For Radco, What Once Was Green Is Green Again

As a manufacturer of high-performance specialty fluids, Radco Industries is not the type of company that comes to mind when you think of green industry. However, as more solar energy enterprises around the globe turn to Radco for heat transfer fluids, the stature of the company’s green credentials — along with its revenues — is steadily rising.

According to Radco CEO Michael Damiani, the company’s green roots run deep. Long before its heat transfer fluids flowed through “solar fields” on five continents and before the U.S. military became the largest end user of its performance fluids, Radco had established itself in the early 1970s as a recycler — rather than producer — of specialty fluids.

“Basically, we’d take in used fluid and clean it up and send it back to the original user — at near new-fluid specifications,” explains Damiani, who says that his favorite catch phrase of late is “We were thinking green, before it was good to be green.”

After more than 10 years as a “reprocessor,” Radco began producing its own fluids in 1984 and has to date introduced 18 different specialty fluids that have elevated the firm to a new tier of competition, where its rivals today include chemical heavyweights such as Dow and Solutia.

“This is such a specialty area that even when competing against billion-dollar companies, we actually have as many resources essentially dedicated to the fluids as they do. We’ve learned that by remaining nimble, it can be easy to dance around the elephant,” says Damiani, who adds that the firm’s solar opportunities quickly snowballed after a few interested firms came upon Radco’s offerings via the Internet.

Using another turn of phrase, Damiani characterizes his company’s evolving focus as “two different markets joined by similar chemistry.” While military performance fluids remain Radco’s biggest market, it’s clear that the second market — heat transfer fluids — is now what is opening a new age of growth (double-digit growth) for the privately-held firm that industry watchers estimate is capturing anywhere from $20 million to $40 million in annual revenues.

The company, which closely guards its financial numbers, likes to boast that revenue-per-employee at the firm is exceedingly high and well above industry averages. Currently, Radco has only 25 full-time employees, who reside at three different locations, and it dedicates 50,000 square feet to its manufacturing operations.

“The number one concern among our solar customers is always quality. If the fluid quality isn’t there, they can severely damage their fields to the extent where they have to shut them down,” explains Damiani, who notes that many opportunities inside the solar sector have often taken months and years to secure.

“What we discovered is that we had to build trust over time, so it wasn’t as though solar fell into our lap. We had to introduce ourselves to the solar industry and sell our reputation as an engineering-based company — and that’s really what got us in the door,” observes Damiani, who believes that the firm’s reputation for quality was accented nicely by the fact that the largest end user of its offerings had long been the U.S. military.

In fact, until very recently, Radco was best known for its military performance fluids, all of which have been engineered to meet the requirements of the ISO 9001 quality program. Besides helping to qualify Radco’s quality credentials, the firm’s military customers also helped to shape the middle-market firm’s global scope — a broad lens that helped Radco to tamp any hesitation when it came to pursuing business overseas. Among the countries and regions where Radco is servicing solar customers are Spain, India, and parts of Africa.

Back in the U.S., the firm’s growing pains are now being made visible by its renewed appetite for office space. This January, the 42-year-old firm is scheduled to relocate its headquarters and primary manufacturing plant to Batavia, IL — a short move from its current home in LaFox, IL, but one that undoubtedly signals a new chapter for Radco’s growth narrative. Watch Radco CEO Mike Damiani on Growth Monitor