(FORTUNE Small Business) – Time was when an entrepreneur like Art Baer would consider going abroad only when he couldn't find any opportunities in the U.S. How telling, then, that the 25-year-old founder of Impress Gum pursued the first niche he saw--selling chewing gum in Singapore, where it was famously banned until recently--without considering the challenges of serving a faraway market. "I wanted to build a business," says Baer, whose gum went on sale in April. "I found a good opportunity to do that."

Baer's reasoning sums up the attitude of many American entrepreneurs: Follow the niche, wherever it leads. "You have to find the customers, no matter what country they are in," says Fred Bayer, who advises small businesses about going global from his office in Naples, Fla.

"You do it by staying very alert to the opportunities." Opportunities? Lately among politicians and pundits it has become so fashionable to moan about the downside of globalization--the U.S. jobs lost because of outsourcing, the big steel and textile companies begging for protective tariffs--that it's possible to forget that there are plenty of U.S. companies of all sizes that pin their growth on foreign markets. Small firms do it as effectively as bigger ones, taking advantage of advances in technology and employing clever marketing techniques. What businesses are these companies in? As you'll see on the following pages, they may sell roller coasters in Japan or design shoes for manufacture in China or rent furniture in Baghdad. The six companies that we examine use different techniques, but they rely on the same fundamental tool: imagination. Instead of being intimidated, they are energized by the world's possibilities. "This opportunity was just out there, waiting, and I know there are more like it around the world," says Baer, who is based in Santa Barbara. "I'll find them, wherever they are." --JOSHUA HYATT

License for Adventure TOKYOPOP, Los Angeles

Tokyopop, which last year sold Americans almost $40 million of manga--Japanese animated novels--is neither based in Tokyo nor the creation of an export-happy Japanese entrepreneur. Its CEO, Stuart Levy, 36, had no publishing experience before he transformed manga into a $100 million U.S. industry. Until Levy came on the scene, manga was mostly relegated to specialty comic book shops and rarely translated from Japanese and Korean. These books' subject matter ranges from violent, boy-friendly superhero tales to love stories for teen girls and dramas for adults--including tales of derring-do in business. Since Levy founded the company in 1996, he has built it into the nation's largest seller of these books, doubling sales in each of the past seven years and reaching 500 titles in print. Over the next five years Levy projects at least 50% annual revenue growth.

How did Levy sell a uniquely Asian product to Americans? He says he knew manga's appeal would translate when he saw its fan base in Japan. In 1991, after graduating from Georgetown Law School, he had ended up in Tokyo almost haphazardly because of his love of sushi. "I never liked comic books, but I fell in love with manga," Levy says. "They're so visual and have such a broad subject range--they are more like TV or film." He also noticed that while comic books in the U.S. tended to be the domain of adolescent boys, manga appealed to readers of both genders and attracted a wider range of ages. Inspired by buzz in the U.S. over new anime TV shows (Japanese-style cartoons) in the late 1990s, Levy used that trend to pitch mainstream booksellers such as Barnes & Noble. To seal the deal Levy standardized his books so they could be easily displayed, making each manga a five- by 7 1/2-inch paperback costing $10.

Levy has mastered an ocean of cultural and logistical challenges. COO John Parker explains the first step of the company's process: "We have a green-light committee in Japan that evaluates titles that we think would be interesting to Americans." Once a title is sent to the Los Angeles office, non-Japanese speaking employees gauge its appeal based on the graphics and a summary of the text. Tokyopop measures reader interest by direct communication with its American fans, some 100,000 of whom it e-mails monthly, as well as by trolling newsgroups and chat rooms to spot trends. Then the company brings in a freelance translator and an in-house rewriter to add U.S. slang and colloquialisms. During production, every piece of information about the books is on an online database that allows employees in Tokyo and the U.S. to get instantaneously updated information about anything, from how far along the translation is to whether the graphics have been scanned.

This technology should ease Tokyopop's move into other markets. As the company begins selling this year in Germany and Britain--as well as next year in Japan, where it will market original editions--the real-time file sharing will allow the books to be translated and printed globally. In January the 86-employee company signed with Hasbro to release action figures for Tokyopop's Rave Master animated show that debuted on the Cartoon Network this spring. Another recent deal made Tokyopop the sole publisher of any manga books based on Disney's movies and TV shows. Tokyopop is also working on expanding its manga produced in the U.S., now about 12% of revenues. Levy needs some new content--which he intends to sell back to readers in Asia. --JULIA BOORSTIN

Following the Action HOME ESSENTIALS, Dallas

Chris Exline didn't travel outside of America until he was 32 years old. Now, six years later, he is hardly ever here. His furniture-rental company, Home Essentials, may claim Dallas as its headquarters, but it operates only in Dubai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Singapore--and, starting in March, in its riskiest outpost yet: Baghdad.

Exline started six years ago with a four-day trip to Singapore, where he was visiting some expatriate friends. A seasoned entrepreneur--he had started his own real estate business when he was just 24--Exline got the idea for Home Essentials after one of his friends tipped him off to a problem: The friend's employer had given him $5,000 to buy appliances that would be compatible with Singapore's electrical system. But he then had to declare that money as taxable income. Why didn't his friend rent, Exline wondered, enabling him to get a tax deduction? By the time Exline returned to Texas, he had written a business plan.

Furniture rental, it turns out, doesn't exist globally on the scale it does in the U.S., where it's a $6 billion industry. In most markets Exline faces no direct competition. In Hong Kong, where he opened his second foreign outpost in 1998, incredulous Chinese journalists followed him around with TV cameras. "They interviewed people on the street and asked, 'Would you ever rent furniture?'" says Exline. "The people looked stunned." Luckily, he's not renting to them. Home Essentials' customers are multinational corporations such as Ernst & Young and IBM, as well as local landlords who rent apartments for use by corporations. Instead of shipping over workers' furniture in containers--which can take six to eight weeks and cost many tens of thousands of dollars--Exline will rent them everything from beds to microwaves for several hundred dollars a month.

So far the sales pitch seems to be working. Having invested more than $750,000 of his money, Exline says that Home Essentials moved into the black in 2001, and that last year the company reached sales of $3.5 million, with the number poised to double in 2004. As of the middle of this year, Exline reported that he had contracts in hand worth $6.5 million.

After cracking Singapore and Hong Kong, Exline opened offices in Kuala Lumpur in October 2001 and Dubai in September 2003. Each new market brings its own cultural surprises. Culturally taught to defer to seniority, Exline's employees in Asia have expressed shock at the way he treats his father, Sam, a former VP of Target and now COO at Home Essentials. "If he's missed numbers or made a mistake, I'll let him know," says Exline. And employees in Hong Kong reacted with bewilderment to Exline's American-style attempt at motivation: designating an employee of the month. The first honoree initially refused, not wanting to disrupt group harmony. When the cash bonus was forced on him, he bought everyone lunch and divided the rest among his colleagues. (There hasn't been an employee of the month since.)

Exline's expansion philosophy is pretty simple: Where there is a growing number of expatriates, there's a need for cubicles and end tables. In March 2003 he was on a flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong when he read in a newspaper that the Bush administration was set to pour billions of dollars into the reconstruction of Iraq. Seeing a potentially huge need for imported furniture, Exline opened an outpost in Dubai six months later and this past March began operations in Baghdad.

To get into Iraq he had to be persistent. Exline met some people in Dubai who knew people in Iraq, and learned he could catch a ride into Baghdad from Jordan. It took a couple of visits to the headquarters of the American Coalition Provisional Authority to convince those in charge that he was serious. But he ended up winning a $90,000 contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which ordered beds, dressers, nightstands, and sofas for its employees' homes.

After trial shipments to various ports in the Mideast, Exline found that the quickest way to get containers to Baghdad was to ship them to Dubai and truck them into Iraq. From the factory in Asia, furniture shipments take from four to six weeks. That is assuming his shipments proceed smoothly--which is hardly a certainty, given the unpredictable environment. He has a secure warehouse in Baghdad, but he is realistic. "You cannot expect to enter a market like this without factoring in certain disruptions," says Exline, who believes that "the true opportunities in Iraq begin once the transfer takes effect" from U.S. authorities to Iraqis. In the next four years he plans to launch operations in 18 more cities, from Geneva to Moscow to Delhi. He'll probably also add to his stable of four homes, which he uses mostly to store clothes. "I hate to check luggage," says Exline, speaking like the global warrior he's become. --JULIE SLOANE

The World as a Factory MORGAN & MILO, Boston

During the 1990s, Mia Abbruzzese logged thousands of miles in business class traveling to Asia to visit factories that manufacture shoes. As a product-line manager first for New Balance, then for Fila Sports, and finally for Stride Rite, the Boston native had the trips down pat: arrive at Hong Kong International airport after a 24-hour flight, be greeted by a Mercedes limousine, and enjoy the vehicle's VCR on the 22-hour drive to the factory district in southern China. Abbruzzese's employers were the giants of the global shoe industry that, in shoespeak, "bought the pairs," commanding respect and deference from suppliers. After work, her Asian counterparts insisted she choose the restaurant where they would eat.

Flash-forward a decade, and Abbruzzese (pronounced "ah-bra-ZAY-zee") is still flying to Asia to visit shoe factories, but key details have changed. She books her coach tickets on Orbitz and travels on land by public bus. Instead of checking up on an order of 300,000 pairs of shoes, she's now scrutinizing the tension of the stitching on just a handful of sample children's sandals. Oh, and her manufacturing partners choose the eatery now, forcing Abbruzzese to develop a taste for pickled jellyfish. Or try to.

After a decade of serving corporate masters, Abbruzzese realized 18 months ago that she knew enough to start her own international shoe business. Even beyond the industry-specific knowledge she had gathered, her experience inside some of the world's largest shoe companies provided an ideal education in building a company, albeit with a tiny fraction of the staff and capital that the giants have.

Her firm consists of just three executives working in three locations, with a Chinese factory connection and an office loft in Boston. The company creates shoe designs--upcoming products include versions of clogs and Tevas for kids--and gets them manufactured in China, then sells them to retailers in the U.S. and, soon, Europe. Abbruzzese is using what she learned at the feet--make that shoes--of the masters to make room for herself. Here's what she now knows about building a small firm with global reach:

GO WHERE THE ACTION ISN'T. Abbruzzese decided to focus on the $5-billion-a-year U.S. children's shoe industry because she considered it "a great market no one is paying attention to." She learned the advantages of targeting an overlooked market at New Balance in the early '90s, when she was assigned to create a line of sneakers for walking. At the time walking was considered a dull, mature sideline compared with the company's main focus on running and cross-training. Abbruzzese and her team created the walking shoe rated No. 1 by Consumer Reports and watched walking turn into a full-blown craze. (Remember the mall walkers?) Walking shoes soon became New Balance's third-largest business category, generating $10 million in revenues. "I loved being in an overlooked category," she says, "because people left you alone."

Abbruzzese describes children's shoes as a similarly quiet slice of the often brutal industry, "with less competition and more opportunity because people aren't doing it particularly well." It is also the only segment of the shoe industry that is showing healthy growth, with sales rising 10.6% between 2002 and 2003, compared with 3.5% for the industry overall.

IT'S WHO YOU KNOW, AND WHO THEY KNOW. Having launched several shoe lines, Abbruzzese knew what kinds of connections and talent she needed. Through word of mouth and contacts, she quickly landed a Taiwanese investor as well as two industry veterans with more than 35 years of shoe-biz experience between them (not to mention a pair of fat Rolodexes).

The investor, whom Abbruzzese refers to as the "Godfather," is a 75-year-old Taiwanese businessman whom Abbruzzese met through a factory contact from her Stride Rite days. He invested $595,000 up front and also agreed to cover Morgan & Milo's operating expenses, wiring Abbruzzese money every other month. Abbruzzese expects to pay him back in the first quarter of 2006, when she estimates her annual revenues will be in the $8 million range. That its investor has a familial relationship with a reputable manufacturer in southern China is a huge asset for Morgan & Milo: The teeny startup's orders are unlikely to be botched or overlooked, lest the Godfather's wrath be stirred. Through this partnership, Morgan & Milo wields the clout of a much larger company--which is how Abbruzzese likes it.

One of the Americans on her team, Rob Moyer, 43, oversees sourcing and development. Moyer, who once spent 18 months riding his bicycle around the world, handles the all-important face time with the Chinese manufacturers, whom Morgan & Milo use to keep its shoes affordable. Critically, Moyer also helped Morgan & Milo arrange a partnership with an elite Italian sole manufacturer that enables the startup to boast the European styling that many consumers want.

Moyer also provided Abbruzzese with another critical introduction: Alan Paulenoff, who became the sales and distribution head of Morgan & Milo. Paulenoff, 50, has been inside the industry for 25 years and is on a first-name basis with what he calls "the 30 or 40 good children's shoe customers"--"good" being a euphemism for "paying." In his first few months on the job, Paulenoff landed either accounts or buyer's meetings with an A-list of retailers, including Macy's and Nordstrom, chains such as Rack Room, and key independent retailers around the country. He sold 40,000 pairs of shoes in Morgan & Milo's first test season in 2003 and estimates the company will ship 125,000 pairs this year. The company projects revenues of $1 million for 2004 and $2.5 million in 2005.

To attract the experienced executives, Abbruzzese offered each of the men salaries in line with their previous corporate pay, along with the freedom to stay where they were living (Salt Lake City for Moyer and Westchester County, N.Y., for Paulenoff).

BE FASTER. Because she once helped craft their production processes, Abbruzzese is keenly aware of how long the large shoe manufacturers take to design a new line or even just produce a particular shoe. Morgan & Milo's strategy is to move faster than its big competitors. The way the shoe business works, that means being among the quickest to respond to what's hot, and getting the company's version out in stores. Morgan & Milo can develop and produce a shoe from design to finished product in three to four months, compared with the four to six months that Abbruzzese knows it took Stride Rite when she worked there. Morgan & Milo produces a shoe that's already designed in 30 to 60 days, vs. the typical 90 to 120 days required by larger competitors. "It's a luxury for retailers to wait as long as they can and to buy closer to the season," Paulenoff explains. "That way they're not guessing on trends as far in advance." This spring Morgan & Milo was first to introduce to retailers a kids' version of the popular Ugg boot--complete with zippers and embroidery. Such touches are the trademark of the company, which has also taken a popular two-tone suede tennis shoe and tweaked it for tykes by offering colors such as Very Berry and Tahiti Blue.

INVEST IN TECHNOLOGY. Beyond its small and efficient headcount, the key to Morgan & Milo's agility is having the right technology. Thanks to cellphones, e-mail, and sophisticated software that tracks inventory, orders, and shipping, Abbruzzese and her team are able to manage their global enterprise from wherever they happen to be. Abbruzzese communicates with her manufacturing counterpart in China every day. If a design change needs to be made to a particular shoe, she can instantly mark up a scanned photograph and e-mail it back to the factory floor. She helps design the company's marketing materials via e-mail with a freelance illustrator.

Moyer, the sourcing expert, is in touch with China and Italy almost daily and has a $500 monthly cellphone bill to attest to it. Paulenoff knew from experience the precise order tracking, electronic data interchange, and warehousing/distribution systems that shoe retailers require from their suppliers. "This is very time consuming and, if not set up properly, can be very costly," he says. "The big guys will charge us back for any deviation from their prescribed shipping/packing and communications instructions." Before it shipped a single shoe, Morgan & Milo invested $10,000 in computers, and it now spends roughly $1,000 a month on communications software.

ACT BIG. From day one, Abbruzzese knew she needed to create a brand: "I couldn't just create shoes. I had to position them and create a story and feeling behind them," she says. She learned the lesson of "everything tying together" from one of her Stride Rite mentors, who had previously worked for Levi Strauss. Long before she had created a pair of shoes, Abbruzzese designed a logo and supporting material that made her company appear larger than it is. She created a slick-looking ten-page booklet with attractive photos of smiling kids and answers to breathy questions such as "What is the Vision?" and "Why Morgan & Milo?" just as she had done at Stride Rite when she developed lines for Target and Tommy Hilfiger.

In preparation for her industry's largest trade show this past February, Abbruzzese FedExed rather than mailed an invitation with her promotional material. "When competing in a global marketplace of shoe giants," says Abbruzzese, "you have to do all of these things people don't expect from someone operating out of a 1,000-square-foot office." --ALESSANDRA BIANCHI

Exporting Cleaner Air PURAFIL, Doraville, Ga.

If you didn't know better, you'd think little Purafil was one of those multinational behemoths. After all, its air filters remove pollution from the Sistine Chapel in Rome and the Dead Sea Scrolls archive in Jerusalem, cleanse the smells at an oil refinery in Zimbabwe, and eradicate corrosive molecules at a semiconductor facility in South Korea. That is a lot of ground to cover for a company with annual revenues of just $47 million--60% of which comes from overseas.

CEO Bill Weiller bought Purafil, based in the small industrial town of Doraville, Ga., in 1989, intending to turn around the near-bankrupt company, which was then focused exclusively on air filters for U.S. pulp and paper factories. "The technology was valid but antiquated, and it wasn't taking advantage of its international potential," says 65-year-old Weiller, who drew on his experience running the European chemical operations of an Atlanta company. "It doesn't matter where the customer is; cleaning the air is the same." Weiller started by tweaking the technology to broaden its application; now the company provides 20,000 customized filter installations with refillable filters for 11 industries. The company provides an appropriate product whether "a museum is worried about air pollution or a semiconductor facility needs to remove specific compounds from the air," says COO David Nicholas.

The same technology may underlie all of Purafil's products, but selling to such varied countries and customers is hardly a one-size-fits-all proposition. And the company's modest size--it has just 75 employees--heightens the challenge. As a result Purafil has contracts with 140 independent sales firms that know the local markets in the 50 countries in which they operate. "The initial buying decision is made by engineers who speak English," Nicholas explains. "The operations people who decide about the refill are on a lower level and may speak only the local language." Using sales reps who know the territory and culture, adds Nicholas, "helps us be user-friendly and keep the local competitors out of the business."

Adding to Purafil's global success: a password-protected intranet, which it developed in 1998, with updated information on each customer. Employees and sales reps can tap into everything from drawings of proposed systems to lab test results from filter samples analyzed at the Doraville headquarters. "The Internet came along at the right time for us," says Weiller. "Third World countries such as Indonesia and Thailand were our impetus to get online--they had jumped ahead of their antiquated infrastructure to be online and thought we should be there too." Putting global systems online quickly allowed Purafil to cut overhead, handle larger sales volumes, and increase productivity. "It allows our representatives to have enough information that they seem like they are direct employees," Nicholas says. And that ties into the main goal, which is for Purafil to seem not so far away. "The world," as Nicholas says, "gets pretty small." --JULIA BOORSTIN

Erasing Borders HEITERCONNECT Townsend, Mass.

It's 6 A.M., and in what was formerly the birthing room of a 1720s Massachusetts farmhouse, Stefanie Heiter prepares for her earliest global meeting of the day. After pouring herself the first of what will be six cups of coffee, the 40-year-old mother of four dons her headset and places a conference call to Singapore. Then Manila. Then Moscow, and finally Bangalore. "Okay, who would like to ask the check-in question today?" she says, hoping one of her far-flung counterparts will speak up. "Come on, guys, let's talk about the weather or what you did over the weekend." She knows the people on the other end of the phone--most of them brilliant engineers with independent streaks--are likely rolling their eyes. "It's hokey," she concedes, "but it works."

Meet the most recent addition to the new outsourcing economy: the consultant without borders. HeiterConnect, her four-person company, specializes in the soft skills so easily forgotten by companies that have been seduced by the economics of what's often called offshoring. "We help executives, managers, and supervisors communicate, collaborate, and motivate across boundaries," says Heiter, whose global headquarters is a 12-acre organic farm in rural Townsend, Mass. "Basically," she adds, "it comes down to how to deal effectively with people who are sleeping when you're awake." Who comes to her? Compaq, Halliburton, and Lucent Technologies, to name a few. Typically they want help with an underperforming team whose members not only live in different places but also have different priorities. There may be an employee who doesn't answer e-mail, or another who won't participate in instant messaging. There could be someone who stays quiet during audio roundtables, responding but never initiating. Or maybe never bothering to talk at all. Heiter labels such willful nonparticipation "going dark."

Misunderstandings can also plague such teams. There are the virtual head nods that are interpreted as meaning "Yes, I'll do it," but are actually intended to say "Okay, I heard you." And some team members will seek to save face by agreeing to deadlines they know they can't possibly meet. Heiter says she helps workers ask the right questions so that "they get answers to what they really need to know."

By now everybody understands the rationale behind offshoring, but the practice of it can engender awkward feelings--especially since colleagues from different cultures, newly pushed together as a team, often feel fear, frustration, and anxiety over the outsourcing project. The bread and butter of Heiter's business is a two-day in-house workshop for which she charges a client company $18,000 for as many as 12 employees. She also holds open-enrollment two-day sessions, which anyone can attend for $995. Each workshop comes with two 90-minute follow-up audio-conference-call roundtables, in which Heiter facilitates discussion among members of a remote team. She has set a record of hooking up nine countries in seven time zones.

Heiter typically stands before a roomful of data-driven managers and engineers and does her best to address the squishy topic of interpersonal relations as rationally and scientifically as possible. Armed with a battery of flip charts, self-assessment tests, checklists, tools, and templates, Heiter proceeds to dive into each audience member's listening skills, trust level, and feelings about remote co-workers. "When working with people in multiple time zones, cultures, and languages," she explains, "you have to find explicit ways for people to relate to each other." That is why she starts off every conference call with an informal check-in time, where someone asks a nonthreatening ice-breaker question and everyone in the group responds. What is your favorite place in the world? What are the ways you relax? She also recommends that team leaders make known their virtual "open door" office hours, times when they'll read e-mails or take phone calls or instant messages from other group members.

To capitalize on the offshoring craze, Heiter recently added a sales and business development specialist, and she is translating her workshops and presentations into material she can sell to other consultants. Early this year Heiter and her husband, Darryl, took out a home-equity loan to help finance the growth of her company. Heiterconnect posted revenues of $140,000 last year, and Heiter projects sales of $400,000 this year. All those alarmist headlines about the exodus of American jobs, it turns out, have only been good for hers. --ALESSANDRA BIANCHI

A Wild Ride Overseas S&S POWER, Logan, Utah

When it comes to refining his products, Stan Checketts operates on gut instinct: If his gut feels queasy, he knows he's onto something. "I've never built a ride without trying it, and it has been a really scary experience a lot of times," says the 62-year-old CEO of S&S Power, the country's largest maker of thrill rides. Based in Logan, Utah, the company posted sales of roughly $30 million last year and is best known for what it calls "vertical amusement"--air-launched behemoths that shoot riders up 200-foot towers, then ease them back down. Now Checketts is moving into roller coasters, which may prove his scariest ride yet. He will be competing almost exclusively against foreign rivals--the same ones that have already derailed one premier U.S. coaster company.

With a cutting-edge coaster costing $10 million to $25 million, manufacturers are continually one-upping one another to snag the relatively few sales (a successful coaster design may sell three copies over its limited lifetime). Most of those orders today are being won by innovative foreign companies that turn out ever faster, higher, and more terrifying rides. At Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, every model built in the past decade has been designed by one of two Swiss giants, Bolliger & Mabillard or Intamin. Since 1992, Six Flags Magic Mountain in Los Angeles has added seven foreign-built coasters, and just two by an American company, Arrow Dynamics, which invested so heavily in trying to beat the Swiss that it landed in bankruptcy in 2001.

Since he founded the company in 1994, Checketts says, S&S has focused on tower, or Space Shot, rides in which air is accumulated in a tank, compressed, and released all at once--the resulting force rocketing riders up a tower at 50 miles an hour. Checketts pioneered the ride and holds 13 patents on the technology. Since introducing the Space Shot in 1994, S&S has modified the design, creating towers that launch up, launch down, and launch both ways. It has sold more than 100 of the $1 million to $2 million rides to parks in 24 countries. But Checketts has also become aware of two looming problems: a shrinking pool of potential customers and a growing number of formidable foreign competitors. "There must be 12 manufacturers who have copied my tower rides," Checketts insists.

Around 1999, Checketts decided that he'd better figure out how to apply his air-launch technology to roller coasters. That way S&S could build a unique type of coaster that was more like a catapult, achieving unprecedented acceleration. In 2001 an S&S coaster--Dodonpa (named after a magic move from an animated Japanese series) at Fujikyu Highlands park in Yamanashi, Japan--set a world record by going from zero to 107 miles an hour in less than two seconds. It was also the first coaster to break the 100-mile-an-hour mark. Checketts was so confident of his air-launched coasters that he acquired bankrupt Arrow Dynamics in 2002, aiming to merge its coaster technology with his launch systems.

The Swiss coaster makers didn't have the air-launch technology, and with its first coaster, S&S upstaged them--and snagged three big sales, including the one to Fujikyu Highlands, which bought its first U.S. coaster. (S&S says the final price of its coaster depends on height and configuration but can easily exceed $10 million.) "Stan blew away everyone," says Sean Flaharty, spokesman for American Coaster Enthusiasts, an 8,500-member club. "No one had ever seen a launch like that. It made me nervous, and there is not a whole lot that makes me nervous." But Swiss coaster makers, as Checketts knew, catch up quickly. Last year an Intamin product, Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point, achieved 120 miles an hour using a hydraulic launch system (although it took four seconds to reach that speed). Checketts is still trying to figure out how to top that one. While doing so, he's hedging his bets by applying the air-launch technology to other types of rides, hoping to beat the Swiss by offering more variety. S&S has developed a new drag-race attraction called G-Force, which lets drivers accelerate from zero to 100 miles per hour in less than two seconds. It has also introduced the SkySwatter, which uses air thrust to lift riders 65 feet before sending them head over heels while strapped to a giant fly swatter.

Checketts is trying his hand at some nonthrust rides too. The Screaming Squirrel flips riders under the track and keeps them upside down for much of the ride. At $2 million apiece, these rides can be marketed to parks in the U.S. and abroad that can't afford a $10 million über-coaster. Not that riders will notice the savings. As long as Checketts does his job well, they will be scared senseless all the same. --ALAN COHEN