Motion Laboratories is ”” finally ”” ready to make its move.
Situated in Cortlandt Manor, the manufacturing firm primarily serves the entertainment industry ”” clients include Broadway theaters ”” Motion Labs had been implementing $2 million in expansions when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020.
The company is now set to make the move to Peekskill to a new 40,000-square-foot facility on John Walsh Boulevard that it began leasing in 2019. Its current headquarters at 520 Furnace Dock Road in Cortlandt Manor totals 30,000 square feet.
Expansion and relocation are not new for the firm ”” this is its fourth expansion since it opened at its original location in the Trench Building in Irvington. Back then, the company only totaled five or six people and its space was only a few thousand square feet throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s.
The company was first founded with Sean McCormick, who owned an audio support company that worked with musical artists like the Grateful Dead; Christopher Greco, who owned a chain-hoist rental company; and Vincent Carnivalli.
President and CEO Peter Herrmann had been involved in doing live sound for concerts and productions around the New York metro area and in a club in New Rochelle when Greco approached him with the idea of joining the team.
Today, Motion Laboratories is a full-service fabrication and assembly facility specializing in high-quality portable electrical power systems, weight monitoring systems, metering equipment, testing equipment and cable assemblies, mainly serving the entertainment market.
“We were just trying to build on an idea, and it started to catch on, Herrmann said. “It started to become successful.”
Since then, it moved to a 10,000-square-foot location on Highland Avenue in Peekskill, and then relocated again to its current location in Cortlandt Manor after quickly outgrowing the previous Peekskill space.
Expansion and growth are key to the company’s success; it has always been part of its model to incorporate services that were outsourced into the company’s business wherever possible.
“As we grew, we brought in a lot of the services that we were outsourcing,” Herrmann said. “We started to bring them within the company. So as growth occurred, we started to add machining in-house, we bought punch presses and we bought wades and we started making our own parts. We started to bring in painting facilities.
“Every time things got to a point where we were spending a certain amount of money with an outside vendor, we would evaluate whether or not we could do it ourselves,” he continued. “We brought it in-house and that growth occurred from the ’90s all the way up to today.”
Lately, however, the company has been expanding to new markets in the general business community, partially brought on by the realization of new opportunities, and accelerated by the slowdown of the live entertainment market during the pandemic.
Herrmann noted that many of the company’s clients are looking toward 2022 as the beginning of the Covid recovery for the entertainment industry, which could mark the end of a long downturn that Motion Labs and many others in the industry had to endure.
“In 2020, just as we were about to enter into all of this, we got hit with Covid ”” that puts the brakes on everything,” he said. “All of our expansion plans suddenly halted, and we had to really do some serious consideration as to where are we going to be ”” are we going to give up and just close everything up, or are we going to hold on and push forward?
“We decided to just hold on and push forward,” Herrmann said. “That’s where we’ve been for the past year and a half. In our industry, it was particularly brutal because live shows were just completely gone, touring was completely gone and the entire industry was destroyed. A lot of people did not survive that.”
According to Herrmann, Motion Labs’ ability to pivot to include manufacturing for other companies helped it to adapt and stay afloat in a difficult year.
“We began to seek business from other companies doing their contract manufacturing work for them, so we’ve expanded there and put in additional machinery,” he said. “We spent quite a bit of money on putting in additional fabrication services. We were able to outsource other companies and build parts for them.”
Herrmann noted that the plan is to move many operations to the new Peekskill facility over the next few years, and keep the Cortlandt Manor facility to house the expansion of the company’s fabrication services.
The Peekskill location will become the company’s sales headquarters and house assembly operations, along with a research and development and education center. The latter will allow customers to take classes and learn about operating and repairing equipment sold by Motion Labs ”” something that could prove valuable to those who may not have the same expertise that the company’s usual industry professional purchasers have.
“The benefit for us is to be able to have an outreach program with our customers,” Herrmann said. “Motion Laboratories, throughout most of its time, has not utilized advertisement or marketing programs or any of those types of resources ”” we have relied solely on customer loyalty, and people who have known about our product and the industry, and that served us very well when we were focused predominantly on the entertaining industry.
“It’s a very tight-knit community,” he added. “People know who the players are and they know who they want to deal with. When we went through past problems with Covid and the shutdown and all of that, part of our plan to deal with all of this was to reach out and get into markets that are outside of entertainment, to expand beyond the entertainment industry itself and just start to offer services to other businesses. That’s one of the main reasons for expanding our manufacturing facilities, so that we can offer those services to businesses that are not involved with entertainment.”
The company is also beginning to work with the AJ Ross media firm to expand its reach in e-commerce, social media and advertising strategies.
“It’s definitely a leap in a very interesting time,” Herrmann said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. The events that we’ve been through have all been sort of countrywide global events ”” the stock market crash that happened that affected people internationally, 9/11 was certainly quite a major event ”” and this one has impacted the entire world.
“We’re just trying to maintain our faith and our abilities,” he said. “We feel that we have our destiny in our hands. We just need to be smart about it. And hopefully everything will come back and we’ll be stronger than we were before, and we’ll be growing again.”
