Okay.
Can you hear me without the microphone? We need a mic.
You need a mic? Oh, okay. All right. Thank you everybody for coming. Appreciate it. Thanks for your interest in Pro-Dex. I'm sure everyone wants to know what's next for Pro-Dex. I would like to start with a little bit of a review of how we got here, a little bit of a Pro-Dex history lesson. We were really struggling in about 2011, 2012. $11 million business. I think one year we lost $1.8 million. Then we had, in 2012, I guess we would call it a proxy contest, where three gentlemen ran for three or five board seats, to help change things. They took an interest in the company. Prior to that, we had a board that people showed up, didn't do anything, a CEO that was burned out, and they weren't invested, they didn't care.
These guys came in, won the proxy in a landslide, immediately were engaged and supportive, invested in the company, you knew they were involved. They gave an ops guy a chance to run the company after a year or so, which I'm still appreciative to this day. We really focused on costs at first, because that's a little easier than a lot of business than growing sales, a lot of cost reduction efforts, a lot of changes. It didn't take long to realize that an $11 million company didn't need six vice presidents and a coffee service and things like that. We got down to a pretty good level of detail. Our chairman, Nick Swenson, one day we were talking about costs and things, he says, "Rick, I want you counting paperclips." I said, "Oh, gosh.
Nick, we're really careful about costs." He said, "Rick, no. I really want you counting paperclips." That's how serious he was about it. I didn't count individual clips, but I did count the boxes, because I was new in the role and didn't want to take any chances. We got some costs under control, and we only lost $800,000 instead of $1.8 million, really worked hard in the summer of 2015 to muscle three projects through engineering development so we could actually ship some product and make some revenue. One of those three projects turned out to be what most people in the room now refer to as customer number one, who's such a big part of our business. That's when it started. We started producing some revenue. We could invest back into the business, got some equipment. We could reduce costs.
We invested in our own technology, we have our own technology products. We'll talk about that in a bit. We bought a second building, did a lot of things, I think, to position us where now we've always had a lot of good growth over the last few years. We absolutely plan on continuing that, if not more. The purpose of all that is to say this is kind of how we got there. I think we're in a good spot to really, really build on that. I'm going to go through all the detail stuff there. Platform is a good word for this. We're at a spot where we can really help a lot of people, really grow the business. We have some good relationships with some of the larger OEM distributors in the medical device world, a couple of good long-term contracts.
We've got a pipeline of more products available, whether it's Pro-Dex branded products or customers have an idea, and we're helping them with their manufacturability about that. Again, we'll talk some more about some of our IP and Pro-Dex technology products that I think can be very fruitful for us in coming years. We've had stable operations and cash flow, we've got a really strong management team. We've got a good combination, in sports, they call it a good combination of youth and experience. We've got people who've been with the company for a number of years. By the way, I'm remiss, I didn't invite everybody who came with me. Also, part of that management team is Angel Domingo, who is our Senior Director of QA and RA and a member of our board of directors. Ned Hall, who is our Mergers and Acquisitions Associate.
I'm sure that might prompt some questions later in the meeting. William Swenson, who is interning for Ned this summer. We've got a strong team that's kind of been there and there's some new people that have brought in some new ideas, I think that's a good combination. Our model, we have good credibility with some of the big players. We have a reputation for a quality product. We frankly have a reputation for being transparent and honest. We're not perfect. We'll make mistakes like other companies, we immediately say, "Okay, our bad.
What can we do to fix it?" I've got relationships with all of our major customers, they know that they'll get the attention they need if there's a problem, and I think between the products and our quality and the way we work with people, it's reflected in the fact that with our largest customer, we're on our second project with them. Our second-largest customer, we've had three projects, and our third-largest customer, we're on our third project. People, once they start working with us, they like to continue to do that. I'll talk more later about the challenge that we need to make more friends that feel that way about us. When we engage with someone, it goes well, and they stick with us, and it remains a really good relationship. We like to work with surgeons and inventors.
A lot of you are probably familiar with the Monogram story. That started out us working with a surgeon who had an idea, and we worked with them and have really enjoyed that ride and hope to enjoy that more. We have our own disposable kind of razor blade model in some of our battery products. We're working with a couple of big players and in terms of robotics and end effectors, kind of a fancy name for the surgical hand pieces that we make. We provide services. I'd like to provide a lot more engineering and quality and regulatory services. I think that's a good business for us to be in, and we need to do more of that. These major customers, we've got long-term contracts with the four of them now. We had the security of having some long-term agreements with these people.
Maybe this slide kind of reflects the history lesson I went through. Obviously, we've had a nice run on the share price. When we all started, actually, it was like in 2014, 2015, it was like $2.32. Pretty happy where that's gone. Obviously, the growth has gone well. Other things of note, 208 employees. When we started this, we had 55 employees. Kind of the cool part of the story I left out is when we were losing a lot of money and didn't have work in the shops, most of those 55 people, they're still with us. They could have left and gone somewhere else, but they kind of stuck it out, and it's really nice that they could be part of the good times now. The other number that might be interesting to this group, 3.2 million shares outstanding.
When this board started, that was about a little over 4 million shares. Obviously, we have a history of buying back shares, which seems to be something people like us to do. There's kind of a reflection of how much we've done in 10 years. What we offer these customers and future customers is, unlike a lot of contract manufacturers, we have the infrastructure to do things from, I hate to be cliche-ish, but from napkin sketch all the way through production. We can help design products or help people finish their design. We can help with the FDA submittals. We make products, anything electromechanical assemblies we can make. We've got a machine shop, an assembly shop. We've got a Class 7 clean room where we can make sterile packaging for some of our products. We have a lot to offer.
Back in the day before me, we had a lot of business with what they would call development and supply agreements. "Hey, big customer, we can develop your product in 18 months. It'll take you three years. You'll get your revenue stream sooner, but we want the manufacturing rights." As we got into the tougher times, the management team before us would insist on engineering and manufacturing, engineering and manufacturing. We kind of woke up a few years ago and said, "You know what? If they just want engineering, do engineering. Give them what they want. If you do a good job, you might get the manufacturing anyway." That's worked out well for us. It's kind of give the customer what they want. It goes a long way.
We're a medical device company, so we have all the important quality systems and validation plans and a QMS, quality management system, they call it. We've got two facilities. We've grown. Like I said, we were one facility before. We'd have a machine shop and an assembly department. We'd machine a whole lot of metal components, buy some electrical stuff, and assemble it over here. We bought a second building. It's about 3 mi up the road, about the same size manufacturing floor space-wise, we moved the assembly operation there, put the clean room there, so we could knock down a wall in the original building to double the size of our machine shop. We doubled the size of the assembly group, so effectively, we could double capacity at least. We've got still precision machining. We got the clean room.
We've got a number of outsource partners for machining that even expands our capacity further. We're doing all these things to kind of position ourselves for even more growth, and we feel pretty good about where we are in terms of that. What we've done over the years are basically power tools for the operating room. These are some of the customers that we work with now or have worked with in the past, but we've made a lot of arthroscopic shavers. Right now, we're making a lot of, I'll just say CMF screwdrivers for cranial surgeries. If someone's putting a plate in someone's head, they use our screwdrivers. We've got thoracic screwdrivers for chest surgeries. We've made multifunction hand pieces. Sorry. Like I said, we're getting into a lot of robot end- effector business now, which is a good spot to be in. I keep harping on it.
I really like the idea of engineering services as a business, and we repair. We have a repair shop where we can repair any product we've made, and that's usually a good revenue center for us. The technology I'm talking about is for our screwdriver product line, and it's a software, Adaptive Torque Limiting. I'm not an engineer, but basically what it means is if a surgeon is finishing up surgery on someone's head and they're putting a plate in and driving screws, with our powered driver, they push the button and in like less than a second, the screw seats perfectly every time, which is a big deal in that world. For one reason, kind of traditional power drivers, the screw doesn't go all the way in. The doctor's got to finish by hand. They're doing a lot of surgeries. They get tired.
Probably the more important benefit is the screws won't go too far and strip where they have to start over and kind of move things around and drive extra holes into someone's head. It's a much better patient experience. It's a better surgeon experience, and it works out great for our customers. What it does is they don't make a lot of money selling our drivers to hospitals, but if they get our driver into the hospital, they sell them a lot of their plates and screws. It's kind of their razor- blade model. Just for perspective, the one data point I have, customer number three, the first year they used our screwdriver, they increased their plates and screw sales by $1 million. It's great for the patients and it's great for our customers, which means it's great for us.
We started in the CMF space. We've got four customers that we have exclusive screwdrivers for. We've got a big part of that market, but there's just so much more we can do with the torque limiting, more thoracic surgeries, other parts of the body, extremities, smaller bones, spine, and we'll talk a bit about that more later. That's one of our better opportunities for revenue in the future. I like to say we can leverage this technology up and down the body and up and down the hallway. Customer number two has a cranial screwdriver. They liked it so much, they introduced us to the thoracic group, and now we make a thoracic screwdriver for them. That's up and down the hallway, up and down the body. We got to develop screwdrivers for hands and spine and kind of keep this going.
This is a little more about that torque limiting. It's a software that's particular to a particular customer's screw set where another customer can't take their driver and drive their screws in. It's very unique. It's characterized to each customer, which protects them. It's an algorithm. It kind of reads, has the screws going in, when to stop. It's amazing. I would do a bad job of explaining. I'm not even going to try. It's IP that we have. No one else in the world can do it. Like I said, we need to do a better job of exploiting that as we grow the business further. Again, we've had a lot of good surgeon feedback. We have five customers now. One of them is a thoracic customer. This is just some more details of what it does. I kind of summarized that.
It's just a really highly effective tool for surgeons and just a really good opportunity. It's been great for us. We've grown that part of the business from $0 to $14 million or $15 million a year since it started, but there's just a lot more potential that I think we can tap into. Talking about the future. We've spent 10 years building, I think, a successful business and we've had some really good results, but I really think we're positioned to kind of take this next step and grow further. We've always been shy about committing to numbers, but we've never been shy about saying that we have very aggressive growth plans and I think we can continue that commentary. Some of the things we have going for us are on this slide. The Helios Pro driver, that's our latest off-the-shelf cranial screwdriver.
What that means is the first four drivers we made, we make them exclusively for a particular customer who paid lots and lots of money for an engineering project. There's some customers that can't afford that but would like to kind of play with the big boys with the torque limiting. If we develop a Pro-Dex branded product, we can sell it to them. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on an engineering project, they can spend a couple dozen thousand dollars on some labeling, putting their label on the product, adjusting the software to their screw set, and they can get into the market that way. This is actually our second Pro-Dex branded CMF driver.
We did one five-ish years ago and one of our major customers said, "We'd like that to be exclusive to us. How much do we have to buy a year to do so?" We gave them a number and they said, "Okay." That branded product became exclusive to someone else, we went into development to come up with another one that we could sell off the shelf. I think that's a good opportunity for some future growth. We're developing something called an articulating attachment. A lot of screwdrivers will have a right angle attachment where you can go in and kind of drive a screw at an angle. This is articulating. We can go any angle, which really provides a lot of opportunities for surgeons and get to places where they normally would not. We have that in development now.
I think that's a really good opportunity for us to do something that no one else has done. We hope to have that in production by spring or next summer. We have a couple more products on our roadmap. A spinal driver, a smart driver. We think there's a lot of things you can do with this torque limiting technology, whether it's driving pedicle screws or taking out material to put implants in and things like that. We're actually got a prototype in development we can go find a partner to work on that together. That's one I probably don't want to do products branded but want to partner up with a spine company and use their expertise as well as some of the talent we have in our engineering group that's done spine before. Our heritage is arthroscopic shaver systems.
We have that in our product roadmap as well and hope to have that done in a couple of years and get that out in the market as well. Business development is a big focus for us right now. I've told a couple people in individual meetings today that we had a really good BD guy a few years ago. His name was Ben Sexson, he went to take Monogram to the promised land and I haven't done a real good job of replacing him. We've got a couple of really good candidates now. I think we're going to have a good team by summer. We're going to invest in a deeper, stronger team. We've already started investing in the website. We've got some content we can put in there to make that a more useful tool and attractive tool to people.
We have a few channels where I think we can really grow the business, e xisting products I talked about. We can still sell development and supply agreements to some of the major distributors, but I also think we're just a natural for startup companies and surgeons. Like the Monogram story, where someone has a great idea, but maybe not an engineering department to finish off the design or a shop that can finish off prototypes and bring it to market. Those are some channels that we can grow the business with. A big opportunity is mergers and acquisitions. For years and years and years, people have asked me, "Hey, Rick, what's your thoughts on M&A?" We were always just kind of opportunistic. If something came up, we would consider it, look into it, and not too many things did.
Early this year, we've made a conscious decision as a company and board to actively pursue safe and sane mergers or acquisitions. I introduced Ned earlier. He's an M&A associate. He's tasked with researching and developing a funnel of opportunities for our investment committee to review. The investment committee is myself and two board members, Nick Swenson and Ray Cabillot. Looking for a way to grow and diversify the business. We have a very large customer that's a big part of the business. I think it's a long-term relationship that we've done enough to protect that, but it just makes prudent sense to diversify as best you can. Acquisitions is a good way to grow rapidly. We're looking for people in the MedTech space, not too big. Probably typically family-owned companies looking to move on.
We're a good fit for them because as opposed to a company that might buy them and flip them in three years, we've got a culture that I think mirrors a lot of them. We're frankly going through a transition from, we were 50 people, an $11 million business, family atmosphere, family environment, to now a $66+ million medical device manufacturer. We love and appreciate culture, and we like to talk to people in this acquisition process and encourage them to keep theirs. We don't want to interfere. We'd like to have standalone companies so it's not takes a lot of attention or distractions from our management team in Irvine. We're new to the process, but excited about what it might yield. I think it's a really good opportunity for us for growing the business. We did just finish one acquisition in February, you probably read about, APM.
They were actually a supplier for a long time, a machine shop about 15 minutes away from us. Frankly, they were way ahead of us in terms of technology and efficiencies in their machine shop. For the 10 years I've been CEO, or 11, I've always told my ops folks, "Go over there and copy those guys." Never really happened. The owner of their company met with me a couple of years ago, said, "I'm ready to sell. I want to sell to you guys. What do you think?" We worked it out, and there's just a lot of pieces of the acquisition that I like. One is that, for lack of a better word, infecting our shop with their automation and technology and shop disciplines. They also have a small aerospace and defense business with super good margins that's nice to kind of tack on.
They make a lot of parts that we use in our assembly for customer number one, there's the ability to maybe control cost there a little bit. That's kind of the first swing at the acquisition process. Those are some of the things we're doing to grow the business. I know Monogram's a big topic on everyone's mind, and we're excited about that. I'm not prepared to give out numbers or expectations, but it's a good opportunity for us. I think within a couple of years, they could definitely be customer number two. We're starting to work with them on some design for manufacturing stuff and getting ready for production, that that's actively in process. It's going to be good for us.
I'm just not able to tell you how good, but it's something we're excited about in terms of growing the business and diversifying more than a 79% customer number one. We feel pretty good about that. That's kind of a glimpse at the future. Here's the management team I was talking about. I forgot to tell Ned to take the years of experience off, 44 years. Obviously, I started in the sixth grade working at Pro-Dex, and Angel started in kindergarten. Like I said, we've got a good mix of people that have been in the business a long time. Angel, 21 years, me, 20 years, our CFO, 13 years. The others, anywhere from two to four years, so they can bring in some new ideas.
George and Mitchell have come from companies that have operated under the Danaher systems, they're helping put some more structure into our shops and getting us more efficient and managing things better. Excited about the team. I'm hopeful that we're invited back next year. I have one more picture up there of a really talented BD leader. I would expect that we would, to try to keep this thing going. That's kind of a sense of where we've been and what we got in mind for the future, and I think I left about two minutes for questions. Sorry, are there any questions? Yes.
I meant to want to say that you guys were really cool. I see you again, I'll tell him I agree.
All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Thank you. Yes.
You mentioned repair requests. How much of the business is that? Is there any insight, or can you see that maybe increasing?
For repairs and stuff?
Yeah.
It's about 10%-ish of the business, good margins. Hard to predict because with customer number one going to a new generation, the repair business might slow down a little bit. Kind of the neat thing about customer number one, just bragging about our company, these guys are great at robots, but not so good at hand pieces. In 2018, we went and did a presentation. Here's some things you should do to improve your design. "You guys, we make robots. We're smarter than you." Now they got a new design that just came out. It's got about a half a dozen of our suggestions in it, so that's cool. It will affect the repair revenue going forward because there'll be less failures in the field because it's going to be a more robust product.
It's been 10%-ish, and I think it might be a little bit less than that in the future. Yeah.
How long do you warranty your products?
Typically a year. Yeah. Most of these repairs are after a year. We don't have a lot of warranty repairs. They last a long time. We've made over, I think it said in there, 60,000 hand pieces, we kind of figured out it's kind of tricky, actually. You got a shaft that's spinning and moving, but you got to keep it from leaking, because if it gets moisture in there from autoclaves or surgery, it shorts things out. After a lot of trial and error over the years, we figured out a kind of the secret sauce for that. They last a long time. Usually it's a non-warranty repair when it comes in. Another question? Yeah.
I was going to ask in terms of the piece itself, do you use replacement parts or do you repair?
Typically, we'll repair some of the components in the hand piece. Usually, the housing's okay and things, but sometimes the motor or some metal parts or a little circuit board needs to be replaced. The units typically come in, and then we'll do a test or evaluation, see what's wrong with it and figure out. There are three levels of repair, like, "Hey, we're just going to clean it up," to replacing all the electrical stuff, and it's really expensive. It could be any of that depending on the condition it's in when it comes in. Welcome. Hey. Hi, Mark. How are you?
Good to see you.
You too.
How long do they last? When will they come back to be fixed? Is it five years or six years?
We've had some, this is not normal, but last up to 15 years, some of the old hand pieces. I say they're a good three to five years, I think, f ive years out there. More questions.