Podcast Transcript
Welcome to RF Frontiers and Introducing Bob Sandage
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the inaugural episode of the RF Frontiers podcast. I am joined by my cohost, Sean Wallace and Ariel Carlson, and our guest today, Bob Sandage, who has what an incredible career this guy has had. Oh my gosh.
What an incredible career. It’s not even that important to know where he is right now, but at the moment, it’s with National Instrument because it’s really about his history. This guy has built, as I he told us in prep, like, four businesses. Okay?
And not all of them in the RF space, which has a really cool wrinkle. Okay? So we’re gonna get into it deep. What RF Frontiers podcast is, it’s a podcast for small medium business entrepreneurs by small medium business entrepreneurs.
We’re here to help you with the intersection between technology, operation supply chain, go to market strategy so we can help other RF entrepreneurs succeed, frankly.
So we’re just gonna roll right into it. Everyone, welcome.
Good morning, Chuck.
Thank you. Thanks, Chuck.
Good morning. It is morning here as the sun rises, and I have the cardboard blocking out most of the sun here on my on my very bright window.
And at least it’s a great day without the snow today. So so welcome. Welcome. Welcome. So, Bob, you’re the star of the show today. No pressure. Awesome.
Bob’s Early Foray into RF and Entrepreneurship
So you had told us a great story in prep, about just to get to know you and how this all goes down. You had told us about, essentially, a journey that took you into being a lifelong entrepreneur and four businesses.
Okay? Let’s focus on how you got started in that RF, you know, entrepreneurial journey. What in God’s name drove you to do that? You could have easily just gotten a job when you had your first job. You could have easily just taken the easy way out, frankly, as if anything’s the easy way out. What got you started?
Yeah. It’s a good question, Chuck. And first of I’m happy to be here. I look forward to sharing my stories.
So when I was in grad school at Iowa State University, so working on analog IC design, you know, the old the old dinosaur type stuff, A lot of that so my senior project was designing a wideband RF amplifier. We designed an FM receiver on a chip that was funded by Tektronix. So that was my first foray into saying, you what? I’m designing circuits, and it’s not just on a breadboard, but this is actually working on a chip.
And we actually got it to work for a few seconds, you know, when it came back the next semester. We learned a lot about temperature drift, you know, with oscillators. So that was kind of the first foray into RF, and I got my my graduate degree in electrical engineering.
LabVIEW, Medtronic, and the Birth of Daptron
Worked at Medtronic in Minneapolis on the IC design for pacemakers for a couple years. Not really any RF there. But, yeah, I love the company and wanted to I thought I wanted to teach. So off I went back to Georgia Tech and so designing lots more chips.
You know, some stuff being in the RF domain, but not really focused on that. But I also did start my own company, Daptron, in nineteen ninety four. And I said the first four years was mostly just all geographic based systems integration. So it was working for, hey, automate this with a carpet mill or a chicken processing plant or a steel mill or Johnson Controls for destroying car seats.
They weren’t supposed to be destroyed, but you wanted to test all the forces on them.
So I actually did destroy one of them, unfortunately, a very expensive And so nineteen ninety four, that was really early in the LabVIEW days.
Was this a LabVIEW based business?
Yeah.
So I was at Medtronic, I used LabVIEW. Was kind of very novel, using patient data, heart rate data with pacemakers implanted. And then looking at kind of how are I kind of look at it like, well, is, not to pat myself on the back, kind of revolutionary for the time because I was essentially modeling these complex systems that would almost never converge in SPICE because lots and lots of mixed signal stuff. And as soon you start breaking down, here’s blocks for amplifiers, comparators, filters, etcetera, and start running patient data through that, you could actually, okay, now I can see the impact of changes I make in the design.
And so it was kind of like, I look at that as very early model based systems engineering. Presented on that in the ‘ninety six IEEE ISCAS symposium. So it was pretty cool. That’s when my first start with LabVIEW, and then I went to the first ever NI user symposium in nineteen ninety three.
I think there were about one hundred people. It was in the Austin Stouffer Renaissance up in the Arboretum area. And that was very first NI big assembly of people using their hardware And so, yeah, from there, I after I left Medtronic, went to Georgia Tech, it didn’t take me very long to say, you know, I wanna I just got this, you know, thing in the mail for, you know, National Instrument Seminar. Chuck Woolsey, my area sales manager, is giving it.
And I went and talked to him afterwards. He says, you know, you ever thought about starting a business?
And so it was you know, we we just we we talked for probably a, you know, a month. And, you know, before I know it, I’m buying a computer, which those days, you know, Sean, it was like, actually, you’re not as old as I am. But yeah, was, yeah, like a three thousand five hundred dollars computer that was, you know, like a, it might have been like a four eighty six or something. I don’t know. It was not really all that great.
Well, I think LabVIEW was Macintosh only in the early Right?
Yeah. My first my first nineteen ninety two with at Medtronic was version two point two point one on the Mac. It wasn’t Windows wasn’t at a point yet where where you could actually have something like that on it.
So so Are you guys just doing that to suck up to me because I’m such an Apple fanboy?
You might It could be. It might Could be.
It could be.
It’s a far cry different from a lot of the software that we rely on in the industry nowadays where it’s all Windows based and you can’t do that at all. Yeah. Well, I Or a lot of it could be Linux based too. So that’s the good news.
The the whole the whole promise of LabVIEW was that it was a graphical interface. So the idea of running a graphical interface on DOS was kind of a non starter.
I did all the text base back then, CC plus plus Pascal, Fortran, basic, all of that in college. And then I loved the programming element of it, using that to solve some problems. Then when the graphical piece is like, oh, I really like this. So Yeah. You know, it’s definitely got pluses and minuses, for me, it’s worked, you know, even after, like, last year when I was doing more laby programming than I’ve ever thought I would.
What what love about this story that you got into it is it’s so much with any business, RF or otherwise. Whether intentionally or by kismet or happenstance, people get into something on the early days. Right? And there haven’t always been gold rushes to the, you know, to the new technology, especially when you have something so niche as LabVIEW.
Right? It is hardly large language models in the, you know, gold rush that we have to that or the telecom technology that happened, you know, back in the nineties. But so often, success of the business is because people end up being early adopters. Maybe it’s just because they’re the only one that’s out there or maybe it’s because they have some insight that others don’t have.
Hopefully, both. And that’s a surefire way to be a rocket create a rocket launch on your career.
Yeah. So he real I mean, it sounds like Bob really got in, you know, on the on the ground floor of Labview. Right? So and so did it kinda sound to me like maybe starting a business was actually not your idea?
Well, it’s it’s kinda all those things, you know, it can be fairly enticing as as somebody that’s going to grad school getting a pretty measly stipend as a research assistant. I thought, okay, I can control my hours, the projects I work on. Sound good in theory even before I knew that I was working eighteen hours a day.
Yeah, of course.
That’s good. They can, seventy five bucks an hour, bet you never pay a tax like, wow, this is not too bad of a salary as graduate student.
If you’re young and don’t have a family yet, right? Yep, exactly.
Carried on like that for a few years.
And nineteen ninety seven is really where things got interesting because through all of my a lot of me going out and doing my own marketing, but then a certain portion of it was coming from the area sales manager Charles. And he’s like, hey, just talked to someone. So I got a lead from these guys that have a DAX system. They wanna do something.
Early Wins, Growing a Team, and Partnering with NI
He came up with one and said, hey. I’ve got this company called Arris, a r r I s, in Atlanta. And I know them well. Yep.
Yep. They joint yeah. Like, obviously, think you probably would check joint venture between Nortel and Antech. And so their whole thing was we’re making a box that goes on outside your house, cable comes in from the street, and then what comes out in your house is one, two, or four phone lines, and cable TV service and some higher speed internet versus that time, was like, wow, if you got like twenty whatever ks baud, you’re like, wow, this is pretty nice.
So it was definitely a step up. I remember when I first went in there, I know all the people that was talking to at that point, and it it between myself as Dactron and HP. So this is before HP spun off Agilent. And so they had an HPV system they were quoting, and and I looked at the bench that they were they said their whole purpose was to make an automated system for their production testing, which they were just, and the next year, gonna be moving that over to Mitsumi in Japan.
And then throughout then from there, throughout other facilities within Asia, but they’re gonna start the the pilot and initial first year in in in Japan. And so I looked at this bench full of equipment that’s, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty years old. You can’t even, you know, find replacements for some of it. You know, telephony test sets, the POTS, the plain old telephone system, you know, testing the phone lines, the RF, the back then, it was a HP, know, the old eighty five, ninety something, you know, spectrum analyzers Looking for noise and spurs and channel powers.
And so I think I have that one on a shelf out, by way.
It’s in my shop right now.
I can still get them on eBay.
I used one of my I used my last my last company, and I I will say, guys being RF, it’s like, man, I you started looking at the Fidelity of some of those things. You’re like, holy cow.
These are still really good pieces of equipment.
The the eighty five ninety is the RF version of the Tektronix four thousand six hundred sixty five analog oscilloscope. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I I used one just just last year and a half, two years at my old company, and and I couldn’t find the the the drivers that work for it. So I just wrote my own GPIB drivers for it.
There you go.
You know, it became a great piece of lab equipment that we could just sit on the bench and, you know, do some, you know, some measurements and cows with, etcetera.
Yeah. But you might be and it’s really interesting. Right?
Because in those days, it was the confluence of LabVIEW and GPIB that really made National Instruments grow and allowed business Sounds like it was founded.
You know, doctor T and I guess said, you know what? We’ve got a military contract. We’re gonna make this board that actually communicates with instruments.
I mean, but it it’s I think it’s easy to forget. Say, oh, they wanted to automate this thing. But it was in those days, it wasn’t so obvious that you automate anything. Mhmm. Right? Yeah.
So g Do remember what the original eight hundred number was for for NI?
No. What was it?
Four three three three four eight eight. It’s spelled I triple e four eighty eight.
I love it. It’s fantastic. Yep.
Yep. Well, clearly, it’s show clearly, it’s a podcast for geeks too. So Yeah. You know? Exactly. You have to appreciate that kind of stuff without it down. Yep.
Exactly.
So but that but back to that one story, it was, you know, so it was a long journey. Like, I I was used to, you know, these projects that might be small between maybe a couple of days to maybe a month. And this was a pretty significant program, a significant investment for ARRIS. And took months and months, like I said.
And finally, said, know what? I mean, I’m just gonna make a mock up of what this thing would look like. Lavie’s got a great user interface. So I took all of their tests, put on a front panel check boxes and test name and upper and lower limits, and here’s your values.
This is just spitting out simulated data and maybe some simulated screen captures of an RF spectrum. And got the PO, like, within two days.
So was anybody else doing anything like this, Bob?
No. I mean, that point, HPV and HP was coming in. Don’t know if they had a they probably didn’t have an integrator because, you know, I don’t traditionally, NI is in like, as Sean knows, mean, NI is big on partners. And so I don’t know that HP really had a partner. That’s really what closed the deal is. Charles brought in me as a partner, and I think it was the dilemma for them. Like, wow, this is essentially one guy, maybe a one guy plus a part time helper.
Do we trust that our production testing for what’s gonna be millions of these products is gonna work? And I think you’re just generating some simulated reports. I had almost no requirements. That just maybe some here’s the limits on so I could put those in there, but there’s very very little in requirements. And then, you know, once once that happened, you know, they they said, wow, this is this is amazing. This is this is you know, it may not be exactly, but this is, you know, close to what we’re looking for. And they said, let’s go.
Small Business vs Big Business: Innovation and Risk
So what you know is you what you say there about being a partner and a part timer.
Sean and Ariel and I talk about this all the time. It’s about that risk of, you know, do I work with a small business?
Yeah. Right.
Right? But all the great innovation all the great innovation comes from the small businesses. Oh, yeah. If anything, there’s an incentive in the larger businesses to kind of, you know, choke it down a little bit. Right? Because it because small businesses are nimble, they can they can really come, you know, come up with something and, you know, make a lightning strike pretty quickly.
Oh, yeah.
So we talk about there’s a there’s a risk. Oh, well, should I work with them? Because they only have certain number of people. But on the contrary, how can you afford not to? Right. The great things are coming out of these start up businesses, which are small, start as a one or a two or a three person shop, essentially.
Yeah.
How can you afford not to consider them? And Yeah. Indeed, look. The it keeps happening in the industry.
The small businesses keep coming. Small businesses keep growing, and new ones come along all the time. They get acquired. They evolve.
Somebody goes off and they say, oh, I have a great idea that I didn’t think of before, and boom, your next one is born. Yeah. So too often risk comes into that conversation, but I say, how can you risk not taking the risk, if you will?
So do you I’ve had so many discussions with, you know, you know, work colleagues, friends, family. My family like, some of my family calls, he’s gonna talk about this again. You know? It’s a you know, this isn’t our it’s our fabric, you know, DNA as a country.
You know? That’s that’s what I think has made, you know, America what what it is is that, you know, for all of the, you know, hundred billion dollar companies are bigger, they didn’t start off as a hundred billion dollar company. They started off as one person, maybe a small number of people with an idea. And being agile and being adaptable and going through some pain, Sean and I don’t have a whole lot of hair probably.
All three of us.
This is the three claw guy.
So that’s I think has really made our industry, the country, test management industry and the country really, really great.
It’s just small companies. Yeah. I think it’s that partnership between the small companies and the big companies too. Because and Doctor.
T had to take a risk on partnering with small businesses. Right? And then RS had also take a risk. So it’s interesting.
You know, we like to talk about technology, about the different kinds of technology complementing each other. But in this case, it’s the business structure. Right? The the the giant the and maybe maybe and I was willing to do it because they were still growing and they remembered what it was like to be two guys, and so maybe they were willing more willing to to work.
Yeah. I think I felt like being being involved with them from the early days, you know, I think when I started my company in nineteen ninety four, the alliance program was was fairly new. It it was maybe a couple years old, I think, at that point. I don’t think it it went back into the eighties.
But, you know, back in the eighties, they really know, NI wasn’t to the point where they probably needed. They’re just selling data acquisition cards. It really is once you start getting into, hey. There’s some bigger solutions that we just can’t can’t take on as a as a company that’s making these software and hardware products.
They they did something that was, know, I think at that time kind of revolutionary. And, yeah. Even to this day, you know, you know, Keysight may have channel partners, I just don’t see the same level of of, you know, network camaraderie. And I know Mhmm.
That’s what I was gonna say is, as you mentioned earlier in our pre show talk, the surface level aspect of just small businesses being able to meet better relational aspects in business. And that’s a huge win for working with a small business is Right. You seem to be able to have the more intimate relationships to grow business a lot quicker than if you’re working with a corporation.
Yeah. I think it’s interesting too, Ariel. Like, you look at small businesses, a lot of small businesses are populated by longtime employees. A strong small business has employees that last five, ten, fifteen years. Corporations, when you work with a giant corporation, those guys, they’re they’re there to move up the corporate ladder. So they’re continually moving into a new role every year or two.
Especially in today’s world, your turnover rate for working with millennials and Gen Z is high.
Yeah. So when people think about, you know, the quote unquote risk of working with a small business, it’s like, what’s the risk of working with an employee at a giant corporation who really his motivation is just to get his next So it’s interesting, I think, that in some ways, the small business is way better for the relationships in the long term.
Yeah. You’re right. I think a lot of us, small business, more entrepreneurial type, we don’t go into it to be quick. We’re to flip something really quick.
It’s going to be longer term. And you probably don’t do it to I mean, yes, it’d be great if you sold something and it made a lot of money. Did okay in the sale of Dacron, but it wasn’t like I think between that and the the brewery and other things, I put together some spreadsheet, you know, back about five years ago, said, you know, you have essentially, you know, pretty closely estimated what I paid employees in in my whole, you know, time as as an employer. It’s it’s somewhere at this point over, like, twenty five million dollars.
Fantastic.
And I only have twenty five million dollars in the bank.
That’s awesome. That’s that’s the best win story I’ve heard, you know? Making twenty five million dollars payroll is that that’s the American success story.
Yeah. Yeah. So so essentially from ninety four to now, so a little over thirty years, you know, I’ve I’ve paid employees twenty five million dollars, and I’m happy. I’m that know what? I’m Yeah.
That’s a lot of families you supported. Exactly.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. You know what? I’ve just honestly, from the bottom of my heart, I just I’m really grateful that you mentioned that, that you told it that way.
It just tells me something about the guy you are.
Honestly, in this world, as, you know, Ariel just stated about, you know, the way things are today, hyper focus on private equity and hyper focus on seed round funding and hyper growth and all these different things to hear someone talk about how they’ve been able to frankly you know, two guys, frankly, talk about how they’ve been able to take care of families, is yeah. Frankly, it just okay. I I love you guys forever, frankly.
Because I’m in this for the long haul. You know? I I’ve been in this industry for quite some time. I I’m in a privileged position to be able to help to take care of families and actually care about these people that work for us.
Yeah.
And I it’s not lost on me that, you know, I’m trying to make their life better, not just trying to, you know, sell cables and make a buck.
Yep. I’ll tell you another real real quick feel feel good story if you want. You know, the the tech downturn of two thousand, two thousand and one, and it just still just haunts me a little bit where two thousand and one things fell out so quickly that I was letting people go. I think in one day I went from thirty employees to eighteen.
And I had to let people go that they’d only been there for five months. One had just had a baby like three weeks before. Like, are you kidding me?
It just tore me up to have to do that. And I actually got a, as I posted on LinkedIn recently that I got this position at National Instruments, I had a guy that I’d let go. He worked at Dactron for five months in two thousand one, and he’s now a director at Humanoid, you know, robotics, you know, type company. And he said, hey.
I’ve just I’ve, you know, I’ve kept you know, kinda lurked back there noticing what you’re doing on LinkedIn. I just have to say, you know, that, you know, I can see now how hard that probably was for you to have to do that, you know, because now he’s in a position where he’s making decisions on who, you know, who who who comes in, who can stay, who who has to go. And he says, you know, it it it provided me the, you know, the the the kick to to do something different that I now love and I appreciate everything you did for me in that short time at Daktron. So yes, it’s stories like that.
It’s like you said, family. I almost look at my Daktron employees, my brewery employees, my I want to see them succeed. If they end up going somewhere, hopefully not that I let them go, but that they go somewhere else, I want to see them do better.
That’s fantastic.
I think when I was interviewing this last year, I have seventy five people at least that I know that either want them to start their own businesses, become, you know, higher ups at a company, just doing something really incredible. That that makes me happy. Yeah. Yeah.
That’s great. Yep.
Well, probably the greatest thing we can do, frankly, is to multiply ourselves. So if all I’m doing as an early entrepreneur, as a consultant, is trading one hour of my time for one hour of my billable rate, things are good, and I can make a living. But if you can find a way to parlay that into multiplying yourself, okay, and creating progeny. Right, and spawning something great. We think about it in the mentor mentee relationship, and it may not be that. It may be quite a bit more subtle than that, but you multiply yourselves in many ways.
Multiple employees, right, you’re able to multiply your efforts and do a greater good for your customers and more. And then each of those goes off to have a career. And some of them go to do great things as well, and we don’t realize the subtle influences we have on their lives. Your story comes from something, unfortunately, was a dark time for all of us. But yet, we can all do it and in the end smile because we got through it. And a lot of us came out better.
Yep. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.
So so you let’s talk about how you multiplied. Right? So you started it was so was it just you when you started the business?
Yeah. Was just me. It was just you. Yeah. Think the first three years was just myself pretty much working out of my Yeah. Second room or my basement.
And then you had to you just hired did you find a partner? Did you find employees? How did you make that move from solopreneur to a real business scale that?
The first person was part time. He was one of my grad assistant colleagues. We shared an office, I think, four or five of us. And he was really good at software and he had probably twenty hours a week that he could help out.
So went right to the technical help was your second employee.
Yep, exactly. And at this point I’m doing the marketing and the accounting and maybe sometimes not all that well. Might might might have been, you know, just well, I I should say. I I I didn’t strangle too long in sending the invoices.
Yeah. That’s that’s always a solopreneur’s struggle is sending out the invoices. Yeah.
Mhmm. So so really, I think when I brought second person on, he’s somebody that had graduated from Virginia Tech and, you know, that was working somewhere else and, you know, through the the National Instruments area sales manager, was able to say, hey, Matthew. Looks like he’s looking for, you know, for something else at this point. So he came he was my first full time employee.
Mhmm. And then, you know, at that point, it it I was, you know, a little extension of that earlier story. Once we got the production manufacturing test system for the capabilities, at that point it wasn’t even DOCSIS, it was more proprietary. And DOCSIS one point zero was just starting to come out.
So I spent almost all of nineteen ninety eight in Japan. I think I was over there thirteen times in nineteen ninety eight.
And is that because Iris had production in Japan or they were doing the standard setting in Japan?
Mitsumi was their contract manufacturer. They moved their once they got things proven out in Atlanta, they said, okay, we’re we’re getting a manufacturing line set up in Akita, Japan, far northern Japan. And I think I remember the first trip. They’re like, oh, yeah. We can we can do this with Bob remotely. And I thought that might have been the worst two weeks of my life because essentially, you know, being twelve, thirteen hours spending on the time zone, time you know, whether we’re daylight or not.
It’s you know, I would get done with my normal work or my school work at, you know, five, six o’clock, and then I’d start getting calls from Japan. And I was up all night long and trying to, you know, integrate. You know, you thought you got all the kinks worked out, then now you’re seeing things. Now there’s some of the first production units coming down the line. And two weeks, I was literally a zombie.
And that’s literally a phone call.
It was no Zoom.
It was a phone call and connections dropping and trying to it literally was, I think, I guess it’s not bad Actually connection to a system in Japan, it was lucky. Bring a special lab view, you bring a cursor across and like a few seconds later it moves.
Yes.
It was horrible. So I think for two weeks I probably got no more than about two hours of sleep night.
Yeah. Yeah.
When they came back, they they got things to a point. You know, we all got things to a point where it was, you know, somewhat going. And and I said, hey, guys. Next time, you’re you’re gonna have to send me over there.
You know? Yeah. It’s this is you know, I can’t do this. So they paid for me to go over there, and there was new products that were just coming out.
Now here’s the two line model, here’s the four line model, here’s indoor version. You name it. And I think within two years, they introduced probably at least a dozen, maybe to twenty different products.
So in those days, this was basically hourly consulting, right? You weren’t thinking about products, right? Is that right? And you were kind of funding.
You hire a person in, you just build them out, and so just cash flows it off.
Essentially, when I hired Matthew full time, he became there’s all those double edged swords where it’s like I couldn’t spend enough time training him to can’t Well, I’ll just send Matthew over to Japan. He wasn’t up the curve enough. He would handle a lot of the local geographical based systems integration type projects and did really well at it to the point where I didn’t have to worry about that piece. I’m in Japan communicating with him on these projects for a lot of nineteen ninety eight.
But it cash flowed itself, right? Because he was billable on day one, essentially, because you had started with a technical employee.
Don’t have get too far into numbers, I think ninety seven, I think, you know, as a business that was fifty five thousand in sales, and then nineteen ninety eight was two twenty, and then ninety nine was one point one million. This is a fantastic thousand was five point five million.
Bootstrapping to Industry Standard: DOCSIS and ARRIS
So it was a bootstrap success story, And so we’re at that point, now getting into probably like nineteen ninety nine, I’m able to start sending him over there.
I’m able to start working on more of the business type stuff, working on the marketing. We brought in somebody to help us with trade shows and you know, a full time full time marketing person that then, you know, got our all of our literature. It’s all standardized. Looks looks amazing product photography.
You know, now we have a full full on system, you know, production systems, and that’s when we started Harris started, hey, we’re working on a DOCSIS one point zero version of this particular product. And so some of the people spun off a little entity, so we worked for both of them. But that was really where, Okay, now we’re in a standards based instead of ARRIS proprietary kind of world.
Yeah. So I I think what I you didn’t say it, but I think probably what you did is you set your rates high enough that there was enough margin to pay for that marketing. Right? Exactly.
Because I think that the trap that I see a lot of solopreneurs and really small integrators fall into is they they set their rates so that they can support their family, but they can’t support any marketing or an admin person or accounting or anything. Mhmm. And so you just have a couple engineers who just, you know, bill hourly and their their margin’s just not high enough to to build a real company. But it sounds like you escaped that trap.
Yeah. No. Kind of what we did or and I’m not gonna say, like, myself on back, but essentially redesigned their system. You know, after seeing some of the the the headaches and hiccups the the first probably six months of integration, I I just went, you know, back to the drawing board. I said, you know, I’ve I’ve designed electronics, you know, down to the chip level, board level.
We designed boards that replaced twenty year old telephony test sets. Oh, this board, you send it a command and it starts a ringing signal that can then be measured by this cable modem or now going into DOCSIS type device.
RF stuff, that was about the same time that ‘ninety nine, two thousand, NI was releasing their first PXI RF. I think backing up there, PXI was the first systems were big desktop kind of computer mounted in a rack. And then when PXI came out, I was on the ground floor for good or bad. There was a lot of I could talk for days. There was controllers.
Might have worked great on a lab bench, but as soon as you start running them through production testing twenty four hours a day. We had one point where after redesigning the system and then now there’s PXI RF.
Having controllers dropping like flies in Asia, production line one is down, production line three is down. Oh my Great luck.
What was it you say? The lab ain’t the real world, Sean?
The lab ain’t the real world. Yeah. Exactly. Shocking. Yeah.
You know, and and I had I think there might be so one or two people left in those days that were, you know, you know, significant, you know, like, Bill Reid, I think he’s probably gone from NI now, but he told me years later, he says, if it weren’t for what Dactron was doing, we wouldn’t have been anywhere near where we are in PXI or RF.
That’s fantastic. Yeah. Wow. That’s a real that’s a great partner story for NI, a real success story.
We had some real real come to Jesus meetings at NI. I flew there a few times and it’s like, we’ve got they were in damage control mode, supplying spare controllers and now some trust is kinda, we had a few, not as much, but a few issues with the PXI RF, the initial five thousand six hundred sixty RF analyzers.
I remember it, yeah. I mean, in those days, just putting RF stuff near computer stuff was viewed as highly risky, right? There was this belief in the industry that like, oh, it’s RF. You can’t have switching power supplies.
You can’t put it too close to a CPU to I’m sure that was all all of well, probably at that time, Agilent’s pitched like, oh, you don’t wanna use this. It’s Yeah.
I’m sure they definitely did use some fun on that. Yeah.
I hope that’s not true because I literally just redesigned two test station, and I got a nice computer sitting right next to a great big Hanritsu VNA.
It’s about that far apart. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, ultimately what they did with the five thousand six hundred sixty and the five thousand six and sixty one, which came later, was they they got really, really good at machine CNC machined enclosures.
Yeah.
Sure. And so there’s still computer noise everywhere, but it was all shielded extremely well. So they they figured it out.
Of course.
But yeah. So I mean, at some point though, just to jump ahead a little bit, right, cable modems were obviously exploding in the world. Right? This was touch everyone almost everyone in the United States touched their lives, cable modems. Right? Because everybody had dial up and then went to DSL, DSL was supposed to be great, it turns out it was awesome. Or terrible, rather.
And then cable modems came out, DOCSIS, right? And this was like finally true broadband to the home.
I guess DOCSIS one point o and then, I don’t even know what else, DOCSIS five, whatever it is now.
It’s the s four point o now, yeah.
Yeah, okay.
But at some point, like, you started out as a consultant, essentially, billing hours with ARIS. Right? And then at some point though, I just know from my own information that Bactron became was it started selling a product, and it became the industry standard that tested all of the cable modems in the United States essentially, which is like an amazing achievement. Right?
What what was was it a slow transition where you went from a couple of guys consulting to the industry standard product, or did it was it a conscious choice that you made and you knew that fast?
Good question. And I think, about that time where production lines are rolling, they’re starting to work on DOCSIS one point zero designs. And I’ve been out to all the trade shows. So once again, we’re talking signal to noise.
Is this just something that these guys are working on, this particular customer, or is it something that’s a broader trend? And I can definitely tell that it was DOCSIS one point zero and then one point one. So we got involved with Cable Television Labs. It’s now Curio out in Lewisville, Colorado.
They were the ones that were the one working on the DOCSIS standard.
So Yeah, they were like a nonprofit industry consortium, basically.
Exactly. So they essentially, if you wanted to have a cable modem or modem modem based device in a house in the US, it had to have a CableLabs sticker on it. CableLabs are Right.
Yeah. That’s a big ultimate monopoly.
Yeah, it was.
So you kind of wrote on that monopoly status a little bit, right? You say, hey, if these guys own the market, we want to be associated with them. Was that the basic idea?
Really I mean, I’ve you know, so was that all these user forums at CableLabs, you know, they’d have them a quarter. And, you know, we had some internal development going on. So now, yes, the the you know, we’re putting out systems now with great margin because we went from having all this old refurbished equipment that would often break and it might have cost one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars to find all this equipment and going to PXI. And I can sell systems for one hundred thousand think we’re selling for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars a test station and making great margins.
Making almost no margin on the ones that were using all the old refurbished equipment. So it was actually able to fund that was the internal generation of once you get past a certain margin and you’re doing enough of them, it’s like that really helps the funding on other things going on. We said development into DOCSIS one point zero and one point one. So we already had LabVIEW and test stand development going for we have the whole DOCSIS standard because we’re part of this user forum, all the NDAs and all that.
So we’re working on things. And then we knew at that point Agilent had a two bay test rack. And they’re kind of like the ones that were well, they weren’t the standard yet, but you can see that that was the direction it was going. And I remember having an event where CableLabs had Dactron, Ericsson, and Agilent.
Wow. All with their testing.
So here so and how many people were you at this point? I think at this point, we were we were now probably fifteen to twenty twenty So this is a twenty person company going up against Agilent Keysight, originally HP, the the clear, you know, dominant player in the RF space.
Yep. Was that intimidating?
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We’re like at that point even at that point, it was over a billion dollar company. Like, okay. We had, you know, like, a few million dollars in sales this year. Yeah.
Right. Right. Right.
Yeah. Right.
And and so Everybody loves a Dave and Goliath story.
Oh, Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it’s really what it is.
I’m I’m proud to say, you know, that that on the production test system displaced HP. And then when it came to the DOCSIS, you know, displaced Agilent. And I remember being there at that event and also there was starting to work on DOCSIS two point zero. And I remember the guy that’s manning the Agilent test station and he said, Yeah, DOCSIS two point zero will never fly. We’re not proceeding on it.
Oh, wow. So they made a real strategic plunder there.
They did.
And at the same time, in my back pocket, I’m saying, you know what, through all of this interaction and networking, I’m working with somebody that I did another production test system for their products. They went to a place called Terion in the San Francisco Bay Area, And they were the ones that had the only DOCSIS two point zero chip in the CMTS and then the cable modem. So we already had an MOU joint development system. We’re working on newest NI stuff, all the newest interfaces, all the newest software. And essentially when DOCSIS two point zero was released, we jointly announced that we have they have the products and we have the test system. So it was pretty amazing. And we took the system out to CableLabs.
The CTO, he was kind of on loan from Comcast. He listened to the presentation. He says, you guys go out in the hallway. And five minutes later, comes out goes, I can’t talk to my people. He goes, the system you’re demoing here right now, you’re not leaving until it’s in our lab. And we wanna buy you no more.
Wow. That’s an awesome story. I love that story. Uh-huh. That’s fantastic. So you had a real champion in Comcast. That that was kind of your really I mean, I guess Iris was your first big win, but Comcast was the one that really pushed you into product.
There’s a bit a kind of like shakeup at CableLabs back in the two thousand to two thousand and one timeframe where they brought in some people from industry to because it probably wasn’t being managed as well as it should. And so they brought in some heavy hitters, one being the CTO from Comcast. He ran CableLabs for several years.
And he was the one that just two years before, couldn’t corner him at the trade shows. And now we had something that’s like, Okay, we have you know, an actual know, also got a DOCSIS two point o test system.
So so you you you really won that not based on the relationship with Comcast, but really just on product functionality.
Right. We, you know, we’re we’re in all those user meetings. We’re we’re actually developing to that standard word. And with the MOU, it kinda gave us a chance.
We didn’t make any money on that first project with Taryon, but it wasn’t about making the money. Was saying, you know what? This company is going to have with us working together, they are going to have the first DOCSIS two point zero head end and CPE product. We’re going have the test system to test that, then differentiate yourself.
So do you think the story would have turned out differently if Keysight said, we’re all in on DOCSIS two?
Honestly, think so. Think this comes down to what we talked about earlier, being the agile, smaller company. Mhmm. We we were able to crank out, you know, not trivializing it, but, you know, with probably five people working on five to seven people working on DOCSIS two point o, we were we were able to get, you know, the bulk of things done in six months. You know? It would’ve taken them years. Yeah.
You know, it’s like Well, and we think of them we think of that as a as a strategic error potentially, but, you know, as a missed opportunity.
But there’s also the other side of that. It’s it’s quite possible. They looked at it from a strategy perspective, and they said, okay.
We’re not gonna be able to tackle this in the time frame that the market needs it. Somebody’s gonna go eat our lunch before we can even make it. Mhmm. Okay?
And so does it even make sense to invest all of this money? Yeah. Now it might very well have been a strategic error. They might have missed something very, very big because Lord knows they have the resources.
But with those resources comes, an abundance of slow. Yeah. And they might not be able to tackle it.
If I put my business hat on, I’d I’d say, yeah, they they probably did the right thing because, you know, based on on their structure, even at that time, it would have taken, you know, teams of people, lots of mean, had everything. If you start doing the projected P and L on that, you’re like, wow, we’re going to spend five times more than we’re going to get out of this over the next three, four, five years.
It just wasn’t probably a business decision they could justify.
Whereas if you’re looking at it, say, you know what? If we can sell a DOCSIS two point zero test system for four hundred, five hundred thousand dollars, and we make sixty, seventy percent margin on it, we’re going to do it.
Yeah. That’s a lot of money for a fifty person business.
Right.
Right.
It the glaring difference between the small medium enterprise and the large enterprise.
Yeah. Yeah.
They’re coming at life and their business from very, very, very different perspectives in a very, very, very different set of constraints.
Right.
And sometimes we forget because we look through business and life through our own lens that the view is very different from the other side.
Strategic Growth, Surviving Downturns, and Acquisition
Right. Yeah. At what point did you say, no more consulting. We’re not doing that anymore?
Did that ever happen?
Say something. No consulting. No more consulting.
Yeah. That that actually we We had probably out of, I’d say maybe in the two thousand to two thousand one timeframe, kind of think before things started, the bottom started falling out of the tech industry. We said, look, we’re making so much more margin on standardizing on And we actually had some of our own PXI products we designed.
They weren’t something you’d go People were going to order dozens of them or anything like that, but they definitely were And we did that as in support of our systems.
But anyways, it just became more of I hate to say a drag, but you start looking at the finances of it. It’s like, I’ve got one person that’s a very talented engineer that’s working on a project that’s making decent hourly consulting rate, but I sure need them on what they could actually provide for this new area with DOCSIS one point zero, two point zero, maybe some of products we’re working on. It was kind of night and day.
So the opportunity cost of having a talent that was on a lower margin project was what really drove you to saying I’m more of that. Right.
Yeah. Yeah, I’d say after about, pretty much after two thousand and one, we probably didn’t do, I think we might have done one, probably got convinced to do one kind of time and materials type project and said, I shouldn’t have done that. Not that we lost money, but there’s always that, was it scoped out right?
The company be paying for that? Should we be paying for that? And at the end of day, wasn’t what we could be making profit wise and just probably the excitement. I think some of the people who work on those were like, you know, I’d rather be working on the cools.
I think it’s gonna generate all the excitement and, you know, we’re out at trade shows on and, you know Well, the cool thing is what gets all the gets all the glory in in the, you know, stories and history is, right, what were these great achievements that I had and these great things that I adopted?
It’s the thing that happens in the background that nobody knows about, about all the things that we in the entrepreneurial, you know, journey quietly close or end. Right. Right? It it’s it’s what is the great thing that I did? Well, honestly, some of the greatest successes are when we said, okay. Let’s focus.
Didn’t stop. Yeah.
Let’s focus on the things that make the most sense for us where we are today.
Yep. That might seem trivial.
I mean, like, the the simple question that Sean asked, it was I mean, that was a tough decision for me.
It’s a very tough decision. Well, the thing about hourly the thing about hourly rates, right, where hourly consulting is it’s so safe. You show up, you do the work, you get paid. It’s like having a job.
Right.
Right? And when you go to products, there is no guarantee that anybody’s gonna buy that thing ever again. Obviously, had momentum, so I think I imagine momentum made your decision easier. Right.
If the product side was just growing at a smaller pace, but it was growing so fast, like it literally was hair on fire sometimes, like, oh my gosh, we have to be ready for this event. We have to have this this way, we’re going have to hire more people.
And managing that was was not trivial. You know, it was so much, you know, so much disparity. You know, probably if things were a little bit different, I might have said, you know what? We we might have still have a team of, you know, four or five people that’s gonna work on these type of cool, you know, time materials projects that are know, might be more geographic based. Because it’s not now that there was financially, still made sense. I think we were charging more per hour at that point.
By and large, you’re gonna get paid for most of your time. So it wasn’t a bad financial thing.
Just you know, the opportunity cost is saying, like, I can’t I don’t even have time to sit down and, you know Yeah.
Figure out who who we’re gonna hire. You know? Yeah.
So so so and you’re still bootstrapped at this point from when right?
Because you didn’t go out and get funding to hire employees or anything like that?
No. We never we never brought in external funding. Yep. That’s awesome. Amazing.
Well, and bootstrapping has become en vogue in twenty twenty five.
Don’t think they even used the word bootstrapping back then. I think you just called it building a business.
Yeah. Exactly. It’s not just the way it was.
Yeah.
And then and then the the the the bright shiny lights of, you know, VCs.
Oh god. Remember that? Yeah. The bright shiny VC light at the beginning of, the twenty first century, you know, and now PE and all these different things. And but there’s a lot of evangelism on what is now properly known as bootstrapping, right now, right today, and that sometimes the benefits definitely do not outweigh the, you know, the costs in in taking that fast money, if you will.
Yep. So but I think what’s interesting now, just jumping ahead a little bit because I know your story, you know, when you ultimately had to position yourself for an exit, and it wasn’t to PE in those days, it was to a related company. But I don’t to put words in your mouth, I imagine if you were still doing consulting that may have been a net negative when you went to sell the company.
I don’t know if I would say a net negative, but they wouldn’t have been as compelling a story.
Right. For sure.
You know? And so, you know, I’d say we we had some some dark times between two thousand one and two thousand five.
There was Mhmm.
You know, we went so far in the hole. You know, personally had had went, you know, significantly in debt to try to, you know, keep four or five people there.
We were at the point where I think for two years up until maybe mid two thousand and three that probably every payroll I was like, am I going to get paid for this customer?
Giving them a two percent discount for net ten versus net thirty. Then trying to manage that was incredibly stressful. Got through it. We finally back in the black in two thousand and five.
So it took a few years. But by doing that, we had stuff that people needed. And I’d say that in two thousand and six, I said, Okay, my goal is to sell the company in three years. And that was three years and three months.
And there’s a whole different phase at that point of saying, okay, well, the good and bad. Mean, it’s like part of it is you’re going have to do things that, you know, I don’t wanna call it window dressing, you know, but it’s, know, I’ve gotta hire a VP of sales. I’ve gotta hire a VP of marketing. I’ve gotta have, know, chief engineer.
If it’s People need titles.
People are gonna try to, you know, look at it and say, well, it’s just Bob.
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
That that’s not, know, what I brought to it, but that’s Everybody in the company is a VP.
Right? Yeah. Exactly. Right.
So now one of the things I should mention along there, that same CTO at Comcast because we made their operations so much more efficient. In two thousand and six, he he he came to me and said, hey, Bob, I think you might wanna know that because one of the key suppliers of of RF protocol analyzer, they’re based right they they were based right there in Columbia, Maryland.
He he said their their British parent company is wanting to divest of their you know, they bought this company, like, five years before. And he said, may wanna start, you know, because at this point, there was six or seven people left of the company. It had already started. And, so I started talking with the person that was the boots on the ground managing the operation in Colombia. And we ended up acquiring that company for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash in late two thousand and six. And that was the DOCSIS RF protocol analyzer that Iverna to this day is still making I think I figured that they’ve probably made sixty million dollars on that particular product alone.
So that two fifty ks acquisition allowed you to really control the whole test rack for the whole market.
Yeah. Essentially, that test rack, we had got to the point where with NIPXI, a lot of our own boards and all that, there was no Tektronix. There was no Keysight. At that point, was Agilent. There’s nothing I think we even had some replacement for smart bits for all the packet type stuff. One thing we didn’t have was the RF protocol analyzer. And if that entity would have said, the bridge company is like, yeah, we’re done, that’s a little bit they were the point where like, we’re just going to close the door and throw the stuff in the trash.
The five or six people remaining go home. And if that would have happened, that’s why think why the CTO at Comcast said, hey, this isn’t good. We use these in our lab. We’re using these in the test systems to test the full that’s the only way to tell whether the head end sends something and it’s not processed correctly or vice versa.
You you might be able use it for other nefarious purposes too, but, you know You know what I love about this, though, Bob?
It’s it’s just it’s so perfect with what we were talking about earlier. A small business saved, right, Comcast, when the large business said, oh, this this little protocol thing is we don’t care about that.
We need to get rid of that.
Right? And so the real risk to Comcast was was not the small business. You saved him. It it was the giant corporation that said, this is peanuts.
We can’t be bothered. That’s you know, I see that I see that in our business too. I tell customers, hey, look, man, you know, our business, this is it. We are totally all in on this thing.
It’s not penis to us.
That’s a Bigger company wouldn’t even have touched it.
For us, the two fifty ks investment. And I knew by kicking the tires and going up there looking at inventory, looking at people, these are the people that are going to stay, going give them a pretty decent salary to keep going on the DOCSIS two point zero protocol analyzer. But with the inventory they already had with one point zero and one point one products, I’m like, this would be a no brainer. We made a return on investment in two months.
That’s fantastic. That’s the inventory really may work. Because so I you know, I’ve been in that kind of situation where I’ve looked at businesses too, you go in there and there’s no inventory, and you see five employees, and you’re like, so this is an immediate liability because as soon as I buy this company, I have to make payroll in two weeks and there’s no order backlog.
And by inventory.
And by inventory.
And by inventory.
So it’s interesting, know, inventory is Oh, God, I think small businesses have such a complicated relationship with inventory. But in this case, is what allowed that business to continue, which is Yeah.
If there would have been no inventory, even as a small business, it just would have made financial sense. And I knew, like adding up some pretty high end senior FPGA design engineer salaries. And I knew, because we had access to we were talking with the same customers and we knew, hey, there’s already six sales right here, close within the first month.
That order backlog or that sales pipeline and inventory, that’s what you need to make something That’s part of the due diligence, had to go in and really start understanding where, let’s look at your pipeline and see where things are at.
Is it real that smoke and mirrors, and that they said, okay. You know what? And I because it’s the same industry, you know, I knew, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Motorola is going to buy three of these, you know.
And you were probably the only person in the United States that was actually qualified to value that company. To to to right? To value the sales pipeline and the inventory.
There’s probably nobody else in the country that’s Likely.
Except for Yeah.
All I know is I can hear misguided CFOs all across the country shuddering at this entire conversation about that value of the inventory.
Yes. No doubt. For sure.
For sure. Alright.
Well, I’ll tell you what.
Frankly, I found this to be super super incredible. What I I I wanna take this somewhere just a little left field.
Yeah.
Building a Top Brewpub and Final Reflections
You piqued my interest. What about the brew pub?
I’m Oh my god.
Like, that I mean, what what is it was this your baby? Was this you started brewing beer? Did you invest with someone? What is this side business that you had?
This was a the crazy story. You know? It I’ve been brewing since actually, when I went went worked at Medtronic, a friend that I went to Iowa State with, we both worked there, said, hey, let’s try this new thing called homebrewing. First batch, not so good, it took maybe like three or four batches.
And back then, craft beer wasn’t what it was today. And it’s like, we can make better beer than we can buy in the store. And so I did that for, you know, like I said, between ninety ninety three and two thousand nine, two thousand ten when when this all started to happen, you know, and won home brewing awards, been to all the the home brewing conferences. And, you know, the kind of fortuitous thing of, like, you know, selling the company and having time and money on the not so distant horizon said, Okay, let’s do this.
And I’d kick the tires.
Essentially, the broker gave me the keys and I spent nine months going through that property with contractors, architects, plans, business case, best to worst case, ended up in lots of neighborhood because it was not able to happen in our neighborhood. Had to work with people to get the zoning done and neighborhood approvals and all that. So lots of stuff behind the scenes.
Was a little bit of leap of faith. I think it was an educated leap of faith.
I didn’t think that it was going to it actually ended up being like, let’s say, after the first six months, ended up being more successful than I thought it would be. And a lot of that was just being out there. I had probably at that point been to one thousand different breweries and brew pubs and know what works and kind of applying a little bit of engineering mindset. I know if I look at these eighty traditional styles of beer, probably if a table walks in, they can probably break them down into eight different ones, malty or hoppy or light or sour or whatever.
And so we said we’re going to have something that anybody that wants beer and then actually, did cocktails and wines and all that, some award winning type stuff on that side. But said, we’re gonna have something for everybody when they come in here. And then the food was all paired to go with the different types of libations and all from Georgia, local farms as much as possible. And so it was just it was this this really cool story of, you know what?
You know, did all the due diligence and, you know, kinda, you know, kinda makes this work. My goal was to be a top five US brew pub in the first, I think I think was five years, I think I was saying. We hit we hit that at five at three years.
That’s incredible.
Three years in. If you look at beer advocate, rate beer untapped, if you you kinda, you know, add up an average all the scores on those, and I was doing that every year. And, you know, we were right there at number five after three years.
Well, at ten thirty eastern, I assure you this is tea. But you’ve got me feeling like I really want a nice multi beer here at this hour of the morning. But I think what I’m hearing is something very, very similar in when you started this business to when you started Dactron. You got in early.
Your brain was looking forward. Right. Your brain wasn’t, well, I’ve got these skills. I guess I might as well get in business.
What the hell? Right. It was, I’m looking forward. I see something. Oh, and I happen to have these skills, and it’s about doing something different and doing something forward looking.
And, you know, I think by the time you get out into the world where they start writing a plethora of articles and they say, is it too late to get into the brew pub business in twenty twenty five? No. It’s not too late. By the time you see a whole bunch of those on, you know, insert whatever your industry is, it’s probably too late.
Yeah. Right.
Right? You’re not being forward looking. You’re like, oh, I have this idea in in hindsight. And everybody else is doing great. I guess I will too.
Yeah.
And think that’s a great strategy note for us to really consider.
Yeah. And you have to keep in mind that the two thousand ten to two thousand fifteen time frame roughly was just, you know, the golden age for craft beer.
Not that it’s not exciting anymore, but now and I’m big into data, obviously. So the Brewers Association, they kind of oversees all the US breweries, brew pubs. They have a chief economist, PhD, and he slices and dices the data every year. And you can see the trends that based on compared now to, say, twenty fourteen, where craft beer was, like, in the golden age, now people are they’re still drinking the same amount, but they’re drinking a different mix. And he’s got it diced down into, here’s under thirty, here’s thirty to forty five, here’s and so whether it be, you know, cocktails or spirits or beer or, you know, seltzers, you know, there’s there’s so many things that that that, you know, you have to be on top of that, and that’s where, you know, if I was gonna start with a day, it’d be a whole different mix. It wouldn’t be, you know, one hundred percent beer focused. There’d be some different things in there too.
Canned cocktails. Who knew?
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Hey. The the canned, the canned, old fashioneds that they used to give on Delta, those are pretty good.
There you go. Yeah. There you go. Now if only we could make them smoked.
Oh. Yeah.
Anyway.
Well, I would like to thank you very much for joining us. Do you have any, like, last words, any last advice? If you could just, like, pick one thing just to tell people who are they might be struggling, they might be considering starting their own business, or they might be looking in a later stage of their business where they wanna sell it or something to that effect or whatever their exit plan is. What thoughts do you have for folks?
Yeah. I’d say, you know, if, you know, if you’ve got a business, you know, being being I can obviously tell through listen to this that, you know, I’m big on on due diligence. You know? Maybe sometimes maybe to a fault.
You know? Like, I I wanna make sure, you know, you can’t always be guaranteed that that the move you’re gonna make, whether it’s something simple within your company or even a significant selling, is going to be the right decision. But if you come through and say, I did my due diligence. I did as best I can.
Maybe out of maybe we’ll try ten times, but out of ten times, maybe you’ll be successful on seven of those.
And there’s a couple of things I did along the way. It’s like, well, you know what? We did the best we could. That was a development idea, a product idea that just is not going to do what we thought it did.
And understanding when to be able to say, all right, we have to we have to cut ties with that. And that kind of maybe sounds unemotional, but because, hey, this is my product, my babies, or my people. Sometimes you have to make some tough decisions. And don’t don’t run it based on just emotion.
Hey, I’ve got to see this product through.
At the end of the day, you look at it from a business perspective. Is it going to make sense to keep doing it? So I’d say as far as if your goal is to sell your business, surround yourself with good people, make sure that you’ve got the right team, and don’t be afraid to make changes to get that right team. And it’s a delicate balance.
If you go out there and say, Hey, exaggerating, I put my business for sale in Facebook Marketplace, You’re probably not gonna you’re probably not gonna be happy with the results. You know? But that’s where networking and just, you know, the the way it happened for me was just some very casual conversations. You know?
Like, it’s almost like, is he is he kinda going the direction I think he’s going? And he’s probably saying the same thing about me. You know? And and, you know, it took, you know, probably a year and a half of just kinda seeing each other at events and talk about that stuff and and the timing, you know, end up being just right for both of us.
So, you know, if you’re and I had a three year window, that’s when I said, you know, I I’d like to sell my company in three You know? And so during that time, I’m starting to, you know, instead of, you know, attending the technical sessions at a conference, I’m actually, you know, you know, hey, I wanna talk to this guy, this guy, this girl. You know? It’s like Mhmm.
You know, there’s different different goals. So just don’t be afraid. Yeah. You know?
You’re not always gonna make the right decision, but, you know, if you can go through the process kind of the process that I talked about with these different, you know, different things this last hour and a half, at least we say, I gave it my best shots.
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Well, for my amazing RF Frontiers team, your takeaways? What have you got for me?
Well, I think I think Bob is very product focused. Right? So he did it with with DATTRON and then he did it again with the with the Brew Club. Very focused on delivering exactly the right product features for a very specific set of customers. Right?
That that was my takeaway. And also, think the big takeaway is like, what that it is possible for a fifteen, twenty person company to beat Keysight, a billion or two billion dollar company or whatever they are. Absolutely.
That’s a real inspirational story. And then when you couple that with, you know, with with Bob’s comment earlier about, you know, spending twenty five million dollars or supporting families with through twenty five million dollars of payroll, it’s it’s an all American success story. It’s fantastic.
Amen. Yeah. Eri, you got any takeaways?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I love the emotional relational aspect of everything. So even just what you just said, Bob, about, you know, if you’re doing making a choice that’s difficult, being able to just look back and say, okay. Well, I did this, and it didn’t work, but that’s okay moving forward versus just focusing on the negative of how it didn’t work out. I think that happens a lot, and you get things get overanalyzed and being able to just give the facts of what you did, making sure you did it to your best, but then being able to move forward and go to the next step.
Mhmm. I think a lot of people lack that ability, and then they spend a lot of time dwelling on Yep. And analyzing things that don’t need to be. I think that’s a really something that I know myself I do all the time.
So being able to move forward good.
Well, I’d like to offer something deep and wonderful like my cohosts here, but mine’s very shallow, frankly. I’ve been able to do some great things in my career. I’ve been able to rub elbows with some people who are truly the greats, names that folks will never know.
I never in a million years dreamed that I would be meeting one of the guys who was partially responsible and on the team for putting an end to that god awful dial up modem sound that we all have ringing in our ears if we’re old enough and have enough Exactly. Missing hair. Yes. So thank you for putting it into that, Bob. Yes. I appreciate your contribution.
Dial up.
Okay? There you go. I’ll stop.
There you go.
I feel like I wish I had the sound effect loaded loaded in my soundboard here. So with that said, folks, thank you so much for joining us. Bob, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. I know I speak on behalf of my cohosts here.
Thank you so much for joining us. You’ve got a great story or stories as it were. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Until the next time on RF Frontiers.
Folks, dream big.
