Self-taught exec Hollander tries not to specialize

GUNBARREL — High Precision Devices is full of engineers, PHDs, physicists and chemists, but Bill Hollander isn’t one of them.

The company’s CEO didn’t graduate from college, although he spent years at a university.

Hollander is self-taught in physics, chemistry and business. He’s also connected to three Nobel prizes, including this year’s physics winner, the LIGO project.

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Now, the inventor and business leader is growing HPD and it’s brand-new wholly-owned subsidiary, QalibreMD.

Starting in auto mechanics and photography, Hollander found himself working as an apprentice instrument maker at JILA, a research institute partnership between the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (which would eventually become a consistent customer of High Precision Devices.)

“I don’t have the technical education; I’m self-educated,” Hollander told BizWest, sitting in an office filled with lasers, small optical devices and a picture of him with the gravity meter he built his first business around. “But having worked with Nobel physicists, I had the benefit of smart people where I could learn a bunch.”

While working at JILA from 1979 to 1990, Hollander got to try a little bit of all things, a characteristic he carried over to HPD when he started that business in 1993.
At HPD, the approximately 32 employees try a bit of everything. Engineers might be good at making one of HPD’s several products — cryostats and air sampling systems and MRI phantoms to name a few — but are never shoehorned into being just “the cryostat guy.” Machinists and engineers and physicists are moved from project to project, being able to work on anything at any time.

“We utilize people’s expertise, but we don’t want narrow-slotted people,” he said. “There’s a balancing act.”

For his part, though he may run the business now — something he learned how to do by reading Harvard Business School-recommended texts — Hollander has done just about every job available at HPD.

“When you work with something, you understand how it behaves, and that influences your design for the next thing,” Hollander said.
Hollander and HPD have been hard at work on their next thing, this time in the healthcare field.

HPD now makes MRI phantoms: devices filled with chemicals meant to mimic human tissue in the way MRIs see human tissue, in a repeatable and traceable way. These phantoms, which were first created for the world leader in standards, NIST, can be used to create a standard measurement amongst MRIs. It’s something that wasn’t done before, Hollander said. The phantom acts as a control, can help ensure that two different doctors with two different MRI machines don’t look at the same patient and have different readings.

The MRI phantom business, which has products for prostate exams, breast tissue and two different systems for the head, is a potential commercial boon for HPD. So much so, that the company formed its first wholly-owned subsidiary, QalibreMD. The company is looking to market the MRI phantoms to hospitals that want better, more accurate MRI results. (HPD recently won a BizWest IQ award for its MRI phantoms.) Elizabeth Mirowski is now the CEO of QalibreMD.

It’s not the only potential new stream of business Hollander is considering. Inside his office, he shows off a scribbled-on piece of notebook paper, with a large circle and smaller ones coming off it, connected by blue ink lines.

It’s Hollander’s vision for the future of HPD. The large circle is HPD itself, with each circle off it a different segment of business. Its cryostats — largely the bread and butter of the company, they reach temperatures of nearly absolute zero for researchers to use — are in one smaller sphere that’s an offshoot of the HPD circle. Its air sample systems are in another sphere. He shows a circle where MRI phantoms are written and takes a black pen, circling over it and drawing a line between HPD and the MRI circle. He writes “QalibreMD” and says if any of its other business lines grow to the size of the phantoms, they too could become their own business and a subsidiary of HPD.

One idea with the potential to do this, though still a long way off, is HPD’s environmental monitoring systems that the company still has under development. The systems can be used to monitor decommissioned oil and gas wells, Hollander said, and detect when flammable gas is leaking from them. It could potentially prevent another accident like the one in Firestone this year that killed two.

Those environmental monitor systems would actually be rejiggered from another project HPD is working on: monitor systems for NOAA that measure atmospheric chemistry.

Those types of projects are what HPD loves, Hollander said. The company loves to take designs and then expand them beyond just the initial customer, finding additional uses and turning it into a product the company can adapt and sell to many. It’s how the company got started, with cryostats being its first adaptable project. Now, they’re sold to research institutes in Hawaii, Italy, Kazakhstan, China, to name a few.

And of course, there are one-off projects that still do well by the company. HPD probably won’t need to commercialize the isolation platforms it built for the LIGO experiment, but doing so helped connect the company and Hollander to another Nobel prize.

With projects like that and the work it’s doing as HPD and QalibreMD, Hollander expects High Precision Device’s esteem to continue to grow.

“Our reputation for building complex instruments is strong,” he said. “People come to us. As HPD grows and what we do gets broader, and deeper, we have more capacity to do more varied jobs.”