Every part of Town Square has a story to tell. The “Richard Kelley Insurance” facade in this photo is an allusion to ETC’s early days when only Richard Kelley was willing to take a risk insuring the Foster’s risky venture.

The Foster brothers soon travelled to a Washington D.C. lighting industry conference on a tip from Hemsley. They intended to sell Mega Cue to Kliegl, the top stage lighting company at the time.
The would-be lighting design luminaries had bright hopes. They were traveling with an early prototype of today’s consoles, which allow lighting directors to initiate complex automated displays onstage with the touch of a button. Microprocessor controlled units are a fraction of the cost of traditional lighting assemblies and can perform precisely the same way every night, making production easier and less expensive. It was a great invention. Unfortunately for Foster, someone else had already invented it.

“When we saw Gordon’s board, it was really hard to keep going on, even that day,” Foster says of coming across Gordon Pearlman’s light board at the conference. The console did essentially what Mega Cue did, and had been developed by Pearlman for Kliegl.

Foster was despondent, but, in his words, still “too stupid to quit.” He was encouraged by others in attendance and assured he had a great product. Eventually, persistence paid off. The Fosters signed a contract with Colortran, now electrical wiring manufacturer Leviton, to produce Mega Cue. They were ecstatic to have the opportunity, though they soon learned Colortran was less excited to be working with them.

One late night while working at Colortran in Burbank, CA. the naturally inquisitive Foster took a peek inside a filing cabinet indicatively labeled “Memory System.” He found ETC’s file and discovered memos referring to him and his brother as “the flakes from Wisconsin who would rather be sailing.”
The brothers found it hilarious, and promptly altered the letterheads of all correspondence with Colortran to include a sailboat and changed ETC’s company pens to read: “Electronic Theatre Controls … we’d rather be sailing.”

Foster left Colortran after independently securing jobs with Disney. His early work with the entertainment Goliath led to installing ETC systems in Disney theme parks worldwide. ETC expanded throughout the 1980s, introducing new products and acquiring Lighting Methods Inc. in 1990. With the acquisition, ETC tripled in size and moved to a new building. That was when Foster felt the first real pangs of growth.

“People had ripped their lives up and moved 1,000 miles to Madison. It was a big turning point in how I looked at the whole thing. … These people had chosen to commit themselves to this enterprise, this thing, and so now it was an obligation,” Foster says.

A larger company meant more rules, and Foster rebelled against them all. He wanted to hold on to the informal way of doing things and be involved at every level of production the way he always had been. Scrambling back-and-forth, he inevitably stepped on the toes of others in upper management, most often on those of ETC’s current president, Dick Titus. It wasn’t working. ETC needed to restructure or risk falling apart.

“These are steps that have to happen in the evolution of a company. … A lot of entrepreneurial companies get choked off because they never break through that really informal tiny company mentality,” Foster says. “One of the challenges is letting go of things.”

Unsure of what his job was, and feeling he was in the way, Foster turned to his wife Susan. She recommended he make a list of fives: five things he does best, five things he does worst, and five things he could do to fix the problem. It helped, too. The main problem: the role he performed at ETC was becoming obsolete. He was Q-File. He needed to reinvent himself.