Photo: OnLogic's helix series scale. Courtesy Photo.
by C.B. Hall, Vermont Business Magazine While the COVID pandemic has put some sectors of the economy into the doldrums and worse - spawning the closures of restaurants, bars, and retailers – there are plenty of businesses that are thriving. Count South Burlington computer manufacturer OnLogic among them.
“Our compounded growth rate is right around 24 percent a year,” the company's president, Sean Larkin, told VBM in a December 14 interview. Asked to estimate calendar 2020's total sales, he said, “My guess would be about $68 million dollars.”
Photo: Sean Larkin, President of OnLogic. Courtesy Photo.
That's up from $54 million in 2019 and $20 million in 2015, for example.
While it maintains its headquarters in the Green Mountain State, OnLogic boasts branch offices in Malaysia, Taiwan and the Netherlands. It ships to customers in “almost all countries,” Larkin said.
Lisa and Roland Groeneveld founded the enterprise in 2003, as Logic Supply. The couple continues to own the company, along with employees who enjoy an ownership stake through an employee stock purchase plan. The company changed its name to OnLogic in October 2019.
The firm occupies a distinctive niche: building computer hardware for environments that subject the apparatus to “extreme temperatures, variable power, shock and vibration,” in the words of the company's website.
The high-stress sitings may be an underwater vehicle, a solar farm monitor in a scorching desert, or simply an inconvenient place – on an airport terminal's message board, for example, high above a bustling waiting room – where frequent maintenance is not an option. OnLogic's hardware, that is, puts the emphasis on hard.
Medical equipment that requires extreme miniaturization presents another challenge, but, Larkin said, the company can produce a computer “the size of two card decks on top of each other.”
Rather than customized systems, he said, OnLogic's products are “standard models that are highly configurable.”
“What makes us different from our competitors is our direct-to-customer approach. Many in our industry, they'll create the product, and then they'll use resellers or distributors. We deal directly with the customer... We show our pricing online – that's very unique” in the field.
OnLogic's customers are of two sorts: end-users who will put the computers to their own use, and customers who put the company's wares into a larger product, such as a medical cart or an ATM machine.
Larkin mentioned Virginia-based American Woodmark, for example, as an end-user. Computers on the furniture manufacturer's production floor would give out in a few months, he said, because of the dust in such places.
“With our computers, which are solid-state, they were able to have computers on the floor, in this rugged environment, that wouldn't burn out at all.”
While revenue growth has been an established fact over the years, the onset of the COVID pandemic has led OnLogic to undertake a new form of growth.
“We started to rent new space, for example, in Vermont, so that we could spread people out. For everyone, it's been instructive. We've all learned a lot.”
Asked if the firm was looking to increase its 36,000 square feet of space further, he said, “Very much so. Honestly, once we find a suitable location, we're looking to expand immediately.”
Worldwide, payroll stood at about 160, he said – and, as of the interview date, the company had 23 positions open in Vermont alone.
Asked if he considered the local labor market tight, he wasted no time to answer.
“Absolutely.”
The November unemployment rate in the Burlington-South Burlington labor market area stood at about 2.8 percent, according to VBM's extrapolation of the Department of Labor's official unadjusted rate.
For OnLogic, full employment is thus the environment.
“We're always trying to find really good talent,” Larkin put it.