Three corpoate tales: Ground rules for growth;

              Three Corporate Tales
Ground! Rules
for
srouutn
The White House waits for
it; Congress wants to
stimulate it; the media
keep looking for it—and when we
get home at night, our kids seem
overdosed on it. What's so great
about growth?
Nowhere is growth more
sought after than in America's
boardrooms, where progress is
measured by "substantially
higher revenues" or "significantly
improved earnings." The corpora­tion
as compared to a ship is
a well-worn metaphor, but
according to three CEOs it has
some validity. To them a corpora­tion
without growth is a ship
becalmed. We asked these
captains of industry to share with
us their views of growth, the
problems of achieving it, and the
challenges of maintaining it.
The CEOs represent companies
in very different stages of growth
—from the emerging Metheus
Corporation (with virtually no
sales), to Visual Technology (with
sales now at $50 million), to
Automatic Data Processing (with
annual revenues of $700 million).
These companies are guided by
remarkably dissimilar growth
philosophies.
One CEO theorizes that
"Growth occurs when you're in
the right place at the right time."
Another asserts that "You've got
to create a good place for growth
to happen." And the third insists
that growth is a careful orches­tration
of concepts combined with
a constant fine-tuning of details.
Can growth be controlled or
encouraged, or does it just
happen? The experiences of the
three growth-oriented companies
suggest that there is value in the
process of growth, as well as in
the growth itself.
VISUAL
A Home for Growth
To hear Tom Foley describe it,
starting a $25 million company is
a cinch—you just convince some
brilliant, well-paid corporate
managers to risk their livelihoods,
rustle up a half million dollars,
and tell the world you're in
business. "It's the easiest thing
I've ever done," says the gre­garious
president of Visual
Technology Incorporated.
Visual epitomizes the high-tech,
high-growth entrepreneurial
success story of our era: a well-defined
market niche, a small but
impressive team of managers and
technical people, and the convic­tion
that you can do something
better that anyone else.
The marketplace seems to
agree. From $700,000 in revenues
just three years ago to $26 million
in 1982, Visual ranks among the
leaders in its industry in return
on equity and profitability.
Adding icing to the cake, the stock
market has afforded Visual a
generous price /earnings multiple.
Visual designs, manufactures,
and markets a broad line of both
standard and custom-designed
video display terminals. A
popular feature of the Visual
terminal is its ability to emulate
(at a significantly lower price) the
characteristics and compatibility