Welcome to Seeking Business Excellence

This site has valuable tips, suggestions, and ideas that will help you manage and grow a small business. These ideas will help you build and maintain an excellent company. They helped us start, grow, and operate Spectracom Corporation from the time of its founding in my basement in 1972 until we sold it to a venture capital company in 2000. These ideas and techniques will help you do the same thing.

Our goal was to build an excellent company. Our model in 1972 was Hewlett-Packard.   From startup right through the sale of the company in 2000, when our annual product sales were $5 million, we wanted to be as much like HP as we could. We didn’t get as big as HP, but we were just as good. We designed and manufactured excellent electronic products. We maintained excellent financial control. We hired and managed excellent employees.  And we were seen as an excellent company by our customers.

Our constant focus on excellence allowed us to make excellent profits while the company grew 15 per cent annually for decades.  I hope this blog will help others to do the same.

These ideas grew out of our need to succeed.  Our experience and training began at home as we grew up, continued through Cub Scout, Boy Scout, and US Army leadership training, and included an Electrical Engineering degree, an MBA degree, and a course taught by the American Management Association that emphasized “participative management”.

Whether you strive to be a farsighted founder or a hardworking hired gun, you will find here some ideas for building an excellent business.  Periodic postings will give you ideas that worked in building from scratch an excellent business that dominated its market niches and grew to attract the venture capital company that bought it.

I hope you benefit from reading our postings.

—Robert J. Hesselberth