After two decades in business, Micro Power, a Hillsboro-based battery system supplier, is stepping out and looking for attention. The company is flush with $14 million in new cash raised from California venture capital firms Sierra Ventures and Palisades Ventures in two funding rounds last year. Micro Power, which supplies the power for some 70% of the automatic defibrillator market, is posting double-digit revenue growth, hiring scores of new employees and exploiting a growing market for portable medical devices, hand-held scanners and global positioning systems.

So, what transformed a company already well into middle age? We posed the question to Greg Love, Micro Power's CEO.

OREGON BUSINESS:You've raised $14 million and you're on a hiring spree. It seems like the company is just now starting to come into its own. What did Micro Power do for its first 20 years?
GREG LOVE: When I first interviewed here [for the CEO job], I learned that Micro Power had been part of a larger division of a plastics company. The interesting thing is that they only sold in Seattle — that was the only market they went after. I was looking at it and wondering: Why Seattle? Is it a salmon thing? Why are you only selling in Seattle? They had a general manager who had no marketing or sales or — from what I could tell — business skills. This market was starting to take off worldwide and they were selling in Seattle.

That's a lot of untapped potential.
It's what attracted me to the company. I've done this before with companies, where they're looking to kick-start things into the second stage of growth. Normally, you come in and say, "Okay, you're selling $20 million in North America, now let's look at Asia, let's look at Europe. Let's get things going." Here, it was: "Let's sell somewhere other than in Seattle." With the $14 million [raised in 2004] we were able to open up a number of sales offices.

Who were your original Seattle customers? Were they medical device companies?
Yes, it was medical devices. Medtronic is up there, Philips is up there and there's a company called Intermec that does the bar-code scanners. My strategy was to look at the core markets: What is it we do really well? What we do really well is major accounts in the medical area and in automatic identification and data collection (AIDC). So we went after other accounts across the country such as those.

What's different about selling batteries?
We sell systems, not batteries. A company called SonoSite — guess what, they're in Seattle — makes portable ultrasound machines, they're pretty typical of our customers. They build this device, they add all these features — color screens, wireless. When they finish with the design, they realize they've got no room for a power supply. In this case, they came to us with that challenge and we inserted the battery system in the handle. It's not only putting the electronics together, but in some cases there's a mechanical jigsaw puzzle to make it fit.

You're being very careful about the markets you're going after, considering the markets that are out there. Why?
The challenge for a lot of small companies is that their next market is their next phone call. You end up getting three miles wide and half an inch deep. It's not a way to grow the business. As we look at opportunities, if it doesn't fit in the core business, we don't do it. The trick is to pick the right markets. The medical area has been a huge, growing market for us, growing more and more portable. And the bar-code business is going through a growth spurt driven by the radio-frequency tags that Wal-Mart is pushing all their vendors to use. We don't make the tags, but we power the scanners. Our strategy has worked. About 70% of our business is in medical, about 20% is in AIDC and 10% is in our emerging markets such as GPS systems.

According to your investors, battery systems are hot right now. What about the competition?
This is a very fragmented business. There are probably only two or three other companies of our size in our space. What we're running into is that some of the cell manufacturers, who make the individual battery cells, are starting to look at the medical area, and they're starting to bounce into our market. We'll probably be looking at an acquisition strategy in the second part of this year.

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