Roger Byford and his colleagues knew they were on the verge of incredible potential in the voice recognition industry. But as that potential set in, their employer, Westinghouse Electric Corp., was losing interest in the business.
Byford and two colleagues knew someone would see success with the product offering and thought: Why can’t it be us?
“We really didn’t want to be sitting around watching someone else succeed with that business,” Byford says. “So we decided the only thing to do was to do it ourselves.”
Vocollect Inc. was founded in 1987 and has grown north of $100 million in revenue and employs more than 400.
Byford, Vocollect’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer, will be a keynote speaker at Duquesne University Small Business Development Center’s 12th Annual Entrepreneur’s Growth Conference on June 10.
Smart Business spoke with him about how to take the first steps in growing a company.
What are the keys to growing a company?
If you go back to the very beginning, the first thing for an entrepreneur, if you will, is know where it is you want to go and why it is that you’re doing this crazy thing. Starting a company is a high-risk venture and understanding what it is that you think a company might look like in five or 10 years time, and what your role is, what your personal goals are, can really help to clarify the picture and make sure that you, initially, and everyone else, are moving in a consistent direction over time. That would be No. 1.
How do you clarify that vision for the future?
Your goal might be anything from somebody whose recently been laid off and is looking to start a consulting business that will keep enough cash coming in that will see them through until they find their next permanent job … through to somebody who wants to start the next Facebook or the next Google and is looking to be the CEO of a $1 trillion enterprise and has gone public and is flowing all over the world. Putting those parameters around it will first of all help tell you, assuming you have an idea for your business, does the idea for your business really line up with your personal goals. Again, I’ve seen on occasion when you quiz a person on that, those ideas really don’t line up. Time to go and have another think — is it your personal goals that should change or do you need to look for another business concept to help you meet those personal goals?
The most common disconnect, perhaps that I’ve seen, is an entrepreneur who wants to build a large enterprise but is very unwilling to think about things like raising money or giving part of the company to investors or actually having to manage significant business. If you have those inherent conflicts, then I think the business is going to get into trouble.
