Last night's attendants of the MIT Enterprise Forum got to see what makes a company stand out. Touted as Canada's IPO success of 2006, Evertz Technologies went public with a $67 million offering in June of this year. They now boast a market cap of one billion dollars. How did they do it when every other IPO of the season seemed to stall from a lack of interest? The big answer is through exceptional execution by a talented management team. But as we all know, big answers are made up of hundreds of smaller, critical details.

Brian Campbell, the EVP of Business Development for Evertz, is a details guy. Trained as an engineer, he has an MBA and years of experience in Toronto's financial community. More than that, he has the ability to understand the numerous functions that come together to create success. He shared his insight with the audience last night. Campbell explained how Evertz took a $2 million dollar a year company to $150 million in eight short years. It was not luck. The team executed with clinical efficiency on the key factors behind their growth: Engineering, self-financiing, innovation, and team-building.

I'll write more about this remarkable story later in the day.

Update: Let's take a brief look at how the management at Evertz took a series of small steps over time that resulted in building a very successful company. Campbell explained that in 1997 two former Leitch Technology employees identified an opportunity to buy a stable, 30 plus year old tech company with about 17 employees. At the time, they surveyed the market horizon and decided that high-definition television - HDTV - was going to be a big industry once governments settled on regulatory standards. Thus they began focusing their company's products towards HDTV. Smart move.

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