Other Experience: Sold magazines on Chicago street corner, starting at age 6.
Other Companies Started: In 1956 launched joint venture turning Waltham Watch, a gear maker, into a defense contractor. Later brought in partners, went public, lost control of company, disagreed with majority shareholders, and departed in 1961 with $300,000.
Role as CEO: To be a visionary, charting future course of company. To select the right people and get out of their way. To can them quickly when they're not the right people after all.
Family: Married to Johnnie Cordell Breed, entrepreneur who funded Breed Technologies' ramp-up; four grown children (two of them involved in company)
Hero: Henry Ford, the ultimate vertical integrator: "He brought iron ore into one end of his plant. Three days later it came out the other end an automobile."
Quote: From Calvin Coolidge, on persistence: "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." The quote hangs on walls in Breed offices around the world.
PROFILE:THE MAKER OF THINGS
When a call comes through from one of his chief engineers, a fidgety Allen Breed practically leaps from his chair to take it. He's been waiting all day. Stooping over the speakerphone, his blue eyes fixed on the box, he fires a clip of questions about the testing of a new product. They're not just management plaints like "When can we ship it?" They're detailed inquiries, the kind only a guy who dreams in schematics and knows his way around a lab can ask.
Even from his princely corner office, this engineer, now also a globe-trotting air-bag tycoon, still hears the call of the lab, still gets his hands dirty on a new design, still needs that daily data dump from his soulmates in development. No matter how many miles he logs visiting operations and customers on three continents, buying companies, building plants, and chasing new or bigger contracts, Breed, this year's Entrepreneur of the Year, founder of one of the fastest-growing and most profitable suppliers to the worldwide auto industry, is, aw, shucks, just a guy who likes to build stuff. Like air-bag systems and their component parts. Like multinational industrial dynasties.
The 68-year-old CEO, who works 14-hour days, looks out on his mile-square campus in sun-bleached central Florida and explains his passion with a shrug: "I'm a maker of things." In huge volumes. At ever lower costs. Most of what Allen Breed makes -- the products that brought in $250 million-plus of fiscal 1995's $401 million in sales -- are electromechanical sensors that tell air bags when to inflate. Breed Technologies also manufactures some air-bag inflators and systems, but the bulk of its revenues and almost all its profit have come from its conquest of the air-bag-sensor market. In the last five years Allen Breed has made nearly 75 million sensors for more than 140 models of automobile. When it comes to dollars, he's made a few hundred million more.
He's a mogul, for goodness' sake. You'd think the magnitude of his success, against impossible odds, would have inflated him more, would have transformed him into some self-important CEO-statesman. But Breed remains the affable, slightly awkward engineer, with the ready smile, the glasses a little too big for his face, the hands jabbing the air excitedly as he explains a new product, a new process, a new acquisition with some "beautiful technology."
For Breed, the thrill still comes from building new stuff. Cheap. The overactive boy who rigged up alarm clocks to sound in the middle of Presbyterian church services still likes to invent gadgets (still timing devices) that surprise the hell out of everyone. He tosses a handful of miniature metal parts on his desk like jacks and palms a sample of his new inflator. Not much bigger than a hockey puck, it's a device that propels an air bag. Breed hopes it will also propel next year's sales. "We'll make every single part in this thing," he says, beaming. "We won't be paying someone else's margins. That's the way we steal business."
An industrialist in a postindustrial age, a guy who gets vertical just as everyone else goes virtual, Breed breaks rules for a living. Like the ones that say the customer is always right, or listen to your market, or know when to quit.
Nothing is more unconventional than the way he manages his company. It's a half-billion-dollar publicly traded mom and pop. Obsessed with his products, he directs most of his prodigious energy and engineering genius toward making more for less, toward wringing costs out of his products and driving sales up. The rest he delegates. Legal, finance, administrative details -- "They bore him," says his son Doug. That's where Johnnie Cordell Breed, his former financier and current wife, comes in.
While Breed whittles away at the cost of goods, Cordell Breed polices expenses. Her fiscal vigilance is legendary. Cordell Breed still reviews every travel request. She knows if a scrap hauler is weighing light. She knows what a United Way sign at the plant entrance costs. "She's a helluva manager," says Breed, wrapping his arms around her.
Other managers at the company haven't fared so well. Turnover at the top has been brisk: Breed has had three manufacturing vice-presidents in as many years, and a marketing vice-president and a president were ousted this year. "We get people in here from big companies, and they get fired," says longtime associate Ted Thuen. "They don't get it. It's not tomorrow. It's not 'maybe next week.' It's now. Allen has to move."
Some motor inside Breed never stops urging him forward, regardless of how many roadblocks are thrown up against him. "The natural state of any deal is dead," he says. "You got to just keep kicking it and kicking it and kicking it."
