SMITHFIELD – LFI Inc., a medical device and aerospace component manufacturer, has opened a new office in Walpole, Mass.
Roland Benjamin, who owns the Smithfield-based company, told PBN the office at Walpole Park South will be used for much of LFI’s high-tech rapid prototyping work, while its manufacturing and production-oriented activities will remain in Smithfield.
“The big reason [for opening an office in Walpole] is that it’s a little closer to our customer base,” he said, due to the concentration of medical device businesses along Interstate 495. “We wanted to be close to those engineers.”
LFI has five employees in Walpole, including one executive, compared with about 60 workers in Smithfield, Benjamin said. He expects to hire a few more workers for the Walpole office, a light-industrial space that the company is leasing.
Although Smithfield is also somewhat close to Interstate 495, “having a Massachusetts address helps us in just bringing some credibility – being in that 495 loop,” Benjamin said. “It brings us into that industry pretty solidly.” The Walpole office is about 30 miles northeast of Smithfield.
“And then,” he added, “there’s the secondary benefit of expanding into a neighboring state with a little better business climate.”
Last August, LFI president Kip Brockmyre told PBN the company would save tens of thousands of dollars a year in taxes by locating in Massachusetts, rather than Rhode Island.
“It doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but that’s a piece of equipment for us or another employee,” Brockmyre said at the time, adding that LFI also would be able to avoid the “bureaucratic garbage” necessary to get approvals for building an addition in Smithfield.
However, Benjamin said he wanted to squash talk about the company moving its entire operations to Massachusetts. “Even internally there’s a lot of rumors about that, but we have no intention of doing that,” he said.
“There’s no benefit,” he continued. “We own property in [Rhode Island]. The cost of a move and expansion up in Massachusetts … would be cost-prohibitive.”
LFI received a $21,751 grant for employee training from the Governor’s Workforce Board of Rhode Island in 2007.
Benjamin said that, like many companies, LFI saw “a pretty steep revenue drop-off” in the second half of last year. “It seems to be picking back up, but there’s a lot of anxiety out there,” he said.
