Specialty: Fisheries engineering
President: Ken Ferjancic
1999 revenues: average $3 million over the past three years
Projected revenues 2000: steadily up
Location: Port Orchard
A large part of FishPro's business involves designing passages for fish to take around dams and other obstructions. That makes for plenty of work around the country.
"We're primarily in the business of preserving threatened and endangered species," said marketing manager Dawn Mayes.
The Port Orchard-based firm holds jobs nationwide and in Canada, so last year's listing of seven local salmon species as endangered doesn't represent a particularly large boost to FishPro's overall business. "We work so much out-of-state that the (local listing) hasn't meant that much" to the firm, Mayes said.
The listing certainly doesn't hurt, though.
Ken Ferjancic started the company 20 years ago and serves as president and head of fisheries biology. Two others hold ownership stakes in the company: Ed Donahue, who head FishPro's engineering division, and Sharon Sawdey, a fish biologist and civil engineer who head the firm's Oregon office.
The firm has owned and operated a salmon and sturgeon hatchery in Port Orchard for much of its 20 years, but "there's change going on with that," Mayes said. "We're concentrating more on the engineering and design."
FishPro has offices in Port Orchard, Beaverton, Ore., and Springfield, Ill, where the office operates under the name of Cochran-Wilken Engineers. A total of 40 people work in those offices.
The firm's biggest customers are federal and state agencies, Indian tribes and utilities.
One of FishPro's largest projects is about to go into construction, a $60 million salmon production and a restoration facility in the Clearwater River sub-basin in Idaho, developed by the Bonneville Power Administration and the Nez Pierce Tribe. FishPro designed the facility, which consists of five hatcheries and two acclimation sites, and will manage construction for the next couple of years.
Locally, the firm is providing stream restoration work in Kitsap County for a residents group. The firm stands out because it works in cold, cool and warm water, Mayes said.
"We're certainly busy now," she said. "We're trying as best as possible to design natural production facilities, so fish can survive when they're released. We're trying to make a less human, more natural approach," a direction federal regulators are pushing.