Reinventing your company based on today’s market challenges
March 2009 - By Jeff Hilliard, President & CEO - Compudigital Industries
Times are really changing! The stock market is on a rolling decline, banks are going out of business every day, a new President has started his term in office in Washington D.C., home prices are still on the decline, Fortune 100 manufacturers are seeing a record drop in sales and reporting record losses, major chain stores are going out of business, and the government is doing all they can to produce an effective bailout program, unemployment is at a record high and there seems to be no end and no resolution in sight! There is nothing but difficult financial news on the horizon. Is anybody making a living? How will we continue? Are there any opportunities left? Is it time to reinvent my company?
Some history about technology
Being an inventor for 30 years, I have heard that most everything that is going to be invented has been invented. If we take a brief look backwards to technology advances, we realize that the speed of the original microprocessors started at less than 1 Mhz way back in the days of the first computer and now, we have exceeded 3.5 Ghz (3,500 Mhz)! 
The first computer I owned in 1976 was an IMSAI 8080, a 2 Mhz, machine with no hard drive, 16K of RAM, no keyboard, no monitor, and no mouse! I programmed this computer through the switches on the front panel!
The first REAL Personal computer I owned was the original IBM PC with 128KB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive running a 4.77 Mhz processor and it even had a keyboard! The IBM PC was introduced in 1985 and was the flagship of personal computers. 1 At the time, I was totally convinced that I would never run out of hard drive space and look at today’s technology, just 23 years later! Your wristwatch has more computing capacity today than the IBM PC had back in the 80s! Hard drives today start at about 100GB (100,000 MB) and are available in various sizes up to 2TB (2,000 GB or 2,000,000 MB). Computers of today range from a low end standard 1GB of RAM to up to 32GB of RAM on some home computers!
Processors can’t go much faster and I can’t use more than the 16GB of RAM I have in my computer. In my brief lifetime of 55 years, technology has blown by me!
Technology has taken an incredible leap from the early 1980’s until now. The Internet was introduced as a communications tool for governments and universities and little known until the mid 90’s. Today, the internet is the primary path for most of the world wide communications traffic. In about 1994, I had our town’s first residential T-1 line installed in my home office, where I put together our first mini Data Center.
My wife and I started our first company in 1976, installing security systems for a living in Davis, California. To keep the income steady, we occasionally got into the installation of fire alarms, monitoring, intercom systems, CCTV, sound and other low voltage applications. In the late 1980s, the stress of this business was getting to me. I started having chest pains every day when I went into the office dealing with the messy day to day stuff. The big company competition was encroaching on my territory, charging less and less for monitoring, and selling systems for next to nothing. I wasn’t destined to be in this business forever and after realizing the delicate position I was in, I finally sold the monitored accounts in 1989 to the competition.
What do you do when the comfortable place you have been in for so long starts to change?