Meet Chuck Hodges | Product Development Guru

We had the good fortune of connecting with Chuck Hodges and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Chuck, what principle do you value most?
For me this is easy: integrity. Which to me is roughly defined as “doing the right thing even when it’s not aligned with our own self-interests.” It’s a concept that gets lots of lip service but as a society it’s something we all too often excuse our way out of. Doing the right thing happens in personal decisions we make on a daily basis. In politics this might be voting for raising your own taxes because it’s right; in real life it could be buying a Prius instead of a pickup truck that would suit your lifestyle better. In business, it’s about trying to do the right thing even when it doesn’t always serve the bottom line. For us at Zebulon Solutions, this often manifests as telling our customers an answer that we suspect they don’t want to hear. We’re product development and supply chain consultants–designing physical products and getting them into volume manufacturing. There are answers that will get us more work, and those that will get us less. When that easy answer doesn’t line up with the facts, with the test data, and with the global supply chain realities, integrity is about saying “hey, that won’t work.” Sometimes, yes, we lose the business to a competitor who tells that same customer what they want to hear. Most often this situation has predictable results, but everyone has their own idea on what integrity stands for. Sometimes of course the decision is easy–flagging a defect in a medical device for example. Other times we are dealing with an intangible supply chain challenge where it would be easy to ignore the warning signs, discount the data, take the project, and pass on the bad news down the road. Integrity is about doing the right thing regardless of whether it hurts.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I’m a visionary business executive and engineering professional with a strong track record in managing successful tech businesses. I’ve worked on the design of game-changing products like the Xbox and the Palm Pilot, but I’m most proud of having helped launch over 50 different product families over the years.

Currently I run a design and production services company, Zebulon Solutions, based in Longmont, Colorado. We specialize in taking science projects and turning them into manufacturing-ready products. Our clients range from Colorado startups to global multinationals, although our sweet spot is small to mid-sized businesses who are long on R&D magic but short on manufacturing know-how. We cover a wide variety of end markets, but we focus on clean-tech, medical and electronics.

In addition, I’m active in the Colorado investment community, and have invested in a couple of local startups in the clean-tech and medical spaces respectively. I have sat on Angel panels and screened deals for local investor conferences. The past few years, Zebulon Solutions has helped sponsor the National Renewable Energy Lab’s Industry Growth Forum and connected with a slew of emerging clean-tech startups.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
While it would be easy to rave about Denver’s hot spots, Coors Field, or the snow-covered mountains we all love here in Colorado, I’ll stay super local and give a shout-out to the St. Vrain Greenway here in our own little corner of the state, Longmont. Skip the ball game, skip the traffic on I-70, and enjoy a crisp fall morning away from all that. The views are fantastic, the birds are singing, the beavers are working on their dam, and the world just feels a tiny bit better.

We just got together for a company picnic, in fact, albeit in 100-degree weather. We had a grand time despite a howling dog, red ants, and too many wasps, and everyone got home safely. I know that because they showed up at work the next day.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I write science fiction in my copious free time, and I hang out with a bunch of amazing fellow writers of the genre. And of course my career as a technology visionary and product developer has been all about making tomorrow’s technology seem like it’s straight out of yesterday’s science fiction novel. So my shout out is to all the geeks and nerds out there–the scientists and the engineers, the dreamers and the implementers, the writers and the readers, the social justice warriors and the peacekeepers–who are all trying to make our world a little better place.

Website: www.zebulonsolutions.com

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