an adaptation.

Q: Who are your customers?

A: The lion’s share are in medical products and automotive, but we also work for the consumer products and defense aerospace industries.

Q: What’s driving your growth?

A: Increasing the customer base, largely in the industries we’re serving. Although we also look for new segments as well. It’s all part of a multi-year strategic plan that we’ve been working on for years.

Q: What’s the plan?

A: In general, our strategic planning process involved discovering the core values that drive our company’s success, what we’re really good at, what is important to us and what we want to accomplish in the future. We then break down these elements into specific actions and near term goals that are required to keep the plan moving forward, such as revenue goals, customer relationships, facility improvements and new employee requirements. The details of the plan are reviewed and changed as needed on a quarterly basis. The biggest challenge has been to stay focused on the long term and not get to hung up on short term situations.

Q: There’s got to be a lot of competition for that business. What’s been the biggest key to your success?

A: We have some very specific things we do to differentiate ourselves from the competition. Mostly along the lines of service and how we deal with the customer. The process we use and how we deal with the customer and their issues. We use a very collaborative process that focuses on identifying and solving customer problems. We also use an extreme level of flexibility in terms of being able to accept and adapt to changes during the design and manufacturing of our products.

Q: Where do you see the biggest opportunities for the next few years?

A: There’s somewhat of a national movement to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., plus the manufacturing that is here tends to be more high-tech, more technology oriented. That fits very well for what we do.

Q: In which industry segment do you expect the biggest growth?

A: Medical products.

Q: So are you confident that manufacturing has returned for good?

A: That’s a pretty complicated issue. In general, I think the low-hanging fruit is already gone and the trend is moderating, somewhat. It’s very industry-specific. The more high-tech (rooted) manufacturing has been very resilient in terms of staying in the U.S. or coming back (here) and that’s a real opportunity for us. That’s the type of equipment we are most involved in.

Q: How did the company fare during the recession?

A: Back then we did slow down, we did shrink a little bit. We are extremely attentive, though, to our overhead, our fixed costs, our cost structure. We stayed as lean as possible. So we never were unprofitable, but our revenue did shrink somewhat. We were very attentive to our customer relationships, made sure that they were strong. We stay in close contact with our customers with dedicated individuals who are assigned specific customers. We spend a significant amount of time staying in communication with our customers and trying to be sure we understand what are their issues going forward and how we can help. We’re also conservative with our resources financially, that allowed us to weather a downturn. We fared better than an awful lot (of other companies).

Q: Did you know it was going to be important for your growth to invest in this addition coming out of the downturn?

A: We did. You live within or below your means during the good times so you can survive the slowdowns. And then when you come out of a slowdown, if you have the resources — and we did — you can really make some very attractive acquisitions of equipment, materials. We acquired the land next to our facility here, this two acres that we just built on, in 2006, thinking ahead that we were going to be looking to expand.

INVOTEC Engineering Inc.
Contact: John Hanna, president
Address: 10909 Industry Lane, Miamisburg 45342
Phone: (937) 886-3232
Web: invotec.com
Business: Design and manufacturing of assembly and test systems

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