Like Jeffery, Oakman had never owned a stock certificate. He dug down deep and bought 6. Feeling reckless, he bought 4 more. By this time, about half of Findlay's police force and even more of its firefighters held lottery tickets in the Great Holotronics Sweepstakes. When Battelle published its first glowing report on Kirk's SLM, all caution went to the wind, and Jack Oakman sprang for another 14 shares. "Heck," he smiles today, "I even bought shares for three of my buddies when they were a little short on cash. We were getting real excited."
Despite such enthusiasm, the operative word over at Errett's Car Waxing annex was caution. Earlier that year, Holotronics had realized it needed outside financing to get past the theory stage. Yet Kirk, as he admits, was "paranoid" about losing control of the company, and therefore wary of both joint ventures and venture capitalists. It didn't help the atmosphere any that Marathon Oil Co., Findlay's largest employer (Marathon is based here, with a payroll of some 2,700) and the bedrock of its economic foundation, had been involved in a well-publicized takeover bid by United States Steel Corp. during this same period.
With Kirk as point man, the dominant force behind the company's drive to woo small investors -- and its hope to generate cash flow with some military contracts -- became George P. West. West, who by chance had been visiting his mother in Findlay, responded to an advertisement Holotronics ran in the Findlay newspaper for "qualified personnel." Kirk liked his resume: former head of the Canadian subsidiary of Joy Manufacturing Co. (1,000 employees, $40 million a year); former head of the Carribbean operation for Mead Johnson & Co.; executive positions with Maremont, Crane, and Honeywell. For a one-time ad in The Findlay Courier, it was not a bad talent haul. A lot of positive vectors there, or something like that.
"I never felt attracting funds would be a problem," says Kirk. "My feeling was, hey, if you've got the technology, you'll get the money. I'm not what you'd call overly conservative, either. When we set up an operating budget, the obvious strategy was to streamline as much as possible so we could conserve our cash for research. I don't think like that. I said we had to commit ourselves to more research than we could afford to if we actually had the money. Why? Because if you struggle to work within your known limits, all you wind up proving is that you can keep your doors open a little longer by conserving your assets. And I don't believe in limits. In fact, setting goals is almost an antireligious thing for me. Setting goals means setting limits, and I'm very uncomfortable with that. It goes back to what I was saying about operating in all eight dimensions of reality simultaneously. I'm afraid I drove old George pretty crazy with all this, but that's how I work."
Says West, "I guess I've been trained too long in traditional thinking to see eye to eye with Ron's philosophy. At a certain point, though, I had to recognize its worth and go along with it. We battle, sure, but he doesn't force me to comply. And he doesn't lose very often, either. When you've been around the business world as long as I have, it's a little difficult to be lieve that a 30-year-old with only a limited academic background could do what Ron's done anyway. Once Battelle said it was for real, I knew we were 90% down the road. The big question was, could we make sure the company survived financially through the early stages? I mean, it's nice to believe the money will just roll right in, but I'm the type of guy who feels a whole lot more comfortable if you go out and make it happen."
He smiles at Kirk much as a tolerant father would whose son (is that you in the basement, Tom?) has just come upstairs announcing the discovery of an antigravity spray.
"I've watched what's happened in the technology field for 30 years now," West continues. "Typically, the biggest failures have come when the entrepreneur has stopped pushing technical advances and concentrated on the business end of things instead. Look at [Adam] Osborne, to cite one example. By engineering our stock sale, we created a moral obligation to our shareholders to push ahead and see things through. None of us took salaries last year, because I didn't think it would be fair to our investors. So the real risk going into this -- and it's a risk the NASA contract has pretty much obliterated -- is that this damn thing wouldn't work. It does work. We have the credibility we need now.
"Of course," he adds, "it wouldn't help if Ron got run over by a firetruck, either."
Indeed, it would not. Which is why more than one Findlay fireman has confessed that when Kirk gets around burning buildings these days, he tends to draw just a jot of extra attention. Not an armed escort, but a little extra concern. Fighting fires is high-risk work, after all.
But then, so is launching new technology companies. "A lot of my old friends said we were crazy to go up against a Hughes or a Litton," West avers. "Those guys have many man-years and tens of millions of dollars invested in this field, not to mention annual budgets in the $2-million range. They said we couldn't possibly have the funds or facilities to compete. I said they were right. Only, we had Ron."
