When Fred Foster first realized how far he had come he thought he was going to be sick. He had just walked two blocks past the freshly laid asphalt in front of Electronic Theatre Controls’ new building, and with each step his stomach had turned a little more. His gut knew it before he did: from here on there could be no stepping back.

“It was a lark. I stuck with it, dropped out of school and worked as a stagehand. … I was just too stupid to quit,” Foster recalls of his early efforts in the entertainment lighting business.

Just he and a few project partners, who would rather be sailing on Lake Mendota, had been along for the ride, building a company because they were told they couldn’t. Now, 65 additional people and some heavy investments were on board with him, and it was his job to make sure the thing didn’t tank. Foster had a queasy feeling the task might be more than he could handle and that staying on course would mean risking the loss of more than just his breakfast.

Foster has spent 34 years building a “lark” born in the backstage of a high school theater into one of the world’s premier lighting companies. He’s an “innovator” for more than his passion and the new products he’s brought to his industry. For ETC to grow into something so much larger than himself, Foster says he’s had to learn to strategically downsize his ego.

Foster is a celebrity in his business. He has a mildly boastful manner but a self-deprecating wit to balance it out. He seems at all times cognizant of his past. That’s probably because his office itself is a reminder.

A miniature, fully-functional garage door opens to his workspace at ETC’s elaborately stylized headquarters in Middleton. He had the door built into it out of equal parts deference and nostalgia. It’s a metaphorical portal to ETC’s early days on concrete floors, which Foster ensured span both office and factory space during ETC headquarters’ construction.

Hearing him talk about his past, it’s easy to understand why he built in these reminders. The story of his young entrepreneurial days is an endearing one: a boy with a great idea and a few carefree friends goof their way to riches. In fact, Illinois Rep. Bill Foster, Fred’s brother, even used his part in the story to market his entrepreneurial history while campaigning.

Foster’s life in theater lighting started early. At 13, he serendipitously joined drama club with the intent of charming a girl. But his stint as an actor was short lived. He forgot his lines halfway through his first play, and his mortification killed the acting bug in him forever. He preferred his role backstage, behind the spotlight, not in it. He dreamed of being a lighting director like celebrated University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Gilbert Hemsley. But as a theater student of Hemsley’s in the late 1970s, he learned that wouldn’t happen.

ETC headquarters’ main lobby, dubbed “Town Square,” is a massive Edward Hopper-themed theater set designed to showcase ETC products and bring together employees with different expertise. Involved in the building’s design, Foster was adamant that concrete extend throughout office space to create a sense of common footing with workers on the manufacturing floor. Also, nobody in management gets an office with a window.

“I thought I was going to be a really great lighting designer and great artist, but I just didn’t have confidence in my ability to pick colors,” Foster says. To this day he asks for the help of his wife and daughter to dress himself.

At UW-Madison’s Mitchell Theatre, Foster first encountered Q-File. Q-File was a ponderous $250,000 dinosaur of a lighting rig that he became determined to see extinct. Consulting with his tech-savvy brother, they figured the functions of its three racks of electronics, knobs and levers could be recast onto microprocessors for just $5,000.

Foster proposed his gift to the theater industry at one of Hemsley’s infamously debaucherous Christmas Eve parties. The lighting designers and theater magnates in attendance playfully jeered the idea. But the headstrong Foster brothers and their two friends, Gary Bewick and Jim Bradley, were spurred on by their proposal’s poor reception and set out to bring the next evolution of lighting design to life.

The four toiled in Foster’s apartment, unsure of what they were doing. They scrounged up money and parts wherever they could find them. One year and one day later Foster and company sat a small box they dubbed “Mega Cue” down on Hemsley’s table. It worked. The once doubtful Hemsley became one of Foster’s most generous supporters. It was a merry Christmas for Foster, indeed.