Jeffrey Feltch, president of DisplayWorks, an Irvine trade show and exhibit house, knows the completion of the Anaheim Convention Center this year will mean more business for his company. But though the 20-year-old company does a lot of work in Anaheim, Feltch is positioning the company to take advantage of other growth opportunities as well.
In the past two years, DisplayWorks, which has done work for the likes of Quiksilver, Cisco Systems, Broadcom and the Walt Disney Co., has opened a third facility in Portland, Ore. It also has a fabrication plant in Brisbane, Calif. The company also has refocused its business to include fixture and lobby design for the corporate world and expanded its management staff.
Earlier this month, DisplayWorks, which had about $22 million in revenue last year, played David to the industry’s Goliath when it hired 28-year exhibit veteran Herb Hite as COO. Hite was previously president and general manager of the Los Angeles office of Roselle, Ill.-based Exhibitgroup/Giltspur, a $2.5 billion subsidiary of Viad Corp., Phoenix. When Exhibitgroup moved its Southern California operations from Los Angeles to Cypress in 1998, Hite told the Business Journal the move would give that company better access to a growing number of Orange County clients. Now he represents the competition.
Feltch said Hite was brought in to “help control the margins” of the company’s trade show business, a move that Feltch believes will help the firm’s future profitability. He calls Hite a “key part” of the company’s expanded management team.
Hite admits it’s a bit of an adjustment to go from a big, publicly held company to one he calls “entrepreneurial” in spirit, but said that was also part of the attraction.
“Before I had complete responsibility for one facility; now I have responsibility for three facilities,” Hite said. “It was a growth opportunity for me.”
A secondary consideration, Hite said, was the chance to reduce his travel, spend more time with his family at their Huntington Beach home, and stay on the West Coast permanently.
The company also recently hired Scott Spires,another veteran of Exhibitgroup/Giltspur,as project manager in charge of coordinating the work of the Irvine and Portland facilities.
But fine-tuning trade show operations isn’t the only strategy DisplayWorks has employed to grow the company. Though Feltch said trade-show work accounted for about 70% of the company’s business last year, DisplayWorks also saw a need to diversify. A sister company, ComWorks, was created two years ago to handle strategic marketing for clients, and last year DisplayWorks went after the corporate market, focusing on retail and commercial fixture installations and corporate lobbies.
Corporate Work Growing
That work generated about $2 million to $3 million in revenue last year. Locally, the company completed a retail remodel for Traditional Jewelers in Fashion Island, and is creating a lobby design for computer hardware company MTI Technology Corp. in Anaheim, a contract valued at about $350,000. In addition, DisplayWorks is designing a homefinding center in Valencia and bidding on another in Texas.
Feltch said the company created a separate business plan for the corporate design work and hired sales staff knowledgeable in that market. But he said the addition of corporate work was not made in response to stiffer competition in the trade-show market, despite increased interest in OC from national players like Exhibitgroup/Giltspur and Dallas-based The Freeman Cos., which announced an expansion of its Anaheim facilities late last year.
“The major companies moving into this market are more auto-show-based,” Feltch said. “They haven’t brought much competition so far.”
Still, Feltch said DisplayWorks has strengthened its sales staff and is working to protect its non-auto show clients, to stave off competitors.
New Markets
DisplayWorks has its eye on the potential in other markets, too. Feltch said the Portland facility was added partly out of a desire to get into that market early, and partly because the company found a large pool of designers and production people in the area. He said the company hopes to realize $2 million in revenue from the Portland facility this year. Dan Hones, a 20-year industry veteran who has handled design and fabrication for the Nike SuperShow and Nike Park Atlanta 1996, was recently hired as vice president for the Portland operation.
DisplayWorks was begun in 1980 in a 1,200-square-foot facility in Costa Mesa, with four employees. The company now employs 200 and has a 270,000-square-foot building in Irvine. It had $22 million in 1999 revenue, up from about $20 million in 1998. Feltch said he expects the company to reach about $28 million in revenue this year.
Industry experts estimate the trade show business as a whole will exceed $5 billion this year. n
