Oct 17, 2019, 7:07am CDT
Houston Plating & Coatings has been growing its revenue, and it expects to keep doing so, but the company probably won’t need to expand its headcount to match.
The company employs 183 people now, which is up about 10 percent over the past two years, said CEO William Howard. That’s certainly some amount of headcount growth, but it isn’t keeping pace with the 25 percent increase in revenue in 2018,nor is it likely to follow the expected 20 percent revenue increase in 2019, Howard said.
“We can do a lot more work with the same amount of people,” Howard said. “I think the headcount is probably going to be fairly steady.” In many cases, HP&C can handle spikes in the workload by adding overtime opportunities, Howard said.
The company has been making investments in the technology and equipment it uses to add throughput capacity lately, Howard said.
The company’s plating and coating services protect customers’ products against corrosion and wear. The majority of the company’s work is related to the energy industry, mostly in the upstream and midstream sectors, he said.
The offshore and pipeline industries are in growth mode right now, Howard said. That’s given him the chance to grow his business, despite the fact that a lot of the onshore upstream business is experiencing a much tougher environment.
“There’s no question that the onshore activity is slowing down,” Howard said. “But once an offshore project gets started, you don’t just pull back on it.”
Offshore projects sanctioned toward the end of last year are tougher to just stop in response to short-term market conditions than their onshore counterparts, Howard said.
HP&C is backed financially by a number of investors, including Houston-based Main Street Capital Corp. (NYSE: MAIN). It produced about $28 million in 2018 revenue, and it’s expecting to reach $33 million in 2019, Howard said.
Joshua Mann
Senior reporter
Houston Business Journal