Getting Started
OpTek machines will have made over 3,000 parts by the time you finish reading this sentence. But it wasn’t always that way. OpTek was founded in February 2000 by three entrepreneurial engineers who had what CEO Mike Osborne calls, “a crazy idea that we wanted to sell capital equipment.” The “crazy” worry seemed to be confirmed when multiple potential customers declared bluntly that they weren’t about to purchase capital equipment from a startup company.
But it really wasn’t crazy. The first customers to understand the value proposition of OpTek were the telecom and datacom businesses that were looking for innovative manufacturing methods to meet the unprecedented demands of the dot-com boom – something that OpTek was eager to provide with its novel and patented laser and automation technology.
OpTek was first in the world to take these capabilities from the laboratory to full, successful commercialization.
The Model for Success
From that beginning, OpTek established the business model that is still driving its success two decades later: Be willing to take on the challenge, develop a better way to solve it, and make the solution work at-scale – either through the provision of production-line machines, or through contract processing of parts, now done at OpTek’s sites on three continents.
That can mean anything from manufacturing parts in-house according to the customer’s specifications, to designing processes and building machines that perform extraordinary manufacturing feats on the customer’s own production line.
Machines can be anything from a tabletop laser device to a 20-ton automated system integrating material handling, laser machining, real-time inspection and closed-loop feedback, and more.
Processing can be from prototypes in single digit volumes, to multi-million parts per year.
Or it can even mean candidly advising a customer that a laser is not be the optimal way to achieve the desired result (and offering a non-laser solution if appropriate).
The dot-com downturn of the early 2000s brought pain to many technology startups, including OpTek. But the company’s R&D innovations had already proved so valuable, its commercialization capabilities so solid, and its ability to serve new vertical markets so agile, that OpTek was able to continue expanding. It wasn’t long before the company would be on a trajectory of doubling in size every two to three years.
