-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueBox Build
One trend is to add box build and final assembly to your product offering. In this issue, we explore the opportunities and risks of adding system assembly to your service portfolio.
IPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
Lessons Learned on the Road to Becoming an Industry Veteran
March 25, 2016 | VirTex EnterprisesEstimated reading time: 9 minutes
I came to Texas on a Greyhound bus from New Hampshire and started my career in the oil industry on the offshore drilling rigs; hard work, dangerous and everyone knew that what they did or did not do impacted the safety of everyone around them. That was a good life lesson. Then, after the big oil crash of 1985 I moved into defense electronics in a sales support role for Minco Technology Labs. There I quickly made the transition to sales and in my first year, with the support of our top talent engineering team, we won the largest contract in the history of the company for a submarine subsurface communication system for the US Navy. I was hooked! This was less dangerous work but the stakes were bigger. Failure could put many at risk, so failure was not an option. And the dynamics that we were changing how things had been done since WWII was both exciting and humbling.
Then I joined XeTel, in 1989. At that time Solectron was the largest EMS at $140M and were about half that size. XeTel, a spin-off of Texas Instruments, was a technology leader and our customers needed us. I left after XeTel went public and joined Sanmina, opening up their first remote sales office in Austin. In 1995 Sanmina was still under $1B and Juri Sola (CEO) was active in every aspect of the company. He was tough, a Croation football (soccer) player. He knew that it took a team to win. He was demanding but fair and I learned a lot. Three years later I joined SMTC where we were part of the roll out of DSL FTTN (Fiber to the Node) bringing Internet to the masses through the installed phone lines, still in broad use today. This single piece of business doubled the size of the SMTC and still has an impact on how we get our broadband data today. That was challenging; hard work, but fun. After the “tech wreck” in 2001, I went back into Defense where I had top secret clearance for 3D visualization technologies; working with some of the world’s leading scientists and defense departments like DARPA that was funding innovative new technologies. This was mind-bending technology in use at a critical time for the US military. But the people I worked with at SMTC had joined Flextronics and recruited me to stand up new business segment, SBS (Small Business Solutions), creating a small flexible company inside the giant company to support low volume, high technology solutions, bringing the resources of a giant company with the flexible and innovative market offering of a smaller more nimble operation.
After the Flex acquisition of Solectron for $10B in 2008, I left and joined Celestica. We set up a new Industrial Segment and I was tasked with leading that initiative. In my first year in Celestica we brought in a giant appliance company by demonstrating innovation they had not seen. We bought and took apart their and their competitors’ products and in our first meeting showed them that though we were not experts on appliances we were experts in manufacturing and solutioning. We were experts in our approach to problem solving. In a supplier conference with ten competitors we were selected to support a product we had never built, because we differentiated with innovation resulting hundreds of millions of dollars. Following that I was asked to manage to global team for sales and solutions and for the next four years traveled over one million airline miles to every part of the planet where our customers were, and me and my team posted record sales revenue every single year.
My entire career has been about challenging the status quo, leading with innovation and creativity and the privilege to work with some of the leaders of this industry and using that knowledge and those experiences for building and developing customer centric winning teams and delivering results.
Back to your new role with VirTex Enterprises, what challenges are you looking for in this position?
The market is truly hungry for the technology capable, innovative and flexible manufacturing partner. They are not seeking a quote model; they are seeking a solution that lets them differentiate with innovation, and the products they produce are a piece of this. The market has always been product driven and that is changing. The large EMS giants are not nimble enough to address this and they are trying to solve it with innovation centers. But they do not have the patience to truly listen and develop solutions around a specific customer’s needs; we do. They try to bend the customer to their methods. They are still trying to fit them in a box. We develop value based solutions around the customer’s specific needs; not ours. We participate with solutions that enhance their unique aspirations.
Page 2 of 3
Suggested Items
Boeing, GKN Aerospace Close Deal for St. Louis Site
04/29/2024 | BoeingBoeing has closed a deal with GKN Aerospace St. Louis and its parent company, Melrose Industries, to continue the manufacturing of critical components that support the U.S. government and its allies.
Cicor Records Solid Growth in Q1
04/16/2024 | CicorThe Cicor Group continued to grow in the first three months of the year. Quarterly sales increased by 11.8% to CHF 107.3 million compared to the first quarter of the previous year (Q1/2023: CHF 96.0 million).
TT Electronics Awarded Contract with Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace
04/11/2024 | TT ElectronicsTT Electronics, a leading provider of global manufacturing solutions and engineered technologies, announced today that its Fairford UK business has been awarded a new contract with long-standing customer Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace (Kongsberg) for the production of complex cable harness solutions.
Cicor Successfully Completes Acquisition of TT Electronics IoT Solutions Ltd.
04/03/2024 | CicorThe Cicor Group has successfully completed the acquisition of TT Electronics IoT Solutions Ltd. with three production sites in the UK and China.
Absolute EMS Successfully Recertifies ISO 9001:2015 and AS9100 Standards
03/26/2024 | Absolute EMS, Inc.Absolute EMS, Inc., an award-winning EMS provider of turnkey contract manufacturing services, is proud to announce the successful recertification of its ISO 9001:2015 and AS9100 Rev D SAE International Aerospace Standards.