In 1998, ETC Europe in London needed a leader to step in to temporarily replace its managing director. Foster seized the opportunity to work with a smaller version of ETC. It was something he knew he was good at. The 13 months he would be gone would give Titus the chance to restructure ETC at home and buy Foster time to reinterpret his role there.

When he returned Foster found a company that was much better organized but had lost its spirit.
“We were doing it more efficiently, but we didn’t know why,” Foster says. “I couldn’t fault Dick for not providing that because it wasn’t his scope and if he had tried it I would’ve killed him. But that left a kind of void.”

That void was what Foster would strive to fill. But it wasn’t like filling a dark theater with light. There were numerous false starts, and Foster and Titus continued to bump heads as they both stepped in to handle the same issues.

“People perceived a big rift between Dick and me,” Foster says. He likens the situation to a company with divorced parents: if an employee didn’t get what they wanted from one, they would go to the other.

Ultimately, he found common ground with Titus in ethics and in the kind of culture they both hoped to instill at ETC. It just wasn’t always easy to see because they hadn’t been communicating enough to realize at a deeper level they were working to solve the same problems.

Foster’s principle job as CEO today is to define a vision for the company and ensure everyone understands how it informs their own work and the work of their co-workers. In addition to ¬¬his involvement in marketing and product development, he’s also in charge of keeping the spirit of the early ETC alive.

Fred Foster's advice on becoming an entrepreneur: "Drop out of business school...Taking a finance course, you would learn that having a an 8-to-1 debt-to-equity ratio was stupid, and you would quit. I had the advantage of not knowing how bad off we were, and I was too stupid to know to quit...If you get your MBA, you're going to be really valuable to an entrepreneur at some point when their company gets large enough that they need your specific talents, but I think it could poison your ability to take risks."

When ETC was just six people, Foster and friends once put all the phone lines on hold and everyone piled in his car to go see a matinee of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”

In 2001, inspired by that stunt, but this time with 500 people, Foster took everyone at ETC to see “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.”

For his 50^th birthday, Susan surprised him with a live band at headquarters.  Foster called off work early for everyone and sprung for beer.

Foster is also a champion of ETC’s mission statement. Well, the last point of it at least. The rest he calls “marketing pabulum.”

ETC will:

– develop great new products for the lighting world
– listen to our customers and give them more than they expect
– have fun and make money

“[The third point] captured what I think is critically important in the company,” Foster says, because it draws the best employees to the company and keeps them there. Foster elaborates with a story. While in negotiations to buy a German company, he was fielding questions. Most of the questions were asked through a translator, but one engineer who had worked in America was able to ask questions for himself.

“On your website you have a mission statement,” the engineer said, going on to read the first point and the second and continuing with a heavy German accent, “… but the last point is,‘vee vill have foon and make money.’ Can you tell me please, vat is foon?”

Foster managed to keep his composure despite the snickering shoulders of his American colleague. He explained that in a business sense “fun” doesn’t mean parties and movies all the time, but that it’s something that is best measured by whether you feel you have to go to work on Monday or you get to go to work.

“And the ‘making money’ part probably sounds really greedy and American. … There’s some of that. We have to be profitable to prove we’re a successful company,” Foster says. “But more important than that, the more money we make, the more money we have to spend on doing cool shit that makes it more fun to be here.”