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Connecticut’s Fastest-Growing Firm?
ADC Video Systems is on a fast track by facilitating the marriage of telephone and cable industries
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Business New Haven
10/23/1995
By: BNH
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There's more than meets the eye to the picture you see on your television. Behind O.J. Simpson in the courtroom or the elegant violence of the Super Bowl, there's technology and equipment that transports video signals to your living room or neighborhood sports bar.
One company that engineers and manufactures that technology and equipment is ADC Video Systems in Meriden.
Formerly known as American Lightwave Systems Inc., the company is a self-contained business unit in Meriden, even though its parent, ADC Telecommunications Inc., which purchased the firm in 1990, is in Minneapolis. (ADC Telecommunications is the seventh-largest telecommunications company in the world.) In Meriden, ADC's Research Parkway home houses manufacturing, finance, customer service, marketing, engineering, administrative offices and sales.
ADC develops video transport technology, engineering and manufacturing the technology and equipment that allows telephone and cable companies to transmit video signals (images) to carriers that then deliver them to the customer. ADC's technology and equipment enabled CNN to put the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles in living rooms across America. It allowed SNET to transport the 1995 Special Olympics World Games from the Yale Bowl to viewers across the country. And it permits schools to put teachers and students in the same electronic classroom even though they may be hundreds of miles apart.
ADC Video has grown almost faster than the speed of light. This year the company expects sales volume to hit the $100 million mark - more than twice gross receipts for 1994 and eight times the $12 million it sold just three years ago. In just 16 months, employment levels in Meriden have more than tripled, from 107 to 340.
ADC is growing because American Lightwave's founders had the vision in 1986 to foresee a market need in the expanding cable industry and put together a team to develop that technology. As Fred Lawrence, president of ADC's Minnesota-based transmission group, explains: “The telephone and cable industries have been distinct, but now there is convergence in the industry. Each wants in on the other's business.”
ADC's products are designed to allow both industries to deliver their signals (phone and cable video) via the same technology. For example, telephone companies (ADC provides equipment to all seven regional Bell operating companies) have installed their lines and cable companies have laid their cables; so rather than have to run extra equipment to access the other service, they want it to be carried on the same transport.
ADC Video designs products for all video formats. Tiberio explains that ADC “offers diverse network configurations and video formats that give customers flexibility.” ADC customizes products to fit the telephone systems in places like Santiago, Chile and Shanghai, China.
How does ADC manage through lightning-paced growth in wild and woolly times? Lawrence speaks candidly about it: “We've made some mistakes. But we don't dwell on them. We stay close to the customer and have a good grasp of their needs. We keep our product-development strategy in concert with needs of the market place - we market what people will buy. We empower local management and keep a can-do spirit, focusing on successes.”
So far, at least, it's working.
Sewing Up Business
Lina DeMasi's success is cut from the same cloth as immigrant entrepreneurs of old
It's a classic tale of American bootstrapping success. And an increasingly rare one these days.
Lina DeMasi got her start in the garment industry 20 years ago as a machine operator. She had emigrated to American from Jogiosaj-Jonica in southern Italy with her husband and three young children. She didn't speak English (even today her accent gives her away), and she couldn't work full-time because of her family.
She finally found work at Elita Dresses, a subcontractor long out of business. DeMasi had little formal education; she “learned everything in this country.” Mainly, she learned by doing. She started out as a machine operator but before long was promoted to floor manager, “dividing work, pushing production and doing quality control,” DeMasi recalls.
Over the years she was forced to bounce from subcontractor to subcontractor, working night shifts and other demanding schedules because bosses wouldn't permit her to work flexible hours to meet her family's needs. She dreamed of starting her own business to help others who were in here same position.
Certainly, she would be able to empathize with hard-working, low-wage employees. “Bosses don't understand,” DeMasi says. “They don't care about your kids, your family. I understand. I went through that road. I feel sorry when these people ask for work. I say, 'Come when you can.' It puts a little money in their pocket.”
DeMasi started Lina Fashions in 1991 with four sewing machines and four employees. Four years later, her 7,000-square-foot Pratt Street plant houses 45 machines and 50 workers. The company is a subcontractor that assembles complete garmets, labels and all. Lina works for one company, the Massachusetts-based KGR, which distributes the clothes to familiar retailers like Talbots and Lord & Taylor.
DeMasi got her business off the ground and eventually landed KGR the old-fashioned way: knocking on doors, calling designers and manufacturers, asking them to give her chance to make some clothing samples. She started out with business from Christian Dior and Jones of New York, but she needed work year round. KGR keeps her busy, and so she works only for them now. DeMasi explains that she has “a good reputation. People know my work. I do quality work, and I deliver my work on time so that they can get their product to the stores to sell.”
DeMasi says she can find enough workers who sew, although “it's getting harder.” Meriden has many Spanish-speaking immigrants now walking in DeMasi's former shoes. They come from Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Guatemala. Few of them speak English: DeMasi learned Spanish over the past 18 years, and says she now speaks Spanish more than she speaks Italian.
DeMasi attributes her firm's growth to plowing profits back into the business, mainly buying machines and attachments. Lina's revenues have grown more than 20 percent in the last year, and she expects to gross about $500,000 in 1995. Although there are “a lot, a lot of subcontractors in Connecticut,” she says her secret is a simple one: delivering a quality product on time.
That, and plain old hard work. And even though business is robust, DeMasi isn't exactly kicking back. “We work. We come home. People say, 'What are you doing?' We have one car. Nothing fancy. My husband does the bookkeeping. We are very careful. There's not much left after we pay workers, workers comp, rent, employment taxes and other expenses. It's not profit.”
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