Lessons Learned on the Road to Becoming an Industry Veteran

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

I came to Texas on a Greyhound bus from New Hampshire and started my career in the oil industry on the offshore drilling rigs; hard work, dangerous and everyone knew that what they did or did not do impacted the safety of everyone around them.  That was a good life lesson.  Then, after the big oil crash of 1985 I moved into defense electronics in a sales support role for Minco Technology Labs.  There I quickly made the transition to sales and in my first year, with the support of our top talent engineering team, we won the largest contract in the history of the company for a submarine subsurface communication system for the US Navy.  I was hooked!  This was less dangerous work but the stakes were bigger.  Failure could put many at risk, so failure was not an option.  And the dynamics that we were changing how things had been done since WWII was both exciting and humbling. 

Then I joined XeTel, in 1989.  At that time Solectron was the largest EMS at $140M and were about half that size.  XeTel, a spin-off of Texas Instruments, was a technology leader and our customers needed us.  I left after XeTel went public and joined Sanmina, opening up their first remote sales office in Austin. In 1995 Sanmina was still under $1B and Juri Sola (CEO) was active in every aspect of the company.  He was tough, a Croation football (soccer) player.  He knew that it took a team to win.  He was demanding but fair and I learned a lot.  Three years later I joined SMTC where we were part of the roll out of DSL FTTN (Fiber to the Node) bringing Internet to the masses through the installed phone lines, still in broad use today.  This single piece of business doubled the size of the SMTC and still has an impact on how we get our broadband data today.  That was challenging; hard work, but fun. After the “tech wreck” in 2001, I went back into Defense where I had top secret clearance for 3D visualization technologies; working with some of the world’s leading scientists and defense departments like DARPA that was funding innovative new technologies. This was mind-bending technology in use at a critical time for the US military.  But the people I worked with at SMTC had joined Flextronics and recruited me to stand up new business segment, SBS (Small Business Solutions), creating a small flexible company inside the giant company to support low volume, high technology solutions, bringing the resources of a giant company with the flexible and innovative market offering of a smaller more nimble operation. 

After the Flex acquisition of Solectron for $10B in 2008, I left and joined Celestica.  We set up a new Industrial Segment and I was tasked with leading that initiative.  In my first year in Celestica we brought in a giant appliance company by demonstrating innovation they had not seen.  We bought and took apart their and their competitors’ products and in our first meeting showed them that though we were not experts on appliances we were experts in manufacturing and solutioning.  We were experts in our approach to problem solving.  In a supplier conference with ten competitors we were selected to support a product we had never built, because we differentiated with innovation resulting hundreds of millions of dollars.  Following that I was asked to manage to global team for sales and solutions and for the next four years traveled over one million airline miles to every part of the planet where our customers were, and me and my team posted record sales revenue every single year. 

My entire career has been about challenging the status quo, leading with innovation and creativity and the privilege to work with some of the leaders of this industry and using that knowledge and those experiences for building and developing customer centric winning teams and delivering results.  

Back to your new role with VirTex Enterprises, what challenges are you looking for in this position?

The market is truly hungry for the technology capable, innovative and flexible manufacturing partner.  They are not seeking a quote model; they are seeking a solution that lets them differentiate with innovation, and the products they produce are a piece of this.  The market has always been product driven and that is changing.  The large EMS giants are not nimble enough to address this and they are trying to solve it with innovation centers.  But they do not have the patience to truly listen and develop solutions around a specific customer’s needs; we do.  They try to bend the customer to their methods.  They are still trying to fit them in a box.  We develop value based solutions around the customer’s specific needs; not ours.  We participate with solutions that enhance their unique aspirations.

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