| Shortly after starting the company, I needed software support. So, I hired a person that I used to work with at Bou-Matic . And so Dave Peters and I have been doing embedded firmware.
Then when my son graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in electrical engineering four years ago, he joined us. And so it's just been the three of us since.
I guess originally I wanted to just be a consultant and as an engineer and consultant you're helping other companies succeed in technology. Probably our biggest client, that really launched us, was the Promega Corporation (a Madison-based company that develops biological research materials). We helped them with a secure radio frequency identification cabinet to house their pharmaceutical supplies. That was our big break that gave us a long contract and really got us started.
Q: What got you interested in founding a high-tech engineering company, given that your professional background is in agriculture?
A: I always wanted to run my own business, to be a consultant. I used to hire consulting engineers at my other jobs.
It allowed me to stay in the technology area, which I'm good at, and to stay innovative in that area. High tech was a passion of mine. I'm a tech lover and a serial entrepreneur.
And I get to be involved with a wide variety of products. It may not make the most business sense sometimes, but it certainly is enjoyable to be involved in a variety of technologies.
I didn't want to borrow a lot of money to get started designing products, so consulting was a way to get into a business with low fees. Since then, we've used the consulting business to essentially help fund a couple products that we've come up with on our own. So now without having an angel investor, we're ready to launch some major products as well as continue to do consulting.
Q: How did your background influence the way you ran your own company?
A: Well, I worked for companies that didn't design one little niche product, they were very broad. At Bou-Matic, for instance, you had to be good at plastics and sheet metal and a whole variety of sensors for milk reporting and animal identification. It's where I got my experience in the radio frequency identification (RFID) area. So from that standpoint, it gave me a very broad engineering background.
Now my company has a wide variety of clients and projects because we can. I'm very mechanically oriented as well, so we can be a one-stop shop. We can design electronics, enclosures, sensor housings, packaging and be an entire solution without having multiple companies involved in the design.
Q: What is the focus of your company?
A: We like to stick in the area of wireless, or RFID. That's a huge area in itself. There are so many applications for RFID in asset tracking, people tracking, laptop tracking, etc., at hospitals and small businesses and you name it. There's a lot of opportunity for growth.
A real time location system is one application of wireless tech that we think we'll be making in the future. They identify where an object is in a room. Hospitals need this sort of thing. We'll probably do more work in that area.
We're also designing a sensor for the International Dark Sky Association in Tuscon, Ariz. to monitor the night sky brightness. There's an increased amount of light pollution due to cities and people having lights that shine upward. So we're creating a new world standard for night sky brightness monitors.
Most of our business is local, Wisconsin, mostly in the Madison area. Most of it is word of mouth.
We get our business three ways: word of mouth, our Web site, and our competitors, actually. A single-person consultant who doesn't have enough time to take on a project will call me up and ask if we have bandwidth - enough hours to get the project done - and we get maybe 25 percent of our work that way. We return the favor for those cases too. I'm in the process of bidding on a large medical project where I'll be returning the favor.
Q: Do you seek out certain kinds of projects now that you're well-established in the area?
A: I would say now we're doing more medical products. And if I have my choice, I would like to make a medical product that will make a difference for society. I look for products that make a difference.
For instance, the International Dark Sky Association brightness monitor will have implications for global warming. The medical devices we're working on are really state of the art and pushing the technology where it isn't possible to do today. Those are the ones that I'm most proud of because I feel like we're really contributing to society.
Q: How has the company changed in 10 years? What changes are still to come?
A: At first, you know, when you're a business consultant you'll take anything. You don't have the luxury to even choose. When you're more established and busier and people see the amount of experience you have and are comfortable with you, business kind of comes rolling in a bit easier.
In fact, this has been our best year ever and it supposedly is a down economy. Next year we predict will be even bigger for us. I think we're ready to turn a corner and add people and services.
We are in a very comfortable place at the moment. I see us having an office manager for sure, another software program, a sales person. I don't see growth more rapid than that in the next couple years.
Q: How much further do you foresee yourself taking the company personally before retiring?
A: I'm sure I'll be in this for probably another eight years full steam. After that I wouldn't mind doing more business development, sales.
It's my goal to soon hire an engineering manager so I don't have to do those tasks and can do more business development which will fund further growth. But I'd be giving up the tech work that I love. That's why I've resisted doing so for so long. I probably could have done better in previous years if I'd hired an engineering manager sooner. But at some point you decide you have to retire on something, so you make some decisions.
I've tried hiring a sales person in the past and that didn't worked out as we had hoped. People like to talk to the business owner when they're doing sales. So I felt I could do better if I was the sales person and I hired an engineering guy to take over the day-to-day duties. Then for the first couple years you remain pretty sharp and help him out, but then when you don't use it you lose your high tech edge.
Q: What technologies have changed the way you operate?
A: Parts are getting so small that you can't hardly assemble a circuit board yourself anymore. Some of them you cannot. The medical products we're working on have to be robotically assembled because they're too small to be put together by hand.
The effect is a little more expensive prototyping. You have to have a complete design and run lots of simulations before you make hard prototypes.
Another area is how quickly technology changes. Microprocessing power grows all the time. Yesterday you couldn't buy a chip that could do bi-directional Voice Over Internet Protocol (a way of voice communicating via the Internet). Today you can. So all of a sudden you can buy a $15 chip, put it on the circuit and make a VOIP application.
We did one last year for nurse call stations. The current system at many hospitals is point-to-point wiring so if you're in a bed and you press the button it goes to the nursing station. When you go VOIP, you just have a router which can handle up to eight rooms. So when you change a hospital wing you can rewire the system a lot easier. You don't have to pull wire from the room back all the way to the nursing station.
Q: What emerging technologies do you think will change your business?
A: Most circuits now are for the most part two dimensional. You lay a circuit next to a circuit. You put it together like a puzzle. I think there's room for 3-D, where you stack chips rather than going sideways. You'd end up with a lot tighter packaging. I predict this will happen. I see it a little bit in very specialized applications. But everyone wants to get small and I see a growth area in that.
Q: Were there ever moments where you weren't sure you were going to be able to make it as a company?
A: It seems like you're always being stretched to take on a new technology. Nobody ever asks us to do something we've done before. It's always something new, pushing us. So you have to be a good learner. And you have to guess how long it's going to take for you to learn these things, so you also have to be a good guesser.
Once in a while you take on an area that you don't have any experience in and you think you can learn it quickly and you stumble a lot. We've did that on a brush with DC motor control. It took us a lot longer to learn it than we had anticipated. We spent a lot of time on it, and did not succeed in the time frame that was allotted to us. So we abandoned it.
Q: Do you have any advice for new entrepreneurs?
A: Don't try to do it in a vacuum. I hired a business development manager, which helps you gain the confidence that you can do it or points you to other people you need to help you. If you try to start without any kind of advice, you're more apt to fail.
Matrix Product Development
A small private high-tech engineering and consulting company in Sun Prairie. Their signature work has been in developing radio-frequency identification technology and software for tracking medical equipment in hospital catheterization laboratories. The company celebrated its 10- year anniversary in November.
Founded: 1998
Address: 13 N. Bird St., Sun Prairie.
Web site: www.matrixpd.com
Employees: 3 permanent and 1 temporary.
2007 Sales: $750,000
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