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Tulsa-based company generates growth in downturn
By Brian Ervin
When business owners talk about the current recession, it’s often in terms of their cutbacks and layoffs, but when Clifford Power Systems CEO and namesake Ken Clifford talks about it, he tells how his company’s growth slowed to a brisk jog instead of a run.
“We just didn’t grow a lot, but we didn’t have any cuts,” he said.
Clifford Power Systems distributes and services industrial and commercial off-utility power generation systems, generally to serve as emergency backup for power failures. It is based in Tulsa, but after recent acquisitions, the firm has ten locations across the central U.S. encompassing Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas, with 135 employees company wide and 40 in Tulsa.
Clifford said the firm’s latest expansion positions it for its ten-year plan of becoming a $75 million-a-year company. Current yearly revenues are $35 million-40 million.
His company’s growth through the recession is a success story, but his outlook for the decade to come, he said, is the direct result of setbacks suffered a decade ago.
“What has helped Clifford to get where they are today is that, ten years ago, when Worldcom failed and a lot of the telecom and IT stuff went down, we changed the course of what we were going to do as a company,” Clifford said.
He founded Clifford Power Systems with his brother Tom Clifford in 1985. By the late 1990s, their yearly revenue had grown to about $20 million, but suddenly inflated to $40 million in 1999, due partly to fears of the apocalyptic system failures expected from the Y2K bug, but also from the growth of the telecom industry during the dot-com bubble.
Clifford Power Systems’ three biggest customers filed for bankruptcy after the dot-com crash, and by 2002 they were down to $15 million a year and had to lay off a substantial portion of their workforce.
At that, Clifford said his company resolved to make some changes.
“We all looked each other in the eye and said, ‘I don’t ever want to lay anybody else off. Ever.’ It’s the hardest thing to do,” he said.
“We changed the course of what we were doing as a company, and we said, ‘Let’s be the very best service company in the industry, and make that the cornerstone of everything we do,’ ” Clifford said.
It was a gradual climb up again after the dot-com crash, he said, but the firm’s new emphasis on service and maintenance made it a much more stable and profitable ascent.
“When we did that $40 million, we thought we were rock stars, and the reality is, with a little bit more than half those revenues, we made more money, because we were focused on the service. So, our profits were generated at a much higher rate, based on just having good service, than when we were selling all that equipment,” he recounted.
Sales and distribution still make up two-thirds of their business, but with the other third devoted to service and maintenance, they were able to keep their resolution to never downsize when the economy took another dive.
Three years ago, their yearly revenues finally reached pre-dot-com levels at $20 million, and then they began to expand more aggressively. Now, he said he expects to double their revenue over the next decade by expanding into outlying areas within the firm’s existing footprint.
