Tour shows Sisters' business depth

The city-sponsored "Made in Sisters" tour on August 9 surprised even longtime Sisters residents with the breadth and depth of the international businesses operating quietly in Sisters.

Outgoing Economic Development Director Mac Hay put together a bus tour to give a sampling of five Sisters businesses. Hay said, "We are well-known as a tourist town, and we acknowledge that and we like that label, but we are also manufacturing, light-industrial and professional services as well."

More than 15 local and regional business people, elected representatives, and economic development executives hopped on a school bus to tour Metabolic Maintenance, Rescue Response Gear, Ponderosa Forge & Ironworks, ENERGYneering Solutions, Inc. and Sisters Eagle Airport.

The group lunched at Blazin Saddles bike shop.

Local content was featured throughout the tour, which started at city hall with Sisters Coffee and Angeline's Bakery & Café scones. The assembled group then boarded a big yellow Sisters school bus, with both driver and bus donated by the school district.

Metabolic Maintenance, a supplier of custom-blended amino acids and vitamin and mineral supplements was the first stop. This appeared to be the business that caught most of the locals by surprise. Metabolic Maintenance has been in their current building for more than 18 years and employs 32 people in their 17,000-square-foot facility. Three-quarters of the employees are from Sisters, and many have more than 10 years of service.

Metabolic Maintenance markets their products world-wide.

Owner Ed Fitzjarrel explained how he got started in the blended supplement business 26 years ago in San Diego.

"Mom was diagnosed with chronic leukemia 40 years ago when I was just 24. She was given 10 months to live," said Fitzjarrel. "I went back to school to try to figure out how to keep her around... she just turned 90."

When asked why he picked Sisters as a location to expand his business, Fitzjarrel said, "Because of Kelly (his daughter). I wanted her to have a place to go to school where she could play sports and was safe."

Quality schools was a constant refrain throughout the tour when owners were asked what drew them to Sisters.

Metabolic Maintenance has always sold in the physician exclusive market, attending some 15 trade shows a year to interface directly with physicians. Many of their products are custom blended for a specific patient based on the patient's blood tests and the attending physician's recommendations.

A new segment of the Metabolic Maintenance business plan is taking a limited group of their products and selling them direct (to the public) under a different label.

This growth combined with the robust business in their traditional line has Fitzjarrel thinking about adding a second 17,000 square foot building to his site, and hiring more staff to support the growth.

ENERGYneering Solutions, Inc. and the Sisters Eagle Airport are only slightly better known than Metabolic due to more recent publicity. Current negotiations to annex the airport property into the city allow their story to be told in a bit more detail. (See related story, page 4.)

Launched at Sisters Airport in 2007, Benny and Julie Benson's company has grown to more than 30 employees and is bursting at the seams.

Their core business is renewable bio-gas, and now bio-mass, power. Their traditional business involves the design, installation and operation of power plants that work off the waste gases of landfill and wastewater treatment plants. Burning of recycled wood products in the form of pellets has also now been added to the mix.

Besides a number of installations working in the U.S., including the bio-mass boiler at Sisters High School, ENERGYneering Solutions, Inc. is truly international.

"Our portfolio last year between design, construction and operations was about 100 megawatts," said Benson. "We are working on the largest wastewater treatment plant in the world right now in Mexico City, doing power generation design. We just finished the design for one plant in Puerto Rico and are working on a second one. We have strong ties to Korea, and are starting designs in Vietnam and Peru."

Benson is quite proud of the model he has developed of growing local subcontractors on-site. These entrepreneurial enterprises provide support to ENERGYneering Solutions, Inc. projects and to a wide variety of other customers. These include graphics design and video production, Mountain EDM machine shop, and a custom watch-builder.

Between Energyneering's 3-D color printer, the precision EDM shop and the watchmaker there are only two places in the world that do what they do: Sisters and Switzerland.

Benson pointed out, "Facebook is a big word around Central Oregon. But adding up our payroll we are right around the $2-million mark which is pretty similar to Facebook, and we are in a pretty small footprint.

"We see this as a tech hub from a renewable energy standpoint as well as (giving us) an ability to distribute smaller-scale technology that we can move around with airplanes."

Lance Piatt's Rescue Response Gear, a 20-year-old business now housed in the former Multnomah Publishing building, is also selling from Sisters to an international customer base. Rescue Response Gear provides technical rescue equipment and training to private and government agencies such as fire service, the FBI, mountain and swift-water rescue, window washers, wind turbine builders and operators, and building inspectors.

"Our customers are anybody that hangs on a rope," said Piatt.

Rescue Response Gear's 12 employees not only sell rescue and rigging equipment, they also produce video training and education videos on-site to teach their customers how to use their gear. Twenty percent of their business is in the Northern Hemisphere, with a significant customer base in Australia and New Zealand.

Industrial customers are currently 30 percent of their business and also represent their fastest-growing business segment.

"Our on-site training facility is the result of somebody not growing up," said Piatt in reference to the three-story tree house and fully rigged climbing wall that make up their on-site training video production center.

"This facility represents something that no one else in our industry does. We are not just offering gear. We devise solutions based on (customer) questions: we rig it, film it, and then send it off to the customer."

Piatt picked Sisters as a place to live because of the quality of the school system. His son is now finishing film school in Australia and will come back to run the video subsidiary of the business.

Jeff Wester, owner of Ponderosa Forge & Ironworks, shoed horses in the day to put himself through engineering college at Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT), and then continued to shoe horses and teach welding, machine shop and applied science classes at night at COCC until he got his business up and going in a yurt north of

town.

Wester built his current shop in Sisters in 1981 as a combination of blacksmith shop, welding-fabrication shop and machine shop.

"Our product line is forged ironwork - anything you would think of being in a house: bar stools, tables, shelf brackets, fireplace doors, hinges and handles," said Wester. "We have a small but rapidly growing Internet business, and we are shipping stuff all over the country. We have more than 100 products online."

When the shop is running at full steam, they employ about seven people. Wester has little difficulty getting people.

"A lot of Central Oregon people want to work in an artistic sense," said Wester. "It is a form of art. You throw the tape measure away."

Ponderosa Forge does a lot of work with Sisters High School with work-study program interns. Once a year, Wester transforms his entire shop into a gala venue for the Sisters Folk Festival's "My Own Two Hands" fundraising auction/party, consistently raising thousands of dollars to support the festival's outreach programs.

Lunch was served by The Depot Café at Blazin Saddles at the conclusion of the tour. Hay told The Nugget he wanted to serve lunch in a less formal environment than a restaurant and expose the attendees to a Sisters retail operation.

Jacquie Zanck and her son Casey Meudt started Blazin Saddles cycle shop three seasons ago, fulfilling a dream Zanck had from her days as a pro cyclist. Working as a buyer, Zanck moved from Colorado, to Idaho, and then, after a lot of research, she moved to Sisters because of the reputation of the schools for her three kids. Jacquie's day-job is as director of spa/retail at Black Butte Ranch; Casey runs the shop.

"We are shipping bikes all over. We have a big eBay presence and a lot of Internet and social media sales," said Zanck. "We just keep growing. We've taken a strong stance in the community and with the school

district."

Casey developed a colorful "Cycle Sisters" guide, which has received strong response from the big California bike shows, and from distribution in the Pearl District of Portland. Some 10,000 copies are in circulation. Bend has asked Meudt to develop a similar guide for Bend cyclists.