But Balkcom had big plans for pushing Techsonic beyond its estimated 10% market share. At first, he unsuccessfully tried repackaging Dean's products for other distribution channels. Then he acquired a plastic-worm company, a forgettable venture except for his hiring of former West Point classmate Tom Dyer -- who later succeeded him as president when Balkcom became chairman -- to help manage the acquisition.
Balkcom also hired a couple of engineers and set them to work enhancing Dean's product. They tried. And tried. One model featured a motor that rotated at 4,800 revolutions per minute. Bulbs popped off. Disks flew out into orbit. Another experimental product could operate at six times the depth of most fish finders -- a great feat, if only people fished that deep. "We were developing in the lab, not the market," Dyer recalls.
By the late 1970s Balkcom decided it was time to move into new technologies, a step his competition, unfortunately, had taken a year earlier. All fish finders work on the same basic principle: a transducer sends out a sound signal to bounce off whatever's below, be it a fish, a log, or a Budweiser can. Dean's flasher-style depth sounder interpreted that signal via flashing red lights. Between 1979 and 1982 Balkcom poured money into new, expensive paper-chart recorders that used a stylus to draw a picture of the bottom, like an electrocardiogram. Techsonic came up with four models, all of them -- to quote an executive -- "half-dead dogs." Half? "They were a series of mistakes," Nunley says. "There was no innovation, no ingenuity."
After each fall the Super 60 was there to catch them. By signing up more reps in other parts of the country and selling through such mass outlets as Wal-Mart and Bass Pro Shop, the fishing-tackle catalog, Dyer kept the company's sales increasing. Revenues grew from about $6 million in 1978 to nearly $9 million in 1979 to $11.5 million in 1983. By then the company's five principal investors worried that Balkcom's dismal record with new products was endangering any future the company might have. "They were starting to say to themselves, 'It may be time to reap before things get any worse,' " Balkcom says.
How fortunate, then, that one of Dyer's projects led him to meet Barry Huey, president and chief executive of a small advertising agency in Birmingham. Dyer had been looking for someone to help him upgrade the company's packaging, which consisted of a dreary plain-brown box with a four-color stick-on label. Huey came up with a three-color box with a picture and information -- at half the cost. Impressed, Dyer asked Huey for help designing ads, which the company placed sparingly in fishing magazines.
OK, Huey said, tell me why people choose a Humminbird?
Dyer thought for a moment. Because it's waterproof, maybe? he offered. And they like our service policy, I think.
What features really matter to them? Huey asked.
Don't know, came Dyer's reply.
What magazines do they read?
Couldn't tell you, Dyer said.
It went on and on that way. How old are they? A shrug. How much can they spend? A guess. How often do they fish? A blank stare. What do they want? Silence. "It's time to do some research," Huey concluded.
He proposed that Balkcom commit $20,000 to have a marketing consultant he knew hold some focus groups with fishermen. You've got to find out what the hot buttons are, Huey argued. You need input from consumers. "I figured, Of course, your advertising agency is always going to tell you to spend more money on marketing," Balkcom says.
But Huey didn't let up on Balkcom or Dyer. He brought it up on the golf course at Shoal Creek. In the men's room at the restaurant in Eufaula. "It took some arm-twisting," Balkcom admits. Huey saw not only a company with potential -- "These were not sleepy guys," he says -- but an industry just waiting to be dominated. Despite industry revenues of roughly $55 million, nobody used any marketing tools. Balkcom wasn't sure he wanted to be different. "If you're going to invest money, you think about what you'll have when you're through," he says. "Spending money on this, all you have is a folder with some stuff in it. It's not an asset, like a mold."
Nevertheless, with investors breathing down his neck and profitability dropping like a downrigger, Balkcom began to soften. He was running out of choices. And time. "We needed to do something different," he says. "Quickly."
The next time Huey started his pitch, Balkcom interrupted in his Atlanta-bred drawl, "All right, let's give this thing a shot."
* * *
Within months Balkcom would regret his decision. He was crowded into the company conference room, staring at what had to be the most expensive sheet of paper in the country. Twenty thousand dollars, and there weren't even complete sentences on it. Just phrases, each with a ranking, number 1 through number 45. And it didn't make any sense.
Number 1 was "sunlight." What would number 2 be -- air? Still, he sat patiently as Sue Symons, a marketing consultant from Atlanta, handed out copies of her report, which included 94 other pages -- a packet each to Dyer; Nunley, then marketing manager; Bob Gibson, director of engineering; Huey; and Erwin Brown, a former executive vice-president of electronic and information technology at 3M Corp., who served on Techsonic's board. Symons's methodology was unusual. She called it "vision interviews," but it sounded more like past-life regressions. One-on-one, she had asked fishermen, reclining in easy chairs, to tell her about their most recent fishing experience.
