Mark Medley : Control Technology Incorporated

On February 15th we got a chance to visit Mark Medley at his company, Control Technology Incorporated. CTI, not to be confused with the CTI from last week, has been around for a while here in Knoxville. Mark Medley founded two companies in the 70's with a few college friends, one was called 1330 corp and focused on publishing magazines, the other was called computer concepts and was focused on building computer systems to automate manufacturing facilities. Mark worked with the Mayfield milk family to help automate their dairy production facilities with programmable logic controllers. In the 1980's Mark was interested in expanding the business beyond milk production so he decided to buy Mayfields part of Computer Concepts and take the company on his own. Initially Marks company was financed by borrowing money from family and friends and from the bank. Bank loans for start ups are pretty much impossible these days. CTI now makes custom circuit boards and PLC's that go into all kinds of products. CTI has a clean manufacturing facility and some state of the art equipment. It was pretty entertaining to sit and watch a robotic arm place different components on a circuit board. Once all the components are placed, the entire board is soldered at once to fix each component in place. CTI does specialized boards in orders of 50-500, not huge lots of production. This forces them to remain nimble in their operations and create competitive advantage through their customer service and adaptability.