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When Peter Burgess launched Burteck LLC in Bloomfield in 2010, he started with just a couple of employees in a small rented space, two doors down from Back East Brewery.

Three years later, the plastic injection mold maker bought its current facility in Windsor, and Burgess and his team figured the move would be the company’s last. After all, the new building was more than triple the size of their original 4,000-square-foot space, giving the company plenty of room to grow.

“We were thinking to ourselves, ‘This is it. We’re set,’ ” recalled Burgess, the company’s owner and president. “Well, here we are seven years later, and we’ve outgrown it.”

Burteck makes custom plastic injection molds mostly for the medical industry, although Burgess said the company’s customer base is diverse. It specializes in Class 101 molds, which are the industry’s highest-quality and highest-priced molds, built for extremely high production.

It produces molds to make fasteners, surgical devices, lab testing equipment, goggles, consumer products and “anything you can imagine, really,” said Burgess.

Major customers include medical technology companies like Medtronic and CooperSurgical, as well as subsidiaries of toolmaker Stanley Black & Decker, and other manufacturers located in New England and around the country.

“We’re in a lot of different markets because that’s the smart way to do business,” Burgess said.

And now the company is poised to return to its Bloomfield roots and nearly triple its footprint — again — this summer when it moves into a new 40,330-square-foot headquarters in the 600-acre Griffin Center business park.

Burgess said the building was in a prime location near Bradley International Airport and within commuting distance of both central Massachusetts and Connecticut’s shoreline, where some of his employees live.

The company spent $1.4 million on the new building and is making a significant investment to convert the former office space into a manufacturing facility.

He said the company has also poured $1 million into new equipment, improvements that will help him increase the company’s headcount from 32 to 50 employees in the next few years.

While Burteck also has a location in Shanghai, China, the latest expansion will allow it to take on more work domestically, Burgess said.

For the last few years, the company’s annual revenues have averaged between $10 million and $12 million, double what they were in 2015.

“We feel that there’s plenty of business and we can’t get big enough for it all,” he said.

Burgess grew up in Terryville and got his start in manufacturing right out of high school in 1988 as an apprentice at Apex Machine Tool in Farmington, one of several Connecticut manufacturing firms he would work for over a 30-year career.

He climbed the ladder with each job change, rising from mold maker to tuning engineer to project manager.

In 2010 he took a risk and struck out on his own, tapping his savings to launch Burteck with an Asian investor, which owns 30% of the company.

Burgess said he wasn’t sure what to expect, but reassured himself that even if the venture flopped, he was still employable and could always earn back any money he lost.

“I knew if I didn’t do it, I’d have regrets,” Burgess said.

Having worked for publicly-traded manufacturers, he was determined to build a more personalized company that emphasized quality, workmanship and its employees over the bottom line.

“It’s really more about the product than hitting a quarterly target that’s driven by somebody else,” he said. “The stance is: Don’t ship it if you think it’s wrong. Let’s fix it.”

That philosophy has enabled Burteck to steadily build its customer base over the years, even without a sales force, Burgess said.

He cites the company’s unique business model, which includes a hybrid of offshore and domestic manufacturing, as a key to its growth in Connecticut.

The arrangement has allowed Burgess to offer competitive pricing to his customers without giving up control over quality, he said.

“At the end of the day, everything leaves here as a domestic-quality tool, because it’s a hybrid. We only buy portions of the mold [overseas] and finish it at Burteck,” he said. “We’re not a broker where we place the order and ship it to you.”

Kevin Hicks, senior automation engineer manager for Trumbull-based medical device company CooperSurgical, said Burteck does “a high-end job that you don’t usually see in this area.”

“And we’ve used places all over the country,” he said.

The company recently used Burteck’s new turnkey service, a growing segment of the business. Customers can purchase a molding machine and ship it to Burteck, which will then work with an automation company to create a complete molding system to accompany the mold.

Brent Giansanti, engineering tooling manager for Nordson EFD in Norwich, which makes fluid dispensing systems, said Burteck also offers testing and validation of its molds on its own machines prior to delivery, which is a major timesaver.

“They are the only toolmaker that I have currently that has that ability,” he said. “Most toolmakers do not have molding machines in their facility.”

Burgess said finding skilled workers to handle the volume of work has been the company’s biggest challenge, as it has been for most manufacturers. But he said it’s getting easier. He just brought on a junior engineer and recently hired three advanced manufacturing graduates out of Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield.

“I’m in my early 50s so I’ve still got a good 10 or 15 years in me, because I like the business,” he said. “But at some point I want to keep it going after I’m gone. I’m hoping there will be people here to take it over and run it.”

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Stay on top of the emerging Connecticut Cannabis market with news and perspective from our reporting team in this weekly newsletter. Delivered every Thursday at 10 am.

Hartford Business Journal provides the top coverage of news, trends, data, politics and personalities of the area’s business community. Get the news and information you need from the award-winning writers at HBJ. Don’t miss out - subscribe today.

Delivering Vital Marketplace Content and Context to Senior Decision Makers Throughout Greater Hartford and the State ... All Year Long!

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