Credit line gives global sales a lift.

• Author: Regan, Keith
• Position: FROM BEGINNERS TO BIGSHOTS - Stephen Fantone of Optikos Corp. - Company overview

Stephen Fantone, Optikos Corp. founder and chief executive, is living out an inventor's and entrepreneur's dream.

It's not a story of overnight riches, but rather a story of steady progress that has turned the part-time, one-person operation he launched in the basement of his house in 1982 to a company with 40 employees, global reach and expected revenue of more than $10 million for 2008.

Today, Wakefield, Mass.-based Optikos is a leading designer and maker of equipment that measures optical-image quality. Its products are used in a range of industries and applications, from consumer gadgets to military applications.

The company's innovations--its staff lays claim to some 65 granted and pending U.S. patents--are used by household names such as Fisher-Price, Mattel, Lockheed Martin, Samsung and Bausch & Lomb.

From his company's new headquarters, where manufacturing operations have been expanded recently, Fantone says a key point in the company's evolution came in 1999, when it bought the system image testing assets of U.K.-based Coherent Ealing Ltd.

That purchase opened doors into overseas markets. Optikos integrated the new manufacturing capabilities into its own and set out to serve new customers in Europe and Asia.

"We took hold of that business and ran with it," Fantone says. "That has served as a central market for us."

The opportunity came with a significant challenge, however. Purchasing cycles in China and elsewhere tend to be longer than in the United States, so customers were ordering machines well before they were ready to take delivery--and pay for them. Those machines may cost $50,000 to $500,000 and to source the components and raw materials to build them, Optikos needed to borrow against the future sales.

However, most U.S. banks won't use letters of credit or similar promises from overseas companies to secure loans.

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That, according to Phillip Dunn, vice president of Boston-based Eastern Bank, is where the Small Business Administration came into the picture in an important way. Dunn, who has been working with Optikos since the early 1990s and had lined up other SBA-backed financing along the way, helped qualify Optikos for the SBA's Export Working Capital Line of Credit.

The program offers up to a 90-percent guaranty on export loans of up to $2 million and helps smaller businesses quickly access overseas markets without draining capital from domestic operations.

Optikos' line of credit eventually grew to...