Business View Magazine | December 2019

54 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 “The beauty of being part of a large organization like AIAC is that with that ownership comes opportunities for us to get involved in a lot of other things. For example, Champlain Cable also owns a copper tubing manufacturer and we also own a slit steel manufacturer. So, we’ve tried to both broaden and balance some of the ebbs and flows of some of the products and some of the markets that we serve into. We’re very process oriented, and it doesn’t matter to us what that process is; we like to keep it along the lines of material science and/or metals, so the fit of copper tubing and the fit of slit steel fits in very nicely with us. And we’ve used our model of how we go to market, and to what areas we want to go to market, and how we look at potential new customers and new products to take advantage of some of these other companies within the AIAC fold to see if they make sense to be with Champlain.” One of Reichert’s long-term concerns is just how vertically-integrated he wishes the company to be. Currently, all of its raw materials are purchased. “We do not manufacture compounds and we do not make our own copper,” Reichert explains. “We buy from many different companies. But, do we want to make all of our materials here? Do we want to manufacturer our own copper stranding? What technologies and what materials do we want to have more direct access and control over? Because if we don’t