PMI vice president Jim Boone displays one of the company's pieces of test equipment.

This story has been updated to correct the name of one of the founders.

PMI Industries Inc. may be focused on the ocean, but it calls Northeast Ohio home.

PMI — which stands for Precision Marine Inc. — was founded in 1984 by Bob Eucker and Allan Metzler. The company is still owned by the Eucker family, said president Bob Centa, who declined to share annual revenue or employee numbers.

PMI makes underwater cable connections and terminations for a variety of uses. Those products might be connecting a cable to a submarine or a ship, Centa said, so that information can be transmitted from a remote operating vessel searching the ocean floor or from a seismic exploration looking for oil and gas.

"Our products, one thing, they're small. They're not very large. But if they break, it stops the entire operation," said vice president Jim Boone.

PMI had been located on St. Clair Avenue in Cleveland until January, when it moved to a new location at 990 Resource Drive in Brooklyn Heights.

PMI serves everything from the U.S. Navy and defense contractors to the oil and gas and seismic survey market to universities and research institutes. Boone said about 98% of the company's work is ocean-based, with a small amount of work in freshwater settings.

And the renewable energy market — particularly wind and wave energy, though some projects in tidal are in early stages — is another critical segment for PMI. It's a future-looking, "skating to where the puck's going" kind of focus, Centa said. Renewable energy sources like these use cables just like PMI's other customers, so the company is applying its knowledge to that growing market.

PMI doesn't do heavy manufacturing, but focuses on engineering, testing and assembly.

"We're an engineering company at our core," Centa said. He added, "If people have a problem, we can come up with a solution."

Centa joined PMI in January 2022, with Boone having come on board about a year earlier. And PMI began looking for a new facility last spring, Centa said. The previous building didn't meet the company's current needs, let alone account for future growth, he noted.

The new site in Brooklyn Heights was close enough that it wasn't a disruption for employees, but it offered more space and a more open layout. The new building is 37,000 square feet, mostly in the factory, and offers 67% more square footage in terms of shop floor space.

And it's not just about having more space. Efficiency is the theme of PMI's new location. Product moves from station to station in a large U-shape, moving from unloading to quality to the machine shop to assembly. The old facility was more piecemeal, spread across multiple buildings, and PMI had to move product back and forth frequently. The old location didn't even have a dock, a feature the new site boasts.

PMI has special equipment to simulate what the company's cable attachments will experience in the ocean, from a large-scale machine that pulls cable to check how the attachments behave under tension to the submarine-shaped autoclave that fills with water for testing.

And the site will be more efficient in other ways, too. The lights are all LED, and the air conditioning and heating are new.

"It really checked a lot of the boxes that we wanted and needed," Centa said.

Centa thinks the additional space and new capabilities will help PMI grow. Already, PMI has won some new business in the naval/defense market that Centa said wouldn't have been possible without the new building. And he sees growth opportunities in renewable energy and oil and gas, as well as geographically in the Asia Pacific and Australia markets, where PMI doesn't have as strong of a foothold.

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