A David-and-Goliath Story from The Green Mountain State

Ian Wright posted 2017-11-17
(Image courtesy of the Vermont Historical Society.)
“It’s not just maple syrup and good beer,” said George Lamphere, regarding his home state of Vermont.

Lamphere is president of Liquid Measurement Systems (LMS), a company that produces fuel probes for military and commercial aerospace applications using graphite composites in place of aluminum. As a result, the LMS probes are half the weight of their aluminum counterparts. They’re also designed to crumple, reducing the chance of puncturing the fuel tank in the event of a crash.


Manufacturing in Vermont

(Image courtesy of Liquid Measurement Systems.)

LMS is one of more than half a dozen companies I visited on a recent trip to the Green Mountain State, and though each company was unique, they tended to share certain traits in common. For example, many of the companies are family-owned: LMS was founded a quarter century ago by Lamphere’s father.

The same is true of Vermont Precision Tools (VPT), which produces knock-out pins, ejector pins, perforators and special punches. VPT’s gage division, Vermont Gage, is the largest fixed limit gage manufacturer in the U.S., in terms of both volume and number of employees. “If it’s ground and round, we did it,” quipped Mike Oddy, VPT’s technical resources manager.

Monica Greene, president and CEO of VPT, took over the company from her father, Norman Leduc, who co-founded VPT in 1968. Her son, Tyler, also works at VPT as a customer service representative and seems likely to carry on the family business.

There are some definite advantages to running a private, family-owned business, as Briar Alpert, president and CEO of BioTek Instruments pointed out: “We tend to think in the long-term. Our public competitors are thinking quarterly, and I think that’s a huge barrier to innovation.” Coincidentally, BioTek was also founded in 1968 and, like VPT, it’s a second-generation family business.


Innovation in Vermont Manufacturing

A LazrBloc laser lens undergoes quality testing at Revision's lab. (Image courtesy of Revision Military.)
Despite the relatively small size of Vermont’s manufacturing sector—which accounts for 10.6 percent of the state’s total economic output and employs 10.4 of its workforce—there’s no shortage of innovation to be found.

Consider Revision Military, which began manufacturing protective eyewear for military personnel in 2001 but has since expanded to face, head and torso protection and, most recently, personal energy storage and power management. “Lithium-ion batteries offer a tremendous tactical advantage, but they’re also volatile, so we’re working on how to mitigate that risk in the field,” explained Greg Maguire, Revision’s government affairs program manager and chief legal officer.

Dynapower is another prime example of the innovation in Vermont manufacturing. Founded in Detroit in 1963, the company moved to Burlington, VT in the early ‘90s. Though it began by servicing the automotive industry—ten out of the eleven auto body electroplating lines in the Rust Belt in ‘80s came from Dynapower—the company has pivoted and expanded several times since.

It’s now a major player in the burgeoning energy storage industry, having recently launched a fully integrated energy storage system in partnership with Samsung that’s a direct competitor to Tesla’s Powerpack. “Tesla is our biggest competitor in that segment, but they’re also a customer of ours,” said Dynapower president, Adam M. Knudsen, “We’ve been using the term ‘coopetition’ to describe our relationship with them.”


Manufacturing Challenges in Vermont

(Image courtesy of Dynapower.)
So, with all these innovative manufacturers, why is manufacturing, as Joan Goldstein, commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Economic Development described it, “the state’s best-kept secret”?

It’s a question I asked myself repeatedly over the course of my trip and, though there are no doubt a multitude of contributing factors, the answer I kept coming back to is a demographic one. Vermont is the second-least populous state, ahead of Wyoming by a margin of less than 100,000. Moreover, its population growth is essentially flat.

The poses a significant challenge for manufacturers, whether they’re looking to grow their market share or employee roster. “To be a successful company in Vermont, you need to look outside of Vermont for your customer base,” explained Alpert. That seemed to be the case for every company I visited: while many have customers within Vermont, the majority of their revenue comes from out of state.

Manufacturers in Vermont also tend to go beyond their state borders when it comes to recruiting new talent. At 2.9 percent, the state’s unemployment rate is significantly lower than the national average of 4.1 percent, but the challenge here has less to do with people than ability. This is essentially a microcosm of the impending skills gap in manufacturing.

Vermonters, ever a stalwart bunch, are tackling this problem head-on. VPT, for example, has pioneered a unique training program in partnership with the non-profit Vermont Healthcare & Information Technology Education Center (Vermont HITEC).  The eight-week course starts with basic math and works its way up to G-code and M-code programming and machine operation. Most of the students—roughly 40 have passed through the program already—are adults looking for a career change, but VPT also encourages its managers and line supervisors to attend in order to gain a better understanding of what their subordinates actually do.

These sorts of top-down strategies for cultivating manufacturing talent can work well, but it’s also possible to strengthen the sector from the ground up. That’s essentially the idea behind the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET), a start-up incubator that’s assisted over 900 Vermonter entrepreneurs (Vermontrepeneurs?). “There are three ways a state can make money,” said VCET president, David Bradbury. “Real estate, finance or entrepreneurship. Vermont’s population growth is flat, and we’re not exactly known as a Mecca for hedge funds.”

To encourage burgeoning businesses, VCET maintains three separate working spaces for, as Bradbury described them, “the hustlers, hackers and hipsters”, i.e., entrepreneurs, engineers and designers. VCET  is also partnered with ten colleges and universities, including the University of Vermont and Champlain College. The fee for 24/7 access to VCET’s working spaces is $100 per month per person, but this is waived for undergraduate and graduate students. The approach seems to be working; the center’s portfolio of start-ups includes:

This may be the first time you’ve heard of these companies, but from what I saw, it won’t be the last.


Green Mountain State Manufacturing

Church Street in Burlington, Vermont.
Manufacturing in Vermont is very much a David-and-Goliath story. Companies from a state not well-known for its industrial prowess punch far above their weight on the global stage, whether they’re making advanced scientific instruments, fixed limit gages or personal protective gear. Don’t get me wrong: Vermont does have very good beer and maple syrup, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Stay tuned for more engineering tales from the Green Mountain State.