Friday, October 24, 2008

Babson helps filter ideas for Boyd Technologies

By Brendan Lynch

A recent graduate of Babson College has returned to the Wellesley campus to help develop market opportunities for his family business’ wastewater treatment technology — and to help develop a few grad students while he’s at it.

Boyd Technologies LLC, which employs about 100 people, has built two prototypes of the system, which is designed to be a mobile cleaner of small volumes of industrial wastewater — about six to 12 gallons at a time, though the system could be built to treat thousands of gallons at a time.

Vice president of business development Matthew Boyd said the system could be used by any industrial site that produces liquid waste. He offered dairy farms as an example, where the system could be used to clean liquid animal waste. The system could also be used by cruise ships to recycle gray water — non-sewage waste produced by guests showering or brushing their teeth, Boyd said.

“If you can treat liquid and reuse it, you save time and money,” he said. “And depending on the situation, you can lessen the environmental impact.

Boyd is entering a field with some local competition. Brookline-based Water Synergies LLC is developing filtration technology to mitigate water shortages, such as those in Israel, where the technology is being tested. Last year, Solmetex Inc., a Northborough-based water-purification company, was bought by Layne Christensen Co. for $13.5 million. In 2004, General Electric Co. bought Watertown-based water desalinization company Ionics Inc. for $1.1 billion. Both of the acquired companies still operate in the Bay State.

To help it stand out against competitors, Boyd has enlisted the help of four second-year Babson MBA candidates, who are developing market plans for the filtration system in Babson’s Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE) program — a program in which Boyd himself was enrolled a little more than a year ago.

Boyd graduated from Babson with an MBA in 2007. While he was there, he and some classmates performed a semester-long strategic evaluation of a legacy business, and ended up using his family’s 30-year-old South Lee-based materials manufacturer, Boyd Converting Co., as their subject. That project led Boyd, over the course of his time at Babson, to consider joining the family business after graduating for the first time. Moreover, the project led to the establishment of Boyd Technologies, a new parent company — containing the family business of Boyd Converting — focusing on new products, such as the filtration system. 

“Obviously, it wasn’t totally unbiased, because I was on the team,” Boyd said. 

After graduating, Boyd (the person) kept in touch with the college to recruit for Boyd (the company), and submitted the filtration system as one of a group of projects from which the Babson MBA candidates could choose. Boyd said he sees the project as support and validation for work that the company is doing on commercializing the product.

For their part, the students are researching the system’s use in the agricultural, pharmaceutical and biofuels markets, focusing on pricing strategies, distribution channels, competition and revenue maximizing models, Boyd said. Initially he had asked the students, with whom he meets every other week, to research the industrial wastewater market, “which is like asking someone to research the world,” he said, laughing.