What are your priorities over the next 1 – 3 years? We have three main priorities over the next few years: 1) Continue our mission of One Digi-Key, globally, where we maintain and export the powerful values that formed the company while we learn and adapt from the experiences of new team members around the world. 2) Digital acceleration: Leveraging our roots of being a digital innovator and evolving at the pace required by our customers. 3) Create a passion for continuous improvement; what was a differentiator yesterday will be simply the cost of entry tomorrow. All of these things must happen as we embrace an outside perspective, in line with understanding our customers emerging needs. What lessons have you learned in your current role? Virtually every company will tell you that people make the difference; yet their policies express everything but that sentiment. Being headquartered in a small community, we try to continue to feel small, even as we grow bigger. This intimacy has created a culture for ‘having each other’s back’. Building a culture on a foundation of trust, open communication and honesty is powerful. We learned that asking for help goes a lot further than trying to mandate it. Hire great people, let them delight customers, and customers will fuel the growth that allows this cycle to be repeated. Don’t measure financial metrics such as return on working capital (ROWC) or inventory turns as much as you measure customer- facing service metrics such as in-stock rate and same-day ship. If you take care of the customer, the financials will follow.
What was your career path like after graduating?
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My first position was as a manufacturing engineer with Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) in Marlboro, MA. I realized that I enjoyed work at the component level and became a component engineer, assisting internal programs with component selection and performing vendor qualifications on devices selected. I left DEC to become a field application engineer with Toshiba and later went into sales management, supporting DEC as one of Toshiba’s four global accounts. I ultimately relocated to Long Island, NY to join Arrow Electronics where over a 13-year period I held various positions ranging from leading their North American application engineering team to becoming Vice President of semiconductor products.
I was always fascinated with Digi-Key and the reputation they held of having outstanding customer service and being easy to do business with for both suppliers and customers.
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How did you get your start at Digi-Key?
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I was always fascinated with Digi-Key and the reputation they held of having outstanding customer service and being easy to do business with for both suppliers and customers. I met Mark Larson at an industry function, and we spent an evening getting to know each other personally; exchanging philosophies and life stories. When the opportunity to join the company arose in late 2007, I discussed it with my wife and oldest child at the time (a son who was entering his junior year in high school) and we made a family decision to leave Denver and relocate north.
12 | Navigating Through Change
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