Matt Tobolski and business partner Dave Benson started their company Basx nearly a decade ago in an empty Walmart store in Redmond with just a germ of an idea.

They realized that the market needed customizable heating and air conditioning systems from businesses that were willing to offer customer service. While talking about their business to their contacts, they learned that there was a budding market for HVAC systems in the rise of data centers, which neighboring Prineville was attracting. Data centers typically use a lot of energy, water and like temperate climates.

Today, Basx is part of a national corporation that employs 525 Central Oregon residents. It’s the ninth largest employer in the region, rising from No. 16 the year before, according to an annual ranking of businesses by employee size provided by the Economic Development for Central Oregon. The ranking is culled from self-reported data from the first quarter of the year.

It was no accident that Basx was founded in Redmond. It was the work of the city and the Redmond Economic Development Inc., a private nonprofit corporation linking the public and private sectors.

“Over the last decade, simply through the scale of their capital investments and their commitment to growing a skilled workforce, Basx has proven to be among Redmond’s most valuable traded sector companies,” said Keith Witcosky, Redmond city manager.

When Basx arrived in Central Oregon, both EDCO and the city of Redmond worked together to support the manufacturing company, said Steve Curley, Redmond Economic Development Inc. director. The company held the promise of bringing in higher paid jobs that could employ Redmond residents.

“Now as one of the largest private companies in the region, they show other companies that Redmond is a great place to locate and that there is a strong, trainable and available workforce that they can be able to attract,” Curley said. “It’s a great example of the types of traded-sector companies EDCO works to move and grow in the area.”

The Redmond business was acquired for $180 million in 2021 by Aaon, (NASDAQ:AAON) a publicly traded company in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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One of the key components of the sale was retaining the business’ employee-forward culture, said Tobolski company president and cofounder.

“Our No. 1 asset is our people,” Tobolski said. “It’s critical to keep that front of mind when building a business. We wanted to make sure we maintain a culture that respects the contributions of the entire team and is focused on continually improving and learning to ensure we can succeed in the future.”

For Tobolski, the key to establishing a foothold in business was rooting operations in innovative solutions that took a problem and automated it as much as possible to create a product that customers wanted.

Everything that Basx makes is customized. There’s no product models, Tobolski said. No catalog of parts. It’s all custom systems, which usually cost more, but by costs can be controlled by automating as much of the process as possible , he said.

“The actual final product assembly, though, is relatively manual,” Tobolski said. “Putting it all together still requires humans. With automation, we can translate a simplified drawing into a unit and that is fully automated. Robotics takes the cutting and bending of sheet metal and the humans assemble the parts.”

How it all started

Benson and Tobolski met in 2010 in San Diego. Benson is a serial entrepreneur who started and sold several businesses. Tobolski owned a structural engineering firm that worked at nuclear facilities and hospitals to make them earthquake-proof. The pair worked on a hospital project together and became friends.

They both felt that the HVAC manufacturing industry provided an opportunity to create a company that focused on providing a customizable product with top-notch customer service. Data centers and engineered rooms free of airborne particulates were not part of that original thought process, Tobolski said. Through their contacts, they settled on Redmond and tapped into the growing data center business.

“Central Oregon has an amazing culture and environment,” he said. “We love it here. We love the climate and the people.”

Early on, in order to grow like they did, Tobolski had to keep reinvesting in the company, even though it wasn’t profitable, he said. A shortage of equipment was holding them back kept the company from meeting customer demand and hitting profit targets. Two additional partners joined Basx, and together they self-funded growth, he said.

“We didn’t have enough equipment to make the parts then,” Tobolski said. “It’s difficult to go across the mountains, and we grew so fast, especially in the early years.”

That was in 2018-19 when they reinvested $6 million in capital equipment to do sheet metal fabrication and powder coating in house and limit the outsourcing.

It was a turning point for Basx. Now the company works out of a 200,000-square-foot facility and plans to expand.

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Looking ahead

Tobolski said he and Benson had not considered selling. As the business grew and prospered he’d get pinged by companies wanting to acquire Basx. When Aaon offered $180 million, and $22 million to the founders for the real estate, Tobolski said he considered it because both companies had similar cultures.

“We always strived to make Basx a people-centric company that was focused on delivering on our promises to our customers, vendors and team,” Tobolski said. “We will continue to keep this front of mind at all times.”

BasX doubles down on Redmond manufacturing plant