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The RCA executives who bought their division when it went up for sale in 1987 would not have been pegged as likely candidates for self-employment. All had chosen large-company careers. Some had spent decades in the corporate cradle. None appeared to have an entrepreneur burning inside.
"It was always my dream to start a business. I just didn't expect to do it this way," says Harold Krall, 54, formerly a new-product manager at RCA and now chief executive of Cardinal Technologies. Like several other of the company's seven cofounders, he "grew up in a small-business family in which having your own business was considered normal. People who knew me knew I always said I would do it, even if they were beginning to doubt it."
The wait was worthwhile: Krall launched the right company. In five ears the Lancaster, Pa., business has become an entrepreneurial juggernaut. Sles of Cardinal's modems, monitors, desktop systems, and other computer, elated products reached $50 million in 199 Employment tops 220. And make no mistake about it: the path Krall and his colleagues took before they founded Cardinal not only prepared them well for the marketplace but actually is prototypical of how the most successful start-ups in the country begin. Take a look at the demographic traits of start-ups that achieve success (see "The Eight Habits of Highly Effective Companies," page 56, and take a look at Cardinal. Without quite realizing what they were doing, the Cardinal founders set their company on a course that comes as close to guaranteeing success as any.
To start, the Cardinal founders had the most rudimentary elements down cold: they knew their industry, and they knew how to run a business. They launched with a full management team-heads of manufacturing, engineering, marketing, sales, finance, and systems, as well as a CEO--so that "basically, we just lifted ourselves off and became a company," says Krall. Not only had most of the partners, by coincidence, either grown up in family businesses or run companies themselves before their stints at RCA, but also they had been seasoned by running their corporate division with a fair degree of autonomy. "We were intrapreneurs at RCA," says Krall. "We had very firm credentials starting many businesses there; we had the...