Thermagon Company Profile
by Julie Henry

To Cleveland business woman Carol Latham, the definition of an entrepreneur is someone who has the five "no's." No products, no customers, no employees, no facility, and no money.

That's exactly what Latham had - or didn't have - 13 years ago. But "plenty of nothing" didn't stop her from quitting her job as a chemist at british petroleum to follow her dream of creating her own company.

Carol Latham: So you know, how in the world were you about to start a business with the five "nos" - but that's the risk and that's the challenge. What I did have was an idea and I believed a technology for making polymers more thermally conductive than the world had seen with the knowledge that the electronics industry was going to have some serious heat problems going forward so with that little bit of a vision, I set out to develop products around the technology that I had.

I had sort of an underlying desire to do my own thing. And when I became part of a research organization, I saw an awful lot of technology which was good technology never make it to market. So really my goal was to take a technology to market, to make it useful. I'm very pragmatic. I like to solve problems and I had this desire to take an idea and a technology and turn it into a product that the world needed and would use and could buy.

The product Latham developed is a heat-conducting polymer putty that can be rolled out in sheets. This material is used in computers and other electronic equipment to dissipate the intense heat generated by semiconductor devices.

Her company's name is Thermagon. Clients include Intel, IBM, Dell Computer, Lucent Technologies, and Compaq, just to name a few. Annual sales have grown from $140,000 in 1993 to $11 million in 2001.

Today, Thermagon employs about 75 people. And Latham has been honored with dozens of business awards. But her road to success has had its share of potholes, especially early on. Latham quit her job at BP in 1989 and was left without a regular paycheck. So she rented out her Lakewood home, moved into a tiny apartment, and lived on the difference. She set up a small lab in the back corner of a local manufacturing plant, where, believe it or not, she had to clean the bathrooms as part of her lease agreement.

Carol Latham: I always wondered if I would know whether or not this was going to work. I really was doing development work, I was turning the concept into products, and i really did believe that it was better that the world had known, and you have to continually believe I think to keep going.

Three years later, after she came up with the products, she still faced the daunting task of raising money to start the business.

Carol Latham: The concept of moving heat and helping keep electronics cool was not easily understood and people were scratching their heads and saying, yes, right. So the only way I could get money really was from people who knew me and believed in me as a person, the fact that I was honest and probably wouldn't be doing anything this crazy if I didn't really believe in it. So it was the personal connection that allowed me to get the initial money that really got us started.

Over the past decade, Thermagon has made a commitment to serving the inner-city neighborhoods on the near west side of Cleveland. After outgrowing its original facility on West 25th Street, the company opened a new world headquarters in a restored turn-of-the-century building at West 48th Street and Detroit.

Latham says lending a hand to the revitalization of the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood dovetails with her philosophy that people are as important as products.

Carol Latham: Well, we feel very strongly about that. We ended up on W. 25th Xtreet before we moved here and I'd like to tell you that had this genius that had the foresight to realize that that was a really key move and I didn't realize what a goldmine that I'd moved into because as we started to need more people, and more space, we could expand physically within the building and we were able to find employees within the neighborhood. And we tapped into the resources around us and it was really a very positive thing. So I often say it's a bonus for Thermagon, this ability to create jobs for people and to improve their quality of life, which we think we have, we've done a lot.

Then when we moved to this building, that was one of the stipulations that I made that we couldn't move out of the near west side, that we didn't want to lose any of our people because I was so excited about them and their contribution to the company and in fact didn't lose anyone when we moved here. And we have when the economy turned south and things became a little more difficult, we took that opportunity to use the extra time to train our employees and we teach english as a second language and math skills and writing skills and computer skills to our people just to help improve their ability to help us or to help in their life in general.

We feel that yes, we've improved the neighborhood and we work with Max Hayes High School across the street, we paved their parking lot in exchange for some parking spaces. It's a community effort to improve the nature, as well as to provide jobs. Those are things that as a culture here, we're very proud.