Highlights of 2019 

2019 was an exceptional year for Custom Valve Concepts! We recorded a 19% growth over our previous record high year. This challenge to our team was met with a lot of hard work and excitement spanning the entire organization - every individual, every team, every department working as a whole. December was particularly rewarding  - we shipped almost double the previous record high month. Thankfully, everyone rose to the opportunity and we were able to deliver to our customers, continuing our mission to serve them to the best of our ability. After this fourth-quarter push to ship, the entire company was glad to stay home between the Christmas and New Year’s shutdown.

Our revenue wasn’t the only growth we saw. Throughout the year, we added 10 new employees to the team, with quite a few of them specializing in manufacturing. Along with hiring some great people, we also added equipment to increase our capabilities, reduce lead times, and maintain flexibility as we continue to strive to be our best as a team of excellent designers, quick prototypers, and cost-effective solution providers. The added equipment ranged from a high production small envelope, swiss machine to the large component, a sub-spindle machine with a five-axis milling head. The people, machines, software, and systems have laid the foundation to keep our excellent reputation of quality while increasing our market share.

Our industry focus has remained relatively the same. The petrochemical industry, in particular, has been a business segment for CVC that has seen significant growth in 2019. Our standard Kates Flow Control Valve and our capabilities to customize valves to customer’s needs have made us extremely valuable to our customers. We have been a significant part of large-scale international projects for plants such as the DUQM Refinery, Ruwais Refinery, SK Energy, CEPSA, and others. We have also expanded our domestic petrochemical business, quickly becoming the number one solution for mechanical seal flush systems for API plans 32 and 54. The versatility of our products makes us applicable for anything from standard water flow control to critical high-pressure hydrogen control.

Our communications strategy evolved this year and we now have several channels in which we communicate some big ideas, share more about what we’re doing at our headquarters and having interesting conversations with others in the industry. We established our blog on the website and are starting to publish articles regularly. We opened the doors to two new social channels, Twitter and most excitedly, Instagram.

Our sales team and application engineers have been called to travel across the country as increasingly customers are looking to understand and fully optimize the use of the Kates Automatic Flow Rate Controller. We have brought back our presence at industry shows and conferences including exhibiting at the Turbomachinery and Pump Symposium. At the show, we gave a technical presentation on the benefits of controlling flow to mechanical pump seals.

2019 was a year of growth, excitement, and pride for the company. One of our Core Values is ‘The race to Quality has no finish line”. In that spirit, in 2020 we look to improve exponentially on what we did in 2019.

2020 Outlook

Coming out of 2019, we obviously have an extremely positive outlook for 2020. Overall, our industrial markets are continuing to thrive due to macro-environmental factors. This has opened new opportunities to explore in the upcoming months.

Growth within petrochemical and chemical industries. Another avenue that is exciting for us is working with skid manufacturers, mainly in the petrochemical and chemical industry. Certain skids that require accurate flow control (mechanical seal flush systems, lube oil systems, nitrogen generation, etc.) can realize a tremendous advantage by using the Kates Flow Rate Controller due to its extreme accuracy and fully mechanical nature.

Our team will continue to grow at a rapid pace. At Custom Valve Concepts, we strive to meet our goal of keeping up with customer demand, while maintaining great customer service and outstanding quality. Our philosophy is that in order to be the best at what we do, we must allocate time to whiteboard new ideas, improve our systems, and train our people. By increasing our organizational size with smart people solving challenging problems and coming up with new ideas, we will continue to improve our ability to do so.

Our communications strategy will expand. We’re excited to be expanding thought leadership across all channels in the coming months including case studies and a new whitepaper. We will share more about our team via the blog and social channels. We also have a few yet-to-be-launched ideas in the pipeline for all channels that we can’t wait to share with you. This year’s evolution of our communications strategies showcases our thinking and our commitment to our clients and others in the industry by sharing some of our smarts.

A never-ending supply of power is in the cards. We are excited about exploring the marketing of is mission-critical backup generators for UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply). These systems are used for hospitals, jails, data centers, and any other facilities which need immediate, automatic power backup in the event of a mains power loss.

Continued innovation from R&D. We are eager to introduce the new products that we are currently working on. Our team was successful in creating a new, fully mechanical flow controller which we will launch in the first quarter of 2020. Testing results have proven to be very accurate. The valve has a smaller footprint compared to our traditional valves and its price point will make it easy ROI for most applications. We also have multiple oil and gas valve designs in the works which are proprietary in nature that we will release later in 2020. These designs range from specialized solenoid valves to check valves to pressure regulators.

These are exciting times at CVC. 2020 brings a lot of fun challenges and it is always exciting to see our team step up to those challenges.