🔒Fourth-generation Pearse Bertram’s pivot into contract manufacturing leads to growth spurt

For Jon Pearse, it has become a family tradition of sorts — not just leading the family-owned business his great grandfather founded in New Jersey in 1929, but to pivot the company in new directions to keep it growing.

“Each generation has confronted challenges and was able to identify and navigate the need for change,” said Pearse, who is president of Pearse Bertram + Streamline Contract Manufacturing, a Bloomfield-based distribution and contract manufacturer.

His grandfather, Pearse says, opened the company’s second location in Bloomfield in 1946 and built a strong business as a fluid power distributor for New England-based machine tool manufacturers.

His father, in turn, transitioned the company, Pearse Bertram, to serve semiconductor equipment and other high-tech manufacturers — supporting electrical controls and electrical automation — while increasing the number of sectors the company supported.

And Pearse, as the family’s fourth-generation leader, confronted the rise of online commerce, which eliminated the geographic advantages of local distributors.

In 2009, the company’s offerings expanded beyond distribution to include contract manufacturing operations — a move that has fueled the company’s growth over the past decade and prompted a recent rebranding of the company name to Pearse Bertram + Streamline Contract Manufacturing.

Over the past decade company revenue has more than doubled, its employee base has grown by 50% — to 45 employees — and the Bloomfield facility, which includes a warehouse, distribution center and manufacturing space, has expanded from 15,000 square feet to more than 35,000 square feet.

While Pearse says the company had started to do small sub-assemblies for clients in the early 2000s, building component parts for larger machines, the contract manufacturing side of the business didn’t take off until after the Great Recession of 2008.

“Much of our customer base had cut [a lot] of their employees and when the economy came back, they had no one to build their ,” Pearse recalled. “We saw a huge influx of business.”

Proven formula

His company’s business model as both a distributor and contract manufacturer — unique in the market, by Pearse’s estimation — also provided a critical value-add for clients: cost savings.

Typically, Pearse explained, a client would need to cover the cost of supplies from a distributor and then pay a contract manufacturer to build part or all of a product.

“There’s a mark-up on both,” Pearse said.

But as a joint distributor and manufacturer, Pearse’s company can often produce a finished product — providing engineering, design, and production services — for less.

That’s been a huge benefit to clients like Rob Brockway, director of operations for New Hampshire-based Trelleborg Pipe Seals Milford. Brockway oversees the manufacturing of the company’s diamond drilling machines, which are used to drill holes in concrete structures to fit Trelleborg’s rubber seals.

Brockway’s business line is a strategic but small part of the company’s multinational business, and demand for it ebbs and flows.

“Our capital equipment is built to be very durable and, if taken care of, can run, 20, 30 or 40 years,” Brockway said. “In the capital equipment businesses, when you’re busy, you don’t have enough people to keep up with the demand and when demand slows down a little it’s hard to find work for your people.”

He said he found it more efficient to outsource the production of his drills’ hydraulic power units to Pearse’s firm.

Another key benefit, Brockway says, in working with Pearse Bertram is the engineering support.

“My business unit is not big enough to have a hydraulic engineer on staff, but [Pearse Bertram’s] team has got technical capability and that puts them in a unique position as a vendor,” Brockway said.

That’s proven to be a successful formula for Pearse’s company, which serves nearly 2,000 clients, including roughly 300 clients on the contract manufacturing side alone. The firm’s client base ranges from small startups to original equipment manufacturers to Fortune 500 companies, with projects that can range from a week to 18 months and cost between $20,000 to $2 million.

That type of diversity has helped the company weather uncertain times, including the past year, which, Pearse says, was positive for his bottom line, driven by a couple of key clients’ needs.

“One of our long-standing [contract manufacturing] customers makes a precision oxygen flow device and, once it got discovered, it was a go-to therapy for bad COVID cases,” Pearse said, noting his company added two assembly and multiple shifts to meet the clients’ business needs, which quadrupled.

Another client, a major online retailer, looked to Pearse’s company to automate its warehouses globally.

“We had some opportunities [during the pandemic] that were way larger than we ever could have anticipated,” Pearse said.

It has made Pearse bullish about his company’s future over the next three to five years. He understands the value his business can provide to the region’s growing startup ecosystem, including prototype design and speed-to-market manufacturing for industries like green energy, which are expected to grow substantially.

He also sees opportunities to move up the competitive food chain to larger and more complex products.

“I think the complexity of the systems and the jobs are going to grow dramatically,” Pearse said, providing another opportunity to grow the company and carry on the family tradition.