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thedrifter
05-22-08, 05:34 AM
May 22, 2008
Company shows off what it does to help Marines

By DAVID P. WILLIS
BUSINESS WRITER

Inside a large warehouse in the Lakewood Industrial Park, officials at Milspray on Wednesday were showing off the company's products and services, which help protect U.S. Marines around the world.

Milspray, a defense contractor, develops various coatings used by the military to shield vehicles from improvised explosive devices, protect them from chemical agents, hide them from infra-red-seeking missiles, or make a truck bed as hard as steel to cut down on damage.

In another part of the warehouse, a large truck displayed the company's latest venture, which allows Milspray technicians to service military vehicles on any base in the U.S., performing preventive maintenance, body work and repair coatings.

Recently, Milspray was awarded a multimillion-dollar contract by the Marine Corps to provide on-site preventative maintenance to tactical vehicles.

"This is history in the making," said Capt. Shawn Daley, maintenance management officer with the Marine Forces Reserve. "This is a mobile maintenance capability that we have not seen before."

The company also has large mobile shelters, complete with solar cells to generate power, that can be set up to work on vehicles anywhere. At the moment, Milspray technicians are operating in the Mojave Desert.

"We provide services that are very difficult for them to provide themselves when they are forward deployed," said Todd Bullivant, president of Milspray. "We bring our facility. We provide the highly skilled technicians."

Milspray held a ceremony last week to unveil the maintenance trucks and its new 22,000-square-foot headquarters.

The company moved from another part of the Lakewood Industrial Park about two months ago. Bullivant said Milspray had outgrown its old space.

"We needed to be able to deploy and validate our concepts, our equipment," he said. "We needed to have the ability to test it and run through it in a controlled environment with our skilled technicians."

The company's growth has fueled an increase in revenue. Bullivant said he expects the company's revenue to surpass $10 million this year, compared to about $1 million in 2005. In the past two years, the company also has hired more than 35 workers, boosting its employee ranks to 50.

It's a big change since Bullivant bought its predecessor, Production Engineering, in 2001.

At the time, it was a small business located in a garage off Belmar Boulevard in Wall. It applied a coating to military components from Fort Monmouth and other area installations.

The coating, which is patented by the military, is resistant to more than 250 chemical and biological agents.

Using his expertise in sales, marketing and business development, Bullivant doubled the company's revenue in the first year by boosting business with Fort Monmouth's Communications-Electronics Command.

Working with the military, he also developed ways that soldiers in the field could easily and safely repair damaged coating on vehicles.

Milspray started receiving more contracts from the military and changes kept coming, most recently the decision to offer maintenance services.

Milspray also developed other coatings, such as its blast-resistant coating, a three-quarters-of-an-inch-thick layer that when applied on top of 3/16ths of an inch of steel will stop a 7.62-mm bullet.

Now the company is working on a way to combine all of the protections of its various coatings into one application.

Ellie