Canadian firm growing as field of choice for sports teams
By David Weldon
To succeed in business, you need to always keep a leg up on your competition.
And Field Turf Co. is taking that motto quite literally, as it works to woo more professional sports teams to what it has marketed as a truly unique artificial playing surface.
Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Field Turf views its product as a field of dreams for the professional athlete — an artificial surface that has a firm but flexible foundation which moves with the athlete, reduces injuries, but does not reduce speed.
“It is the layering of sand and cryogenic rubber, 11 layers worth, that makes our fields unique,” says Field Turf President John Gilman. “From 100 feet away, all artificial fields look the same. But the difference with an elite field is with performance.”
The company integrates rubber pellets with sand in each layer of the subsurface to keep the base from compacting with use and over time, Gilman says. For a comparison, think of the affect of mixing peat moss with garden soil, to keep the dirt from hardening. This enables the top surface to better absorb and cushion the footwork of an athlete, reducing awkward — and often season-ending — leg twists that were so common with early artificial surfaces.
A growing number of teams are coming around to Field Turf’s point of view, as evidenced by the 25 percent annual growth rate the company is now enjoying. That includes some recent high profile field installation projects, including Giants Stadium and Gillette Stadium (home of the New England Patriots and New England Revolution) in 2006. But the company’s projects are truly global, and involve every major sport.
Field Turf also benefits from the relationships it forms with team owners. The Gillette stadium project was a direct result of the friendship that Gilman formed with Patriots owner Robert Kraft, after first installing the field at the team’s new practice facility three years ago. Gilman hit it off with Robert Kraft and his family, and they are now involved with projects together.
Gilman and Kraft are helping to introduce American football in Israel. Robert Kraft recently donated a stadium for use by local leagues, and Gilman donated the field surface. Myra Kraft, wife of Robert Kraft, now sponsors an Israeli men’s football league, and Gilman is sponsoring a women’s football league.
If football in Israel seems odd, it isn’t according to Gilman. Maybe the climate is a bit hotter and dryer than a player might wish for, but American football is growing in popularity worldwide. And soccer, of course, remains enormously popular everywhere. Both facts are making life very good indeed for Field Turf in 2007.
“There is hardly any place were we are not putting fields in right now,” Gilman says. The company currently employs approximately 500 people world-wide, including corporate staff in Canada, and installers sent to nearly every continent. The company has several projects underway at the moment in Africa and Europe, as well as countless field installations in the U.S. at the professional, college and high school levels.
“We have seen dramatic staff growth of 30 percent to 40 percent in the past two years,” Gilman says. “We send installers around the world constantly. At each project you will see 10 people, including three or four of our installers, and the rest local laborers.” He already anticipates growing staff by another 25 percent this year.
While any company would like to boast the growth pace that Field Turf is enjoying, Gilman notes that it does not come without a lot of pressure. Installers are being called upon to be as fast installing a field, as athletes are on top of it.
“The installation window in North America is under the umbrella of the high school and college setups [athletic associations]. The schools, of which we do about 60 percent to 70 percent of the total volume in North America, don’t want us on campus when school is in session. That means we can’t break ground on any of the projects until May or June, and they all want us gone by the first week of September, maybe even by the middle of August.”
The pressure doesn’t seem to be getting to Gilman, however, who says that “business couldn’t be better.”
Still, while the company welcomes the increased business, he says the challenge is always to maintain quality with each project, and not make rash decisions.
Perhaps not realizing the appropriateness of the response, when asked what advice he would give to other executives faced with similar growth, he advises them “don’t take your eyes off the ball — the main core business.”