Twenty-five years ago, Bob Eskew walked out of General Motors’ Lakewood plant and struck out on his own.
Last year his Alpharetta company, Automated Systems Design, reported just under $19 million in revenue and grew its bottom line by 26 percent.
ASD makes cables and installs them for Fortune 1000 customers’ telecommunications and security systems. Roughly a quarter of his customers are health care companies.
ASD has 36 employees and about 200 full-time contractors. Eskew says his employee base has grown about 10 percent during the last three years.
Eskew, who has worked in a car plant, a toilet factory and a service station, says his background shapes his business philosophy. “I’ve been on both ends of the economic spectrum,” he says. “I know the value of a dollar.”
Q: How did you start your business?
A: I started ASD in 1986. I was a full-time employee at General Motors at the time, and a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to build a computer cable and sell it to him, and he would sell it to his customers. And I said, ‘Well, I can build a car, I’m sure I can build a computer cable,’ and that’s how it started.
I never had any intention of leaving General Motors. I thought it would just be something I would do on the side.
Within six months, this friend called me up and said a customer wanted the cables installed, and he gave me the name of the customer, which was the IRS — the Internal Revenue Service — and that was my very first installation customer right here in Atlanta.
Q: Were you on the assembly line at GM?
A: I started on the assembly line in 1976, and I worked on the assembly line for four years, and then they closed the plant we were in down at Lakewood. Three years later, they sent out a notice that they were going to reopen the plant and were starting a management-training program. I got in the management-training program and was in management when I left GM to start my company.
Q: Leaving GM was a pretty major career change.
A: When I left General Motors, my mom cried and the rest of my family laughed that I was going to start my own business. But it’s been great.
Q: Are you seeing an uptick in sales this year as the economy recovers?
A: Knock on wood, we’ve actually grown in the last three years. We haven’t had any negative impact in our business from the economy. A lot of people call this a jobless recovery, and probably the main reason for that is companies have become more productive with fewer people. And the best way to become more productive with fewer people is through technology.
Q: Describe your competitive landscape?
A: Our industry is highly fragmented. You’ve got companies as big as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who will actually hire us for projects, and companies as small as a one-man operation — somebody who may have worked for a company as a technician.
They’re very smart on the technical aspects of the network. Maybe they got laid off, or maybe they just decided, “Hey, I can do this on my own.” They go out and start their own business. They hang out a shingle. They have one or two customers. Those can be as much of a competitor as anybody.
Q: What’s your biggest business challenge?
A: This week it’s world events, with everything going on in Libya and Japan and what that’s doing to the stock market. Once it affects the stock market, it starts affecting companies’ growth decisions. ... If one of our customers that accounts for 12 percent of our revenues decides that they’re not going to do anything else this year until they see some stability in the economy, that could be a big problem. We would have to go find that business somewhere else, and that takes time.
Q: Give me an example of how your experience as a front-line worker affects the way you lead your company?
A: There are a lot of social aspects that I focus on with my business now, taking good care of the people I’m responsible for.
I do that from a business standpoint, do it based on merit. But one of the things that we do every year is set goals for the company, and if we hit them, I match everyone’s 401(k) 100 percent. The average match since we started our 401(k) in the 1990s is 40 cents on the dollar, and the last three years we’ve matched it 100 percent.
Meet Bob Eskew
Title: CEO and founder, Automated Systems Design
Age: 53
Hometown: Decatur
Current residence: Cumming
Family: Wife Barbara and children Rob, 23; Sara, 21; Amber, 18; and Brooke, 15
Education: Clarkston High School, graduated 1975
Hobbies: Golf, guitar, cooking, travel
Favorite philanthropy: Wounded Warrior Project
Favorite travel destination: Grand Cayman
Favorite recent movie: “500 Days of Summer”
Last song he downloaded: “Lovely Day” by Bill Withers
Guilty pleasure: Yogli Mogli frozen yogurt
Favorite thing about Atlanta: You can always find something to do.
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