When I look back on 2019, this was one of the most important years and challenging years for CCS since we started our business back in 2007. This will forever be remembered as the “Year of the Move”. Over the past 14 years we have been located in Forney, Texas then moved to Wylie, TX and then to Terrell, Texas. Each move was related to growth to provide additional production and office space. When we bought the property in Terrell back in 2015, I honestly thought we would never have to move again because we had 5 acres of land with the acquisition. Then the State of Texas and Kaufman County threw us a curve ball – they were going to widen State Hwy 205 into a 4 lane highway with a median and shoulders. All of this expansion would be coming from the west side of the Highway which was of course where our facility was located. When we got the drawings of the expansion, around 10 feet of this new road and shoulder went through our building basically meaning we would have to tear down our shop and rebuild.
One other challenge we were having in Terrell was finding skilled workers that would allow us to expand our work force and increase production. Numerous job ads with the Texas Work Force Commission and several online job placement companies were not getting us the desired results we needed. After working with a local consultant, we determined the best location for CCS in terms of manufacturing space and a large work force pool would be Ft. Worth, Texas. We made the decision in June 2019 to move all production and office space about 80 miles west to Ft. Worth to 2800 Golden Triangle Blvd. – 76177. The move was gradual over several months before getting completely moved in around the first of October. The building we are in is shared with BFX Fire one of our sister companies that manufactures a complete line of brush fire trucks. We lost about 40% of our current work force with the move, but we were quickly able to ramp back up by hiring some new skilled welders and fabricators from the large pool of workers located in the Ft. Worth area.
Despite all the chaos around the move, CCS continued to expand our customer base and roll out two new products. 2019 included new projects for FEMA, Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas Dept. of Transportation, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Wireless, Country of Panama, Country of Argentina, City of Houston, Harris County, Country of Saudi Arabia, Arlington Fire Dept., City of Irving Police Dept., State of Virginia, Texas General Land Office, and many more. We were also able to roll out our new PERC (Portable Emergency Response Center) that includes an iDirect satellite modem and our new MERC-UASC which is a drone deployment trailer.
2020 is already shaping up to be an incredible year for CCS with multiple projects already under contract and some more new products under development. CCS is also very proud to announce with our partners at IP Access International the the State of Texas has awarded us a new four year contract to continue to provide the State satellite service and hardware and Mutualink service through 2023 for all of it’s mobile command centers. We were the incumbent vendor for the past 4 years, but the entire project had to be rebid. This multi-million dollar contract will ensure that the State has satellite service to all of it’s mobile command centers to provide internet service, hosted dial tone, off-grid Red Phone service, and Mutualink for the next 4 years.
To all our customers and vendors in 2019, we truly appreciate your business and support. I think the biggest complement a customer can pay a supplier is repeat business and over 40% of our revenue in 2019 was from existing clients. I am very proud of the team here at CCS and the quality of the product we continue to deliver. Please contact us with any questions at 972-772-2721 or sales@ccscontact.net.
Happy New Year!!