Eric Zeanah | American Accessories

Our final meeting of the semester was with Eric Zeanah at American Accessories located in the Bank of America building on Main Street. American Accessories is a company that provides manufacturing services to fortune 500 companies such as Uniroyal, Phillip Morris, & Johnson & Johnson. The company has one office here in Knoxville and another office in China employing a total of 28 people. Essentially what they do is take the burden of manufacturing away from these larger companies. When a company wants to run a new marketing campaign with a product, they may want special packaging or some kind of trinket to be included in the box. The large company calls up American Accessories and explains what they want, then Eric and his team find a manufacturing facility in China that is capable of delivering the product. American Accessories has strong relationships with around 100 different manufacturing facilities in China.
Eric is actually not the original founder of American Accessories, the company was founded by an Industrial Engineering professor from the University of Tennessee in 1960. Eric was a student of the professors in the early 1980's and was given a job evaluating time studies as an intern. After his summer internship ended he was asked to come on full time and finish his degree at night, he agreed. Eric moved up in the business eventually managing a whole division of the company, the only division that was profitable in the 1990's. The owner of the company asked Eric if he would be interested in taking over the entire company to try to turn things around. He said he would but under one condition, that the company would become his if he succeeded in turning it around. His old professor agreed to the deal and Eric became the president of American Accessories and eventually the owner. Eric takes a conservative approach to managing his business, his company grows based on their strengths. Eric has been visiting Asia for more than 25 years and even has a house in China where he lives while working over there. His statement to us was that China is probably the most capitalist country in the world, that is a pretty interesting but also scary thought. Eric's words of advice were to align yourself personally with the people you conduct business with. You can be friends with the people you do business with. He also told us that doing business in other parts of the world has become much easier in recent years because of the advancement in communication tools. His parting words to use were encouragement to always listen and take the time to be mentored by older and wiser people. And if you ever have a business be smart enough to hire people who are better than you.

Tony Buhl | EnergX

Tony Buhl started life in a holler in east Tennessee where no one had running water or electricity. He told us that no one he knew had ever even finished high school because they had to quit school to work on the farm. Tony was lucky enough to find a great teacher at school who really believed in him and his ability to excel. His teacher helped him get through high school and apply for college, he got into school at UT and received a scholarship. He decided to become a nuclear engineer. Tony finished his undergraduate degree and was able to continue on to graduate school where he worked on electronics for his PhD. After graduate school he and some friends decided to start a business selling some of the electrical instrumentation that they had developed while in school. Tony and his college buddies did a lot of business selling instrumentation to measure flow in nuclear power plants. Non of the employees had any business education so they drew straws and Tony ended up having to go back to school. He also spent a good bit of time in the military. He then help to found 3 other companies and became a senior executive at a large international company. He founded EnergX in 1997 as a service disabled veteran owned small business to contract with DOD and DOE for environmental management. Specifically EnergX specializes in decontamination and decomission of nuclear facilities. One of EnergX bigger projects was the complete dismantlement of a nuclear facility located just north of Denver Colorado. Tony's company has been declared one of the best environmental management by its certification as ISO 14001. Tony had some great words of advice for young entrepreneurs. He said that he believed in failing forward, " Experience doesn't come from doing great things it comes from learning from the things you don't do so well." Its human nature to resist change but young people who want to be successful should embrace change as opportunity. He parted us by quoting Henry Fords famous philosophy that "Whether you believe you can or you believe you can't, your right"

Dr. Barry Goss | Pro2Serve

After spring break we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Barry Goss on campus here at the University of Tennessee. He is the founder of Pro2Serve, a company who's new headquarters is located on the campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Pro2Serve stands for Professional Projects Services Inc. Barry's company is a National Security Engineering company that has twice been named to the Inc. 500. They primarily do work for the DOE and the NSA but are planning to expand into the DOD and DHS. Barry started his career at SAIC a unique company where he was able to build his own business inside of its corporate framework. During that adventure Barry moved from the technical side of things into marketing where he began to analyze market trends in science and technology. He wanted to figure out how to get a half a step ahead of the market. The trend he saw was that the technical industry was moving away from employing engineers for a career and moving toward project based employment. This concept was not new, there were plenty of staffing companies in existence but these companies focused on low skill level jobs. Big companies were starting to bring in outside help to complete projects rather than hiring more people and keeping everything internal. When Barry realized the trend he decided to leave SAIC and start his own company. The way work was getting done was on a project basis, so Barry decided to start a staffing company that would provide technical expertise by project demand. During the formation of his company Barry and his team decided to include in their bylaws that the company would commit to giving back 10% of each years profits. At the end of the year 10% of the profits were set aside for distribution during the following year. Eventually Barry went out looking for investors, and he landed a 7 figure venture capital investment but not without some arguments about the companies commitment to give back. Dr. Goss was not a huge fan of venture capitalists and ended up buying the investors out to take back control of his company. Today Pro2Serve does government contract work within its four major business units: Core Engineering Design, Physical Systems Security, Environmental Management, & Nuclear Security. 75% of the employees at Pro2Serve hold high level government clearances. Barry's final words of wisdom were "never burn bridges" and "always give more than you receive".

Dr. Terry Douglas : Provision Foundation

On March 15th my classmates and I visited Dr Terry Douglas at his company, Provision Foundation, in Oak Ridge. Dr. Douglas was one of the founders of CTI, a company I have mentioned before where Joe Matteo also worked. CTI was a medical imaging company that developed PET scanners along with several other imaging technologies. CTI was acquired by SIEMENS for around $1Billion, leaving its founding members with substantial resources for their next adventures. Dr. Douglas began putting shares of CTI stock into a foundation in the late 1980's when the stock wasn't really worth anything. By the time SIEMENS bought the company and Dr. Douglas was free to do what he wanted the foundation had substantial resources which could be used to help people around the world. This was probably the most interesting visit we have made thus far, Dr. Douglas now spends his time and his money trying to make the world a better place. Provision Foundation provided the initial funding for Invisible Children, a grassroots movement to raise awareness about children in Uganda and Sudan who are stolen from their families and forced into becoming soldiers. Provision foundation has been working with local organizations and churches in Haiti for some years and recently when the earthquake struck team members from provision were on the ground within a few days to help out. Provision currently has a rotation program in Haiti, where volunteers will go stay for a few weeks and then be replaced by other volunteers. Provision is also in the healthcare business as part of its for profit division. The foundation is helping in the development of the East Tennessee Health Care Center which will house a state of the art imaging center. The Center will house a world class comprehensive cancer center, a proton therapy center where the most advanced form of cancer treatments will be administered. Provisions role in the development is to provide the start up capital and support, in return they will retain a minority share of ownership. Dr. Terry Douglas is getting older in age but he is still young at heart. When asked by a student about retirement he answered, "I want to die with my boots on".

Vig Sherrill : Aldis

On March 1 we visited Aldis in Oak Ridge. Aldis is Vig Sherrill's most recent venture. Aldis is seeking to improve traffic flow with control systems using fish eye cameras and vehicle recognition software. The Aldis system tracks vehicles and sends calls to traffic lights when vehicles approach intersections. It does this all through a camera which replaces the current in ground induction systems which fail and have to be replaced fairly often. Aldis is strictly a software company, they allow others to produce the hardware which their system runs on. This allows the company to take advantage of Moore's law; next year when faster processors come out Aldis does not have obsolete products, they just install their software on the new faster platform giving their product more functionality. The real problem with Aldis's business is that the end user is not the person who will pay for the technology. The end users will be drivers however the municipal government which maintains the traffic lights will be the decision maker on purchasing the product. There has to be some value in the product for the city governing offices. For this reason Aldis has built in the ability for the software to count every car that comes through an intersection over a given time period. Normally cities send workers out to intersections with clipboards to take samples of traffic numbers. With the Aldis system there will be no need to count with a clipboard, the data will also be much more accurate. This data can also be used to determine the best place to build new stores or community attractions. Aldis is a venture capital funded company not because they think they will make a ton of money selling camera's to put on every traffic light in the US, but because there will be substantial value in the data that is collected from those systems. Vig's memorable advice was "Don't start a company, you have to work really long hours, put in tons of effort, success chances are small, why would you do that? You would have to be crazy!"

Jeff Bohanan : Protomet Precision Manufacturing

On Feb 22 my class mates and I visited Jeff Bohanan at Protomet Precision Manufacturing. Protomet is a world class machine shop where lots of fancy and complex parts are manufactured for a variety of products. Jeff started his career at Y-12 nuclear weapons facility in Oak Ridge. After going through a 2 year rotation program at Y-12, Jeff decided he wanted to go out on his own and build a world class manufacturing company. He and a friend started a two man engineering consulting company. In the beginning the two did a lot of work back for Y-12, the employer they had left to start their company. This helped them stay afloat while they pursued other contracts. An opportunity came up to bid on a Mercedes contract to machine a part for their SUV's seat belt assembly. Only problem was that Jeff didn't have a machine shop. Mercedes needed 1 million parts over 5 years at a target price of $4. Jeff and his partner came up with a cost effective way to manufacture the parts and bid on the contract without disclosing that they didn't have the facilities to machine the parts. They got chosen for the contract and immediately bought and installed a machine to produce the parts. While their machine was being installed they contract manufactured with a few other shops to make prototypes. A week or so after Jeff had ordered his machine for building the parts, Mercedes called and said they had a new cheaper way of making the part and wouldn't need Jeff's help any longer. He was devastated, they had spent everything they had to buy the machine to make the parts. He negotiated with Mercedes to make some of the first parts while they were getting their new process up and running. It turned out that their new process didn't work quite like they thought and Jeff ended up making all 1 million of the parts over a 5 year period. Protomet Precision Manufacturing grew out of that experience. Today Protomet's two biggest industries are homeland security and wakeboard boat parts. They manufacture surveillance camera housings that can read license plates and automatically check them in a database in a fraction of a second. Protomet is also a major manufacturer of what Jeff calls "bling parts" for wakeboard boats. These are typically the polished aluminum logo plates and tower components that may house speakers or wakeboard racks. Jeff's real competitive advantage is his ability to design and help customers redesign things in a way that they can be manufactured cost effectively. He is a big proponent of setting goals and spoke highly of Brian Tracy and his leadership development philosophies. Jeff's final words of advice were the following: "You may think that technology will be your biggest difficulty in entrepreneurship, but people will most certainly be your biggest difficulty". He spoke a lot about how to hire good people and reward them for what they do. He said "The main thing is to have integrity in the process, be very honest and shoot strait with people"

Mark Medley : Control Technology Incorporated

On February 15th we got a chance to visit Mark Medley at his company, Control Technology Incorporated. CTI, not to be confused with the CTI from last week, has been around for a while here in Knoxville. Mark Medley founded two companies in the 70's with a few college friends, one was called 1330 corp and focused on publishing magazines, the other was called computer concepts and was focused on building computer systems to automate manufacturing facilities. Mark worked with the Mayfield milk family to help automate their dairy production facilities with programmable logic controllers. In the 1980's Mark was interested in expanding the business beyond milk production so he decided to buy Mayfields part of Computer Concepts and take the company on his own. Initially Marks company was financed by borrowing money from family and friends and from the bank. Bank loans for start ups are pretty much impossible these days. CTI now makes custom circuit boards and PLC's that go into all kinds of products. CTI has a clean manufacturing facility and some state of the art equipment. It was pretty entertaining to sit and watch a robotic arm place different components on a circuit board. Once all the components are placed, the entire board is soldered at once to fix each component in place. CTI does specialized boards in orders of 50-500, not huge lots of production. This forces them to remain nimble in their operations and create competitive advantage through their customer service and adaptability.