Business View Magazine | December 2019

52 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 that we have, and the processes that we have to manufacture wire and cable, we were well-positioned to move into the automotive industry.” In 2003, Champlain Cable was sold to its current owner – the American Industrial Acquisition Corporation (AIAC). The company maintained its same three markets: automotive, industrial, and data communications, while adding commercial entities, such as buses, agricultural, and heavy equipment vehicles to its portfolio. In 2008, the company opened its first facility outside of Vermont, with a factory in El Paso, Texas. A second El Paso plant opened in 2015, and, today, Champlain Cable has about 450,000 square feet under roof, 200 employees, and over $100 million in yearly revenue. While not disregarding the company’s success, Reichert says that, nonetheless, competition in the cable industry is pretty significant. “Truthfully, we’re so small compared to those large companies that are in the billions of dollars of size,” he admits. “Where we try to separate ourselves is staying in those engineered cable areas, the environmentally- challenged applications, utilizing our material science and irradiation beam technology, which not everybody has. It’s a significant investment into research and development, and not everybody is willing to do it. A lot of our competition wants volume - they just want to keep moving cable through their plant. We don’t look at it that way. We certainly want to sell cable, no question. But we will look at where we can solve a problem; we will look at where we can utilize our technology to solve that problem. And in many cases, we may end up with a sole source position, or at least minimized competition, because we developed something for a particular application, or we’ve developed an expertise in processing, or we just happen to have the right look in a particular niche that other people may not want to go after.”