Business Person of the Year Finalists
Ryzex CEO Rud Browne has turned a gap in the
market into a multi-million dollar industry.
Rud Browne’s recipe for success began in 1989 with just two ingredients: one good idea and $30,000 of working capital. His company The Ryzex Group, which specializes in the repair and resale of new and refurbished barcode, radio-frequency identification and wireless data collection equipment, now employs more than 300 people in five countries, and last year generated $57 million in revenue.
Browne was born and raised in Australia, and after a career in business consulting that brought him to Canada, he said he found himself at a turning point.
“In 1988, I turned 30, got married, my contract in Canada finished and my visa expired,” he said. “Legally I couldn’t work for six months while I waited for a new visa, so I spent that time planning out what I wanted to do for the next 50 years of my life.”
That was when Browne came up with an idea that not only coupled two of his interests, but also was, at the time, a model for a business with no competition and a 90 percent profit margin.
“A large part of it was marrying one thing I had always been good at -– recognizing the value in something that others might see as junk – with something where I had real technical knowledge,” he said.
Imagine you are running a warehouse that relies heavily on bar code scanning for keeping track of inventory. Your equipment starts to get old, so you call the vendor to ask for repairs or replacement. Browne said that often, the answer you get is, “We don’t stock that anymore, but we’d be happy to upgrade you to our new system.” Depending on your need, the cost attached to that in terms of purchasing and installing new equipment and the retraining of staff can be more than you can afford. That’s where Browne comes in. Ryzex can repair existing equipment from its mammoth inventory of legacy products.
Browne speaks regularly with Western Washington University business students, and said he uses these opportunities to preach exactly what he has practiced so successfully.
He uses a simple graphic model to demonstrate his theories for both personal and professional success. Both rely on one simple premise: success depends solely on the convergence of passion and talent. If either is deficient, the personal result is lack of fulfillment, and the professional result is failure, or at the very least, mediocrity.
In other words, the key is to find something that you are both good at and passionate about.
“It’s crucial – as early in life as possible – to figure out what your passions are,” he said. “If you’re connected to it, you’ll be good at it, and if you’re good at it, the money will take care of itself.”
Rivetek CEO Robin Halliday says it’s
important to have a mentor.
Robin Halliday, CEO, Rivetek, Inc., a subsidiary of DIS Corporation
When Robin Halliday visits schools to talk to students about career choices, she tells them that one of the most important components in finding happiness and fulfillment in a career is following your passions, not just your prudence. Her own winding path to success is the example she uses to explain her philosophy.
“During and after completing my Masters in psychology at (Western Washington University), I had the opportunity to teach statistics courses and work on several research grant projects,” she said. “Both teaching and research interested me more than my original plans toward psychiatry. I also had my first exposure to computers during my research projects; I decided I would look for a part-time computer-related job before continuing on with my education, and then teaching.”
As it turned out, Halliday was able to pursue both of these new interests when she got a job with Dealer Information Systems Corporation in 1980. DIS provides software and systems for agricultural and construction equipment dealers.
“My first responsibility (with DIS) was teaching businesses how to use the DIS business system in their various departments,” she said. “Over the next 20 years, I had an opportunity to work in almost every department, and took positions of leadership early on.”
Halliday is now chief executive officer for Rivetek, Inc., a company she started in 2001 when Bob Brim, her boss and longtime mentor at DIS, gave her and Rivetek President John Gaven an opportunity to spin off some products and personnel to expand beyond the agriculture and construction markets.
“We had developed some abilities in communications that had a broader market than the equipment dealer market,” Brim said. “So we decided to spin off a subsidiary where that would be the focus. I asked Robin to head it because she had such broad experience in management. She’s done extremely well in a tough market.”
Less than four years later, Rivetek has nine employees, 12 products and 17 major contracts. Some of its larger accounts include KOA Campgrounds, CAMIS, Kubota, Volvo, Monsanto, Ward Trucking, Spacenet and MCI. Rivetek employees, many of whom are IBM and Cisco certified, have a collective experience of 130 years and currently serve a total of 238 customers.
Halliday describes her business philosophy as “pretty basic.”
“Listen carefully to your customers and learn about their needs,” she said. “Deliver quality products and services that meet their needs, but be realistic about what you can provide. Be honest, fair and accountable to them, and don’t ever take them for granted.”
She said she thinks about her management style in much the same way.
“I surround myself with great, capable people,” she said. “I give them the resources they need to do their jobs, and then get out of their way. We compensate fairly, provide opportunities to learn and grow, and provide good tools for them to work with.”
Halliday said she credits much of her philosophy to Brim, who has as guiding principles for DIS “to be a service organization dedicated to the success of their customers; to conduct themselves with integrity and professionalism in relations with customers and DIS staff; and to provide a challenging, rewarding and fulfilling work environment.”
Doug Thomas, CEO and president of
Bellingham Cold Storage.
Doug Thomas, CEO and president of Bellingham Cold Storage
If you had asked Doug Thomas 20 years ago what he would be doing today, he would not have told you he would be running Bellingham Cold Storage.
Granted it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine the role. After all, that’s what Thomas’ father did until he took over in 1999.
But at the time, in the 1980s, Thomas was forging a separate career path from his father. He was busy following a string of promotions and transfers on the way up the ladder at Allstate Insurance. And he was making these career move while living with his wife, Sandy, in Ohio.
“I was determined to go out and excel on my own,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a product of nepotism.”
But after the birth of his daughter Thomas wanted to get back to his family roots in Bellingham. He nabbed a job as special projects manager for Bellingham Cold Storage. Before he took the job he made sure it was on his own terms, not as a favored son.
“I was very clear,” he said. “I didn’t want any special treatment -- no more vacation time than any one else who was starting.”
As it turned out, Thomas excelled as a top-notch manager. He just happened to do it at BCS, and in 1999 became president and CEO.
“I think if you’re driven, and if you’re bound and determined to show you’re a hard worker, things work out,” he said.
Thomas is not the type to shy away from a challenge. In charge of the largest portside facility of its kind on the West Coast, he can’t afford to be.
Less than two years after Thomas took over at BCS, the 2000 energy crisis hit its peak. Faced with operating costs that threatened to shut the company down, he pulled his team together and found a way to hunker down and survive those hard months. He counts it as his proudest business achievement.
“We were out shopping for homeowners insurance while our house was on fire,” he said. “ But we stayed at the wheel night and day and we survived. I believe that the best measure of your performance does not come when everything for your business is just clicking along in an autopilot mode. A true test of answering any major challenge most often comes when you are called to act decisively on a task that is vital to your business, your employees, suppliers and customers and much to the surprise of everyone involved, you somehow succeed.”
Thomas said he runs BCS based on one of the oldest rules in the book -- the golden one.
“I hate to use kind of an old axiom, but my parents brought me up to say please and thank you, to leave things better than you find them and basically to do the right thing,” he said. “I find that if you treat people the way you would like to be treated, you tend to attract employees, suppliers and vendors who will treat you the same way.”
He must be doing something right. Several of his customers have been with BCS since long before he came on board, and the average tenure of his 200-plus employees is an impressive 17 years. Those employees process more than one billion pounds of food product each year. Thomas puts it like this:
“If you were to put a billion pounds of product in semi trucks end to end, they would stretch from Bellingham to I-90, east to Boston and back to Chicago,” he said.
Congratulations to Doug Thomas for being a finalist for the 2004 Business Person of the Year award.