Photos by JOHN W. ADKISSON l The Roanoke Times

Seamstress Marge Hulse of Stuarts Draft sews tents at Base-X, a Fairfield company that manufactures tents and shelters for military, industrial and domestic applications. The company's shelters range in size from 100-square-foot units to 1,000-square-foot tents.

Jason Jones handles a tent cover during the final assembly process.

Photos by JOHN W. ADKISSON l The Roanoke Times

Jesse Mason picks up a tent cover during the final assembly process at Base-X.

Adam Runkle handles a tent liner.

FAIRFIELD -- More than 6,000 miles from the scorching heat of Iraq's deserts and 7,000 miles from the bitterly cold Afghanistan winter, a small Shenandoah Valley company manufactures many of the tents and shelters that protect American troops from the elements.

Thirteen years after Base-X, headquartered in Fairfield in Rockbridge County, started making shelters for the military, its products are used around the globe. The shelters range in size from 100-square-foot units that house a few soldiers to 1,000-square-foot tents that can hold a sizeable command post or even a portable field hospital.

They come wired with electric outlets every five feet and are usually powered by portable generators produced by sister company Power Systems International, located nearby in Natural Bridge.

The two firms are part of Hunter Defense Group, a collection of defense contractors owned by New York private equity group Metalmark Capital.

Five years ago, with employees at Base-X's Fairfield factory working overtime to keep up with a massive surge of military orders, almost all the company's business came from the Defense Department. But the company has expanded rapidly, branching out to sell to foreign governments and nonmilitary groups.

Base-X's revenues have tripled in the last five years, going from about $40 million to $120 million, former Base-X president and current Hunter Vice President Jim Maurer said.

During a recent visit to the Fairfield factory, piles of orange fabric were stacked in one corner, waiting to be assembled into tents that were headed to Japan. On another work bench, employees put the finishing touches on the outer frame of a tent ordered by the Toronto Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Unit.

Brian Dearing, Base-X vice president for business development and government relations, said the company began growing sharply when the military realized Base-X could get its tents -- or spare parts to repair them -- into the field faster than the traditional military supply system.

All told, 15 percent of the company's business is to international customers, and Dearing said the company hopes international sales will comprise 20 percent of total business by the end of 2009. Much of the international business is to military customers, but other clients include homeland security operations, search and rescue teams and the Tokyo Fire Department, which is the world's largest.

Tent maker started small

The company found its way into this niche of the defense contracting industry under the leadership of Bea Maurer, a Northern Virginia woman who started sewing tents in 1981 for a subsidiary of Appalachian Outfitters. She was making $3.10 an hour. Two years later she bought the subsidiary and moved it into her basement.

Under Bea Maurer's direction in the 1980s, the company started making duffel bags, backpacks and computer cases. In 1996, Maurer struck a deal with folding frame inventor Ted Ziegler to purchase the patents for military shelters Ziegler had designed.

As the company grew, Maurer moved it from Northern Virginia to Fairfield in 2000, buying a vacant garment factory that had previously made uniforms for restaurant chains.

Today the factory -- which smells strongly of vinyl and fresh fabric -- produces 100 shelters a week and 5,000 a year. As the pieces came off the sewing machines and were attached to the frames, Dearing noted that a shelter, when collapsed into a pair of bundles weighing about 500 pounds each, has no pieces longer than 63 inches. That number is important, he noted, because the smallest Air Force cargo planes use 63-inch shipping pallets.

Maurer sold the company in 2005 for $80 million to Hunter, a Solon, Ohio, company that specializes in heaters for Army tents and vehicles. Hunter's products had been used in Base-X's shelters for several years before the deal was sealed.

Maurer, now 67 years old and retired, still lives in Rockbridge County. Her son, Jim, took over as president in 2005 with a mandate to grow the business. He became a vice president at Hunter in July and works on corporate strategy and strategic acquisitions for the parent company.

Hunter was valued at $335 million in August 2007, when the New York private equity firm Behrman Capital sold the company for that amount to Metalmark, which specializes in energy, health and defense companies.

Jim Maurer said that being owned by a private equity firm puts increased emphasis on growth.

"That's private equity's life," he said. "You can only give investors a return by growing revenue and margins."

Just three years after the company began international sales, Base-X products are sold to about a dozen countries, including Sweden, Australia, Canada, Japan and Israel -- and even smaller nations such as Latvia.

Internet aids global reach

Most foreign militaries buy the shelters through agents or resellers overseas. But the Swedish government -- Base-X's largest international customer -- buys directly from the company, and the story of how they found Base-X illustrates how a small Shenandoah Valley company with about 160 employees can suddenly find itself as the exclusive military tent supplier to a Scandinavian nation.

The Swedish military had been conducting a global search for new tents and shelters, Dearing said. A few years ago, someone from the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., called Base-X. The caller said the Swedish government might be interested in placing a major order with Base-X but wanted to visit the factory and meet the company's executives.

A few weeks later, a car full of military and economic officials from the embassy arrived in Fairfield.

Sandra Reiter, a business administration professor at Washington and Lee University, said this kind of business deal wouldn't have been possible before the Internet age.

"The Internet lets small companies reach out to customers and also lets customers reach out to them," Reiter said. "So the number of employees you need to sell internationally is greatly reduced."

Dearing said the Internet and the ability of delivery companies such as FedEx and DHL to move large packages quickly has revolutionized the way Base-X can do business.

If a customer calls Base-X needing help with a repair, the company first tries to solve the problem through e-mail or Webcam conversations. But if problems persist, Dearing said the company will send its repair specialists anywhere they're needed. Those instances are rare, he said, but they do happen.

"I've punched guys into Nigeria and Chad for training and support jobs," Dearing said. "I can tell you what time it is anywhere our products are used off the top of my head."

Reiter said the power of the Web allows Base-X to have support staff anywhere in the world.

"You used to need everything in the same space, so you could go down to the factory floor and look at a prototype to figure out the problem in the field," she said. "Now you can just take pictures and schematics online, and it's as if you were there in person."

But selling internationally has its risks, Jim Maurer said. He said it's easy to spend huge sums of money developing international clients without seeing much reward. And he said traveling to meet clients ^-- as well as bringing shelters for demonstrations -- gets expensive quickly.

Tents in peacetime

Even as President Obama has ordered another 20,000 American troops to Afghanistan, Base-X and other defense contractors are preparing for the reality that military spending may be slashed in the future.

"Obama will pay for social programs out of the defense budget; there's no doubt about it," Dearing said. "We're very worried about 2011. So we want to expand our foreign and our nonmilitary sales."

The company realizes those other contracts -- with foreign nations, federal agencies in the Department of Homeland Security and state emergency preparedness departments -- can't completely replace military sales.

"The Army may buy 100 to 200 at a time," Dearing said. "The FBI just bought some for their Hostage Rescue Team, but that means they need about 10."

Jim Maurer said he doesn't expect overall defense spending to decline significantly during Obama's administration, but he did say he isn't expecting any spending increases.

The drive to find new customers leads Base-X salesmen to places like Evansville, Ind., where on March 3 several Base-X tents were the centerpiece of an earthquake simulation drill.

The local emergency management officials wanted to figure out a way to take care of patients if a major earthquake left the city's hospital unusable. City officials hadn't purchased the tents yet, but they said they were impressed with what they saw.

After the company grew so rapidly in the past decade, Base-X officials now hope the expected cuts in military spending will be mostly targeted at expensive weapons programs such as new tanks, fighter planes and ships.

Base-X also must hold off its competitors, which include a host of companies such as MFC Survival and Armed Forces International. Base-X believes its unique frames -- which simply fold together when the shelter is packed -- will help it protect its market share. The company has also taken out four patents in an attempt to protect its products.

Dearing said he believes the military will keep buying Base-X shelters, even if the number of troops posted overseas continues to dwindle.

"The total number of troops in the military hasn't changed much in the last few years, and you need these tents whether you're in the field fighting or in the field training," he said.