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By MATT WICKENHEISER, Staff Writer Friday, April 27, 2007

The drive to one of Maine's growing high-tech startups used to involve traveling down a windy road to a small country house in the midcoast town of Edgecomb.

Fluid Imaging Technology officials would rent rooms in Portland to host clients coming in from around the globe, rather than bring them to their remote headquarters.

"Image is everything. If we have reps coming over here to see a cedar-shingled house in Edgecomb, Maine, you wonder what they're thinking," said Christian Sieracki, company president.

But the startup has moved its headquarters to a new office building in Yarmouth off Route 1, leaving behind its bootstrap environment for a location that represents the company's profitability, growth and - Fluid Imaging hopes - future expansion.

"I can't wait for Proctor & Gamble to come visit," said Chief Executive Officer Kent Peterson.

The company makes a line of continuous imaging flow cytometers - basically instruments that microscopically analyze liquid as it flows through the devices, taking digital pictures of cells or particles in the liquid and counting and identifying them. About half its market is in oceanographic sciences, and half in industrial applications ranging from food production to petrochemicals.

The move represents many things for Fluid Imaging, which in 1999 began as a spinoff from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in West Boothbay Harbor. Sieracki had developed the technology while at Bigelow, and he founded the company to commercialize it.

"I see this whole move as going from a scientific idea, a scientist's blue-sky-staring-out-the-window-fuzzy-idea, toward going to be shrewder, more businesslike," said Sieracki. "It's much more serious ­ it just struck me when the company moved here, this is a serious facility. It's going to strike everyone. We really mean business now ­ to heck with this artsy-fartsy side of things."

Fluid Imaging is keeping the Edgecomb building as a research and development facility.

The company is one of many that has been funded, in part, by the Maine Technology Institute, which provides grants that nurture small startups operating in targeted market segments. The state hopes to develop these as a foundation for Maine's high-tech economy.

Many struggle along. Others close shop. Some, such as BiODE Inc. of Westbrook, choose an exit strategy that involves being acquired by a larger company. Others, such as Fluid Imaging, grow and expand.

"They're a good example of the kinds of companies that we love to support," said MTI President Betsy Biemann. "They're constantly innovating, developing new products and improving on existing ones."

And the fact that Fluid Imaging is a Bigelow spinoff "is a good portent of things to come in Maine," said Biemann.

She noted that in several R&D evaluations over the past few years, researchers have noted the strength of Maine's non-profit lab sector. They've also stressed the need to increase technology transfer activity, bringing the ideas from those labs into the commercial marketplace.

According to Peterson, Fluid Imaging has 11 employees, several part-time administrative workers and several interns from the University of Southern Maine, with plans to hire at least five more.

Moving from Edgecomb more than doubled the company's square footage, and it can now tap into the Portland-area labor market. Plus, the extra space allows the company to bring on more workers.

Peterson said Fluid Imaging could easily triple in size over the next three years. And there were other practical reasons for the move. With the exception of Sieracki, Fluid Imaging's other employees live in the Portland area. Their commute has been shortened from about 50 minutes to 15.

Another failing of the Edgecomb headquarters was that broadband Internet service is unavailable there. That's a problem for a company that deals in very large graphics files. To work with clients - or potential ones - on images over the Internet, Fluid Imaging's employees would work from home.

"The loss of productivity was horrendous," said Peterson.

Fluid Imaging's move also allows the company to bring in different fabrication and assembly steps that had previously been outsourced. In particular, the primary assembly process around the optical module will be done in the Yarmouth headquarters, giving the company much greater control over the manufacturing timing, quality and other aspects of production.

The move comes at a time when Fluid Imaging's flow cytometers have gained strong footholds in different markets. One food product firm is so impressed by the technology that it instructed its juice-pulp supplier to buy one so the company could provide quality-control data before shipping.

Another longtime industrial customer has expanded the technology's use from product development to quality assurance to in-line manufacturing, buying multiple flow cytometers, with more purchases planned.

The Environmental Protection Agency has bought the technology for ecological monitoring, and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority uses it to check out drinking water.

And although oceanographic sales are slow in the United States, that's not the case globally, Peterson said.

"The (National Science Foundation and National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration) budgets have been slashed dramatically for other government purposes," said Peterson. "It's unfortunate that the oceanographers in the United States are getting put on the back burner, but that's not true for many, many other countries around the world."

Now, Fluid Imaging is looking at marketing, and organizational growth.

Peterson must hire people for customer service, sales, manufacturing and sales support ­ while weighing projected growth against resource allocation. "It's really a balance between what we can estimate versus what we know, making sure we're conservative enough about both ends to continue our upward spiral," said Peterson.

And the company also needs to keep its character and organizational personality, Peterson and Sieracki said, even as the company "grows up." To do that, they've hired an organizational consultant and have held frequent employee meetings.

One bonus of the Edgecomb headquarters was a nice deck looking over a field and woods. Employees used to have a barbecue every other week or so, with everyone contributing to the fixings.

"One of the must-haves I had on my list in researching new locations was that we must have a place where our employees can have their barbecues," said Peterson.

So in addition to broadband Internet, proximity to a labor force and professional-looking space close to the Portland International Jetport, the Yarmouth headquarters also has a barbecue spot.

Staff Writer Matt Wickenheiser can be contacted at 791-6316 or at: mwickenheiser@pressherald.com