“Detail guy” are the words that come to mind when you meet Jerry Ruzicka .
President for the past eight years of Eden Prairie–based Starkey Laboratories, the largest hearing aid manufacturer in the United States, Ruzicka is at ease on the shop floor during a tour of Starkey’s 100,000-square-foot engineering facility, which also houses his office. Nothing escapes his scrutiny, whether it’s an ear-bud shooter that automatically separates and sorts the buds from their plastic molds, or the cityscape of 30,000 transistors that comes into view on a tiny computer chip when it’s placed under a microscope.
Meticulous and soft-spoken, Ruzicka (pronounced rooz-ICH-ka) is the yang to Starkey owner William Austin’s yin. A gregarious salesman, the white-coiffed Austin made Starkey Laboratories—which he purchased in the ’70s—the company that first offered money-back guarantees, that fitted President Ronald Reagan for hearing aids, and that this year threw a $4.8 million fundraiser featuring John Mellencamp and other entertainers. Austin’s Starkey Hearing Foundation now donates 20,000 hearing aids a year worldwide, with Austin himself personally fitting as many patients as he can. Recipient of numerous awards, including a 2004 induction into Vanity Fair magazine’s Hall of Fame, Austin remains the public face of Starkey.
Ruzicka, meanwhile, has quietly focused on supercharging Starkey’s research and development capabilities. “To grow our company into the next century, we needed to become a high-tech leader,” says Tim Trine, whom Ruzicka recruited in 1998 to oversee Starkey’s R&D. “That was clearly Jerry’s vision.”
Over the past three years, Starkey has poured $20 million into equipment and significantly ramped up its research and engineering staff, including hiring a team of so-called “pure” research scientists in Berkeley, California, a hotbed for hearing-research talent. In April, these efforts paid off with the release of the industry’s first nano-scale technology components in Starkey’s new Destiny hearing aids. Ruzicka expects Destiny sales to quickly hit 1 million units annually, a 40 percent increase over Starkey’s previous product lines.
Last fall, Ruzicka came up with the company’s biggest idea yet: marrying Starkey’s technology with new Bluetooth wireless capabilities for people who hear just fine, thanks, but who want their mobile phone headsets to be more comfortable and have better sound quality. “We think the Bluetooth headset market has had poor performance related to things we’re really good at,” like offering clear microphone sound in a tiny package, Ruzicka says. “Our vision is a convergence of technologies, where we can deliver sound to whoever needs it and bring our skills to a broader base of customers.”
Ruzicka may never be the face of Starkey hearing aids, but he’s clearly got that vision thing. And he believes the opportunities are there to push Starkey—now a $500 million company with 3,200 employees in 18 countries—to the billion-dollar mark.
