Northern Composites

inventory for customers to help their supply chain management. We’re a small company, but we keep about $3.5 million worth of inventory. That’s all part of being able to service a customer and give them a product when they need it. You’ve got to have it in stock; you can’t rely on bringing it in on a ‘just-in-time’ basis. “Then there’s our ability, historically, to anticipate market trends and be ready when they happen. So, nimbleness is pretty key. We don’t carry any debt, so we’ve always been able to weather the storms of recessions well and come out of them well. We are ISO9001, AS9120, and AS9100-registered. That puts us a little bit ahead of our competitors. A lot of people are ISO, but the AS registrations are pretty tough to get, especially the 9100, which refers to the manufacturing side of things. So, customers can buy from us with confidence.” Another key to the company’s competitiveness, as well as its growth, came about in 2016, when it parted ways with a brand that it had sold since 1977. “We officially said goodbye to Richmond Aircraft Products,” Hewett explains. “They’re now part of the Solvay Group, which is an enormous chemical company. We saw the opportunity to branch out and launch our own product line and source all those materials directly from manufacturers. We source some from historic manufacturers who are interested in working with us, and we found some new sources. Mostly, we try to buy domestic product, but we do source some materials from overseas. It’s worked out very well and we’ve managed to maintain most of the business we had when we were selling somebody else’s product – namely the Richmond product. We put a catalogue together and that’s been growing very nicely, ever since. Dealing directly, we’re able to buy more efficiently, faster and at a better price, and offer those savings to our customers.” “Also, being a distributor of somebody else’s brand, we were contractually restricted to a territory, which was, basically, east of the Mississippi,” Hewett adds. “That’s no longer the case – we can sell wherever we want. So, we started to make sales west of the Mississippi. Just recently, we hired a salesman in California, and we’ve been