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Volkman 1
And then about that time when this ball started to roll, Jackie…Jackie’s husband had a
friend named Willis Bright, just an amazing person who worked for corporate responsibility
and economic…economic development at Honeywell and he…Jackie was telling him about what
we were doing and he said, wow, you guys…have you considered starting a company. You may
have an opportunity here. And so he invited us down to his office at Honeywell. We were
going from our little organization, going to Honeywell in this beautiful boardroom,
and he had put up paper all over the walls and just started asking us questions. If you
had…if you had all the money in the world, what kind of business would you start? What
kind of products would you sell? How would you sell them? Who would you sell them to?
How would you repair them? What would be…what’s your vision? You know, it just…all of these
questions and there was hardly a second in-between the question and the answers that we were
giving and there was so much energy in the room. And by the time we left, we…I’m
sure we looked like ghosts because we were going, oh my gosh. We think we can do this.
We don’t know how we’re gonna do this but we think we can do this and we need to
do this.
And…and Honeywell and Lee were so inspirational in getting more volunteers. I asked for a
female mentor because I hadn’t actually been in business and so she worked with me.
We had lawyers. We had market research people. We had marketing people, finance people, and
they were helping us with the vision. And Jackie’s vision, understanding how schools
worked, understand…and having a huge vision about what was potentially possible worldwide
of how many people with disabilities could actually use this equipment—there was so
little available—and we had always worked with students with the most significant disabilities
and that was…we were having so much fun. And so, we wanted to bring that simplicity,
that fun…we knew that we needed to have products that were indestructible because
we didn’t have much money, as a non-profit, to do any repair, so we didn’t want any
repair. And, Lee, being a scientist and a chemist, his natural talent was to look for
everything that could go wrong. He would stay up nights thinking what could happen with
the…you know, the control unit using electrical power. What do we need to do? How are we going
to pass UL testing? And, Jackie, always thinking how can we inspire teachers to know what’s
really possible.
When we first started, we spent more of our time trying to influence people to be excited
about what could be possible with a switch and a control unit for a student with the
most significant disabilities—because our switch was $29. Our control unit was $80 and
people would say, you know, spending $100…$110 on the student that, you know, we don’t
know what they understand and if all they can do is turn on a blender, is it really
worth doing that? So I remember one of our first materials was a hundred appliances that
you could use with a control unit and…and talking about putting together slides and
showing what leads from using…doing a functional activity to…to being able to communicate
and what those basics were. We put together…we wrote books. We did videos. We did workshops
all over, showing slides of students that were showing what they could do and people
were going oh, yeah, I guess those are my students and I can do that!
So it just kept leading one to another. We had amazing people and…and a team that brought
all these talents together and in 1985, we started our business. Mary Kay Walsh was our
first employee after myself. Lee continued to volunteer and Jackie was a paid consultant.
She stayed in her school district and working with us part-time as we built the business.
We had, at that point, 130 volunteers that were helping us. We were making our battery
device adaptors at night with pizza parties and making, you know, small metal disks on
punches in local companies that were doing the…the punching for us on their lunch hours.
And it was extremely exciting. Mary Kay and I were…we were just talking last night and
just are celebrating our 25th anniversary and Jackie, Lee, Mary Kay and I, and our new
CEO, and Lee’s wife, Rose, were out for dinner last night celebrating and Mary Kay
and I are talking about we would run up to the mail every day and we’d get three orders
in the mail and we were so excited!
And another interesting thing is we called our first switch, Switch 100, because we had
gone through this huge effort to come up with the name, AbleNet, and by then we were really
tired and one of the Honeywell people said, well, to name the switch, you know, you’re
gonna have more switches so why don’t you just call it Switch 100 and then you can call
the next one Switch 200. But the orders that we kept getting in the mail were 2 big red
switches and we went, ohhh, you know, that’s a good name and everybody’s calling it…let’s…and
we have a lawyer on our advisory committee. Let’s…you know, let’s trademark it.
So we did and that was kind of the beginning of this…this…how to put fun in and personality
even into the products. And, you know, we were the first ones with the plastic injection
molded switch because of this high quality that we…we wanted. We wanted…we knew…in
fact our testing was we’d take the Big Red Switch and through it 16 feet in the air against
the brick wall of the back building to see if it still worked. And Lee actually drove
over one with his car and it still worked! And we were delighted. We passed our first
UL testing.