Bert Caldwell: As times change, Telect’s Williams stays on course

Wayne Williams is out there.

On YouTube. On his Screamin’ Eagle Harley-Davidson. In managing Telect Inc. With his Extreme Wayne Makeover.

But he’s in there as well, as the keeper of Telect’s guiding principles. As a father of three. As a counselor, with wife Terina, to couples trying to repair rocky marriages.

“I am what I am in play. I am what I am in work,” says Williams, who has been chief executive officer and president of Telect since parents Bill and Judi stepped aside in 1999.

Now, he is what he is as chairman of Greater Spokane Incorporated.

Williams says that although he has served on the business organization’s board, he was not sure his style was a fit. He was reassured by his predecessors.

“I do say things the way that I see them,” he says. “I’ve been asked not to change that.”

That may be among the few things, family would be another, that have not changed for Williams since he took over at Telect.

The company was at a peak in 1999, with 1,000 Spokane employees making connectors and other electronics gear. Sales reached $168 million. But the subsequent collapses of the dot.com and telecom industries brought the Liberty Lake company to its knees.

Founded with the Golden Rule and a commitment to employee security among its guiding principles, Telect was forced to lay off hundreds. A planned initial public offering was scuttled. It was a stark reversal of fortune.

Yet Williams says the last few years have been tougher to manage.

Although Liberty Lake remains the corporate headquarters, only 140 of the company’s 750 employees remain there. Most manufacturing takes place in Plano, Texas; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Wroclaw, Poland. There are small engineering, sales and sourcing offices in Southampton, Great Britain; and Shanghai, China.

Williams says Telect is blessed with a loyal customer base and solid product line. But those attributes can be challenges, as well.

Bill Williams founded Telect in 1982, anticipating the 1984 breakup of AT&T. Great uncles Charles and Luke Williams were pioneers in electric signage. Wayne says Telect will prosper only if it can anticipate the telecommunications industry as it will be, not as it is today.

“How do you kill your business and start over?” he wonders aloud.

New products, of course, are one answer, and Telect is moving into the residential market with service panels for linking home communications and entertainment devices. Sales have rebounded to more than $80 million from a low of $62 million.

And Telect has turned to the Internet to communicate with customers, employees and potential applicants in new ways.

The company, for example, posts prices for its hardware to its Web site. That’s not usually done, says Williams.

Also on the site, he talks about the kind of people Telect wants; innovators, team members, foosball players. The kind, Williams says, who ask, “Hey, what’s next?”

With GSI President Rich Hadley, he has also taped clips posted on YouTube discussing Spokane’s pluses as a business location.

For Williams, change has been about the makeover that has shortened his hair and grizzled his chin. He looks like a goateed Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconic CEO. Friends, he says, ask him if he’s lost weight. He has, a little.

The Harley is the fulfillment of a longtime dream, to which Terina finally gave the nod two years ago. He rides the bike on tours, and for the short commute. An early riser, he has to go easy on the throttle to avoid waking neighbors.

The look, the bike, and YouTube notwithstanding, however, certain values remain constant.

The shocks to Telect reinforced his long-held, fundamentalist faith, convincing him that control, ultimately, lies elsewhere.

“I rely on my relationship with the Lord,” Williams says.

If he was not at Telect, he says, he would do counseling and conduct retreats on marriage full-time. He believes strongly in the virtues of intact, nuclear families.

Hadley says Williams is likewise devoted to Spokane, his home since age 4, but with a global perspective.

“A lot of the companies we are going to be needing look a lot like Wayne,” he says. “He loves this place.”