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Just two years ago San Diego-based Veridiam had $30 million in sales. Today, after several acquisitions and internal growth, the company has sales of $70 million, with 500 employees working in 270,000 square feet.

That kind of growth-in just two years-is enough to raise some eyebrows. What strategy did this 50-year-old company take to expand so rapidly?

Two words: medical industry.

Veridiam was founded more than 50 years ago as a division of Carpenter's special products division. The division acted as the company's draw-tube and machining supplier of specialty materials to the aerospace and nuclear industry.

"How much growth did the nuclear industry have in the U.S.?" asks Steve Thornton, Veridiam's director of sales. Since the 1970s, not much.

Two years ago, Thornton was brought in to make some changes in market strategy for the contract manufacturer. It had recently been sold to WHI Capital, a private equity firm out of Chicago. He had two decades of experience in the medical field, both in selling equipment and in contract manufacturing.

On Thornton's first day, ten percent of the company's revenue came from medical. Today, it stands at 40 percent.

What can account for this growth? As Thornton describes it, medical "was a natural fit. The fact that we drew the materials and helped develop new materials that are commonly used in medical-and machine and fabricate it-it was a natural thing for us to increase our presence in the market."

The company works with the typical medical grades-Stainless 304 and 316; Ti6Al-4V. But it also uses some less common grades, like Carpenter 465, "which is a stainless that's twice the strength of 304," says Thornton. The company also works with Biodur 108-a nickel-free austenitic stainless-and other specialty medical alloys. And, thanks to the company's background, these materials are actually drawn, giving the possibility of a wider size range "as well as better concentricity and ID surface finish than with gundrilling followed by centerless grinding," Thornton adds.

Providing the keystone of Veridiam's strategy has been what Thornton calls a "vertically integrated solution," and central to that has been diversity on the shop floor, taking the customer from product development through material design and prototyping, part production-including machining, fabrication and assembly-and shipping. It's all done in-house and all tightly controlled.

Specifically, the company's capabilities include tube drawing, both thin-wall and cannulated round bar; electrolytic cutting; wire and ram/sinker-type and hole-popping EDM; Swiss-type screw machining; milling and turning; laser cutting; metal forming; welding; and assembly.

Much of these capabilities were brought in through three company acquisitions Veridiam has made during the past two years, the most recent being Costa Rica-based Point Technologies, which focuses on electro chemical grinding, screw machining and EDM.

Veridiam's capabilities make the company stand out in a crowd. "We're finding that a larger number of medical OEMs are looking for integrated solutions," Thornton says. "They no longer want to get materials from one place, then process them in another place; that's very inefficient from an operations perspective."

From the beginning, managers identified four areas that fit the company's diverse capabilities: dental, orthopedic, endoscopy and vascular markets. "We identified each of these to have steady growth going forward," Thornton explains.

Nevertheless, before the company could truly take off within these markets, it had to help customers speed their time to market. The faster Veridiam's customers can get their product to market, the greater their competitive advantage.