Just 15 people will stand between a crowd of about 700,000 and chaos in Pasadena on Jan. 1.

For the fifth consecutive year, a team of three supervisors and 12 workers from Traffic Management Inc. of Signal Hill will man the city’s streets, deploying their traffic control equipment, rerouting vehicles and making sure no drivers enter the “formation area” around the five-and-a-half-mile route of the 124th Rose Parade.

Co-owned by brothers Chris and Jonathan Spano, TMI is a largely anonymous company whose work is integral to the daily flow of the lives of the region’s commuters. Its engineers design the traffic patterns that result from lane closures due to road repairs, large events and big infrastructure projects.

In addition to handling the Rose Parade for the last several years, TMI was brought in to manage traffic flow for the final journey of space shuttle Endeavour from Los Angeles International Airport to the California Science Center in October of last year and the transport of six 500,000-pound coke drums from Anaheim to Chevron Corp.’s El Segundo fuel refinery in February.

“Our core business is providing manpower,” said Jonathan Spano, co-owner and chief operations officer of the company. “Our employees are there to provide a safety barrier between our customers who are working in the public sphere and the motoring public, cyclists or pedestrians.”

That sounds like a labor-intensive business requiring little technical expertise, not something one would expect to do well in a slow economy. But TMI has seen rapid growth since the recession. Spano is projecting revenue will hit $40 million this year, up from $27 million last year and $10 million in 2010.

The company employs 345 full time, most of them workers rerouting traffic in the field. It has eight offices in California and one in Detroit.

And while he played up the value of having boots on the ground, traffic management is at its core a technical business, Spano said.

A detailed traffic plan must be mapped out for each project or event and its plan approved by the governing municipality. TMI employs 12 traffic planners who use satellite imagery but sometimes work on site if it’s complicated. They analyze locations, research traffic conditions and draw plans in a computer-aided design system that are compliant with state law.

The Rose Parade is the company’s highest-profile gig. But interestingly, it is a fairly routine job. Everyone pretty much knows his task and duty, thanks to years of repetition, according to Spano.

Surviving the ‘hurricane’

TMI has thrived in an environment that has seen some larger players in the field fall by the wayside.

Highway Technologies Inc., a Houston company that was at one time the largest traffic-control service provider in the country, filed for bankruptcy protection in May and let go of most of its 800-person staff.

“It’s like when the hurricane came through town, the weaker business was damaged,” Spano said. “But we had a stronger, solid foundation. When the sky cleared and the hurricane was gone, we were ready for the work.”

He said that he and his brother have reinvested profits back into the company, especially in technology and management resources, to make sure it’s not simply a labor contractor.

He showcased the new software system in his Signal Hill headquarters, developed by his brother and other engineers in the company, in which traffic engineers can manage personnel schedules and equipment inventories for any project at any location in real time.

Chris, 37, and Jonathan Spano, 35, started TMI in 1995 when they were teens. What began as an idea from their father, who was running a construction company, grew quickly. In five years, the company had $1 million in revenue, and business continued to grow until the recession hit, when everything flattened out. But activity spiked in 2010.

Part of the rapid growth since that year resulted from the relative decline of TMI’s competitors. Beyond that, however, the brothers are at a loss to explain it.

“We don’t really understand the real reason for it,” said Jonathan Spano.

Thanks to the growth, the company plans to open a couple more offices in California as well as invest in sales and marketing next year.

“Recession sometimes destroys perfectly good, otherwise competitive firms,” said James Moore, USC professor and director of the university’s transportation engineering program. “Sometimes it simply forces firms that can compete effectively to do so.”

Labor intensive

TMI charges clients $800 to $1,000 a day for a single-lane closure, a price that includes both equipment and labor, which is paid $12 to $20 an hour depending on experience.

That might seem expensive, but Moore said it could be a smart choice for companies in need of traffic control.

“Logistically, you got to have access to the equipment, which has to be in good working order,” he said. “You’ve got to have maintenance and repair strategies for it. It’s all about inventory control questions.”

To invest in the equipment and to have people work on it is costly to individual companies, he said, so most companies contract the work out to a company like TMI.

“It frees up human resources to go elsewhere; it frees up capital that will be otherwise tied up in equipment inventory,” Moore said. “And it’s probably a risk-sharing strategy.”

After all, standing in traffic is an inherently dangerous work environment, he added. It’s less risky to have another company take on that risk and handle the safety issues.