Offshoot Optical Company Envisions a New Direction

Three months ago, Roy E. Hacker, the top executive at Santa Barbara Applied Optics, a Ventura-based producer of night-vision lenses and other optical equipment for the military, learned that his firm was about to close its doors.

Defense orders, which accounted for 85% of revenues, were down sharply. The payroll, which had stood at 110 a year earlier, had shrunk to only 40 employees. So Hacker wasn’t totally surprised when his bosses at the parent company, Optical Filter Corp. in Natick, Mass., sent word that his division, which he headed as vice president and general manager, was to be shut down in December.

Hacker, a 24-year veteran in the electro-optical business, quickly raised some money, leased a 24,000-square-foot plant in Camarillo and tapped 20 of his key employees to join him at his newly formed Optimum Optical Systems Inc.

Importantly, he arranged to continue servicing most of the contracts awarded to Santa Barbara Applied Optics. The projects include designing and manufacturing lenses and other equipment used in training simulators for U. S. tank and aircraft crews.

“We’re projecting sales of only $1.5 million to $2 million in our first year. But we hope to grow, mainly in non-defense work. By year three, we expect our commercial business to equal our defense business,” Hacker said.

Hacker believes that his best non-defense opportunities lie in a line of lenses for high-tech surgical instruments. These and other lenses are made with such exotic materials as sapphire, quartz, germanium, zinc selenide and sulfide.

At the former parent, privately held Optical Filter, a spokesman said the Massachusetts firm wishes its former employees well. “We’re a small company. We couldn’t continue to cope with the profitability problems we were experiencing out there.”