As I grew my first company, I became increasingly committed to innovation. I was always looking for new opportunities. One day, I got a call from a guy named Marty Skalka, who owned a company called Computer Science Inc. He asked me to take over part of his business. I knew that CSI worked with some government contracts, but even before Marty reached out, I’d heard that there were some financial problems that were making it hard for him to deliver on his government contracts.
“Marty,” I said, “I can’t just blindly take over your business. I appreciate the offer, but I need to know whether it fits in with our core competencies. If it’s something that’s not electronic related, I don’t think I can handle it.”
He got that, but he assured me that this business, called ActiGraph, was right up my alley. ActiGraph produced wearable electronic monitors for the army called accelerometers that calculated energy expenditures and calorie needs. It helped the army decide troop movements, meal plans, and other logistics. My interest was piqued.
I didn’t know then just how big ActiGraph would become, but I saw something there, a spark of potential that I wanted to follow. One key principle of growth is to spot those sparks, even when they’re tiny, and nurture them and see where you can take them.
We needed to find out how customers used the technology, what was good about it, where the kinks were, and who else would benefit from the product. We had to find a growth market. I approached ActiGraph the way I’d approached my other businesses: find out what the customers needed, grow from the base, and do it the old-fashioned way—with lots of elbow grease. In the process, we found our niche. It revealed itself to us like a glowing light.
The facts are that some of the most expensive costs for any government around the world involve health care, newer generations are less healthy than previous generations, and childhood obesity is escalating. Observing the trends, we devised an innovative new direction for ActiGraph.
We realized that we held in our hands a powerful tool that could help find solutions to monitoring overall well-being, not just for members of the military but also for the entire population. ActiGraph’s mission became to improve world health by providing the most accurate and scientifically validated activity and sleep-monitoring hardware and software solutions to leading research, pharmaceutical, healthcare, and wellness organizations.