Grand Junction.

• Author: ANDERSEN, KRISTIN
• Position: Production Devices Ltd. - management issues - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Sometimes a company succeeds by failing first.

But to Mike Ferris, president and CEO, "It doesn't take very many big orders like that to get us to $10 million, and $10 million's really an anemic number. In a way this project's been a failure in that it has not grown at the rate that it should have, and all I can do is kind of blame myself for that."

That's not to say Grand junction-based General Production Devices Ltd., a manufacturer of equipment used to make electronics boards and semiconductors, isn't successful by most observers' standards. The company has 90 employees, does about $10 million in sales and recently opened a sales office in Taiwan. The occasional $750,000 order isn't unheard of.

Although the company has made market inroads in its 15 years under Ferris' leadership, he said it's tough being the "little guy on the block" among competitors with sales of $100 million.

"Really our biggest single shortcoming has been going down some blind alleys, developing some really nice products that didn't have a significant market," Ferris said.

But that finally may be changing. After completely redesigning a line of adhesive-dispensing products it bought from an Oregon company in 1997, GPD has a new direction and, to Ferris, a better-than-ever chance to succeed.

"It's the product that we think will lead us to a substantial increase in sales down the road," Ferris said.

Its new equipment can apply 40,000 tiny dots of adhesive per hour to attach semiconductor components to a circuit board. Adhesive increasingly is replacing lead solder in this...