A Sydney inventor uses technology to strengthen his glass and mentors to reinforce his management weaknesses.
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Entrepreneur: Peter Stephinson, Managing Director
Company: Stop Shot International
Business type: Security solutions consultancy
Founded: 1999
Employees: 15 staff (group-wide), licensed distributors in United States, Britain and South-East Asia
Head office: Sydney
Contact details: +61 2 9415 6484
Web site: www.stopshot.com
The Stop Shot Story
When Peter Stephinson was in the army in the early 1970s, he learnt that the killing effect of a bullet is actually its shock wave. This was graphically demonstrated by firing a high-velocity bullet into a drum of water, simulating someone being shot in the stomach. “A small hole in and a big hole out,” he recalls. “The big hole came not from the bullet but from the shock wave.” Stephinson was impressed.
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Key learning points:
- Business plans - Develop a sound business plan to help guide decision making. Keep debt at a manageable level. Something can appear low-cost but prove expensive in the long-term.
- Mentors - Do not be afraid to tap the expertise of others. Be willing to acknowledge when you do not know something and seek external help when required.
- Business discipline - It is easy to become distracted by outside interests. If you lose focus on your business, it will suffer and so will employees and their families.
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In 1980, Stephinson, who is a tool maker by trade, bought a window-tinting business in Sydney from its owner, who wanted to retire. Using profits from the business, he began to research a system for upgrading ordinary glass to security glass, which could withstand multiple sledgehammer blows, high-velocity bullets or even a car bomb blast. He says: “The funding has all been personal. I put my head on the chopping block. I believed that this technology would save lives worldwide.”
The Stop Shot system, now patented and profitable, uses a special polymer coating applied to multiple layers of glass to bolster the tensile strength of the glass. There is an air gap between the sheets of glass to absorb the shock wave from the bullet or blast. The energy produced often will vaporise a bullet. The company says its system is useful wherever there is glass that is at risk of crime, terrorism or even violent weather.
Developing and commercialising the technology took nearly twenty years. Stephinson began by shooting at bits of glass at a friend’s farm. In the mid-1980s, he persuaded the New South Wales Police Service to give him free access to the police weapons range. Stephinson’s company now works closely with the Department of Defence and the Defence Science Technology Organisation in testing the Stop Shot technology.
Stephinson has had some near brushes with financial disaster. One of his worst mistakes came in 1991 when he used his flexible bank overdraft to buy lots of stock at a reduced price for his window-tinting business. He bought far too much stock and took years to sell it off. “It nearly cost me the business. I was paying interest on the overdraft that negated any saving on getting the stock at a cheaper price. I didn’t have a business plan to guide me. I just saw it as a cheap price to buy.”
Stephinson finds it hard to make business plans. “I am a salesman. Give me something to sell, I can sell it. Give me a mechanical problem to solve, I can do that. But I should be more on top of my financial results, if not on a daily basis, then on a monthly basis. I’m not trained in that area. I’ve had to acquire that mindset and am getting external advice. I am now doing my own business plan and part of that is determining my own role. Am I really the right person to be running this company?”
Along with a disarming capacity for self-appraisal, Stephinson is not timid about seeking help from others. At present, he is in “a bit of a quandary” about research and development. He says: “One of my mentors told me, ‘You have a product that works, that is saleable. It is all finished. Do you keep improving it or go out and start selling it?’ Australia is only 2% of the worldwide business. The United States and Europe is our growth area. So I have to decide whether to cut back on R&D and pump more funds into things like marketing.
“Everyone has mentors they know who can give them advice. I am talking about people who are already successful in business who can help you solve business problems. It involves letting go of your pride a little bit to acknowledge that you need assistance. But to me you’re dead a long time and it’s how you spend your time on this earth that matters.”