au was born in Hong Kong in 1959 and spent the first 17 years of her life there. She remembers little of her father except that his work in the bulldozer business kept him away from home 50 weeks a year.
"He was a caring, loving man," she recalls nevertheless. His devotion to his family and the eight children he had to feed kept him working hard. When Lau was 16, her father died. His last words, she recalls, were about his eight kids. "Make sure they're in school," he told her mother.
"I'm very inspired by my mom." Lau says. "She took risks to do what was best for her kids." After her father's death, Lau's mother packed up the nine children in 1976 and brought them to New York City.
Growing up in Hong Kong Lau had wanted to be a schoolteacher. That changed in New York. After a week of working at a Chinatown factory she knew it was time to finish high school and devote her time to studies.
"I was very good in math and logic design," she says, "and the field of computer science was a popular, growing field in the late '70s." She won a full scholarship to the State University of New York in Long Island and double majored in computer science and applied mathematics. After graduating in 1981 she sent her resumés to the dream companies--IBM, Ford, GE to name a few.
GE hired her to begin a relationship that would last eight years. Lau began as a programmer for GE's commercial aerospace department, working on planes like the Boeing 767. She soon moved to the military side, programming F15 fighters and simulation software.
"I took the toughest assignments," she says. One job placed her in a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift training people on the factory floor. "It was a male-oriented environment," she recalls, "where some of the men wouldn't bother shaving if they thought no one would see them. Their first question to me was 'What do you know that we don't? What are you going to teach us?'" Lau faced her adversaries and won them over in the end. "After two months, I was good friends with many of the workers."
Lau's next step was marriage and a move to Massachusetts where, at Boston University, she pursued her M.B.A. She began work in the automation division at GE and found she liked it, so she focused her masters study on automation management, getting a degree in 1991.
After eight years, Lau decided the time had come to leave GE. She sent out resumés and within the year found herself a spot at Digital. There, Lau ran the engineering pilot line for disk drives. She developed manufacturing processes whose goal would be to operate at a 99.99% yield rate. This method, called six-sigma, would produce only six manufacturing failures per thousand units made.
"It was like running a micro factory. I had nine people working for me, some who had PhD's from MIT," Lau says.
A big part of her job at Digital was the study of interrelationship--integrating different cultures and different technologies from around the world. The one and a half years she spent there allowed her to do more than her share of traveling.
It was during that period that she saw the chance to start Lau Technologies. Three months after setting her plan in motion, she had completed her work at Digital and was ready to move on.
Lau's initial capital investment of $3.1 million--$1.2 million in a bank loan, $750,000 from a minority-targeted Small Business Administration loan guarantee, $300,000 in notes from the former owners, $450,000 from other employees, and $400,000 of her own money drawn from a second mortgage on her house and 10 years of savings-- bought out Bowmar/ALI and fueled Lau's team for the five months before it landed its first major defense contracts. Lau now owns 56% of the equity.
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The key to the success of Lau's buyout was retaining a staff that already knew the company's nuts and bolts and giving it a stake in its success. The company's program managers had the customer contacts, its purchasing people already had relations with vendors and the employees on the manufacturing floor knew the assembly process.
One of the first assignments Lau gave herself was to visit every one of the company's clients.
"I was honest with people about what I know and don't know," she says. "I respect what others have to offer." She energized her employees and brought the quality control knowledge she had gained from GE and Digital to produce the high-quality technology on which the U.S. Army currently stakes the lives of its fighting men.
Lau's employees are kept well trained and competitive within a changing world thanks to their boss's insistence that each take at least one training course per year, paid for by Lau Technologies. "Good progress," she says, "is being able to look at your resumé at the end of each year, see its growth, and know you've learned."
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au was born in Hong Kong in 1959 and spent the first 17 years of her life there. She remembers little of her father except that his work in the bulldozer business kept him away from home 50 weeks a year.
