Tier One, LLC––

A New Company Arises In The Wake Of A Departing One

By Kaaren Valenta

Joe Young had a hard time sleeping when –– as a member of the executive committee planning the relocation of Kendro Laboratory Products from Pecks Lane in Newtown to Asheville, N.C. –– he struggled with the thought that more than 230 local jobs would be lost.

He knew that once the transfer was complete, Kendro also planned to stop machining rotor assemblies and other parts for its medical centrifuges and purchase them instead from suppliers.

“I asked myself what can we do to save jobs?” he said.

Mr Young, Kendro’s vice president of sales and service, began to think about forming a new company that would provide the machining work for Kendro’s products.

“At 6 am I called Rick [Hall, the company’s director of development and engineering], to discuss the idea,” Mr Young said. “He told me ‘You are late’ because Mike [Iassogna] called me five minutes ago.”

Mr Iassogna, the manager of the Kendro plant and a member of Newtown’s Legislative Council, also was intent on saving jobs and staying in town. The three men joined by three other Kendro managers –– Stan Montefusco, Don Stankus, and Ted Turiano –– got Kendro’s blessing to form a new company, Tier One, LLC, that would buy Kendro’s machining operation and become the supplier.

“It made sense to Kendro because we have 50 years of experience in doing the job,” Mr Hall said. “We’re not a startup operation.”

But getting funds to purchase the operation was beyond what they could raise personally so they approached area banks. Ridgefield Bank put the financing together.

“We went to several banks looking for financing,” Mr Hall explained. “The key to us was Larry Bues of Ridgefield Bank. He had a lot of knowledge about manufacturing. He took us through the whole thing step-by-step and made the whole thing very simple.”

The new company began operations on August 6, employing 50 of the workers that had been laid off by Kendro. [See Bee article August 22, page 1.]

Mr Iassogna said the average length of service with the company for those employees is 18 years. They include 30 machinists, men and women, many of whom came through a four- to five-year state-accredited apprenticeship program with Abbot Technical High School in Danbury.

“We have a lot of talent and experience required to make the highly technical parts that are critical to the functioning of [Kendro] products,” Mr Young said. “The operation is very automated. There are more than 30 CNC –– computer numerical controlled –– machines and the [machinists] are there as highly trained programmers and inspectors, for quality control. We have an equal number of manual machines that are used for secondary operations such as making sure the rotors are well balanced.”

Rotors spin at thousands of revolutions per minute, creating forces that are hundreds of thousands of times stronger than the force of gravity. Aluminum rotors, with G forces of 250,000, are used to separate blood and other body fluids in medical laboratories. Titanium rotors have G forces of 800,000 and can separate RNA and DNA from cells. Tier One makes both types of rotors.

Once a rotor is assembled, it is tested to be sure it is perfectly balanced. If it is not, a little of the aluminum or titanium is removed by the machinist using a manual machine. “This allows the [lab technician eventually using the centrifuge] to put in test tubes that aren’t well balanced,” Joe Young explained.

Tier One is a term used in manufacturing that refers to companies that sell complete components, not just parts, that are used directly in products. “Brake assemblies and transmissions are made by tier one manufacturers,” he explained. “Tier two manufacturers supply parts to them.

“We sell finished rotors, not just the machine parts,” he said. “These are fully functional tested products.”

Besides supplying Kendro, Tier One also will continue to make parts for analyzers used by the Dade Behring Co. of Brookfield and will look for additional customers in the biomedical, aerospace, and similar industries.

First Selectman Herb Rosenthal said he is “very thrilled for Mike and his partners and for Newtown.”

“From an economic standpoint of the town, we are glad they were able to make this happen. And it is certainly good for the families involved,” he said. “I am happy that it all came together.”

Tier One is using 35,000 square feet of the 120,000-square-foot Kendro plant and operates 24 hours a day, five days a week.

Another part of the plant will be used by Kendro Bioprocessing, a product line of Kendro, which is remaining in Newtown. Kendro Bioprocessing employs more than 30 staff, many of whom are engineers or applications scientists, and operates under the direction of managers Suzanne Anderson and Roberta Landon.

While Tier One’s centrifuges are used in laboratories, Kendro Bioprocessing makes large, industrial-scale centrifuges for pharmaceutical companies that produce vaccines and drugs. The Newtown employees design and assembles the equipment, but does not make the components.

“We don’t machine,” Roberta Landon said. “[Tier One] supplies us with some of the components. We custom-design our products for each customer and make about 30 to 40 [centrifuges] each year.”

Kendro Bioprocessing was located in Franklin, Mass., until last year, when the facility was closed and moved to Newtown. Ms Landon said that most of the staff now is new so she does not anticipate that the operation would be relocated again.

The managers of both Tier One and Kendro Bioprocessing said that if Kendro sells the building on Pecks Lane, they would plan to find another local facility to house their operations.