Published October 2002

From basement beginnings to ‘sleeper’ success

The Herald/MICHAEL O’LEARY Wally Carruthers is founder of Pro-Tech Services Inc., which manufactures sleep diagnostic devices at its plant in Mukilteo.

By Eric Fetters
Herald Business Writer

Wally Carruthers says he sleeps well most nights — a deserved reward for someone whose company helps doctors figure out why others aren’t slumbering peacefully.

Since he began making sleep laboratory equipment more than a decade ago, Carruthers’ business has transformed from a basement start-up into a successful supplier of equipment used by clinics all over the world.

Pro-Tech Services Inc., which relocated to Mukilteo earlier this year, makes a range of sleep diagnostic devices, including a range of sensors that monitor breathing, heart rate, leg movement and sleep positions.

Carruthers, 46, calls his company an “accidental empire.” It all began as a side project in the oft-flooded basement of his home near Woodinville’s Cottage Lake.

After a hostile takeover of the large medical device company he worked for during the 1970s and early 1980s, Carruthers started his own biomedical services company in 1987. He contracted with hospitals and medical clinics to maintain their equipment.

“In the late 1980s, hospitals started setting up sleep-disorder laboratories, and they contracted with me to set up the instrumentation they used,” he said.

In the course of that work, he heard a constant complaint.

The deceptively simple-looking sensors attached to sleeping patients in order to monitor breathing, heart rate and other vital functions often failed. Few companies made the equipment, so many sensors were homemade and too fragile to work well.

Carruthers, who attended a two-year technical college but has no advanced engineering degree, began tinkering with building a better sensor device.

His big break came at the Stanford University Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Center. There, faculty members already were using another device Carruthers had built.

Sharon Keenan, a faculty member at the center and the current director of the School of Sleep Medicine Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif., said Carruthers listened when they told him of their woes with homemade sensors.

“He paid very close attention to us and started developing these really nice and easy-to-use sensors,” she said.

Because the future laboratory technicians and directors used his sensors in the training program, it didn’t take long for demand to spread.

“Literally, it went from nothing to getting orders from all over the world,” Carruthers said.

He began using part-time help to keep up with orders, but it was still a basement-based business until the early 1990s.

The firm grew up in Woodinville before moving to Mukilteo in January. Now, Pro-Tech is in a 16,000-square-foot building specifically designed and built for its needs. It includes a deck off the lunchroom that offers employees a tranquil view of green woods.

The more practical manufacturing space, however, is the favorite part of the new building for Steve Winters, the company’s director of operations.

“The amount of space we had at the old building was about the same size, but there was a lot of wasted space,” Winters said.

Winters has helped Pro-Tech improve its manufacturing efficiency over the past few years. He was brought in after what Carruthers calls “Black October.” In that month of 1998, problems erupted when the manufacturing operation couldn’t keep up with a flood of orders.

Four years later, the company is producing double the amount of products with virtually no additional manufacturing employees, Winters said. The entire operations area of the company employs fewer than 20, with just nine people assembling between 2,000 and 3,000 sensor devices each month.

At the same time, the quality of Pro-Tech’s products, which are regulated as medical devices by the federal Food and Drug Administration, has improved. That has helped to keep the company ahead of a small pool of competitors.

“When I first moved out of my basement and had other people start making the product, we had a failure rate under the warranty period of about 15 percent. That’s down to about one-tenth of a percent,” Carruthers said.

Many of the company’s products are used locally in the Sleep Disorders Center at Providence Everett Medical Center. Supervisor Carol Vanderwoude said her facility, which soon will add an eighth bed, has worked closely with Pro-Tech, even serving as a test site for its new devices.

“Through the years, Pro-Tech has been very innovative and keeps coming up with new products,” Vanderwoude said. “It’s been fun working with them.”

For more information on Pro-Tech, visit the company’s Web site, www.pro-tech.com.

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