RTD Company has recently released an updated version of the Motor/Generator Sensor Product Guide which includes Increased Safety Stator and Bearing Sensors. Get it here.

We are pleased to announce that RTD Company now offers a product guide specifically designed for Medical Sensor applications. Get it here.

We are pleased to announce that RTD Company now offers ATEX/FM/FMc (CSA equivalent) Rated Explosion Proof Bearing Sensor Assemblies. In addition, we have recently updated our Motor I Generator Temperature Sensor Product Catalog. In the coming weeks we will be releasing additional industry specific catalogs for our Medical l Process I OEM sensor lines. We have also begun the application process for Increased Safety ratings on Stators, Surface Mounts, Embedment, and Bearing Sensors. Stay tuned!

In our continuing efforts to make it easy and simple to do business with RTD Company, we have developed and published a new catalog specifically directed towards the Motor and Generator OEM and Repair markets.

The Motor / Generator industry is an important part of our business and we wanted to give both current and future customers a tool that would make it very easy to identify and order the correct part, the first time. In it, you will find information about Stator sensors, Surface Mount, Bearing and Embedment styles of sensors. In addition, we also have information about our flexible heaters used to eliminate condensation in motors.

Feel free to review our catalog on-line via the link on our website. If you would prefer to have a printed version sent to you, just click on the “Request Catalog” link at the top of our home page, fill in the required information and indicate the quantity of Motor/Generator Product Guides you would like to receive and we’ll get them sent right out.

RTD Company ranks 66^th out of 800 manufacturers who participated in the 2009 Quality Leadership Survey. The survey included criteria such as scrap and rework as a percentage of sales, warranty costs as a percentage of sales, rejected parts per million shipped and contribution of quality to profitability and shareholder value. For more information please click here.

To all our valued customers,

We are proud to announce that the RTD Company has successfully completed the ISO 9001:2008 certification audit process! Over the last few years, a dedicated group within RTD Company has been working diligently to ensure that we were prepared for this and the results have exceeded our expectations.

Given that we sell to such a wide customer base including OEM, Medical, Aerospace, Motors and Generators, this makes our certification even more of an accomplishment. Within the next few weeks we are anticipating more exciting certification announcements - please stay tuned.

Certificate of Registration

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.

A trio of engineers took RTD Co., a manufacturer of temperature sensors, and is quadrupling sales at the Ham Lake company in just six years.

By Dick Youngblood, Star Tribune

When I introduced you in 2003 to the three new owners of RTD Co., a Twin Cities designer and manufacturer of custom-designed temperature sensors, they had taken a company with a narrow client base and doubled its sales in less than three years.

They were just warming up, it appears: With 2007 sales on the way to tripling the gross of four years ago, I've decided I'd better update you on the Ham Lake company while it still qualifies as a small business.

RTD was purchased in mid-2001 by a trio of engineers: Jim Sulciner, 48, the CEO and veteran salesman; Brad Lesmeister, 38, the operations boss who figured out "a million ways" to boost profits, and Pete Bernier, 42, the brains behind the custom design work.

Together they resurrected a company that had grossed less than $2 million a year through the last half of the 1990s and even had cut workweeks back to 32 hours at times. By the end of 2002 they had hoisted sales to $3.3 million.

Whereupon they got downright serious about diversifying the business, which had been confined to just two markets: large electric motors and generators plus systems that apply adhesives during the manufacture of packaging products.

Relying on contacts gained during their combined 30 years of experience in the temperature sensor industry, they began custom-designing sensors for medical devices, aeronautics products and fluid and gas-flow applications, largely for oil and gas pipelines.

Thanks to the addition of high-profile clients such as Boston Scientific, Guidant and Johnson & Johnson in the medical field and Northrop Grumman in the aeronautics industry, RTD pushed sales to $7 million in 2006.

And by the end of June, it was booking 2007 sales at an annual rate of more than $9 million, thanks in part to a plant opened in China in January and orders for a spate of new products coming on the market this summer. "We're a completely different company than the one you saw in 2003," Sulciner said.

And a much more profitable one as well: Thanks to smarter buying that reduced component prices and upwards of $100,000 invested in automating the manufacturing process to cut both costs and rejects, RTD's operating profit s oared from 6.7 percent of sales in 2001 to 19.7 percent last year.

Which helps explain why RTD's longtime banker -- Brad Meier, president of First Commercial Bank in Bloomington -- has never had to shell out a penny of the $250,000 credit line the company maintains with him.

"They've done a great job of creating a high-performance culture," Meier said. "They're very good at what they do."

The diversification drive began in 2003 with an order from a large pharmaceuticals manufacturer for a miniaturized sensor assembly for a large plant under construction in Brooklyn Park. The pharmaceuticals industry did not become an immediate diversification target, however, mainly because "the market was too cyclical, depending on new construction for new business," Sulciner said.

But the $200,000 order helped finance an aggressive growth effort that opened several key markets. The result: Medical devices will generate more than 15 percent of 2007 sales, fluid and gas-flow sensors will account for 10 percent and the aeronautics market -- largely civilian and military aircraft and other military products -- will add 5 percent.

The key: RTD's partners and four-person sales staff identify a prospect's problem, whereupon Bernier repairs to his lab to design a solution.

All of which is not to say the RTD partners have abandoned the core markets they inherited. No, they simply expanded them: The adhesives application and electric motors and generators markets each will contribute 30 percent of 2007 sales, Sulciner said. Indeed, the adhesives market is why the company opened a plant in China: It will supply a plant recently opened there by RTD's largest customer, Ohio-based Nordson Corp., a leading manufacturer of systems that apply adhesives, sealants and coatings during a manufacturing process.

That's not the only factor in the 28 percent revenue growth projected for 2007. RTD also has a $500,000 order for July delivery of a high-end sensor to replace a product currently used in semiconductor and pharmaceutical facilities around the country.

And RTD's first consumer offering, a sensor that goes into a new product designed to sense water leaks in residential and commercial plumbing systems, is headed for market this summer. The company has about $200,000 of orders in hand, with more expected later this year and beyond.

The upshot: A company with just two product categories five years ago now has nearly a dozen -- and is spending $300,000 a year to find more.

By Dick Youngblood, Star Tribune

When Jim Sulciner, Brad Lesmeister and Pete Bernier bought RTD Co. in Cambridge two years ago, the small manufacturer of temperature sensors had spent 25 years building sales to about $2.4 million.

The company had grown at about a 7.5 percent annual rate in the six years before the new owners took over in June 2001. But at times the business had slowed to the point that the work week didn't exceed 32 hours, said Sulciner, 44, the company's new CEO.

Then the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks slapped a damper on the economy, a slowdown that eventually forced RTD's second-largest customer -- General Electric -- to slash its purchases by more than two-thirds.

Disaster for the new owners? Hardly.

Thanks to the complementary skills of the three partners, all of them engineers with substantial experience in the sensor industry, sales jumped 33 percent from $2.4 million in 2000 to $3.2 million last year. And despite the economic pressures that forced the GE cutback, sales are on course to climb another 19 percent this year, to about $3.8 million, Sulciner said.

At the same time, the gross margin cruised from 33 percent in 2000 to 38.8 percent in 2002, headed for a projected 46.3 percent this year. And the operating profit has done even better, bounding from 6.8 percent of sales in 2000 to 10.9 percent last year, with the RTD partners projecting a rise to more than 16 percent in 2003.

There's not a wisp of smoke or a glint of mirrors involved -- just some industry veterans with a lot of valuable contacts, not to mention one partner with a nose for bargains and another with some ideas about boosting production quality and efficiency.

Let's start with Bernier, 38, the bargain-hunter. In two years, the new owners have invested nearly $50,000 on tools and automation equipment to improve the manufacturing process, but Sulciner said the cost would have been two or three times higher without Bernier's sleuthing.

Buying equipment on eBay

For example, there was the computer-controlled milling machine for producing plastic parts that the partners figured would cost at least $50,000. Bernier heard that a circuit-board manufacturer was having a bankruptcy sale and acquired the machine for $4,000.

Bernier, whose main contribution has been custom-designing sensors for a passel of new clients, also has shopped eBay for bargains on welders, microscopes, calibration equipment and computers.

Meanwhile, Lesmeister, 34, took charge of production, pared the number of wire and cable suppliers from five to two and used that increased leverage to negotiate a 10 percent price reduction and more flexible payment terms.

In an effort to boost production quality, he also acquired new cleaning technology and began using gold plating instead of copper on the tabs used to solder wire onto a sensor. The result: Rejects were trimmed by half, hoisting yields from 80 to 90 percent.

"A ton of little things like that gave us those margins," said Lesmeister, who also had the chore of building the company's existing customer base as Sulciner and Bernier pursued new industrial markets.

RTD's traditional market focus had been on sensors for electrical motors and generators, as well as an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) supplier to a small group of customers led by Nordson Inc., an Ohio maker of adhesive dispensers used in the packaging industry.

Since mid-2001, the new owners have parlayed old relationships and a select list of distributors to add a dozen industrial OEM clients in areas ranging from water heaters and hydraulic fluid systems to semiconductors and aerospace products. RTD also has broadened its penetration of the electric motor market, adding the likes of Westinghouse and Toshiba to the client list.

Custom designer

But the greatest potential might be in several new areas, Sulciner said. In the past two years, RTD has added such clients as Gerber in the food-processing sector, Boston Scientific in the medical products industry and Protein Design Labs in the biotechnology field.

"We're essentially a custom designer," Sulciner said. "We go to prospective clients, find out what they need, and then design products to fit."

Sulciner and Lesmeister met as engineers at Rosemount Engineering (a unit of Emerson Electric), later moving to Minnetonka sensor manufacturer Burns Engineering, where they met Bernier. It was Sulciner who recruited the others as partners in his dream of owning his own business.

The RTD deal came almost by accident: "I just started cold-calling sensor manufacturers in the area," he said, hitting pay dirt on the second call. The trio raised $100,000 among them, borrowed another bundle from the State Bank of Loretto and negotiated a 15-year note with the owner.

Given the company's history of slow to no growth, what sold the banker on granting the loan? "They knew the business, they had a high level of energy and they'd done their due diligence," said Brad Meier, president of the Loretto bank. "And it's worked."

It might have worked a little too well, at least in terms of maximum return to the Loretto bank. The reason: The RTD partners have accelerated their loan repayment, and they have yet to use any of the $125,000 operating credit line the bank provided them.

"That's not a bad kind of problem to have," Meier said.