C-Therm’s Top Executive Adam Harris Buys Controlling Share Of Company
FREDERICTON – Entrepreneur Charles Cartmill has sold his controlling share in C-Therm Technologies, the company that offers thermal connectivity testing globally, to managing director Adam Harris.
“Chuck has been a great mentor and a delight to work for over the years. Extremely supportive. This is all a very friendly, amicable transition,” said Harris.
Harris, who launched C-Therm with Cartmill 14 years ago, had been a minority shareholder. He said the move came down to good timing for both him and Cartmill.
“We’re going to have a very bright future in the next few years,” Harris said.
An exit by Cartmill that puts his co-founder in control ensures continuity, Harris said. C-Therm’s mission, team and culture will stay the same, he added.
“We really believe we’ve got a very strong team we’ve put together…We’re a pretty flat organization,” he said. ” This just makes sure that we’re in a position to keep the band together and keep the beautiful music playing. And I think we expect some very strong results in the next few years.”
The terms of the deal, including the percentage of shares sold, were not disclosed to the public.
In a release, Cartmill says he’s “proud to sell the business” to Harris.
“Adam has been an outstanding business leader delivering profitability in every year of our operation while managing key relationships with ACOA, NRC IRAP and Opportunities New Brunswick. Together we’ve created over 25 high-tech jobs in the region through C-Therm,” he said.
“My objective has always been to create sustainable economic activity in the region. With this change, I know the business will be in good hands and will continue to do that for the foreseeable future.”
C-Therm is doing relatively well given how the pandemic has impacted businesses, Harris said, but it has not been immune to it.
“It resulted in some significant challenges to how we deliver our business when it first hit in March,” said Harris. “We used to have people traveling a lot. So we’ve had to rethink how we approach the business…So, we’ve had to adjust a lot more complex logistics.”
But the company has since moved much of its work to a virtual model of delivery that Harris expects to serve the company well in the long-run. It’s relied on two local tech companies: Kognitiv Spark to help it deliver services remotely, and Beauceron Security to boost its cybersecurity.
It’s also selling the product virtually. The company’s been doing virtual demos of its products. That allows it to pull in a team member into a call for a short time to provide their expertise to answer clients’ questions.
“We’ve gone virtual where we didn’t think it was necessarily possible before,” he said. “But once you are forced to kind of make it work, you realize there are ways around some of these challenges.”
C-Therm doubled the size of its business in the last three years, and Harris aims to continue on that growth path. The company serves clients in various sectors globally, and already a leader when it comes to athletic and technical clothing apparel.
“One of the largest applications for us is conductive polymers, which are used in a really wide range of products from aerospace to automotive to electronics. These are all you quite healthy sectors for us,” Harris said.
He’s expecting growth in some cleantech applications, including in testing electric vehicles, and battery components for hand-held devices and other purposes. One of the key performance challenges in electric vehicles has been managing the temperature of the batteries.
There’s a lot of work going into various composites to help control that, and C-Therm can provide the technologies to measure the performance of the materials.
“It’s broader than just electric vehicles, but it’s a good example of an application,” Harris explained. “What we have here is a fundamental heat transfer property. It’s how materials transfer heat energy. It comes up in so many different industrial applications, including safety, oil and gas, electronics, textiles, there’s a really broad range of field of application.”
Harris says this isn’t an entirely new opportunity, but it’s a growing one. Particularly, because C-Therm’s latest product Trident combines three of the most prominent methods to measure thermal conductivity into one platform.
“It’s an exciting opportunity for us in terms of the landscape for 2021.”