Featured in the Palm Beach Post
Monday, March 6, 2006

Saving money equals saving jobs for Awareness Technology
By Eve Samples
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

PALM CITY — Sure, Mary Freeman has thought about sending jobs overseas.

Outsourcing could translate into big savings for her laboratory equipment firm, Awareness Technology Inc., which sells its machines in more than 100 countries.

	Mary Freeman, holding an assembled chassis of an automated biochemistry analyzer, founded Awareness Technology Inc. in Miami in 1982, when she was 25. The company moved to Palm City in 1984 and plans to expand on 2 adjacent acres. Photo: David Spencer/The Post
	Laurie Anderson of Port St. Lucie, a circuit board assembler, picks out a component. Awareness Technology hired 40 workers last year to handle a $6 million deal with China.       Photo: David Spencer/The Post

Yet it also would mean circuit-board assemblers such as Port St. Lucie resident Linda Miller — who has been on the job for 12 years — would be out of work. The nearby crew that cuts cable would have to go; longtime engineers might get the ax.

So for more than 20 years, she has found another way to keep her privately held firm profitable: Cut costs at her home shop in Palm City, where Awareness makes machines that test samples ranging from blood to wine.

"Because we cannot compete on labor, we have to compete on cleverness," said Freeman, the company's president.

Waste is so shunned that Freeman even tells her workers to write on both sides of every sheet of paper.

"One of our important goals is to keep jobs here," she said during a recent stroll through the Awareness plant on Martin Highway. "It's not easy."

Easy, no. Satisfying, yes. Providing relatively well-paid local jobs — from $9 an hour to six figures a year — keeps Freeman feeling good about the business she founded in Miami in 1982, when she was 25 and felt her ideas were stifled while working in a lab.

With "cost-effective by design" as its mantra, Awareness has not only managed to maintain local jobs, it's expanding its workforce. It hired 40 workers last year to handle the landmark contract it landed in September: a three-year, $6 million deal with China's Centers for Disease Control.

The deal boosted the company's sales to more than $17 million last year, up from $13 million in 2004.

"That's just huge growth for us in one year," said Freeman, 49, who moved the company to Palm City in 1984, the same year her husband, Gary, joined the firm.

With a deadly strain of avian influenza spreading, Awareness scrambled in October to ship the first China order: 1,000 testing machines known as microplate readers, and 1,000 washers to go with them. There, they will be used in labs to analyze blood samples for tracking the spread of HIV and the bird flu.

It's hardly enough to put a dent in the U.S. trade deficit, which hit an all-time high of $726 billion last year, but Awareness' business is firmly rooted overseas. Eighty percent of its sales are in other countries, with strongholds in Russia and the Middle East — including Dubai, where the company has had an office since 2001.

"If you ask an American anything about Awareness Technology, they'll say, 'Who? What?' But if you go overseas, they'll go, 'Yeah, they're the biggest name,' " said Freeman, a trained biochemist.

With that in mind, Ted Astolfi, executive director of the Business Development Board of Martin County, fought to keep the firm in town in the late 1990s, when it ran into delays building its 30,000-square-foot main building.

"They're a clean local manufacturer that sells their product outside the local economy and, in fact, outside the United States, which helps the whole balance of trade," Astolfi said.

Now, he's pushing again to help Awareness get land-use and zoning changes to build an expansion on 2 acres next to its existing campus.

Budget goods sell abroad

Awareness makes products ranging from $600 to $25,000 that fit into three categories: biochemistry analyzers, enzyme immunoassay readers and accessories for both kinds of machines. The machines use lamps and filters to measure color in lab samples mixed with reagents, which are substances that react to antibodies, for example. The machines then analyze the hues to determine levels of cancer-related hormones, antibodies or other properties.

Awareness started with the most basic of the computerized machines — and it still makes them — but now its flagship product is ChemWell, an automated tester that combines biochemistry analysis and enzyme immunoassay. It has manufactured more than 900 of the ChemWells since it started making them five years ago, and the machine earned the New Product Award last year from the National Society of Professional Engineers.

While the ChemWell is sophisticated as far as Awareness' products go, it doesn't come close to rivaling the large-scale fully automated machines made by big U.S. companies such as Abbott Park, Ill.-based Abbott Laboratories, Freeman said.

"The products we make are the Wal-Mart, Kmart line," she said. "We don't make the Rolls-Royce."

That means Awareness has few domestic competitors and more opportunities abroad, where inexpensive machines are in demand.

Still, Freeman keeps her eye on opportunities at home. She's talked with representatives from The Scripps Research Institute, which plans to open its Florida campus in Jupiter, a less than 30-minute drive from Palm City.

The activity surrounding the center could be a boon for lab-related companies such as Awareness, said Brenda Van Der Heyden, co-chair of the Florida Coalition of Professional Laboratory Organizations and compliance officer with DSI Laboratories in Fort Myers.

"We have heard over here on this coast — the other coast, the coast that lost the bid (for Scripps) — that there are going to be an awful lot of wonderful opportunities for companies in the biotech area," Van Der Heyden said.

Smaller start-up labs and reagent manufacturers that arise around Scripps could be logical customers for Awareness. Getting a deal, however, will be a matter of convincing individual scientists that its technology is better and more economical than anyone else's, said Deb Mosca, senior director of business development for Scripps.

While large manufacturers work through Scripps' procurement department, smaller businesses looking to get in on the Scripps action are directed to individual scientists, she explained.

And landing a contract is ultra-competitive, Mosca said.

"It's really up to the scientists to decide if the material meets their needs or not," she said.

Growth seen in food industry

While the vast majority of the machines Awareness makes is used in medical laboratories, a small but growing portion is used in the food industry, where they measure toxins in grain or antihistamines in fish, for example.

The technology is the same as in the medical machines but is programmed to detect other properties.

"These instruments don't care if it's blood or paint thinner to detect color," Freeman said.

California winemaker Kendall Jackson uses about 10 of Awareness' machines to test the quality of its vintages. Lansing, Mich.-based Neogen Corp., which makes food-testing kits, is a longtime customer.

Though the food industry now accounts for only about 4 percent of Awareness' business, Freeman sees growth potential in the sector and plans to target the food industry in foreign countries.

Jan Krestan, 45, who emigrated from Slovakia six years ago, likes how geographically diversified Awareness' business is. It gives him a sense of job security — something he didn't have at the Fort Lauderdale dot-com company where he worked when he first came to Florida.

After that company went bust, he spotted an ad for a software engineer position at Awareness. Now his take on Awareness' sales is this: "The more countries, the better."

Freeman intends to keep pushing for overseas contracts to keep domestic jobs like Krestan's viable.

"My husband and I both feel that they're a part of the growth and the development, and they deserve to be a part of the future success," she said of her employees. "If we just outsource this to someone else, what happens to them?"

Article copyright PBP 2006. Used with permission.