From a Card Table to a Global Brand: Celebrating 25 Years of Innovation

I was given the task of writing something about Insight Automation’s 25th anniversary which will occur on October 1, 2025.  For those gentle readers already familiar with this column, you know I am rarely short on words and glib comments about the topic at hand.  My motto is why use one word when twenty will do. But now, I honestly feel a little tongue tied about our 25th anniversary.  It is kind of a tug of war between gushing through a litany of stories and memories and just letting the milestone stand there and grunt to speak for itself...

Twenty-five years can feel like an eternity or a flash, depending on your perspective. I certainly fall into the latter group. When we founded Insight Automation, 25 years prior would have put me in my teens, too young for a driver's license. Now, approaching 25 years since our start, the same age math doesn't feel as dramatic; I still feel like the same thirty-something person I was back then.

As the eldest statesman within Insight, I fear that I am turning into “that old guy” who takes most every opportunity to relate a story “from the old days”.  With the younger folks, I can relate times when engineers wore shirts and ties, leaned over drafting tables, had to deal with blueprints and filing cabinets, oh, and you could smoke at your desk.  Clearly those were ancient times.

I have told this story about the beginnings of Insight to the younger folks here at Insight, so technically I am repeating myself, but here goes:

In October 2000, Randy Combs (our current president) and I started with a card table and two metal folding chairs in our newly rented space at 11 Girard Street, Florence, KY. We had a bank account with fresh start-up capital and our own company Amex cards. We bought laptops, AutoCAD, Rockwell PLC software, Peachtree accounting, and more. I recall needing a laser printer that could handle 11x17 paper. We found one, but they didn't accept Amex. Randy told me to buy it with my personal credit card, which concerned me since it was a few thousand dollars. Thankfully, my first expense report reimbursement check cleared. Back then, Rockwell required a specially encoded 3.5-inch floppy disk with a license key to be inserted into your computer to work. We kept these in a guarded fire safe. Our server PC used a magnetic tape drive for backups, which Randy would swap every other day, taking the previous day's backup home to protect our records, drawings, and programs in case of fire or disaster

It was a precarious time to start a business. Randy humorously explained that as the first employee, he could fire me at any time, but he, with his contract with investors, could only be fired for doing something illegal. It was like Randy channeling the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride : "Good night. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

We performed typical controls house project work but also had a charter to explore modular and distributed controls products, primarily with DC motorized roller technology. This had to be built from the ground up while keeping the business afloat. Randy focused on this new direction, while I handled engineering and commissioning projects. We were the proverbial yin and yang whenever the phone rang:  

Randy: “Hey I need to answer that, it could be an opportunity.  
Me: “Oh crap, let it ring, it's probably someone who has a problem I have to deal with”.

Before long, Jennifer joined us to answer phones and handle accounting, and we hired Dave Sellers, a spirited young engineer. Dave and I often disagreed on PLC program structure and how to create clear and legible AutoCAD drawings (sometimes Dave's were neither). Over time, Dave's interest shifted to business operations and marketing. I still suspect he did this to escape my red pen on his drawings.

Business was initially a rollercoaster, with periods of intense activity followed by lulls. For every 18-hour day and marathon weekend programming session to prepare for a job site, there were days of searching for tasks and worrying about the business's survival. Through it all, Randy never missed a payroll, and the doors stayed open

The day before the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Randy and I drove from Cincinnati to a job site in St. Louis because we couldn't afford airfare. The attacks happened the next day, and we would have been stranded if we had flown. I remember we considered going to the airport to see if anyone needed a ride to Cincinnati, but traffic was blocked, so we headed home, glued to the AM radio for news.

I vividly recall my awe at seeing the first Blackberry phone that could send emails! Randy quickly got one because he traveled frequently, and we couldn't afford to miss email opportunities. As our motor roller and distributed control concepts began to germinate, initial opportunities for this technology were with the USPS. This often meant Randy was flying out early Monday mornings and spending most of the week in the greater Baltimore area to connect with the USPS and their contractors. There were times when Randy had to leave early Sunday morning to drive because airfare wasn't in the budget. As Randy will attest, there's no good, straight interstate route from here to Baltimore—and he tried them all.

I want to share two pivotal moments in Insight Automation's history that, had they turned out differently, might have led to a very different company, or even its demise.

The first occurred about a year into Randy's Baltimore pilgrimages. We were finally granted an audience with an engineering team from Northrop Grumman, the chosen contractor for a major USPS program. The Northrop team drew their proposed conventional control system solution on a whiteboard, involving many Rockwell PLCs and individual drive controllers.

We then erased the whiteboard and presented our solution: no PLCs, distributed networked drive controllers accommodating four motors each, with all conveyor transportation and transfer control built-in. And, by the way, it would be about one-third the cost of their PLC-based solution.  This was the first time I ever saw multiple people simultaneously aglow with the proverbial light bulb of “a-ha” over their heads.  We knew we were really onto something and we had a customer that understood it.

The second pivotal moment happened a year or more after that first meeting. The Northrop technical team was completely sold on our products and had built test systems. They were largely set on using our technology, but competing solutions were still on the table, and nothing was official. The next step involved finalizing pricing, delivery schedules, and payment terms. Legend has it (I wasn't in the room) that Randy and the Northrop purchasing agent were across the table, with the order for Insight in the agent's hand, ready to sign—a dangling carrot. This single order dwarfed all our cumulative business up to that point. However, the pricing and terms weren't exactly what we requested. Randy didn't sign, leaving the door open for Northrop to choose a competitor. After some negotiation, an agreement was reached that both parties could accept, and the rest, as they say, is history. This was pivotal because of the risk Randy took; things could have gone very differently. I can confidently say that Insight Automation would be a different company today (neither necessarily worse nor better) if we hadn't won this business.

This USPS business opened a floodgate of innovation and development with our partners Industrial Software in Bulgaria.  In due course we were seen by many in the industry as being the folks who understood how to control motor roller conveyors and had the products to make it happen.  As we progressed, we began to get the attention of motor roller manufacturers and this led to our successful partnership with Kyowa Manufacturing Japan.  I don’t have as many tales and anecdotes from this period because, alas, I was doing the PLC integration dance on jobsites and hotel rooms.  We had brought Tim Barnes on board to spearhead the sales and development of these motor roller products.  I have heard it said within our corridors that someone may still have the bar napkins with the jotted down genesis of the Pulseroller name and logo.  All I know is that it happened in a hotel bar in Grand Rapid, MI.

So much for me being tongue tied.

Most of what I've recounted happened within the first ten years of our 25-year existence. As time passes, more and more of the original team have moved on, retired, or even passed away. I felt it best to recount and preserve some of these early tales, leaving more recent pivotal moments for others to share later. I fully expect there will be many more pivotal moments and anecdotes in the years to come.

Like I said earlier, I am the old guy here now and I have already repeated some stories more than twice to others here at our office, perhaps to the point of their annoyance.  When I started on this engineering journey right out of school decades ago, I remember hearing stories from some of the “old timers” at my new job and thinking “wow that was a long time ago”.  When you are young, you don’t realize it will go by in a flash.

I think I have finally become one of the “old timers”.  Maybe when every story or anecdote has been repeated more than twice (and someone kindly informs me); it will be time to hang up my metaphorical engineering cleats and catcher’s mitt.  Until then, gather 'round, because have I got a story for you.