Quadrant Systems: Double or Nothing

The owner, Gary Nedelisky, knows it. Kathleen Dintruff, vice president and Nedelisky's wife, knows it. Quadrant Systems' 39 employees know it, too.

Nedelisky's decision to bulk up his company to prepare for growing to twice its current size is a perilous move.

If the business doesn't grow as planned, Portland, Ore.-based Quadrant will be stuck with all that infrastructure, inevitable cash-flow struggles and the possibility that the 23-yearold company will fold.

If the decision pays off, however, everybody wins.

Everybody expects to win, according to Nedelisky. "I haven't heard any fear," he says, adding that he and Dintruff constantly communicate with employees.



Everybody has a right to be confident, Nedelisky explains. He says that he and Dintruff, a former Nordstrom manager with over 900 employees, are constantly crunching numbers and studying industry trends.

There is a risk involved with bulking up the company, he admits, but it's calculated.

"I'm not a gambler," explains Nedelisky, who claims he doesn't even play the slots at casinos. He says there are times in business, though, when being too conservative isn't the best course of action.

"Most of the things I've tried in life I haven't stretched far enough," says 59-year-old Nedelisky. "I can point to 10 decisions where I should have taken a bigger risk."

The conservatism appears to have paid off. Quadrant, which Dintruff says does "just about every kind of low-voltage system except central vacuum," reports $5,060,000 in revenue for 2006.

"We've been successful," Nedelisky says. "We've had flat, but never down years. We've never laid people off. We've somehow weathered all of the storms."

One reason why Quadrant's 39 employees aren't frantically concerned about their jobs (at least they're not, according to Nedelisky) is probably because they've always been informed about how the company would weather previous storms.

Nedelisky says Quadrant has frequent management and team meetings during which people talk openly. "We ask people what they think," he says.

"I'm not a secretive person. When the market is tough, I'll say, 'Here's my plan.' I'll come up with 15 points of how to respond. I'll never ignore [challenges] and they know I'm looking at it."