Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com. It's guest time on the show and I'm very pleased to have with me a major success story because our guest this morning is Don Nigbor, cofounder and former CEO and Chairman of Benchmark Electronics, Inc. Don, welcome to The BusinessMakers Show.

Don: Oh, thank you Russ. I'm glad you could come down to Angleton and visit with us today.

Russ: You bet. Well let's start here. Here we are in 2010. You're like a year and a half beyond retirement from a major, major success story. So what are you doing with your time these days?

Don: Well, I'm doing some of the things that I'd always planned to do. Doing a little more traveling, spend more time with the family and then one of my interests is working with young companies. I'm on the Board of the Houston Technology Center and also I work individually with some young firms that are trying to get started and so I enjoy, you know, coaching them, spending time with them.

Russ: Cool. Okay. So for our listeners that don't know exactly what Benchmark Electronics is and was; why don't you give us an overview?

Don: Well Benchmark Electronics is a contracted electronic manufacturing company sometimes they refer to it as an EMS company, electronic manufacturing services company - because what's really happened today - we originally started off manufacturing the circuit boards for other companies. They decided they didn't need to build a down-to-earth electronics and so we would build those and they would take these products and take them back to their factories and finish the product and now the business is growing and we actually complete the products. We build all sorts of equipment - telecommunications equipment, medical equipment, computers - and we complete the entire product. And so there's been a big change in scope over the last 20 years.

Russ: It almost seems like you and your partners, the co-founders, started doing this contract electronic manufacturing at precisely the right time.

Don: We were one of the early companies. We were originally a division of InterMedics, a pacemaker company down in Freeport, Texas and we were a separate division and we were building equipment which supports their efforts, which is a programmer and a telemetry device. And the production cycles were such that we had a lot of gaps and so we started looking for work to fill in and we started doing work for, for example, Dow Chemical Company, here and Xerox in California, Digicon was one of our customers in Houston and there were also some Postal Service customers up in Dallas and so we started to grow to a company by servicing companies outside of the medical industry.

Russ: Okay and this is while you were with InterMedics which might have been your first job out of college, actually?

Don: No, I originally - my first job really was with Digital Equipment Corporation -

Russ: Okay.

Don: - I was an analyst for the Vice President of Manufacturing there.

Russ: Okay and then InterMedics followed that?

Don: Yes, of course Digital Equipment was based in Boston. I married my wife and her roots are here in the Houston area.

Russ: Right.

Don: And so we migrated to the Houston area in 1978 and I found InterMedics in 1980.

Russ: And InterMedics at that time was doing mainly heart pacemakers?

Don: Their main business in Freeport was pacemakers, which is a very small electronic device.

Russ: Right.

Don: It's about the size of a Zippo lighter and half of that's a battery. So it's very tiny. It was a very high growth company then. It was doing very well, because they were an innovator in technology.

Russ: Okay. And I know from doing homework with your background - it's real interesting - how Benchmark Electronics started. We do this thing on The BusinessMakers Show - we love to find where was the business idea trigger and in your case, the case of Benchmark Electronics, you ended up running a division and it's this division that had gaps in manufacturing and went out and started just getting jobs to manufacture other people's products which turned out to be very successful. A lot of our younger audience members might not even realize that there was a period of time where everybody manufactured their own product and this was this huge paradigm shift that you were involved in and responsible for, correct?

Don: Yeah, we were able to identify, really a new market that wasn't really well known. We were able to find customers who didn't want to do all their manufacturing. It was traditional at that time for most companies to do all their manufacturing. It was considered to be one of their key ingredients -

Russ: Right.

Don: - is they had to, not only design the product but they had to manufacture it. So it was kinda like the Holy Grail - they needed to do that. But then some companies started saying that they didn't need to do all the detail work and they started outsourcing, you know, smaller projects and then larger products and one of the things that really changed the mentality of the whole electronic industry is when IBM came out with the PC and didn't manufacture it.

Russ: Right.

Don: They gave it to one of my larger competitors.

Russ: Right.

Don: And so that changed the mindset of the industry that this was an option that could be looked at. It wasn't accepted yet but this option it could be looked at.

Russ: Okay. And this is still actually while you were part of InterMedics?

Don: Yes. This happened while we were a part of InterMedics.

Russ: Okay. Now I know it's a real fascinating story how Benchmark Electronics actually came out of InterMedics. You were actually the General Manager of this division -

Don: Right.

Russ: - that was doing some of this contract manufacturing. Share that story with our listeners.

Don: Well, our Chairman and CEO, G. Russell Chambers, had put an aggressive acquisition program together and borrowed quite a bit of funding and then the government came in with some DRGs which controlled the pricing on pacemakers and so the company got into a cash crunch and the board told Mr. Chambers to restructure the company and to divest of all the divisions that weren't purely medical products.

Russ: Right.

Don: And they needed to complete that divestiture by the end of July 1986. And so this all happened probably at the beginning of 1986; the mission was given to Mr. Chambers and so I was called into his office and as the General Manager and I was recruited to be part of the effort to sell the division -

Russ: The division that you headed up.

Don: - my division and because it was no longer fit the corporate directive. You know he set me down on a couch next to me and gave me the mission. Well, they were very successful in bringing a lot of investors in and we also had transferred into the company new technology from InterMedics called Surface mount Technology which shrank down electronics about two-thirds of its normal size and reduced the weight and that allowed laptop computers and a lot of things to be smaller. And so we already had the new technology and everything so we bring people in and they were just fascinated with what we could do and then take them back to the conference room and they would want to know what product we have and I would say, "Well we don't have a product,"

Russ: [Laughter]

Don: We manufacture for other companies.

Russ: Which this was very unique in that period of time.

Don: Very unique.

Russ: Right.

Don: Well nobody ever heard of a company that didn't have a product.

Russ: Right.

Don: And didn't do their own manufacturing.

Russ: Right.

Don: And they would walk out the door scratching their head and we never got an offer for the company 'cause it was a new business model.

Russ: Nobody wanted to buy it.

Don: Nobody was interested.

Russ: Right. Right, well I'm talking with Don Nigbor, the cofounder and former CEO and Chairman of Benchmark Electronics and we'll be back after this because Don's definitely got to share with us the rest of this cool story about how he pulled that part of the company out of InterMedics. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com.

[Commercial]

Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com and continuing on with Don Nigbor, cofounder and former CEO and Chairman of Benchmark Electronics. Okay, Don, you were just at that point where you were telling us that this new contract manufacturing electronics manufacturing entity had been sort of ordered out of the company. You were trying to do your mission and sell it and people were fascinated with the technology but nobody wanted to buy it 'cause you didn't make a product. So how did you accomplish the sale of the company?

Don: What happened is Mr. Chambers had a retirement party in June of '86 and he left the company but we didn't know what our future was, so a gentleman named Dick Martin was made president and so the three of us made a bid for the company. We thought we needed to -

Russ: You and your two partners, bid? Wow.

Don: Yeah. My two partners, Steve Barton and Cary Fu - I was the General Manager, Steve was our Sales Manager and Cary was our Financial Manager -

Russ: Now, let me ask you this: you couldn't sell it. Nobody wanted to buy it. So why in the world would the three of you want to buy it?

Don: We thought that we had some good people and we had some good technology and we had seen that there was a developing market. More and more people were willing to consider outsourcing manufacturing. It wasn't a widely accepted trend but we felt that, you know, we had all the right ingredients. We had a great team. Steve and Cary - Steve was a superb salesman; he had been a salesman in the pacemaker industry and he had a lot of experience. Cary was a superb financial manager and we had highly-trained people. Not only that, we had the latest computer systems. We had - even though we were a tiny company, we had MRP systems, we had accounting systems - so we had all the basic things to make a good firm.

Russ: Right.

Russ: But wasn't there still maybe questions in your mind, "Are we doing the right thing?" Or did you perhaps think, "Well let's buy it and then let's manufacture our own product, let's find a product"? Or -

Don: All those thoughts were in our mind. I'll be honest with you. We didn't really know what the future of the company was.

Russ: Sure.

Don: I'll be honest - then if you asked me, "Do you think this company could've been a billion-dollar company?" I would say, "You're crazy."

[Laughter]

Russ: Which it did become a billion-dollar company, ____ ____?

Don: I mean we would've never, ever - we would've bet you any amount of money -

Russ: Right.

Don: - this would never have happened.

Russ: Right.

Don: We never envisioned that we could become the size we did.

Russ: Right.

Don: I mean we were struggling to get any business.

Russ: Right.

Don: You know, we're trying to convince customers that they should go this way. We had a couple of things in our favor, though. One of them is the advent of that new technology meant that most of the companies' manufacturing equipment was out-of-date and they were gonna have to make a major capital investment to go to service _____. Okay, and if that - and I had done some market research in California, in Silicon Valley. I knew eventually it was gonna be widely accepted. So they were gonna have the big decision to make. The other thing that we did is we took over the cash flow cycle. We were managing the inventory - so we were reducing the cash requirements. At the same time, we were allowing them to have new technology -

Russ: Okay.

Don: - and we thought that was a strong sales message.

Russ: Okay. So you just had this real strong feeling that this contract, electronics manufacturing way of doing business was gonna take off?

Don: Yeah, well we didn't know if it was gonna take off but we thought we could build a stable business.

Russ: Okay.

Don: Okay?

Russ: Okay.

Don: And we were looking for stability because our, you know, we were leaving a parent company was very unstable.

Russ: Right.

Don: And we were looking for stability.

Russ: Right. And so there were no buyers. The three of you decide, "Let's make a offer." That must mean that you all had some pretty good backing or had a bunch of your own money to do this with.

Don: No, it was just the opposite.

[Laughter]

Russ: Okay, all right.

Don: I mean we were - Cary and I both had recently got our Master's degree so we were still paying our student loans.

Russ: Right.

Don: We had mortgages. We had three kids. We didn't have any - you know, the only thing we had was our 401Ks at InterMedics -

Russ: Right.

Don: - and Steve had been a little more successful 'cause he joined InterMedics sooner. And so we really didn't have a lotta money.

Russ: Yeah.

Don: After Mr. Chambers had a retirement party and left we made a, you know, a low-ball bid and we didn't hear anything for months and then the last day of July -

Russ: Which was the deadline.

Don: - the deadline -

Russ: Okay.

Don: Dick Martin, the president, calls me and said, "Okay, our plan is really to close this division. We have a liquidator here that's gonna take the equipment and what we're gonna do is we're gonna allow you to buy the company if you can raise your bid and match the liquidator's bid.

Russ: So your bid was even lower that the liquidator?

Don: Oh yeah. We -

[Laughter]

Don: Well we didn't have any money.

Russ: Yeah.

Don: We didn't have a lot of money and so - and you've got two hours to make up your mind whether you'll accept this deal or not.

Russ: Two hours.

Don: Two hours.

Russ: And he meant it?

Don: He meant it.

Russ: All right.

Don: I mean 'cause he was gonna sign the deal with the liquidator.

Russ: Right.

Don: And so of course we took the deal and -

Russ: What was that two hours like? I mean were the three of you together? Was there consternation then, even or not?

Don: Well, I don't think there was any doubt that we would go forward.

Russ: All right.

Don: We were, by then, committed to do this.

Russ: Right.

Don: We had almost 100 people here that were gonna lose their jobs if we didn't do it.

Russ: Right.

Don: That was a big motivator.

Russ: Right, right.

Don: We thought we had a good team of people.

Russ: Right.

Don: For me, personally, it was the first chance to really run a business.

Russ: Right.

Don: And I didn't want to sink the ship as soon as I got on it.

Russ: Right, right.

Don: So I mean I wanted to save the ship. So I mean there was a little bit of pride there. We wanted to save jobs and we felt, you know, maybe we could create some business.

Russ: All right, so you matched the liquidator's bid?

Don: Yeah, we matched the - well not quite - when we got to closing, we never even actually touched our 401K checks. They - they just let us touch it with a pen. They grabbed the money and we had gone and -

Russ: You didn't touch them, meaning they wouldn't even let you hold them? You had to endorse them over and give them to them, yeah.

Don: Yeah and the problem was the economy in Texas in the summer of 1986 was worse than the economy in the United States today.

Russ: Right.

Don: You know, all the banks were going under. We had gone to 30 banks and couldn't find any financing.

Russ: Right.

Don: We found one small bank that said they could give us the money we needed but then when it came time for closing, the president said, "I really only have authority to loan half the money. I need to go to another bank to get the other half."

Russ: Yeah.

Don: Well we had already been to virtually every bank in the Brazosport and Houston area. We knew there wasn't anybody that would give us the money.

Russ: Right, right.

Don: So when we got to the closing, we had the money from the bank and our 401Ks and we told InterMedics we just needed a few months to come up with the rest of the money. So -

Russ: [Laughter] All right I want to finish this story after this. I'm talking with Don Nigbor, cofounder and former CEO and Chairman of Benchmark Electronics, Inc. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com.

[Commercial]

Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com and continuing on with my guest this morning, Don Nigbor, cofounder and former CEO and Chairman of Benchmark Electronics, Inc. Okay, Don, so where we left off is that, you know, you didn't have all the money and you were at closing because your banker kinda reneged a little bit on the deal. Carry that forward.

Don: Well what we were able to do is Cary, our Financial Manager, was really, really good at managing cash and so we were able to, you know, we did raise a little bit more money but basically what we were able to do is, you know, manage the payables and receivables and pull some money out of the company to finish the payments.

Russ: Wow. And so - and you persuaded InterMedics that, "Hey, give us a little," how much more time?

Don: They - I think we got about another two or three months to get some -

Russ: Yeah.

Don: - time to pay them off. They were so determined to sell the division, they weren't really worried about a few months to finish -

Russ: Okay.

Don: - okay.

Russ: Okay, were y'all worried about your ability to get, put together the extra money or - ?

Don: Well we knew it was gonna be tough.

Russ: Yeah.

Don: One of the things that - all of us had an MBA and we all knew cash management -

Russ: Right.

Don: - and one of the things that helped, I think, us get through a very difficult time is when our financial manager said, "Hey, cash is short," we knew how to pull, push all the right buttons. We'd slow down over time or we would do whatever we needed to do to manage the cash flow.

Russ: Okay, okay, but if I recall correctly from my research that even in this period of time, the business was still a low margin business -

Don: Right.

Russ: - you really weren't profitable. Now you had a lotta corporate overhead which might've caused that, too, but it wasn't like, you know, "Boy, this is just a cash machine," right?

Don: Well, one reason, you know, the company wasn't doing well is because of the overhead. Being part of a large company, medical company that had helicopter fleets and other things - we were allocated some of that cost -

Russ: Right.

Don: - and my whole career ten years prior to that had been in budgeting and cost management, so we really cut down the expenses and actually we were profitable the second month we left the bigger company.

Russ: Okay, okay.

Don: And we were - by managing the cash as tightly as we did - we grew 25 percent a year for two years.

Russ: Wow.

Don: And then we merged with a larger company - took a interest in our company to get some cash in -

Russ: Right.

Don: But for two years, we were able to do that.

Russ: Without raising any outside cash?

Don: Virtually no, yeah, just in managing it internally -

Russ: Right.

Don: - and being very tight.

Russ: Right, now Don we have a smart audience here at The BusinessMakers Show, so give us a little detail. I mean how were you, you know, able to manage - this is before the term just-in-time inventory, I think, had been invented.

Don: Right.

Russ: So, what - how did you do that?

Don: What we had to do is, you know, we've had to be very careful with our inventory management. Historically, manufacturing companies were not very good at managing their inventory in those days and largely because they didn't have computer systems. If they did have computer systems, they didn't have people to know how to run them -

Russ: Right.

Don: - because we have to remember in those - there were no PCs at that time.

Russ: Right.

Don: And virtually everybody in the factory had never used a computer before.

Russ: Right.

Don: And they didn't even trust them.

Russ: Right.

Don: And so the inventory accuracy was poor. The controls were poor. We couldn't afford that and we were fortunate when we split off from InterMedics, they had - we had the corporate standard, which was an MRP system. We had an integrated accounting system that tied in with that MRP system. So we had the ingredients for good control.

Russ: What's an MRP system?

Don: Material Requirements Planning.

Russ: Okay.

Don: Okay, which actually tracks your inventory in the stock rooms and then -

Russ: Right.

Don: - you can place your requirements against it and you get an accurate forecast of what you need to purchase.

Russ: Right.

Don: Believe it or not until that time, nobody really knew what they were doing.

Russ: Right.

Don: I mean they were just guessing.

Russ: Right.

Don: Okay? And wasting a lot of money.

Russ: Right.

Don: When I worked with Digital Equipment, for example, they would write off millions of dollars of inventory every year -

Russ: Right.

Don: - by mistakes in purchasing.

Russ: Right.

Don: And so by being very precise in our procurement and, you know, it was kind of funny to us 'cause we would go into a large company - like one of our customers was Tectronics out in Beaverton, Oregon - and the CEO said, "We're gonna now go to just-in-time inventory and we're gonna have - we're gonna really be controlling inventory," we had to laugh because that was - that's the only way we survived.

Russ: Right. But so how did you even get your customers to pay you fast, too? I mean, controlling inventory is key but also getting paid is key.

Don: We were very fortunate one of our largest customers was VMX in Dallas - that stands for Voice Message Exchange -

Russ: Right.

Don: - they had all the patents on voice messaging.

Russ: Right, right.

Don: And they were sitting on, I forget, $20 or $30, $40 million from an IPO and we would go into them and Steve, our Sales Manager, would go in and negotiate a discount and they would pay us in rates of their return on their investment and we would get paid right away. Steve would get on the company plane, Southwest -

Russ: Southwest Airlines.

Don: - fly down to Houston and put the check in the bank so we could pay the payroll the next day.

[Laughter]

Russ: Did you ever miss a payroll?

Don: We never did.

Russ: All right.

Don: We had - like I said, we had a great team. I mean I think, you know, one of the things to be successful in a business you have to have a great team of people.

Russ: Yeah. That's a great story about how you did it. So now, you survived and you kinda merged with this other company to bring in cash. How did it grow from there to this whole CEM thing really start taking off then?

Don: Well what happened is we started being successful but we really started being very successful in Beaverton, Oregon - that's where Techtronics was, one of our biggest customers.

Russ: Okay.

Don: They had designed, believe it or not, equipment with the new surface mounted technology but didn't have the manufacturing equipment so they became immediately our largest customer and then we had people come in from all over the United States down to little Klute, Texas for our manufacturing capability. We had customers in Atlanta and Seattle because they needed our ability to do surface mounted technology.

Russ: Right.

Don: But around the end of 1989, 40 percent of business was in Beaverton, Oregon -

Russ: Wow.

Don: - and we were in Klute, Texas.

Russ: Right.

Don: So I went to our - Mason Hanger which was our parent company at the time and I needed about almost $8 to $10 million to start a new facility in the Northwest or we were gonna lose that business.

Russ: Right.

Don: And they were a private firm and they agreed to let us become a public company so in 1990 we listed on the American Stock Exchange as BHE and raised over $8 million and I went out to Beaverton, Oregon and started a new facility.

Russ: Wow. Wow and so from there, I think, the company kept growing and then acquisition became more and more a part of the growth?

Don: Well, from roughly '86 to '96 we grew the company by promoting our new technology.

Russ: Okay.

Don: And we would go into the companies and we would offer to do their manufacturing with the new technology and we would take their old designs and help them convert them to the new designs and so we did this transition and we took companies into the new technology for about ten years. But then everybody - all our competitors had that technology by 1996 - and we had trouble growing in certain regions like the Midwest for example. We had great capabilities but the people in Midwest wanted service in the Midwest. So we started to do a series of acquisitions and the acquisitions were targeting and getting us, making us a national brand where we would be in all the regions of the U.S. and so what we wanted to do is get a geographic presence. We were a fairly small company so we wanted to get some good people and we wanted to get more technology, okay? And so what we tried to do is put together an acquisition that would build our strength and regional presence.

Russ: Cool. Talking with Don Nigbor, cofounder and former CEO and Chairman of Benchmark Electronics, Inc. and we'll be back with more with him after this. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com.

[Commercial]

Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com and continuing on with Don Nigbor, cofounder and former CEO and Chairman of Benchmark Electronics, Inc. Well tell us, Don, you know it must've been exciting times - did the company start hitting milestones and just growing very successfully?

Don: Well because of my background had originally been with Digital Equipment, I realized the electronics industry was a global business and it started to grow very rapidly. When we did our first IPO in 1990 we were in New York City and nobody understood what the business was about. They were confused. We did a secondary offering in '92 and there was still - Wall Street didn't understand what was going on in our industry. But then after that, it became known as - we got a little bit of a glamour to us because - not that we had high margins but we had high growth. Our industry was growing over 25 percent a year -

Russ: Wow.

Don: - and in order to stay up and not be lost in the crowd, we launched an acquisition program and I set a target in in the mid-90s, by the year 2000, we needed to be a billion dollar company because in order to have a global presence, you need to have a certain-sized platform.'

Russ: Sure.

Don: And we did our first acquisition. It was about a $50 million or $150 million company south of Minneapolis, Minnesota and very fine company and then we did a series of acquisitions in the Boston area, in Dublin, Ireland and then our biggest acquisition was in '99 we acquired one of the original companies - the number two company for many years - Abex in Huntsville, Alabama, which had facilities all over the world. It was nearly a billion dollar company -

Russ: Wow.

Don: And we were only about half that size.

Russ: Wow.

Don: Okay?

Russ: Okay.

Don: And so even the first acquisition. We were only $100 million and we acquired that $150 million company in Minnesota.

Russ: Okay.

Don: Our - the CPA firm we were dealing with, we were sitting around our table one day and I said, "You know what there's just as much energy needed to acquire a large company as a small company," and so we - a lot of our acquisitions were actually larger firms.

Russ: Wow and so how large were the annual sales when you were last in the CEO position?

Don: You know when I was last CEO, we were over $2 billion in revenue.

Russ: Wow.

Don: Yeah.

Russ: Congratulations on an incredible success story. You must feel good about all that history and what happened with Benchmark Electronics, Inc.

Don: I look at it and what it did is - I used everything that I - all the training I had, all the experience I had, all the mentors I had, all came together. I was able to take everything that I'd been developing over the years and use every bit of it.

Russ: Cool. Real cool. Let's imagine somebody's tuned in right now and they really wanted to know your perspective on this question. What do you see now in 2010 that's exciting? What's the new CEM of the future if you had to kinda make a bet?

Don: The trend for outsourcing is continuing. In fact it's expanding. As I mentioned before, we used to build just components and now customers want us to build the whole product. In fact, they don't even want to touch the product. They want us to build the product and ship it and deliver it to them. I think there's gonna be more opportunities in providing - in design services which we have all along but I think there'll be more opportunities about design services and then more satellite services, too. For example, Benchmark recently has acquired some metal machining companies and because if you have your electronics, you have to package it.

Russ: Right.

Don: And if you're building an X-ray machine you actually some of the mechanical components may be actually more involved than the electronics.

Russ: Right.

Don: So Benchmark's expanding into metal machining and other areas.

Russ: Cool. All right. Before I let you go, let's imagine that there's a young, aspiring entrepreneur tuned in, heard the Don Nigbor story and is fascinated by it completely. What kind of general advice would you give to him or her?

Don: First thing you have to realize - it's a life or death deal. I mean, this is a fight to the death. Okay, you're gonna be in this thing and whether you survive or not is questionable and you have to realize it's very high risk. I ask every person to really look at their personal skills and look at what their background is and do an honest assessment and look at some areas where maybe they need to build some strength. For example, if they're - were not comfortable speaking in public, you know it's something you can work on. You can improve - I figured I've probably made 3,000 presentations here in 20 years.

Russ: Okay.

Don: Okay? And I wasn't a good speaker when I started - or maybe still not but I've developed the basic skill set.

Russ: Right.

Don: So you develop your skills and then the other thing is you really need to know the area you're going into. And you need to understand it and you need to figure out where you can provide some value; where you can make a contribution, okay? And so I go back to my college once a year and there's some students there in a leadership program and I talk to them and they want to - a lot of them just want to come out and start a business right away and you know there's some people, you know, Bill Gates and some others who've done that but I think most people come out in an industry - they learn a industry - they develop their skills. I mean there's a lot of skills you need to be a CEO of a company. You need to know how to handle personnel problems, which even if you get your MBA, they don't really tell you how to do that. And if you work with some mentors , you can develop those skills and when a problem comes up, you know how to address it.

Russ: Cool. Don, thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

Don: Well thank you for coming down, Russ. I enjoyed it.

Russ: You bet. We've been talking with Don Nigbor, cofounder and former CEO and Chairman of Benchmark Electronics, Inc. and you've been listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com.