Nancy Crews - Engineering and opportunity
St Petersburg , Florida , October 21, 2002.
It was a classic case of seeing opportunity in a crisis.
In 1994 the Cold War was declared over Nuclear weapon production was being cut back and production done in Largo was shifting elsewhere.
That meant a local supplier the Specialty Components unit of defense contractor unit of defense contractor Lockheed Martin had to find a new way to make a living.
Most people wouldn't be attracted to a workplace in decline, but Nancy P. Crews thinks differently from most. Wouldn't it be interesting to work at a company in transition, and see where it might go? "It's been quite a ride" Crews says of the past eight years.
Crews now is president and owner of the uni9t successor, Custom Manufacturing & Engineering™ (CME™), which makes detection and monitoring devices for military
and commercial uses.
"I'd always wanted to have my own business and here was an opportunity" says Crews.
She joined the Lockheed Martin unit as senior manager of marketing and long-range planning of work on the transition. She worked with sales, marketing and customer service staffs.
Crews had valuable training from her former employer Eastman Kodak Co., which allowed her to work on teams that dealt with many aspects of the manufacturing process.
She joined the film giant as a research chemist after earning her doctorate in 1975 but became interested in how products were designed and sold. At her request she was assigned to teams where she could learn marketing and product development.
She left Eastman Kodak for Florida when her husband was transferred here.
Her Kodak experience prepared her for what was to come at Lockheed. In 1997 Crews and two other managers proposed they spin off the components division into a new company.
Lockheed gave them $1 million some contracts to work on, and sold them equipment.
"We decided to put our destiny in our own hands, "she recalls.
Breakthrough in Detection
They received a Small Business Administration contract to work on a technology problem Generators in remote, battlefield areas can run out of power creating dangerous condition.
The company invented a power monitoring system to install in a jeep or a building to track power usage. If the system stars running low, the monitor can turn off ancillary computer systems so the jeep or building won't lose all power at once.
A military Humvee equipped with the system is parked on Custom Manufacturing's factory floor.
The company is working on a contract for another monitoring product, Silent Warrior, that can operate in a remote location, detect whether people or vehicles are entering and transmit the date to a satellite.
The system could work for the military and potentially for manufacturing plants and other commercial operations.
Custom Manufacturing posted $7 million in revenue in 2001. The company is profitable, but Crews declined to give specific numbers. It employs 120 people up from 25 two years ago.
Typically, staffers work four day weeks (10 hours a day) in a manufacturing space leased in St. Petersburg.
"You always have a three day weekend," Crews said. It's also more efficient to run machinery on that schedule, she says.
Crews had been savvy at "picking the right technologies and then being able to market them to the government" says Jerry Boyle, who guides the group of 15 chief executive officers that includes Crews. She's also been successful at applying accounting indicators used by big companies like Kodak to a small company, Boyle says.
Crews says she wants to make sure her company develops systems that can be used by both government and private sector customers so it isn't too reliant on any one customer base.
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