Long, Winding Stairway to Financial Fitness : Three men became a part of the stair-climber craze at the right time. Their expertise combined to develop one of the more popular brands.

Each time the U.S. Olympic basketball team--better known as the Dream Team--plays in Barcelona, the 30 employees at Laguna Tectrix Inc. train their eyes on Larry Bird, the Boston Celtics star.

After all, employees recount with pride, Bird uses a ClimbMax stair climber that they made.

But none are prouder than the founders of this 5-year-old company: Michael T. Sweeney, 39; his brother, James S. Sweeney, 40; and Duane P. Stark, 35.

They are their own Dream Team of sorts. They were among the best and brightest in the engineering division of Unisen Inc., a Tustin manufacturer of treadmill exercise machines that the Sweeneys’ father founded in the mid-1970s. After the senior Sweeney sold his 39% interest of the company in 1987, they left the following year to start their own business making stair climbers.

“Mike and Jim mentioned leaving and starting a company, and when I heard it, I said, ‘Let’s do it! Let’s do it!’ ” Stark recalled. Within 18 months, they had entered the stair-climber business, an emerging market in the exercise equipment industry.

Stair climbers are upright exercise devices that mimic the action of climbing stairs. Its popularity is growing because it provides a convenient aerobic workout and helps trim the areas from the waist to the knee without the trauma that running can inflict on the ankle, knee and hip joints.

According to IRSA, a health club trade group in Boston, the stair climber was first introduced in the early 1980s, but did not catch on with fitness buffs until the late 1980s, when manufacturers significantly improved the climber’s mechanical and aesthetic designs.

The use of stair climbers at health clubs nationwide rose from fourth place in 1990 to second place last year, just behind the popular weight resistance machines, such as the Nautilus, according to an IRSA survey. The survey also showed that sales of stair climbers rose from $90 million in 1990 to $110 million last year, said IRSA spokeswoman Michelle Perrault.

The Sweeney brothers and Stark, faced with a lack of seed money to fund the initial phase of their business, used their savings to research and develop a stair-climber for the high-end market. Each contributed their design expertise and helped produce a prototype.

Jim, a mathematician and a software engineer by training, designed the microprocessor and the display electronics and wrote the software for the ClimbMax, while Mike, who studied biology and electronic instrumentation in college, trained as an electronics engineer and planned a strategy to build the machine in an assembly plant.

While they worked on several prototype stair-climbers between 1988 and 1989, the three entrepreneurs hired a consultant to develop a marketing plan and to target fitness equipment dealers instead of selling directly to consumers. At that time, the stair-climber industry was in its infancy, and they found that there was a demand among health clubs for climbers priced between $2,000 and $3,000.

When Stark and the Sweeneys showed off a prototype of their machine during the March, 1989, IRSA trade show in Reno, they attracted a lot of interest from health club owners around the country.

“We used the trade show to see how much interest our prototype could generate and also to get a feedback on it,” Jim Sweeney said.

Redesigning their machine took another six months before they began marketing it under the ClimbMax name in October, 1989. The fast-growing company had 1991 sales of $9 million and projected 1992 sales of $14 million.

“There was a good window of opportunity when we entered the market,” said Mike Sweeney, company president.

While there’s room for the stair-climber industry to grow, Laguna Tectrix has to contend with a number of competitors. There’s Tri-Tech Inc. of Tulsa, Okla.--maker of the StairMaster Exercise Systems--which is locked in a patent infringement lawsuit with Tru-Trac Therapy Products Inc., a Temecula, Calif.-based maker of Aero-Step. Laguna Tectrix is also involved in a similar lawsuit in which it accused rival Pro-Form Fitness Products Inc. of Logan, Utah, of infringing on its patented friction-breaking device used to regulate the climbing speed.

Laguna Tectrix sells its ClimbMax machines, which retail for $2,995 each, to fitness clubs, while Pro-Form sells similar equipment for about $700, to major retailers, such as Sears, Roebuck & Co., Price Club, JC Penney and Best Products. Without admitting wrongdoing, Pro-Form has agreed to discontinue making similar equipment.

While the suit is pending, “we’re branching out . . . into the aerobic exercise equipment,” said Jim Sweeney, vice president. “We should have two new aerobic exercise equipment (products) by spring next year.”