It's a grim fact that most entrepreneurial businesses fail within the first few years. Those that survive often do so by leveraging their ability to bring new products to market much more quickly than larger companies and riding every technological wave that comes along. Then there are companies like Engineering Concepts Unlimited that manage to buck both of those trends.

ECU, based in Fishers, Ind., is a manufacturer of engine controls, speed switches, voltage detectors and other components and modules primarily for stationary engine systems. The company is marking its 30th anniversary this year and it's turning out to be more than just a chronological milestone, as the company is also enjoying its best year financially, according to owner and founder Adam Suchko. While Suchko doesn't specify sales volumes for the privately held company, he noted that "this years growth has our weekly totals at 200% of last year. We're very busy and shipping at record levels."

Somewhat surprising is what's fueled the most recent growth spurt. Rather than the most advanced, CAN-bus controllers ECU has developed over the last several years, what's accounted for most of the company's sales this year has been the company's more traditional control systems, particularly the ECU-9988N engine control. The 9988N is a microprocessor-controlled unit designed to provide complete automation and safety monitoring of a gas or diesel engine in a wide range of stationary applications, including generator sets, pump sets and even vehicles and mobile machinery.

"It's kind of strange," said Suchko. "In 2000, we designed and manufactured the ICS-100 Digital Generator Control. This was an incredibly safe unit that had a detached ac module. We put a lot of bells and whistles in it. But we quickly found out that the end user of the equipment couldn't cope with all that stuff. We started to notice that many of our customers who tried other brands of digital equipment were seeing problems.

"About three years ago, we had a lot of customers ordering our traditional engine controls in large volume. Upon asking them why they were not using digital generator controls, they cited the downtime and said customer aggravation was not worth it.

"We asked a large customer if he would he be interested in a new digital controller and he said no, they're very happy with the 9988N. Everyone is back using what they know will work and we can hardly make enough of them."

The operative word in that statement is "hardly," for as noteworthy as ECU's products have been over the years, a lot of what has made the company successful has been its manufacturing capability. "When we started, we were working out of a storefront on Michigan Avenue," Suchko said. "We got a call from the chief engineer at Kato. He had to come for a plant visit before tendering a wonderful purchase order.

"We panicked, since the whole place was about 1200 sq.ft. He did come and after a brief tour I took him to lunch. I was sure he wouldn't give us the order since we were so small. He made what I thought was a profound statement. He said, I told our board that you guys have one of the finest products around and your literature was second to none. He said he expected to find a garage, but he added, 'I just wanted to make sure it was a clean garage.'"

Shortly thereafter, ECU moved into a leased building and later built its current facility just north of Indianapolis. Along with the new building came a new emphasis on manufacturing technology, which has continued. "We were using automation very early on to engrave and test our products but still were 100% hand-built," said Suchko. "Around 1985, it became obvious that we needed to shift away from the massive hand work it took to build an ECU-100."

The ECU-100 was the company's first flagship product, a basic controller that evolved and spawned a series of modules over the years, including the ECU-50, the ECU-85, the ECU-86A, the ECU-87, the ECU-88 and then the ECU-9988N. "The 'N' stood for microprocessor control," Suchko said. "We delayed putting a microprocessor in our unit until we could be sure they would work well. We then began the process of automating our assembly.

"Our first robot we built from scratch out of raw aluminum and motors. We wrote the controller and program language and created a machine that could run for up to three days and nights without assistance. We then found ourselves in the surface mount revolution and purchased several machines to do the job. We finally had the opportunity to buy very high-speed, high-volume equipment that is typically only found in China and Japan."

That equipment--which includes cassette loaders and unloaders, chip shooters and vision-aligned pasting systems--has helped ECU improve the production capacity of the Fishers plant by some 500% and the company continues to enhance and refine its manufacturing. "We have CNC machines to build any type of manufacturing machine we wish," Suchko said. "Our in-house skills give us a major edge to make our products with systems that cannot be found anywhere since we make them ourselves."