LCF Enterprises gets positive signals – Post Falls firm makes specialized amplifiers, gets defense deal

Paul Finman knows he looks like a pointy-headed professor. But if his Post Falls company keeps racking up more product orders, the 48-year-old Finman might end up the poster boy for how to save good manufacturing jobs in America.

Finman is the founder and technical guru behind LCF Enterprises in Post Falls. The company makes specialized high-end amplifiers used by researchers, medical professionals and dozens of others.

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=030504&ID=s1495624&cat=section.business

His most recent orders, however, have come from U.S. Defense
Department officials, anxious to fast-track the production of about 2,000 of his units.

Right behind that order is a pending federal order for an extra 6,500 units to be spread out over a few years.

The large federal orders for LCF products stem from a need to find tools to defuse or detonate roadside bombs being used against coalition troops in Iraq, Finman said.

Iraqi insurgents are fond of using remote-controlled radio signals to detonate bombs. The amps sold by LCF work either as signal jammers that stop those blasts, or as signal-senders that set them off away from U.S. troops.

“I’m just a component supplier. The features of those systems are classified,” Finman said.

The new order for the 2,000 units will generate about $3.5 million — more than three times the private company’s highest-ever yearly revenue.

“If we deliver those and do further marketing, we’ve got a proposal for those 6,500 more units,” Finman said.

“Hopefully, that revenue can be recirculated in the national and local economy and be part of growing prosperity for everyone here,” he said.

The company now has about nine full-time workers in an office and shop on Commerce Loop Road. The new orders mean LCF will have to hire at least five more assembly workers.

Finman and his wife Lorna, the company president, realize they’ll also have to turn to area contract manufacturers to produce the large share of the order that LCF can’t manage in-house.

The product assembly requires above-average skills, said Finman. The compact radio-frequency amplifiers take about eight hours to produce, and tolerances are very exact.

“These have to be made right the first time,” Finman said. If not, the company has just thrown away something worth $1,000, he said.

The upside for companies like LCF, he noted, is that there have been enough layoffs at other companies that finding qualified workers won’t be a major challenge.

“With the layoffs at (Spokane manufacturing firms) Agilent and Visiontec, I believe there are a good number of skilled workers in the area,” Finman said. He’s planning to pay his assembly workers about $9 to $11 per hour, based on experience, then add raises within six months.

LCF represents the kind of small, specialized manufacturing company that can continue to thrive in this region and elsewhere, said Doug McQueen, executive director of the University of Idaho Research Park, also in Post Falls “There are thousands of guys like Paul out there,” McQueen said. “They make specialized widgets that then go into other widgets and become a standard part in someone’s product line,” he said.

In Finman’s case, he launched LCF in his garage in the 1980s, after leaving Stanford University and going to work for a defense contractor in northern California.

In a few years, his designs for radio-frequency amplifiers caught the attention of assorted researchers and government engineers. His units used less power and produced more powerful signals than those made by his competitors, said Darin Toohey, an environmental researcher at the University of Colorado.

“Paul is a magician. What he does with his units is just magic,” said Toohey. Toohey contacted Finman in the 1990s, seeking an amplifier that was much smaller and more efficient than the ones Toohey used while studying the depletion of ozone in the upper atmosphere.

Finman produced the items needed, and Toohey continues using those units in balloons that rise to 120,000 feet above sea level.

During the 1990s, Finman began getting fairly small orders from the federal government for his products. Many of them ended up going into transmission units that communicate from the ground to military satellites. Some of his units ended up used in the F117 Stealth fighter jet, said Finman.

By 1999, however, the Finmans decided they wanted to leave Southern California. Finman had grown up in Kellogg and had graduated from high school there before leaving to get his undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bob Potter, the former head of Jobs Plus, persuaded the Finmans that they should move to Post Falls, and they returned to North Idaho in the fall of 1998.

Business took a major hit in the year right after 9/11. “Our commercial customers stopped ordering. We got along, paying our bills but not doing a lot of business,” Finman said.

Then in late 2002, as defense budgets began growing in Washington, D.C., Finman started getting frequent calls from engineers working on new military applications.

By the end of 2003, he’d secured the orders for this year’s 2,000 units.

This isn’t just another order, Finman’s also learned. “They’re fast-tracking it. Right after they sent us the purchase order, I got a call from someone, saying, ‘You’re already 100 units behind in delivery.’

“I had to tell him, ‘We just got the order!’”

He knows he’s now under the gun to get those orders filled. “Can we do it? Oh yes, we’ll do it. But I’ve learned we have to hire quickly and carefully. With this kind of product, the ability to keep quality high is key.”

LCF Enterprises

6165 Commerce Loop, Post Falls

Owners: Paul and Lorna Finman

Employees: 8

Web: http://www.lcfamps.com

2004 revenue: $3.5 million-$4 million