Burt Hurlock, CEO of Azima DLI, has run several professional services organizations throughout his career, but he’s new to the U.S. industrial service market. That hasn’t stopped him from helping Azima DLI grow tenfold in five years. BIC Magazine recently visited with Hurlock to discuss the company’s growth and direction.
Q: What led to your position at Azima DLI?
A: I first consulted to the company before becoming CFO and then CEO at the end of 2008. Azima DLI’s big idea was to revolutionize the application of proven technologies like vibration analysis by making them scalable. It was a good idea but it needed capital, a plan and execution.
My career has been starting, building and turning around professional service businesses, which is what Azima DLI is at its core. But the data-driven nature of our service is enabled by some very potent engineering that is rapidly transforming us into a “Big Data” analytics company as well. That evolution has taken almost five years of continuous R&D and cultural transformation.
Q: What is the most important part of your position?
A: Recruit, maintain and motivate top talent. We’re a knowledge-based company defined by high-quality, mission-critical services, so we need the very best people. Azima DLI has to be a place where top talent can come to thrive — where we build careers around what other companies consider “revolving-door” positions — with ongoing training and advancement in a culture that rewards performance and innovation. The most important part of my position is making Azima DLI that kind of place.
Q: What are your goals for your position?
A: I bear the burden of execution and financial performance; that goes with the territory. But those are lagging indicators. Behind that is a core personal commitment to creating opportunities for people to succeed and fostering creativity and desire — desire for success, accomplishment and fulfillment in the rapidly evolving field of machine health analytics. If we all feel we’re contributing to advancing the organization’s mission (which is step-change reductions in risk and improvements in safety and efficiency), and that by our efforts we are changing the way our customers think, operate and perform, then everything else follows.
Q: What is your best management tactic?
A: Listening. I’m surrounded by super smart, very experienced people, from our front line analysts up to and including our board. We have embarked on the enormously difficult mission of changing the way very large, inert industrial organizations capture and use information. It’s hard work — more of a marathon than a sprint. The industrial world is bound to adopt in some form the remote monitoring, analysis and reporting model Azima DLI pioneered because the cost efficiency and results are indisputable. But there are real obstacles to change because the model has implications for assumptions and practices that haven’t been challenged for decades. So I listen a lot for the sound of good experiments and for results, good and bad, from which we can learn.
Q: Do you have a favorite quote?
A: I had a mentor who used to say, “I never ended up in a business I went into.” Start-ups and turnarounds are full of surprises and they come in all forms: people, markets, technologies and trends. When these businesses survive, they rarely resemble the original premise or business plan. That’s what makes building them so much fun.
For more information, visit www.AzimaDLI.com or call (781) 938-0707.
