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Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Capella Space’s High-Resolution Satellites

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Capella Space

Aerospace & Aircraft

Louisville, Colorado

Website: www.capellaspace.com

While Capella Space is headquartered in San Francisco, the company planted its manufacturing flag in Boulder County within a year of its founding in 2016.

The first company in the U.S. to commercialize synthetic aperture radar (SAR), Capella launched its first prototype in 2018. That was followed in 2020 by Capella-2, a satellite capable of producing the world’s highest-resolution commercial SAR imagery, primarily for applications in defense and disaster response.

It’s all about seeing the 75 percent of the planet that’s under the dark of night or cover of clouds or smoke at any given time. “We design, build and operate our own satellites, and those satellites can image the Earth through rain, smoke, clouds, daytime, nighttime,” says Mack Koepke, Capella’s VP of global sales and marketing. “Our satellite systems send a radio signal to Earth, and that radio signal bounces back from Earth to our satellite system. Depending on how that radio signal interacts with what it touches on Earth, you start to gain a picture of what is going on, on Earth.”

There’s a reason the startup immediately looked to establish manufacturing in Colorado. “It was such a rich pool of talent that we frankly just couldn’t pass up,” Koepke says. “We really wanted to ensure that we had a footprint here in Colorado to leverage the excellent workforce that comes out of places like the University of Colorado, as well as some of the legacy aerospace companies that we have, like Ball Aerospace, Lockheed and others.”

The company, which has raised more than $200 million in venture capital to date, has expanded its Colorado facility twice and now occupies a 32,000-square-foot space in Louisville with about 50 employees.

“This larger facility allows us to actually increase the throughput and volume of satellites that we manufacture,” Koepke says. “With this newer facility, we’re actually going to be able to build at least one a month.” With a dozen satellites in orbit as of late 2023, Capella could double its constellation in a year at that rate.

Koepke says Capella eschews slow and methodical protocol in favor of a nimbler design and manufacturing model. “That allows us to take a clean sheet of paper, design a satellite system, and go all the way to production and actually build one of those systems in a really short amount of time,” he explains. “For us, a clean sheet to an operational satellite system can be 12 to 18 months, whereas on a legacy system, that might be on a timeline of seven to 10 years.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): AtmosZero’s Industrial Boilers

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

AtmosZero

Energy & Environment

Fort Collins, Colorado

Website: www.atmoszero.energy 

Based at the Powerhouse Energy Campus at Colorado State University, AtmosZero’s Boiler 2.0 is an industrial boiler that’s at least twice as efficient as the market norm today.

Things have moved quickly since COO Ashwin Salvi co-founded AtmosZero with CEO Addison Stark and CTO Todd Bandhauer in 2021. The company emerged from stealth mode with a prototype system in 2023 and is now manufacturing the first industrial-scale system in Fort Collins for New Belgium Brewing, with installation slated for 2024. The plan calls for more custom installations in the U.S. and Europe through 2025 and a low-volume product in 2026.

“The company is really motivated by the frustration that we have with the notion that the industrial sector, the manufacturing sector, it’s hard to decarbonize,” Salvi says. “But when you dig into it — and this is Addison’s insight — 75 percent of the energy that’s consumed by the industrial sector just goes to making heat, and that’s like hot air, hot water or steam.”

The generation of heat is responsible for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, he adds, and AtmosZero sees a path to drastically reducing that number via its heat pump technology. “We’re sourcing heat from ambient air as well as sourcing energy from electricity, then combining that together to be able to provide the same amount of heat output as these competitive, comparable boilers, but in a much more cost-effective way because we’re consuming half the electricity that today’s electric resistance boilers consume.”

Brewing is a big target market for Boiler 2.0, but Salvi notes that steam is used in a wide range of manufacturing sectors, from food and beverage to petrochemicals, not to mention municipal systems in major cities. “Almost every industry uses it,” he says. “We’re building a system that can now scale across all these different industries.”

At about 20 employees and growing, AtmosZero leverages a network of contract manufacturers along the Front Range to supplement its in-house capabilities, with an assist from students at CSU.

“We’re looking at manufacturing based in Colorado because we have access to these great minds, these great workforces, and the skill sets that these workforces add in terms of welding pressure vessels and building big, industrial-scale things,” Salvi says. “That’s what these industries do, and that’s what we want to benefit from.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Distillery 291’s Custom Colorado Whisky

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Distillery 291’s custom Colorado whisky.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Distillery 291

Beer, Wine & Spirits

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Website: www.distillery291.com

Distillery 291 displays four of their whisky bottles on a counter

A former fashion photographer, founder Michael Myers named Distillery 291 after legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in New York.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone with his background, Myers takes a bold artisan approach with his whiskey. The distillery’s proprietary “El Paso County Process” saves some stillage from each batch for the next one.

Myers uses custom-fabricated stills that he designed himself and almost entirely Colorado-grown grain. He often bottles barrel-strength spirits that are in excess of 130 proof. And he finishes his whiskeys with charred aspen staves after the spirits age in American white oak barrels.

Myers says the still shape and choice of metal impart more unique flavor than anything else, calling the Colorado-grown aspen “a very slight note” that “adds a little spice, a little smoke and pushes caramel notes to maple.”

When he started distilling in a 300-square-foot basement in 2011, Myers used a 55-gallon drum for fermentation. A dozen years later, Distillery 291 has six 1,500-gallon fermentation tanks. The output has jumped from 60 gallons a month to 600 gallons a week.

Success hasn’t stifled creativity at Distillery 291. The E (for experimental) series tweaks recipes and aging, Bad Guy is a barrel-strength wheated bourbon, and the M series is aged in barrels that previously held whiskey and maple syrup, albeit not at the same time. “He puts his maple syrup in there for a few months and then harvests that, sends the barrels back to us and we put rye whiskey in there for four months or so and harvest that,” Myers explains. “It’s a really nice product.”

Since Colorado started allowing the sale of full-strength beer and wine in grocery stores, in-state sales have declined by about 30 percent, Myers says, but he forecasts a comeback. “We’re working on owning Colorado again,” he says. “We’re in the middle of an equity financing raise, so that we can 3X our production and probably 5X our sales revenue. We are excited about that. That’ll be over the next five years.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Autonomous Tent’s Movable Five-Star Hotels

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Autonomous Tent Co.

Home & Lifestyle

Denver, CO

Website: https://www.autonomoustent.com/

Autonomous Tent Co. sunset picture of interior.

Inspired by the soaring coastal designs of late architect Harry Gesner, Phil Parr launched Autonomous Tent to build the world’s first movable five-star hotels in 2013.

Ranging from 380 to 580 square feet, the customizable tents have evolved as Parr iterated the design and manufacturing model over the decade. With a polycarbonate frame, the company’s prototype tent was installed on the West Bijou Ranch east of Denver in 2013. Parr moved to a steel frame when Treebones Resort in Big Sur, California, became the first paying customer in 2015.

Now with more than a dozen installations from Wyoming to New Zealand, the company experimented with wood and aluminum before gravitating back to steel frames, now fabricated by Monarch Metal Manufacturing in Denver.

“Monarch has been just an amazing partner,” Parr says, noting that the learning curve for both companies has required patience and persistence. “You can sit and draw these parts for months, but until you actually make them and you’re out there in the field and you’re assembling them and you see how things fit together do you see things from a different perspective.”

The minimum budget is usually around $100,000 for an installation, and Autonomous Tent sells the frame and fabric for $60,000. The “vast majority” of inquiries come from resorts and other commercial operations.

Parr continues to work on new designs and is bullish on a model due for release in 2024 with amenities for watching wildlife and stargazing.

“We’re working on a new concept where it has a retractable roof over the bedroom and a rooftop deck over the living room,” he says. “The original idea was that it’d be portable and transportable and you could set it up in a day or two, and that just hasn’t been the case with that original design. It takes a couple of weeks to set it up. But there are so many opportunities where, if we could set up a structure in a day and take it down in a day and easily ship it, it would open up a lot of other doors.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Cooking Up Success with ‘Sticky Fingers’: Erin Fletter’s Inspiring Journey as a Mompreneur

With three young kids at home, a traditional 9-to-5 wasn’t in the cards for Erin Fletter — and yet being a mom hadn’t smothered her desire to work. In 2011, at her kitchen table, Fletcher and her dad, Joe Hall, co-founded Sticky Fingers Cooking, a culinary school offering enrichment cooking classes for kids.  

READ: Balancing Work and Motherhood — Strategies for Success in a Busy World

Fletter and her husband, Ryan, co-own Barolo Grill Restaurant in Cherry Creek, so a food-related pivot wasn’t totally unforeseen. “It was a typical entrepreneur story,” Fletter says, thinking back to the organization’s inception. “I went to about a hundred schools, and 97 said, ‘What are you talking about?’” But three Denver area schools gave Sticky Fingers a chance. “That snowballed into 30 schools, then 300 and 1,000,” Fletter says.  

The concept is simple: Chef-instructors lead small-group cooking classes centered around a plant-forward weekly recipe. Food is used as a jumping-off point for exploring new cultures. Students might learn about Mongolia, for example, while chopping bell peppers for fried rice. They’ll also study a featured ingredient — usually a vegetable, fruit or grain — and they might pick up some math, science and reading while honing their culinary skills.  

READ: Plant-based Protein is Taking Root in Colorado’s Food Economy

Business boomed. “We’ve always had a 99 percent retention rate,” Fletter notes. Then in March 2020, everything shut down. “The 1,000 schools we’re in closed; it was scary,” says Fletter. But the Sticky Fingers leadership team bound together, integrating Zoom into the organization’s proprietary software to launch online cooking classes.  

When inflation sparked a resurgence in home cooking, CEO Fletter and her team capitalized on that, too, reaching a younger generation through their TikTok and YouTube channels. Fletter started writing cookbooks, too, and Penguin Random House will release the fifth in a series, “Kid Smoothies: A Healthy Kids’ Cookbook,” this October. 

“That’s how we made lemonade out of lemons during Covid-19,” Fletter says. But there sure were a lot of lemons. “Women were so disproportionately impacted,” Fletter continues, noting that many women haven’t re-entered the workforce after stepping out to care for children and/or aging parents.  

READ: Surviving Food Inflation — How Colorado Restaurants Adapt to Rising Costs and Labor Challenges

Sticky Fingers is 90 percent women-led, and Fletter is passionate about bolstering female business owners. It’s this resolve that led her to explore a franchise model. “What’s great about franchising is that it’s a symbiotic relationship: Our success is their success, and vice versa,” she says. Since initiating a franchise brand in late 2022, Sticky Fingers has opened three territories in two states (Texas and Illinois). The company has retained its company-run headquarters in Denver and Boulder. “We’re in the game as well, running our cooking classes side-by-side with franchisees,” Fletter says. 

 

Jamie Siebrase is a freelance writer based in Colorado.

Floyd’s 99 Barbershop: From Sports Concessions to Clippers — the Story of the O’Brien Brothers’ Successful Pivot

When Paul, Rob and Bill O’Brien opened the first Floyd’s 99 Barbershop in Denver in 2001, none of the brothers had ever cut anyone’s hair, much less tried to do a shave with a straight razor. They were just looking for a new business plan that was not dependent on professional sports. 

The siblings owned Observ Inc., short for O’Brien Services, a concessions company that is a subcontractor in sports stadiums, most notably Coors Field. “There was a baseball strike in 1994,” says Floyd’s co-founder Bill O’Brien, who works on finances and store design. “In 1999 they were threatening to have another strike. We looked to diversify to something else.”

They evaluated several options, and decided they would do well in the hair business. The idea, Bill says, was to start a mid-priced barbershop that appealed to men who wanted more service than the bargain-priced chains like Great Clips and Fantastic Sams, but who did not want to spend the money or time for an upscale salon experience. Floyd’s 99 Barbershop is the mid-priced option that offers a complimentary shoulder massage after each service and a music-filled “amplified environment” with rock ‘n’ roll-themed décor.

Floyd’s 99 Barbershop

The brothers started Floyd’s in 1999 but did not open the first location, on 11th and Broadway, until 2001. “We found it hard to get landlords to get what our concept was,” Bill says. “They would say, ‘Oh, a barbershop.’ Old-school barbers were dying off.” 

Nostalgia played a role in the company name. That inspiration, as many might suspect, was the fictional character Floyd the Barber on the 1960s television sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show.” There already were about a dozen Floyd’s Barbershops in towns across the country, which Bill says were owned by various men named Floyd, so the new business added “99” to the name to differentiate itself.

The brothers opened the second location on East Colfax Avenue, and the third on Leetsdale Drive. They opened more locations, and began franchising around the fifth year in operation. “We were getting a lot of interest,” says co-founder Paul O’Brien, who works with franchising and real estate. “People were calling us.”

Anne O’Brien, one of their sisters, opened a Floyd’s 99 Barbershop in Maryland, where the family of eight siblings grew up. That location stayed open for five years, but then she declined to renew the lease when the rent increased. A franchisee that the brothers knew through friends opened locations in Dallas. “That’s not that uncommon, to open with friends and family at first,” Paul says. A Boulder-based franchisee, Jay Palmer, opened locations in Colorado and Kentucky. Today there are 130 locations in 15 states.

Florida Updatedexterior

The pandemic affected the haircutting industry. In the early months of COVID, depending on the area, stores closed and re-opened multiple times. When stores re-opened, safety protocols limited how many customers could be served at a time. “We had to get through that,” Paul says. “We did get PPP [Paycheck Protection Program funds], which helped us a lot.”

READ: How small businesses can prepare for success in a post-pandemic world

Today 70 percent of Floyd’s 99 Barbershops are corporate-owned. Paul says that percentage will decrease as more franchisees join the system. The brand is looking for multi-unit owners who live in the territories where they want to open barbershops. “It’s so important for the stylists and barbers to have a connection to who they work for,” Paul says. The clientele is still mostly men, and the most popular service is a haircut and a shave with a straight razor.

There are approximately 1,200 corporate employees. For corporate and for franchise locations, the challenge now is hiring and retaining talent. Barbers and stylists left the industry or went out on their own during the pandemic, or tried the hairstyling version of entrepreneurship, which is to rent a chair or a booth in a salon. The good news, Paul says, is barber and hairstyling schools are full, so new graduates should be available in the next year or so.

To attract new and experienced hairstylists and barbers, Floyd’s 99 Barbershop offers medical insurance and a prescription drug plan that includes insulin. Diabetes is a cause that the company does much fundraising for, and its charity of choice is the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). Paul’s daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes more than 10 years ago.

Floyd’s 99 Barbershop

Neighborhoods change, and several of the locations have closed and relocated. The Colfax store is now located farther east, and a large Floyd’s on Champa Street on the 16th Street Mall relocated to a spot near Union Station. Floyd’s corporate office is in Greenwood Village.

Running a business is not new to the O’Brien family. Their mother owned a successful insurance company in Maryland. Rob, who works on company culture and operations, and Paul are still involved in Observ. All three brothers are still involved in Floyd’s. The three agree on about 95 percent of business decisions ranging from price changes to locations.

“It was a lot of sweat and tears to get to where we are,” Bill says. “We talk to each other at least every other day, or every day, which has been great.”

Good Company — Natasha Bond, President of ERI Group

Natasha bond joined ERI group as president in 2021. The company has been helping clients bring medical devices to market since 1988.

“we offer development, manufacturing quality, and regulatory. Some projects touch all of those and some projects touch one of them,” says bond. “our job — my job — is to fill the gaps in the client’s capabilities to enable them to hit the milestones they care about. There’s no minimum or maximum, there’s no one size fits all.”

After working in medical devices in Texas, bond moved to Colorado for a job with Vention Medical (Now Nordson Corp.) In 2014. “I just absolutely loved it out here, so it was definitely by design that we moved,” she says.

The 75-employee ERI group rebranded from evergreen research in early 2022 before merging with Denver-based link product development in july.

Natasha Bond, 44 

President, ERI Group

Golden, CO

Hometown: Manchester, England 

What she’s reading: “I have about eight books going at any one time,” she laughs, highlighting three currently on her nightstand: “Managing the Professional Service Firm,” by David Maister; “The Wind in the Willows,” by Kenneth Grahame; and “Round Ireland with a Fridge,” by Tony Hawks 

Natasha Bond

ColoradoBiz: How did you get into the medical device industry? 

Natasha Bond: Way back when, I intended my career to be focused on automotive. I actually, pre-college, was very much into motorsports and spent a couple of years doing that. I decided I wanted a little bit more intellectual life, got myself to college, got my engineering degree, and fully expected to spend my career in autosport or automotive.  

Through a little bit of taking the door that opened and a little bit of luck, I actually ended up working for PA Consulting Group, who had an automotive division. They also had a consumer products division and a healthcare and medical device group. I took the opportunity to experience all of that different stuff at the beginning of my career and found so much motivation and personal pride in doing something that was going to help people that needed it, as opposed to doing something that, you know, helped people go 5 percent faster or do it on 5 percent less fuel. 

CB: What brought you to ERI Group? 

NB: For the three years prior to joining, I was actually leading a bit of a double life. I was COO of a startup four days a week and then running my own consultancy two days a week. Honestly, both of those jobs each needed about six days a week, as did my family, and there wasn’t enough of me to go around. 

I know the previous owners quite well, and I actually phoned them up looking for safe landings for my clients. I have a lot of emotional attachments to the technologies I work with and I certainly don’t want my choices to impact other people’s business. They mentioned they were looking for a new lead for what was then Evergreen Research, and it just felt like an amazing door to see if I could step through. 

I was incredibly lucky that I managed to take a set of clients and a consultancy that I thought I was going to have to shut down, fold it into 35 years of experience and an amazing team and a huge opportunity, and then turn my day job with my startup into a client. That is the kind of business acrobatics that I don’t ever expect to be able to repeat. 

CB: Evergreen Research recently merged with LINK Product Development to form ERI Group. What was the rationale for that deal? 

NB: First and foremost, my desire with ERI is to make sure that, between what we have in-house and the community and contacts that we have, we can support medical innovation whatever way [clients need]. In terms of industrial design, human factors, engineering, usability, that wasn’t something we had in-house when I joined what was then Evergreen, but it’s something I’m very passionate about. I’m a big believer that if you don’t make things easy to use and appealing to adopt, then they won’t be adopted and used, so I really think that particularly usability engineering is just really critical.  

I have a huge amount of respect for [LINK founder] Marc Hanchak and his team, and we were already working together. The point at which the merger happened, I think that ERI was about a third of their portfolio anyway. So honestly, it was just a very natural progression of what was already a very strong working relationship — and I think that’s borne fruit in what’s happened in the last few months. 

CB: How has the medical device industry changed in your decade-plus of experience? And what was the impact of the pandemic? 

NB: You can get an app to market a year, you can get most consumer products to market in a couple years — we’re looking much more at four to six. Obviously, the pandemic changed the way that we worked a bit. It created a bunch of chaos at the FDA as they were dealing with an influx of people trying to help with the pandemic, and it created a somewhat temporary change of focus away from some of the more traditional things that people cared about, like oncology and heart disease, into COVID tests and antiviral measures. I do think it’s going to take the FDA a couple years to work their way out of a mess of their own creation, but we are working gently with them as they try and figure that out.  

In terms of bigger macro changes over the last decade or so, we’re seeing a lot more innovation going to at-home use versus surgical. If you asked me in the mid-’90s what I was seeing, I would say, “We’re seeing more open surgery going to minimally invasive surgery.” The 2000s was really about the expansion of the scope of those minimally invasive surgeries into things that are much more complicated and much more use of multifactorial data to produce more intelligent diagnoses. Now I think it’s about pushing that care earlier into the cycle, pushing it into the home, pushing it into more accessible health-care situations — the rural health centers or the primary care — from the hospital, and obviously a lot more data and a lot more connectivity and a lot more visibility for people within that whole ecosystem.  

ERI works with about 30 percent large, strategic, multinational, public companies and 70 percent startups. On the startup side for the last decade, there’s been a lot of focus on: “What is the value proposition? What are the health economics?” They really have to get a solid case for benefits going before they’re going to get funding. From that perspective, I think life’s gotten harder than it was in the ‘90s or maybe 2000s when it was: “If you’ve got solid science, the money will work itself out and somebody will figure out how you’re going to get paid for it later.” I don’t think that works anymore. 

CB: Are there any recent highlights of products and projects that ERI Group has worked on?  

NB: In our industry, achieving a quality certification is a pretty big deal. A couple of weeks ago, we actually got two clients through the major international quality certificate in the same week without a single finding. Just to put that in context, if you have a major finding, typically you’ve got to remediate before you can get your certificate. You can have up to 15 minor findings and still get a certificate. Typically, prior to being at ERI, if I got less than six, I felt like I’d overprepared. It’s like coming through a driving test with an absolutely clean sheet of paper, and we had two clients come through with a clean sheet of paper in the same week, which I think really speaks to the quality of the work and the quality of the approach.  

There’s another one I’m particularly proud of where one of our major clients got their FDA approval for their clinical trials earlier than expected, which — as I’m sure you can imagine — doesn’t often happen. I mean, the government actually getting something across the finish line quicker than normal?  

They phoned us up and said, “You know the parts that are due in four weeks? Any chance we can have them in 48 hours?” Supply chains are very difficult right now. These were high-precision, hardened, very complex mechanical systems that we also have to keep completely in control in terms of documentation and traceability, because they’re being used in people.  

The team really pulled together. It took every discipline in the company to make it work, but we ended up hand-delivering the product to the client in good time to hit that 48-hour deadline. I’d really seen the team take the attitude of: “Well, yes, of course, we’re going to try to make this happen for you.”  

The other one I’m really proud of, given the state of supply chains right now, is the fact that we’re running on a 99 percent on-time, on-quality delivery across all of our product lines. The ability to hold that as a manufacturing metric is a little bit crazy, actually. 

CB: What’s your forecast for growth and the future of ERI Group? 

NB: We’re aiming for solidly double-digit growth sustainably over the next five years. It’s not about taking business in our sweet spot — although, that’s always been really critical to make sure we have the skill set to deliver — but it’s about making sure that we are seated at the table with the client, right beside them, as the partner.  

I had one client phone me up the other day, a major strategic company, and they basically said, “We have an issue. We’d love a second set of eyes on this issue to make sure we thought about it the right way and haven’t missed something, and you guys are the first people we phoned.” And that is exactly my goal for every single team at ERI for every single client. We should be the people they phone any time they have a question, a thought, a concern, or a piece of good news. We want to partner in a way that makes us an integral part of the team.  

The other thing I would mention in terms of where we are going for the next couple of years is really an internal focus on culture and rewarding the team for the excellent work that they’re doing, really empowering and enabling the people within the company and making it, honestly, just a really fun, really mutually supportive place to work. That’s something we’ve worked incredibly hard on in the last year.  

I want to hire amazingly talented people and give them incredibly important, incredibly complicated work to do. If I can’t empower them to make good decisions and encourage them to support and lean on each other and ask for the help of the hive mind internally when they need it, we’re not going to do as good a job and it’s not going to be as nearly as fun.