A Chat With Harvey Dean, president/CEO, Pitsco

Then we had a kit using silicone rubber molds. Back then there was a lot of casting, in terms of metallurgy. That was the early stages of casting plastics into room temperature vulcanized silicone molds, RTV molds. Those were the sort of things we were doing initially.

We put those first four kits together, and they became fairly successful. We didn’t sell tons of them, but that’s what we started out with. We were all still teaching, so we’d work nights and weekends. One of the guys had a pretty good-sized garage, so that became our factory. One of the guys eventually sold us his part of the company, leaving just two of us for a few years. I bailed out of education in 1975 and then bought out the remaining guy, although I didn’t have any money. I was borrowing money from anyone I could get it from. I had an uncle who loaned me some money. Then my wife and I hired a part-time college kid to help us out. That first year on our own we had sales of $138,000. I remember that. And we made a profit. That was the beginning. It’s evolved from there.