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The Growth Ethic

A day in the life of an Inc. 500 robotics company that experienced 18,000% growth.

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The Growth Ethic

Growth of 18,000%, whether nightmare or dream, transforms how your business works

What's it like? That's the question we can't shake when, at the end of each yearlong Inc. 500 project, we're faced again with company after company that has pumped head count from 4 to 400 and sales from tens of thousands to tens of millions. We try to imagine life in a business that has grown 18,000% -- and can't. What's it like? This year, we sent four writers to investgate one company with that question in mind.

Here is Adept Technology Inc., in San Jose, Calif., on September 6, 1988. -- The Editors

* * *

It was a typical late-summer day in the Valley. Blue skies, seasonable temperatures, the usual tie-ups on U.S. 101. In parking lots from San Jose to Cupertino, people were talking about the Oakland As.

Inside Adept Technology Inc., America's foremost robotics company, it was business as usual. Customer-service support engineer Bob Swanson was talking with customers -- and hoping to continue his Ludlum novel at lunch. COO Fred Zucker was planning the afternoon management meeting -- and worrying about inventory. Subassembly leader Maria Viramontes was assigning work to her 13 people -- and wondering about her six-year-old daughter's first day at school.

It is easy to forget, looking at a list like the Inc. 500, how many lives and days are tied up in the statistics. Adept's entry will tell you that its sales have grown from $170,000 to $30.6 million, that the payroll has expanded from 25 employees to 230, and that a 1983 loss became a modest 1987 profit. But it won't tell you about Swanson or Zucker or Viramontes -- or those who work beside them.

They -- not the technology, the capital, or the market strategy -- are the ones that keep Adept Technology growing. And they do it one day at a time. . . .

* * *

PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
Fredric E. Zucker
Ten a.m. The problem was inventory. There was too much of it.

So thought Fredric E. Zucker, the newly appointed president and chief operating officer of Adept.

Zucker, 48, ancient by Silicon Valley standards, still hasn't unpacked all the boxes he brought with him from Convergent Technologies Inc., just a mile and a half down the street. But he has already learned two things in his wandering around Adept's narrow halls. First, the men's room is around the corner from his office. Second, Adept has let its inventory get out of hand.

At Convergent, where Zucker was in charge of producing UNIX-based computers -- including the PCs that Convergent manufactured for AT&T -- Zucker turned inventory a remarkable 14 times a year. At Adept, inventory turns fewer than twice annually. As far as Zucker is concerned, that means Adept has millions of dollars needlessly tied up in component parts.

So at 10:00 a.m. he sits down with Joe Avery, the vice-president of operations, to find out how plans are going to free up those dollars. It is one of several meetings on the subject Zucker will have today -- and one of dozens he has had since he was brought into the company five weeks and three days ago.

The inventory problem serves as a wonderful metaphor for Adept, perhaps the only consistently profitable robotics company in the country. While growing rapidly, Adept has been attempting to deal with two problems at once. It has to convince industrial America that robots -- which for the past 20 years have been expected to jump-start America's manufacturing heart -- are here, reliable, and ready to save the day. And once it has convinced manufacturers that this is so, it must persuade the Fortune 500 to buy the robots from Adept.

All this takes time and resources -- time and resources stolen from some basic business issues that have piled up in the corners of the company's low-slung office building just off North First Street in San Jose, Calif. Some of Adept's suppliers have had problems delivering quality goods. In addition, potential for bad debt has upon occasion been frighteningly high. And then, of course, there is the inventory problem.

None of this is unusual. When you are blazing a trail toward nothing less than the "reindustrialization of America," a phrase that Adept's middle managers often use to describe their work, you don't always have time to count the paper clips.

And counting paper clips -- or "making sure the trains run on time," as one of his subordinates puts it -- is to be Zucker's job. He has been given a simple mission: introduce big-company systems into a small company that plans to be big soon.

It's not going to be easy. Zucker has wonderful people skills, is great at spotting potential problems (and outlining solutions), and perhaps most important, owns a sense of humor, but all that may not be enough. Adept, barely five years old, has already gone through one COO and spent two years deciding -- with some gentle prodding by its venture capitalists -- that it needed another. And for all the talk by Brian Carlisle, chairman and chief executive officer, that Zucker is joining the company as a partner, there are signs that he will not be an equal one. His office may be adjacent to Carlisle's, and they may share the same secretary, but he has not, after all, been there from the start.

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