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Weekly UpdatesIn these uncertain economic times, a financial planner is probably preaching diversification and one Sudbury-based company is using that principle to not only weather the storm but expand in spite of it.
Over the past five-to-seven years, Bestech has worked hard to diversify their once exclusively engineering and automation business, said Andre Dumais, manager of corporate services for Bestech.
"That diversification has paid major dividends for us."
When the downturn hit, Bestech lost a lot of mining work, he said, "but we are now selling our services in different markets like the federal and provincial governments, insurance companies, municipalities and schools."
The Sudbury-based company was founded in 1995 as an engineering, and industrial automation group. But in 1999 Bestech developed their own software division, Dumais said.
"Today it's nearly as big as our" engineering group."
As the company continued to grow from 24 employees in 2004 to the 69 people today, "the goal was to diversify our services," he said.
"Let's do the work while times are good," Dumais said.
"We knew it wasn't going to last and we needed to start marketing ourselves better," adding that was when they hired a marketing coordinator and recruiter.
Today the engineering, automation and software development company's largest client is an insurance company, Dumais said.
In spite of the downturn, Bestech has expanded into Timmins Feb. 17.
"We have technological resources on the ground in Timmins, we're already doing a lot of work there, now we are integrating into the community," Dumais said, explaining they won the 2008 Company of the Year at the Bell Business Excellence Awards presented by the Sudbury Chamber of Commerce.
In their flagship office on Lorne Street, renovations are taking place.
"A lot of the work our engineers do is designing electrical panels for industry," Dumais said. "We know our clients are looking for cost efficiencies and we said, 'Where can we provide them with cost savings?'"
What they came up with is the development of a new electrical panel shop at the Lorne Street office.
"Now the engineers can design the electrical panels and have them built in-house," Dumais said.
Another now surging division developed from the diversification efforts is the environmental group.
"Right now the software and environmental teams are going full bore. And this has allowed us to maintain the engineering division," he said.
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This is not to say Bestech hasn't been affected by the economic downturn.
The company has laid off nine employees trimming their overall staff from 78 to 69, Dumais said.
"Some of the cuts were administrative ... we also had some casualties in the engineering division, five or six positions.
"We were gearing up for growth, but when things got tough we had to scale back," he said, "but we are still hiring in our other divisions."
"One thing this economic crisis has made us do is diversify within our client base," Dumais said. "Because of this diversification "absolutely, undeniably we will come out of this economic downturn stronger."
www.bestech.com
By JAMES NEELEY
Northern Ontario Business
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