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Like many entrepreneurs, ASI’s President and CEO, Mel Torrie, is deeply committed to his chosen industry. Through the efforts of Mel and a skilled team of robotics engineers, software developers, and other professionals, ASI has grown from a startup to a world leader in unmanned vehicle systems. Despite ASI’s success, Mel has not forgotten his roots or commitment as an entrepreneur. He is a current member of the Cache Entrepreneurial Council and the Cache Chamber of Commerce, both organizations that support local businesses.
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He is dedicated to principles that build companies and employees the right way. Below, Mel shares some of his thoughts about how to develop a strong start-up robotics company.
It is rare that I’ve found someone who is a proponent of the same principles I feel are critical to growing a great robotics company. Mark Cuban’s 12 Rules for Start-ups captures the keys to success better than I can. Here are his 12 Rules and my corresponding thoughts on each one.
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1. “Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love.” Mel: My biggest pet peeve is hearing young people choose a career for the money, lifestyle, or prestige instead of for the passion it feeds. You can make any amount of money you want by consistently doing the non-urgent, important tasks that will raise you to the top of your industry. Beyond a career, if you are crazy enough to start your own business then for your sanity and chance of success, you have to choose something that you love.
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2. “If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.” Mel: I have been disillusioned by the majority of business-building books because they focus on building what will grow fast, sell quickly, and prepare you for the next. You shouldn’t want to get out. You should want to build something of enduring quality that you want to stay at. One that maintains the culture, long range perspective (not just next quarter), and lifetime customer loyalty. One that you’d want to shuffle in at the age of 74 and solder something up in the lab.
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3. “Hire people who you think will love working there.” Mel: Back to the passion again. Your height of success will be determined by the things that drive your people. If it’s just a job and they live for the paycheck and the weekends, you are not going to get half the “change the world” potential your competitors will have.
4. “Sales Cure All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales.” Mel: Unfortunately, I know this all too well from the wrong side of the line. As a bootstrapping company, we’ve had to leverage services and research grants to develop IP and product. It’s a long road, and sadly robotics research is one of the first things cut in a recession. The recession pounded this lesson home and helped change our focus from being profitable on projects to shortening the time to product sales. We still have a ways to go.
5. “Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but aren’t as expensive to pay.” Mel: A recession is a great excuse to veer from your hedgehog, i.e. what you do well. But we came through staying pretty true to our core, just not charging as much as we’d like. Paul Lewis, our Director of Software Development, says: “You get what you pay for in software.” That means a person that is worth twice the money easily produces twice the results with a correlated level of quality. Note I said worth twice, not demanding twice!
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[col]6. “An espresso machine? Are you kidding me? Coffee is for closers. Sodas are free. Lunch is a chance to get out of the office and talk. There are 24 hours in a day, and if people like their jobs, they will find ways to use as much of it as possible to do their jobs.” Mel: Our proving ground facility is in the middle of nowhere (we wouldn’t want to run over a house with a robotic mining truck), and so this isn’t much of an issue for us. Since we’re talking about food I should mention that I’m a firm believer in it. We provide a weekly lunch for employees, and we talk about what’s celebration-worthy in the week, cover safety training, sales forecasts, and how products and project revenues contribute to the monthly P&Ls and the quarterly bonus. We practice the open book approach so that everyone knows the company’s health and how their efforts contribute to the bottom line. This is coupled with my commitment that as the company does well they should proportionately benefit too via the quarterly product profit bonus.
7. “No offices.” Mel: When we started building our new office overlooking Cache Valley and Wellsville mountain range, I envisioned a large corner office with Manhattan style full windows. Slowly but surely the reality set it that there was no room for that in our culture. We decided to put a meeting room upstairs and a conference room downstairs, and I got a small office with a two and a half foot window.
We’ve always had an open, bullpen-like working area. As we’ve grown over the last 12 years, new people attempted to raise up partitions in the name of focus and effectiveness, only to have our culture bring them down just as quickly for better communication and teamwork.
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8. “As far as technology, go with what you know.” Mel: I was offered a job as a CEO right out of college for an electronics company that had dabbled in robotics. I was told that even if it was garbage can lids, if it made money that was what I was to build… I was so close to taking that job but I’m sure glad I didn’t. The team we were assembling was passionate about robotics, understood the technology behind robotics, and believed in the future of the industry. Hard times are when you find out how true you are to your declarations, and the recession definitely tested us. Instead of seeking out the engineering services work that was abundant (the company that was willing to make garbage can lids had their best year as we were experiencing our worst), we held to robotics, and now it’s paying off.
9. “Keep the organization flat.” Mel: There is always a temptation to want to look like the big dogs by having all the management and CxO’s roles filled. We’ve avoided that and may actually be a little too flat since growth in a technology firm naturally seems to prioritize the hiring of technology contributors to fill capacity gaps vs. the administrative roles.
10. “Never buy swag.” Mel: We never could afford swag.
11. “Never hire a PR firm.” Mel: As some of our competitors announced their new marketing firm partnerships it was tempting to reconsider our choice to bootstrap our marketing internally.
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We came dangerously close in 2010 as we conducted a search throughout Utah for the firm that could take us to the “next level.” Fortunately, Chris Brown, our VP of Business Development, and I had lunch with Chris Condie who’d been involved with many of the marketing firms down in Salt Lake City. He strongly encouraged us to believe in our own knowledge of our industry and to spend our money on internal resources. I believe it was a wise move.
12. “Make the job fun for employees.” Mel: I can’t honestly answer how well we’ve done on this. Hard times were not always fun times, and it seemed counter-intuitive to have celebrations and perks following a layoff. In general though, people seem happy to be here, and we were blessed that many who left us in 2010 have rejoined the company. That’s probably the best indicator of how well we’re doing.
In general, I believe Mark Cuban has identified some basics that any robotics company would do well to incorporate. We have a long way to go but we’re enjoying the journey.
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