A manufacturing company bought out of bankruptcy in New Hampshire has been relocated to upstate.
The buyer, Rochester company Optimation, says the move will boost the local job market and economy.
President of Optimation, Bill Pollock says they already have about 50 staff, and they hope to add about 200 jobs to the area over the next couple of years.
The 120-year old Kingsbury Corporation started out manufacturing toys, but today it’s machines, and machine parts coming out of its loading dock.
It took one-hundred-and-ten truckloads to transport its manufacturing capabilities upstate, but Pollock says it was well worth the effort.
“Kingsbury is an incredible name, an unbelievable brand name with a great legacy.”
Pollock says the company already has purchase orders for 35,000 hours of work to be finished by mid-2013, and he is confident they will be getting even more.
Right now, that means the company will have to run two shifts of 35 employees full-time to get the work done, and that means hiring more workers.
Pollock says apart from the manufacturing operation in Rochester, Optimation has also opened an engineering facility in the company’s hometown of Keene, New Hampshire.
He says owning the patents for machine designs is one thing, but it is entirely another to have people who really know how to build them.
Pollock says they have re-hired some previous Kingsbury employees who lost their jobs when the company went into bankruptcy, for just that reason.
Manufacturing upstate:
Pollock says Kingsbury fits well into the Optimation family, and he is excited about the prospects the new addition brings.
“At Optimation we were sub-contracting and outsourcing all of our machine fabrication, now we can do that in-house. So, Kingsbury will build all the kinds of machines that Kingsbury always built, plus a whole new genre of machines that Optimation designs.”
Despite New York state having a bad reputation for business friendliness, Pollock says the move was definitely in the best interests of the company.
“Rochester has an incredible number of very talented and trained people.”
“There are a lot of people who find this area attractive because of the skiing, and the Finger Lakes, and all the quality of life that we have in Rochester. So, Rochester’s a great place to live and if you leverage that, it can be a really good place to run a business.”
Pollock says he thinks the company has a real chance to grow and thrive in the upstate region.
Since taking over the business six months ago, he says they have already sold more than $1 million in spare parts for Kingsbury machines, and he only expects it to get better.
