Local companies persevere

Beth Lock described her office as a scene from "Willy Wonka," with purple paint speckling the walls and light bulbs rotating on a clunky contraption.

Though Lock doesn't own a choco-late factory, her custom color-light-ing business, Special FX Lighting, Inc., has offered eye candy to clients across the country for 27 years.

Clients have included major theme parks, Broadway productions, the Panama Bridge, Dollywood, the Jefferson Memorial and the newly named MetLife Stadium in New Jersey where both the New York Giants and New York Jets profes-sional football teams play.

For the stadium to shine green lights for the Jets one day and blue for the Giants the next, Lock developed a quick-change lens system for the 257 lighting fixtures on the structure.

"Apparently, they can change out all 257 fixtures in four hours," she said.

Lock said she would not have cho-sen this profession, but a quirky skill her partner possessed and several years of failed attempts finally led her to a successful niche business that continues to offer innovative lighting in a changing industry.

"I love to talk about my business," Lock said as she showed the expansion of her Hurricane office space, where all the inventing, manufacturing and shipping of her products takes place.

"It's an amazing company that's sitting right here in Hurricane," said the Dixie Business Alliance's Small Business Development Center Director Len Erickson. The alliance is a nonprofit dedicated to serving businesses like Lock's.

Niche businesses that persevere and reinvent themselves with the changing times are important to the local economy, Erickson said, and part of what Gov. Gary Herbert wanted to illustrate with Entrepreneur Day in Utah this week.

But it hasn't been a brightly lit path the whole way for Lock and her employees.

In January 2010, Lock owed balloon payments on loans for which she didn't have the money because the struggling economy hit her business hard, and the bank wouldn't refinance.

"For a few years, it was all rock 'n' roll," she said of the once-booming company. "You watch it go away, like a rollercoaster. I was 57 years old. I had to hold onto my business. No one would hire me."

This included letting go seven of her 12 employees, removing health insurance benefits and increasing rates, but the painstaking steps worked, and Lock's business survived.

It was also a close call for Carlos and Teresa Mendez last year, when the business Carlos worked for was about to shut down, putting more than a dozen employees out of work.