You will hear Jack Lester, founder of Hinde Instruments Corporation, a telescope manufacturer, giving a talk about the developme

My name is Jack Lester and I’m here to talk about the company I originally founded in nineteen seventy-two, Hinde Instruments. Today, the company, with factories in Nevada and Texas and its headquarters in California, is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of telescopes. Sales have grown at a rate of thirty-six per cent for the last ten years and in two thousand and two, reached one hundred and twenty-six million dollars. But this hasn’t always been the case. In fact, in nineteen ninety-one, the threat of bankruptcy was hanging over the company.
    I’ve always been an amateur astronomer and started building my own telescopes when I was ten. After working as an engineer at WAC, it seemed quite natural to start my own telescope company, Hinde Instruments. To start with, the company imported telescopes and sold them by mail order, but by nineteen seventy-seven, the company was making its own telescopes. Almost overnight, we took a huge portion of the market, amateur astronomers being keen to buy our telescopes because of the features they offered. By nineteen eighty-three, sales reached two million dollars.
    In nineteen eighty-six, I sold the company for six point five million dollars to the Amtex Group, staying on as President. From the start, I disagreed with the new owners, and things did not go well. Then the sky fell in. In February nineteen ninety-one, the bank called in the company’s loans. There was no cash at the time. In fact, the company’s balance sheet gave a net worth of minus two point five million dollars for nineteen ninety-one, the company having lost that much the previous year on sales of eleven point five million dollars.
    I made a personal loan to the company of sixty-five thousand dollars to stave off the bank for one week so I could start to negotiate with three senior managers at Hinde interested in buying the company. It worked, and Amtex agreed to sell us one hundred per cent of the company’s stock, along with all its liabilities, for one thousand dollars. As the key investor, I purchased fifty-one per cent of the company for five hundred and ten dollars.
    The four of us managed to put together two million dollars, and we decided this was to be used totally on product development. Amtex hadn’t moved on any new products, so we had the luxury of engineering and of proof-of-concept waiting for us. We published a new catalogue of high-tech products and took out advertising in leading astronomy magazines. Just twelve months after our purchase, we managed to get the company into the black. For the first two years, we all took very modest salaries. But it was an exciting time, and progress was being made.
    We develop products the market wants to buy. We rely on our instincts and have frank discussions with dealers. We do this rather than run marketing studies, because we think they can be a waste of time. It sounds simple, and it works for us. And while the advanced telescopes are clearly the company’s brand strength, a major reason for our success with consumers is our ability to apply sophisticated technology to mass-market models. We offer a range of telescopes costing from eighty-nine dollars to fifteen thousand dollars, but fifty per cent of sales are generated by telescopes sold for under five hundred dollars.
    In the future, I see Hinde creating more telescopes for amateur astronomers. But the company is also looking for ways to broaden into new markets. We believe that our core competencies are in demand and will achieve that breakthrough for us. For the last year, for example, the company has supplied optical components to HNT Networks in Seattle, a wireless-communications company.
    Thank you. If you have any . . .
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