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.
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.
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 50th 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.”