Passion and balance

In the last FARO News we interviewed Ping Fu of Geomagic. She's an example of a CEO with a strong hands-on technical background. You come from the financial management side. How important have your financial skills been in facilitating the strong recent growth of the company?

My hands-on finance background was so long ago that it plays only a minor role in driving the overall growth of the company. My last ten years have been spent running companies and growing them through focus on strategy, technology and execution. I currently spend 30-40% of my time just reviewing technology in the marketplace and reviewing progress on our own internal technology development. That then gets translated into significant portions of our growth and expansion trategies.

You were Ernst & Young's 2008 Entrepreneur Of The Year in the technology category for Florida and you're now in the running for the national award in the same category. A CEO is only ever as good as his team. What makes FARO employees different?

First and foremost is passion. One of my fundamental philosophies in life is to live with passion. I discuss it frequently across our entire organization and there is no doubt that FARO employees are very passionate about what they're doing and how they serve the mission and vision of this company. They have an unparalleled drive to serve our customers and do so through their technical acumen, process excellence and of course, through their passion.

You've doubled your global workforce and kept double digit sales growth. Is this an industry boom or is FARO doing something very special?

 It's a combination of both. There's no question that we're still in the early stages of an extremely large market  opportunity that is highly underserved. That market size will also keep growing as we continue identifying new verticals to sell to and new applications to provide. As a company, we have also put significant effort into expanding our sales force and our application engineers in the field to help drive that growth while continuing to provide superior service and support our customers.

In-process goods inspection is gaining popularity over quality control of final products. But inspection interferes and delays production. How does one balance time and tolerance concerns?

Tolerance concerns are addressed by the technical strength of our products. We have the ability to measure as accurate as 5 microns. We also are measuring right on the manufacturing floor with simple, easy to use hardware and software. That balance of simplicity and high accuracy makes our products extremely fast, certainly faster than traditional methods of measurement. We also continue expanding our capabilities in non-contact measurement which will serve to enhance speed, accuracy and ease of use even further.

FARO's headquarters are 1 hour from Cape Canaveral. Have you watched a shuttle launch – and how did you feel when watching it? Is NASA an important customer? How do they use FARO products?

I have seen multiple launches since moving to Florida in 1999. My wife is an engineering manager for the Space Shuttle program, so we've seen a lot of launches over the last nine years. Having watched from as much as 20 miles away and from only 3 miles away in the VIP area, I can tell you that it's an amazing experience. Visually, launches are spectacular,
particularly at night when the sky goes from complete darkness to complete daylight the second they ignite the solid rocket boosters. NASA and many of its affiliates are very good customers of FARO using our products for a variety of applications, not just with the Shuttle program, but in other defense and commercial programs as well.

Tell us about your average working week.

Every day starts and ends on my mobile phone in the car. I live 75 miles away from the office, so I have lots of ‘windshield time' to touch base with my team, particularly those who are based in Europe and Asia due to the time zone differences. I spend approximately 30% of the week in technologyrelated meetings, 20% in meetings related to the organization and our employees, 20% focused on operational activities and 20% focused on sales, marketing and customerrelated initiatives. The remaining 10% of my time covers everything else such as weekly update calls with my senior and expanded leadership teams, investor meetings, and Board-related matters. About 15-20% of my time is spent travelling which is just about the right amount. I've had times in other companies I ran that required me to travel as much as 60% of my time.
However, I also found that if the business leader personally needs to spend that much time on the road to keep the company moving, it's usually a sign of deeper trouble. We have an extremely strong leadership team at FARO who is capable of managing the day-to-day success of their individual operations without me coming to see them every week.

Where do you see FARO headed in 5-10 years?

In 5-10 years, this will be a very different company. We'll still have our core mission of enabling our customers' products and processes to be the best in the world and we'll still have our core vision to remain the world's leading three-dimensional measurement and imaging company. However, we'll be sizably larger – we certainly intend to continue our
historical growth rates of at least 20-25% per year for as long as possible. We'll have significant additions to our technology portfolio, many of which will be tied to non-contact technology and a broad range of software applications. We'll be selling into vertical markets we can only dream of today, and we'll have made FARO and the technology we create a global standard in industry.

Do you have a personal favourite application for FARO products or a dream of the kind of device you want to be developing one day?

No matter what types of devices I dream of for our company, they're always better and easier to use. They're devices that the masses can use. Many of them are non-contact, though certainly not all of them. They are all carrying out 3D measurements and continue to make life simpler. As for favourite applications, it's hard to highlight just one as
there are so many great ones. What I do love is the breadth of applications for our technology. I've seen everything from aligning assembly pins and holes on pre-fabricated furniture using our Gage to aligning the sections of the fuselage of jumbo jets using our Laser Tracker. I've seen reverse engineered parts no more than a few inches in size using our  ScanArm to a complete three-dimensional model of an auto factory using our Laser Scanner. The tools are diverse and highly adaptable.

What's your personal motto or 'measure of success'?

My personal motto is very simple: 'Live with passion, live with balance'. Passion for what you do every day is fundamental to your overall success. Living your life with balance is equally important as it keeps perspective. Having passion and being obsessed are two very different things. One is productive (passion), the other is destructive (obsession). Living with balance avoids the destructive side. It also allows you to stay in touch with reality. It allows you to see strengths and weaknesses for what they truly are and enables you to act appropriately and objectively. Following those two philosophical views enables success, no matter how you measure it.