Changing gears

Jim Calhoun left the high-tech world 30 years ago, started his own one-man landscape lighting business and never looked back.After three decades in the semi-conductor industry, Jim Calhoun started his own one-man landscape lighting business. Since 2003, he’s been the owner of Northern Lights in Mountain View, Calif. Lawn & Landscape caught up with him to talk about what he’s learned about dealing with clients and selling projects after 30 years in the technology industry and how he uses that to stay successful in the green industry.

Where did you work and what did you do there?
I worked in the semiconductor industry, specifically in quality control. I did that for just shy of 30 years. Back then, Intel was in the adventure of the microprocessor. A semi conductor is basically the heart of the computer age that we live in. I worked for several companies: 10 years at Intel, 13 at DuPont and then a few startups in between.

Describe a typical day at Intel or DuPont.
A typical day was meetings. Planning strategies, dealing with minute problems. In quality control, my job was to address the quality issue internally, but also externally with our clients, with our customers. I would be in a room with unhappy clients most of the time, because they didn’t call me in to tell me everything was running right. Or that they wanted to move in a new direction, or a new specification.

At the other end, I would don a smock, go inside a clean room, peer into a microscope and look at a particular problem at a micron level. It’s smaller than a hair. Down to the tenths of microns. It’s small stuff.

What prompted the move from DuPont to the landscaping industry?
I didn’t have a pension plan, and felt that I was going to have to fend for myself in retirement. I wanted to go into business for myself to hedge my bets. In 2002 I started to do some work in the landscape lighting business. In 2003 I got laid off. I was smiling because I never would have pulled the trigger and started my business. God closes one door and opens another, you know?

How did you start?
My wife was a landscape designer. She was going to a class in San Diego, and didn’t understand the math, the voltage, whatever. We went down there. It was all the math and controls and the design, too. This stuff is fun. I started reading, buying some fixtures and aiming them around, finding people who need this stuff.

Semi conductors seem like a world away from landscape lighting. How are the two jobs different?
Not at all. In one sense, they’re different. One is outdoors, one is subject to the elements. It’s a lot less stress. It’s a lot simpler than other things that I’ve been in. The things that are alike is that my understanding of the client is light years ahead of my competition’s understanding of the client. I work by myself, and by the time I leave, I know where the hidden key is, I know where the cats are, the kids; everybody knows me. Sometimes they give me hugs when I come back. It creates a tremendously great environment.

I learned how to dance in front of the clients, not over-commit, to be reasonable but show responsiveness. It has really taught me to under-commit and over-deliver.

It’s the opposite with my competition. Those client skills are why I’m successful today.

Also the attention to quality: I don’t just take the manufacturer’s word for it. I get out the microscope, so to speak. I look at the product and the method of installation. I look at it in great detail. They appreciate the obvious effort and the care I put into their lighting system. That came as a direct result of the years of quality control.

What skills or lessons did you bring from that career that benefit you as a contractor?
The most valuable thing is my interactive skills with the client, because it parallels exactly when I went to a client. We have a product that we’re going to sell you, the quality level that’s required, and being easy to understand without boring them to death. I’m selling myself – ‘Hey. This guy knows what he’s talking about.’ Giving them that feeling without being condescending. Responsiveness. All those things came out of interacting with the customer in my previous work.

Now, I do a lighting demonstration. It’s much like a presentation, but instead of standing up at the front of the boardroom and using a slide show, I’m standing out in front of the customer and I’m holding a remote control of my lighting system. I have the sensitivity to understand where their interests lie. I know how to shut up. You might not be able to believe that, but you’re not my client. [laughs]

Do you miss that line of work?
Zip. This is immediate gratification. When I push the switch, the lights turn on, there’s a pause and then the customer says “Wow.” And I break out in goose bumps.
  
In quality control, I was either dodging bullets or heavily stressed to create something out of nothing. And quality programs sometimes ran for two or three years and you never knew whether you made an improvement or not.
The semi-conductor industry is a charged industry. Delivery times were tracked by hours. You get an order, you crank it up, manufacture it and deliver it in a matter of hours. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were at stake. If you made the wrong decisions, you’d also be out of a job. So, don’t miss it.

Any final thoughts?
I’m a baby boomer, and so I go way back with the old traditional parents who went through the Depression. Now I’m reading about myself, and people are re-inventing themselves. I have effectively reinvented myself as far as how I make my money. It is a very rewarding kind of thing. I really feel blessed that this is working out the way it has.

I’m not driving fancy sports cars, but I’m living comfortably. That transition is on a lot of people’s minds. In the old days, my dad was a business man himself, but the typical person of my father’s era went to a company and stayed there for 30, 35 years. During my work time, that’s the way it was. Now, you’re moving into new jobs – it’s not even enough to go from one company to another. You have to go to another career.

My dad was in livestock and agriculture. He owned and was in partnership and worked for a variety of livestock auctions. He owned the cows. He would buy and trade anything. He went into land. He had a store that he built and rented out to a guy. He owned that damn thing for 15 years. We still own the building. We’re reaping the rewards every month from his shrewd thinking.

He was a wheeler-dealer. One thing I learned from him: I was selling a car, and my neighbor wanted to buy. I wasn’t going to charge him much, because I hated to ask for much money from a neighbor. He said, “If you can’t do business with your friends, who can you do business with?” He meant you should only be doing business with people you like. Make friends with every person you deal with.
 

The author is managing editor of Lawn & Landscape. Send him an e-mail at cbowen@gie.net.