The History of FIC

A manufacturer’s representative firm founded in 1987 by Jamie Sullivan, Mike Matsumoto and Rob Boyce. The company philosophy was to represent only instrumentation manufacturers so we could be proficient in the applications & have a high degree of knowledge of a limited number of products and product types.

Most of our competitors were carrying valves, pipe, pumps, filters, heat tracing, etc. in addition to instrumentation and it’s pretty difficult to be specialists with that many products on your line card. A second company goal was to put a big emphasis on customer service & support. This was, and is, our way of differentiating ourselves from our competitors. We want to be the best technically with our sales staff and the best at taking care of the customer with top tier support.

The first 10 years, our flagship product lines were Krohne, Great Lakes Instruments, Pyromation & Moore Industries which we quickly established as market leaders in their respective product categories. A few years after the company was started Jamie Sullivan bought out his two partners and became the sole owner. Soon after that we built an office building in Spokane, Washington which served as the company’s main office. With a small number of dedicated employees consisting of outside salespeople in Portland, Seattle and Spokane areas and inside sales in Spokane, we were gaining market share every year and establishing a reputation for excellent customer service and product knowledge.

In 2009, we became the Endress+Hauser representative and began the big challenge of introducing E+H to our customers and working with them to transition over. However, the value and technology built into each E+H product quickly won our customers over. The company sales quickly grew as representing E+H was a near perfect partnership – quality products, best-in-class support & cutting-edge technology, which is what we always valued & looked for in the companies we represent. With E+H, we now represented a company that would give us an opportunity for a commanding position in the market for process control technology. Shortly after becoming the E+H rep we opened an office in the Vancouver, WA area (Woodland WA) which gave us a much needed presence in Western Washington. Nick Sullivan managed this office and sales grew substantially. We have now moved this office a short distance to a much larger facility in Ridgefield, WA where we have a complete inside sales and support staff, service team and outside sales team.

In the years following E+H becoming our new flagship product line we added some complimentary product lines such as AT Controls, Schubert & Salzer and Samson Controls for valves. We were challenged by several customers to be able to work their complete projects and have one sole source for instruments & valves. Adding these three companies has taken FIC to a new level of customer support and turnkey capabilities.
In 2021, we opened a field service division which is also serves as the E+H Authorized Service Provider. The technicians are specifically trained in E+H products but are able to work on other manufacturer’s products. The technicians provide repair & calibrations services for temperature, pressure, level, analytical devices and flowmeters for any customer in the Pacific NW. E+H has provided us with a state-of-the-art calibration trailer that allows the techs to wet calibrate flowmeters up to 3” in diameter which makes our service capabilities quite unique.

We feel very confident in the future and know we are in a good position to continue serving our customers with process control instrumentation and control valves for another 35 years as Nick Sullivan begins to lead the company. We have managed to put a team of people together who will always stay close to our core beliefs and those beliefs are centered around one phrase, “Take care of the customer, and the rest will take care of itself.”