MAY 1984 - Birdview Satellite Communications, Inc., seems a fitting name for the company founded by Charles A. Ross three years ago. The Chanute, Kans., firm makes an earth-station system that allows customers in isolated areas to view a wide variety of television shows via satellite.
A mythical bird might have been even more appropriate: phoenix--the bird that rises from the ashes. Bud Ross, 43, rebounded from bankruptcy to start the company, which already has customers in 41 states and expects its sales to jump to $25 million in fiscal 1984, up from $13.3 million in the last fiscal year.
Ross' career as an entrepreneur began in his family's garage in Overland Park, Kans. After playing guitar for a rock-and-roll band for three years, he started Kustom Electronics in 1963 and "ran it for 32 straight quarter without losing money," he says. Ross moved the firm, which made guitar amplifiers, to larger quarters in Chanute and broadened its line to include public address systems, traffic radars, police car computers, drums, portable organs and equipment to test aircraft radios.
Named Small Business Person of the Year for Kansas in 1968 by the Small Business Administration, Ross was flying high. The trouble was, he jokes, "I read all of those [news] stories and believed them." He founded eight other companies making such diverse products as boats and high-speed printing presses.
"People started coming to me with ideas, and I started putting up the dollars," he explains. Before long, he admits, "it had gotten totally out of hand. It was physically, mentally and financially more than I could go through."
In 1973, Ross, who had once spurned a $10 million takeover offer for Kustom, was forced to sell the business and liquidate his other assets to pay his debts. He went bankrupt--and was divorced--the following year. He remarried in 1975 and moved with his new wife to Colorado. "She worked, and I cleaned house," he says. "I could go into the beautiful mountains and not worry about business."
But by 1977, Ross was ready to take on the business world again. He returned to Chanute, dabbling in several businesses, until he spotted an item in the 1980 Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog: a private satellite-receiving station for $12,500. He was hooked. "I read night and day," he recalls. "I had me a new toy."
Ross became convinced he could sell a comparable system for far less. He incorporated Birdview in March, 1981, and offered stock in November.
By the following May, the new firm was turning out its product for a suggested retail price of $2,995: a complete earth-station system with a satellite receiving dish, the mount to hold the dish, a low-noise block-down converter (which amplifies signals and converts them to the proper frequency) and a station selector.
Using the equipment, viewers can pick up signals via any of 12 satellites orbiting the earth, including signals from "super stations" in large cities. They also can pick up the signals of paid-subscriber companies like Home Box Office--and that has Birdview and similar manufacturers in a legal bind.
Birdview does not want to "pirate" pay-TV signals, says Ross. In fact, it encouraged its customers to sand checks to the pay-TV companies whose programming they watch. But when they tried to do so, their checks were returned with warnings that they were not authorized to watch the programs.
The legal question is one the earthstation industry is watching. One possible solution, says Robert E. Owens, Birdview's executive vice president, would be for the pay-TV firms to scramble their signals and then sell decoders directly to satellite-dish owners.
Birdview, which now employs 300, thus far has shipped about 12,000 systems, mostly for rural customers, and hopes to ship 25,000 in the coming year.
Its strengths, say Ross and Owens, are that it is one of the most "vertically integrated" companies in the business--selling complete systems, not just parts--and that it has a solid network of 700 independent dealers.
Meanwhile, Bud Ross' fortunes have come full circle: He was recently named Executive of the Year by Kansas Business News magazine and was 1983 chairman of S.P.A.C.E., a Washington-based earth-station industry organization. "If God ever prepared someone to do something," he has told his wife, "he prepared me to do this."