Making Their Mark On Dry-Erase Board Market | OptiMA's products, search engine strategy help fuel its growth
As owners of a company that was once centered on local sales, then went to the web on somewhat of a lark, Doug and Christine Klimavich of OptiMA, Inc. certainly have become Internet-savvy beyond their wildest dreams.
In fact, it’s their sheer longevity as owners of several domains — plus the fact that their products are top-notch — that has made OptiMA one of Inc. Magazine’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the United States.
According to Christine, when a customer uses a search engine to find a product like the ones they specialize in, which include customized white dry-erase boards and boards that include permanent, specialized graphics, her company will be in the top three search results because, among other things, she and her husband have owned and operated the sites for more than a decade. Furthermore, she added, OptiMA might possibly be behind all of them, given that their five different web domains all direct potential customers to the same parent site: www.OptimaCompanies.com.
It’s this web knowledge — a homegrown effort that took shape in the late 1990s — and optimizing search engines that have allowed the company to grow. Now, it's one of the newest tenants at Shrewsbury’s Hill Farms Industrial Park with a 12,000-square-foot office designed to facilitate the company’s further expansion. Company growth also has opened the door for business relationships with countless Fortune 500 companies from Perdue Farms to Disney.
“If you name a company across this country, I’ve sold to them,” Christine said.
What started in the late 1980s as a home-based operation distributing paper supplies and large-scale cleaning equipment geared toward educational institutions began to take a dive after 10 years of decent local sales. As the field became unbearably competitive, the Klimaviches became intrigued by white dry- erase boards and decided to test the increasingly popular world of web sales. The rest, as they say, is history.
“We thought it would be a good way to supplement our income,” Christine said.
Growth, The Steady Way
They developed their core product, Opti-Rite, a high-quality white-board surface the company uses in a number of applications, whether it’s infused with iron to make it magnetic or printed with guitar fret boards, basketball courts or calendar grids to tailor it to the customer. Another signature aspect of many of their products is that the white board can be rolled up for shipment, then rolled out onto a wall.
The ride has not been a wild one since the Klimaviches have always believed that slow and steady wins the race.
“We are an extremely conservative company,” Christine said, recalling her difficulty in securing a personal loan because they were self employed, and the resulting resolve that she would never let herself be in a position to rely on a bank. “If we don’t have the money, we don’t spend it.”
It’s all a part of her inbred Yankee ingenuity, she said, and it keeps her and Doug active and involved in every aspect of the business. A recent need for a piece of equipment that would have cost thousands to have tailor-made became a workplace pet project. With a weightlifting bench, some skateboard bearings and a welding torch, the warehouse team assembled a specialized paper-roll holder, making production 10 times more efficient.
And in an effort to increase efficiency — with the goal of increasing output as opposed to eliminating jobs — OptiMA was recently awarded two grants that will enable it to bring in a consultant specializing in lean manufacturing and production techniques. The funds will allow lean professionals to suggest ways OptiMA can maximize its product line given its physical space and staff of 20 full-time employees.
At the end of the day, however, the most important thing to Christine is that her employees know how much they are valued at OptiMA. Their hard work, she said, is the very backbone of the company.
“We have a saying around here — ‘It’s just a white board’,” she said.
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