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BOULDER - What happens when you're moving your small company into a new business area just as a recession hits? If you're Craig Martin, founder and president of Archetype 3D Images in Boulder, you hang on, hone your skills and wait for the turnaround.
"Our timing sucks," laughs Martin, who spent almost a year and a half plus thousands of dollars to create a computer graphics division called Archetype FX, only to see that market slide precipitously in the hightech slowdown.
Nevertheless, Martin's core business, making three-dimensional scale real-estate models for developers, architects and governments, has held steady. He expects 2002 revenue to climb slightly after reaching $750,000 in '01.
First launched in 1998, the FX division is already his fastest-growing segment. It should make up 30 percent of overall revenue this year, up from 15 percent to 20 percent in 2001.
Despite economic slumps, Martin's proud that in his 19 years of doing business as one of the Boulder area's premier modelmaking shops, he's never laid off a single employee.
"We turn away business we can't handle rather than staffing up and then letting people go," says Martin, a New York native who founded the company with his wife, Diane, after relocating to Boulder in 1983. "I'd rather train and keep good model-makers than have to go out and find them."
Archetype's spacious workshop, off Arapahoe Road in east Boulder, has a Santa's workshop feel. The dozen employees...