This episode of Hiring for Good offers a rare, authentic look into the journey of Randy Reed, a leader who has navigated the worlds of high-tech, medical devices, and executive leadership with humility, adaptability, and a deep commitment to people.
Randy shares candid stories from his career, including taking a company public, leading major acquisitions, and transforming a small medical device firm into a global player. His reflections on leadership are grounded in real experience, not theory, making them relatable and actionable for anyone in business or aspiring to lead.
“I’ve always been a ‘we’ person, not an ‘I’ person. If you include everybody and understand their motivations and their goals, it helps form how you lead teams—and that’s how you build real success.”
Suzanne Hanifin: President at Acumen Executive Search. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannehanifin/
Tanis Morris: Business Development at Acumen Executive Search. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanis-morris-75a113266/
Randy Reed’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-reed-6b37a1116/
Acumen Executive Search Website: https://www.acumenexecutivesearch.com/
Sam Medical Website: https://www.sammedical.com
Hiring for Good Transcript
Suzanne Hanifin: Well, welcome to another Hiring for Good. I am Suzanne Hanifin with Acumen Executive Search, and once again I’m with my lovely, lovely co-host Tanis Morris.
Tanis Morris: Hi Suzanne.
Suzanne: Good morning.
Tanis: Nice to be here.
Suzanne: And we are super excited to have Mr. Randy Reid joining us today.
Randy Reed: Happy to be here.
Suzanne: Yeah. Well, welcome. I’m going to actually read your very short bio because it’s really impressive and I want to make sure I’ve got everything covered. But Randy spent 10 years from 2015 to 2025 as president of Sam Medical, a developer and manufacturer of medical devices. After spending a year of consulting CFO for SAM, prior to that, Randy was the CFO and COO at Stay in Power, a closely held company in data management cloud services industry. Prior to 2010, Randy worked for 21 years for Microfield Graphics, a publicly traded manufacturing company in the high-tech industry. While there, Randy was in charge of all financial and administrative functions, including the financial side of Microfield’s very successful IPO offering in 1995. After several acquisitions, Microfield became Energy Connect and focused on developing electric grid management software. The company was later sold to Johnson Controls. Prior to his position there, he was at Coopers and Librant, an international public accounting firm. Randy is a retired CPA and holds a bachelor’s degree from Southern Oregon University in business. So, there you go, Randy. What a fantastic history.
Randy: Thank you. Yeah.
Suzanne: And and it’s not often that people start off in public accounting, go and spend a big career in high-tech, and then end up as a CEO. So, share with us this journey and what got you from there to where you are today.
Randy: Yeah. Well, it’s it’s all about opportunities and meeting people that uh um you know, one door closes, another door opens. And so there’s opportunities to come along and just have to jump in. And like getting into the medical industry, I had no medical experience other than being on the receiving end of medical treatment. And so I knew I was in a different world when, during my interview uh the woman who was interviewing me said uh the phrase and when your legs are blown off.
Tanis: Oh wow.
Randy: They they had products medical products that would treat lower extremity injuries like that and and save lives. And so yeah, it was nothing like high-tech or uh actually is a business that makes a difference and I felt really proud of that. So it’s just opportunities present themselves and and you make a choice and jump on it.
Suzanne: Well, and your journey included multiple different types of transactions and transitions. An IPO, not very many people have taken a company through an IPO.
Randy: Right.
Suzanne: And then you’ve taken SAM through a sale.
Randy: Right.
Suzanne: Share with us a little bit about that those two types of transitions.
Randy: Well, in high-tech, uh, I started there when the company had 10 employee. I was the 10th employee, and that was in 1985. And, uh, you’re always scrambling for money because, uh, you know, you’ve got to try and convince people that, hey, this is a worthy endeavor, you know, part with your million dollars or your $5 million or whatever. And, and so, uh, we, uh, we had a product that got commoditized. It was a graphics controller board. And when uh uh the uh PC was in its infant stage, uh people were looking for ways to create colors, fast speeds, you know, lots of things with the graphics. And so our engineers that founded the company came up with that. But it was on a six-layer circuit board. And we didn’t have the resources to take it beyond that. So people came up with chips that did the same things, and we just couldn’t keep up.
So we transitioned into a different product. It’s called an electronic whiteboard. And so it allowed while you were writing on the board, it allowed for what you were writing to be put into the computer and once it’s in the computer, you can share it around the world. So it was really one of the first collaboration um products for the office. And so um so we went out and took that technology, went out and went into the public markets through a company called Pulse and Investment here in Portland. And we we got that thing done in I think it was 120 days. Very very quick.
Tanis: Wow.
Suzanne: Wow.
Randy: Yeah. And we were triple subscribed. Uh they did a great job at Pollson. And uh….
Tanis: And what year was that? Was that like….
Randy: 1995.
Tanis: Okay. So a little before all of the….Okay. You know, there was a certain point in business history where everyone, you know, the IPO….
Randy: It was a big deal. Yeah.
Tanis: Yeah. But you were ahead of the curve. So that’s um….
Randy: Yeah. It it was probably uh before Sam Medical I say the best experience of my life to go through that.
Tanis: I bet.
Randy: Yeah. Um we uh were triple subscribed which means you know for every dollar we needed we had three people willing to give us a dollar.
Tanis: Wow that’s amazing.
Randy: So yeah it was it was a it was a party. We went to Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris and Zurich. And yeah it was a great great time.
Tanis: How amazing. So Suzanne kind of went through um a a really interesting high-level synopsis and you’ve talked a little bit about your journey. If you don’t mind kind of going in a little bit more depth, I would be interested to know about some of the most formative experiences. I’m sure that that was one of them. But particularly experiences that really shaped who you are as a leader. Um not just as a person or not just as a business experience, but like really taught you or grew you as a leader.
Randy: Yeah, it’s a it’s an evolving process and and uh I’d have to say that uh really starts when you first start working. You know, when I was in eighth and ninth grade, I moved sprinkler pipe and potato fields in Eastern Washington. Then I worked in a lumber mill during college in in Roseberg, Oregon. And so, uh, I think you you just have to understand, um, you be present and observe what’s going on because you’re you’re in a business and you you’re an employee, you know, and and you’re going to be managed by somebody who is the leader of that group. And so, uh, you always observe, you know, how they handle people and how they’re successful or oftentimes how they’re not successful.
And so, you just pick up on individual pieces like that all along the way, and and certainly um you know it before I got into business, you know those were jobs where I thought boy um I would like to do what he’s doing cuz I don’t like pulling green chain.
Tanis: Yeah.
Randy: But uh it it it really boils down to how how do you treat people um and and you have to understand their motivations for being there as well to be successful. So you have a job and a goal as a as a leader, but everybody else has goals as well. And so you have to meld those together and and uh, um I’ve always been a we person, not an I person. And uh I think if you include everybody and understand all their motivations and their goals, it’s it’s uh it helps form how you how you lead teams.
Tanis: So, did you learn that from observing a leader that you worked for or did you learn that by making mistakes as a leader? I’m gonna….
Randy: Oh, many, many times. Yeah. Um, you know, I I’ve worked in I think probably three or four companies for fairly long stance and and uh yeah, you look at things that uh that people that you know, decisions people make and you say, “Okay, look look at the fallout that’s happened from that.” And uh that probably wasn’t a good a good way to handle that. So again, you just observe what happens when people make decisions and and how they include other people. Um I, you know, there’s lots of positive and negative experiences, but I probably learn more from the negative experiences because when when somebody makes a decision and it affects people adversely, it really changes a dynamic. You know, corporate culture is important.
Uh you still, you know, you can’t be Mr. nice guy and give everybody everything they want, but you have to understand how to work with them to get the goals that you want done or accomplished and also make them feel a part of the team.
Suzanne: Yeah. And so for the last 10 years, you have been the leader of Sam Medical and it has experienced huge growth, but how do you take those core values? You talked about the we and we you talked about kind of what other people mo..you know are motivated by. How do you operationalize that into your leadership team?
Randy: Well, I think you you have to it’s I think the number one thing is communication, communication and inclusion. Uh I’ve always strived to keep people involved in the uh the board decisions, the board goals, board strategy, and bring them in and say, “Hey, this is where we need to go. Let’s talk about your piece of this and how that needs to work.” Uh always uh in my whole career I’ve always done a financial projections but behind financial projections are work uh or is work that needs to be done and so each department plays a key role in making sure that they hold up their end so that you can get to the greater good of uh you know the overall corporate goals.
Suzanne: And so before we go on to the next question I do want to hear about that growth and how you manage that growth at Sam Medical because 10 years if I recall right, went from fairly small to really large. How how….
Randy: Well yeah we when I got there uh when I was appointed president we just finished a year where we were at 7 million in sales and 10 years later we hit 28 million a little over 28 million. Uh at the beginning we we value the company every year for various purposes and it was valued at a little over 5 million when it started and we sold it in May of 2024 for 31 million. And so, uh, it it really comes down to, uh, uh, getting good people. Um, unfortunately, I had to had to swap out a couple of the the management team members and and, uh, um, it you you have to understand who you’re hiring and what they need to produce.
And so uh we we um the people we got had more I mean the people that unfortunately you know we had to part with um had great skills in certain areas but I didn’t feel they were complete and so uh by certainly the sales uh leadership that we brought in um you know she she had been in a company that we were selling to now as a distributor and she so she understood what uh you know how to treat manufacturers what manufacturers on. Um but yeah, she was a key part of our our growing as well as we did.
The other part was um you know, I was given the instructions, it’s a small company, we want to keep control. We don’t want to, you know, have money put in here and dilute our our ownership. So we had to generate everything internally to take on projects. And so uh the other shift we did was that we went from internally developed products to externally developed products. Uh and uh we hired a guy that was in the military, a special forces medic out of Fort Bragg. And uh he uh his last three years in the military, he was in a position where uh if the military needed some kind of medical product to save lives or things like that, he would have to go find it.
So you can imagine somebody that’s looking for companies to sell products to the US Army. He’s got this great database of of people. So when we hired him, he had just a a ton of people in his for an old term rolodex now iPhone contact list. But uh so we could pick and choose what products we thought were viable for distribution and manufacturing through Sam Medical. So we we changed from internally developed R&D to total license and pay royalties.
Tanis: Smart
Suzanne: Yeah.
Randy: Yeah. So that allowed us to in fact I think the two largest selling products were were licensed products.
Tanis: Yeah but that’s such a that’s a really interesting business model too because you’re probably saves quite a bit of money.
Randy: Yeah. Yeah. If you yeah research and development takes a lot of time and knowing from high-tech you know you could go three or four years before you have anything that generates revenue.
Tanis & Suzanne: Wow.
Suzanne: Absolutely. And because you’re dealing with medical you also have the complication of the of the FDA. All those rules in red.
Randy: Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s a that’s a big part of it.
Suzanne: Absolutely.
Randy: And I’m I’m still good friends with a person who was in charge of quality assurance and regulatory affairs. And uh I joked with him that uh you know he was very very conservative, you know, following the rules. And I said, you know, there’s a gray area. We can make a decision. And he says, “Well, I’m just I have to give you the worst case scenario, and you get to make the decision on how you want to go.” And so, um, but we laughed about I said, you know, having you in the company is like having an IRS agent.
Tanis: Yes. I bet. You need those folks, though. That’s good.
Randy: Yeah. And a great guy and total respect from everybody in the organization even though it may be frustrating because, you know, he brought up the rules that we had to follow. We didn’t like to follow them in some instances or maybe not to the letter of the law.
Tanis: So, I you know, you’ve already kind of alluded to it, but our next question is about building teams.
Randy: Right.
Tanis: So, um, you’ve talked a little bit about some of the values that are important to you. Um, when you are building teams, what’s your process and what do you think is kind of the recipe for a successful addition to the team?
Randy: Well, it really depends on on what position you’re hiring for. Um, the person has to, again, I’ll I’ll refer back to the sales department. They’ve got to be able to manage people. They’ve got to know how to how to manage the process of sales, how to how to get money or how to get the product out of production to be delivered on time because everybody has a deadline. And so, uh it’s really understanding do the people that you’re hiring have the skills, a complete set of skills to accomplish what the company needs. And so that’s probably number one. Number two, um boy, they they’ve got to have flexibility. They’ve got to have good sense of humor. Let’s do AB. Um because you know you spend most of your life you know out of out of bed at the office and uh you have to get along with the people and that’s always been important to me. I I uh I’m not a a yeller. I I don’t want anybody, uh, to be a yeller in the company. You know again communication is is the key and and uh yelling is one-way communication. It’s kind of unilateral, and it shuts down people. So, it’s just the ability of people to um you know, communicate with with each other and and understand the goals and and uh be smart enough to be able to pull off what the you know what their job is. And you you can see that from their past history.
Suzanne: Yeah. Because you talked about letting go people who were not complete. So it’s not just the skill set, it’s also that they bring the similar values and that so there’s alignment, right? And especially looking at an leadership team.
Randy: Right.
Suzanne: And how they fit together.
Randy: Yeah.
Suzanne: Yeah. So again, what an incredible career you’ve had, Randy. When you look back, what advice would you have given your 20-year-old self, or what advice would you give any 20-year-old at this point?
Randy: Well, it’s it’s really, you know, understand what it is you want in life. And uh, you’ve got to observe um you know, if you want to be a leader, you know, you’ve got to observe what works and what doesn’t work. Um, I I worked for, uh, we had a guy named Bill McCormack who was a chairman and CEO at Precision Cast Parts, and he was our chairman of the board at Microfield Graphics, and uh, it’s just awesome watching him operate. And he’s very strict and very tough. But uh uh he he said one thing that uh that really stuck with me, and that is you know if somebody has something that they need to accomplish, let them let them set the uh the deadline and give them all the resources they can to hit it and then expect them to hit it. You know that you’ve got to have them buy in on you know you can’t just say hey, we need this by Friday when it’s really a three-week job. You know, so let them, let them participate in the the timeline. And uh, so it’s it’s more collaborative and uh, you know, as employees you know you want to work in an area where your your values and and thoughts are respected. I think that’s uh that’s a key to that.
Suzanne: Absolutely. And so you said, know what you want. I don’t know if I knew what I wanted at age 20, you know. So it’s interesting. It’s you know how life takes you through these different journeys, and it’s the decision points.
Randy: Yeah.
Suzanne: Because you could go left or right.
Randy: Yeah. And I I came to a tough one uh when I was at Coopers and Librand um you know working I was in the tax department and uh I was in night law school at Lewis and Clark and so I worked the you know a tax department during tax season sixty hour weeks and then you go five nights a week for three hours and each each class they give you 150 pages to read before the next class. And so, um, at two and a half years out of the four-year night program, I made the decision to just stop. Um, you know, I I, uh, I saw this guy named Bill Gates that, you know, had several zeros behind his net worth and and I thought, well, you know, that’s a, that’s a great thing to strive for. I got a lot out of law school, you know, probably everything I wanted to do, a lot of contract work in the business I’m in. But I made the switch to say, you know, do I want to be an attorney or do I want to go out and, you know, be in a business and accomplish something? And so I made that made that tough choice uh to to change. And so, but you’ve got to understand uh you know, why are you doing what you’re doing? And you know, I think everybody goes through that. You know, I I don’t really know what I want to do. In fact, I went to to school for 5 years cuz when I got to the end of my four years, I thought, “Okay, maybe I should focus on something, you know, other than general business.” And so, I went back and focused on accounting and and uh the accounting part was great because you you understand you see how businesses work. You see the the whole um you know, soup to nuts and uh um it’s it’s really a good learning ground for understanding how businesses work.
Suzanne: Right. And it and and it teaches you to make fact-based decisions versus emotional based decisions.
Randy: Yeah. Yeah.
Suzanne: And um I probably should have taken a lot more accounting classes, but….
Tanis: We all could use some accounting in our lives.
Randy: Yeah, you know the the one one uh the other thing that really formed me was a class I took in college. I went to Southern Oregon. Uh we had a collective bargaining class and it was taught by an old geyser from Herz Corporation in New York.
Tanis: Oh wow.
Randy: And he was a great guy and uh but he he negotiated contracts versus the teamsters and so….
Tanis: Wow
Randy: Our collective bargaining class, he was just hands-off. It’s every Wednesday night. You can come listen to me drone on, or you can you know go out and do the project that I’m I’m going to assign you. So say we had 36 people in the class. He would break them down into six people teams six-person teams, and of those six people, three would be management, and three would be union. And so he gave us a list of like 15 items that we would need to negotiate. He says, “Uh, you know, I don’t care if you come to class, but on by 9:00 of finals night. Uh, you need to have a negotiated contract. If it looks like one side’s totally taking advantage of the other side, all six of you get Fs. If it looks like, uh, you know, you guys didn’t really do any work, uh, you know, you all get Fs. If you don’t turn it in by nine, you all get Fs. But if you come back to me and you’ve got a a contract that looks like it’s fairly negotiated and you know you didn’t get everything you want but you got things that were important to you, then you’ll all get A’s.”
And it was interesting…
Tanis: What an interesting…yeah.
Randy: We sat we sat in the bars, you know, the three people on management, three people on union, and….
Tanis: Tried to work it out.
Randy: You know you’re you’re trying to you’re trying to get what you want, and um you know trying to persuade them that you know I need this, I can give this up, but uh it was a real life thing that hey you had a deadline and uh the consequences for not meeting that deadline were not good.
Suzanne: And what a learning to take that. And I have to ask, were you on management or were you labor?
Randy: I I think I was in management
Suzanne: Because it it’s not just do as I say. There’s always a compromise, isn’t there?
Randy: Yeah. And that’s that’s one thing that another thing I’ve learned is that if if you’re not happy with the way the the contract or negotiations turned out and the other side’s not happy with the way it’s turned out, you probably have a good contract.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Randy: If nobody’s happy, that’s probably good. And I run into people that say, “Hey, I’ll just I’ll try and take advantage of the other side as much as I can”. And if they don’t understand that they’re losing something, then, you know, that’s their issue. But, uh, I I, you know, I want to do business on a win-win basis.
Tanis: Yeah.
Randy: Whether it’s with a customer, whether it’s with people that work for you and with you. And, uh, everybody has to win.
Suzanne: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, this um, you know, recording…podcast is called Hiring for Good, which can mean a lot of different things to many different people. What is hiring for good mean to you?
Randy: Hiring for good. Well, um, being a finance guy, the number one goal is to increase the value of whatever it is you’re you’re running. And so, that’s one angle. I I presume I should say, well, hiring good uh, hiring for good means um helping people that work with you, do uh you know, do good things and and create good in their lives. And uh, and then there’s the philanthropic aspect of it. You know, you want to you want to be a good steward of uh you know, of the of the world with your products and and certainly Sam Medical was uh can’t say uh how proud I am of the fact that actually the products save lives.
Tanis: Yeah.
Randy: Yeah. It’s pretty cool.
Suzanne: That is very cool to look back and to say “look at this legacy I’m a part of”. Absolutely.
Randy: Yeah. Well, it was uh my 10 years were short period compared to Sam and Sherry. I don’t know if you met them or not. They they started in 1984 and and uh yeah, so they did a lot of good around the world. It’s funny how they’ll they’ll get a phone call from somebody in China saying, “Hey, I’m coming through. Can I can I stop and see you?” They’ve got friends all over the world.
Tanis: That’s so that’s wonderful. And it’s a it’s a really important role when the founders of a company that’s growing….
Randy: Yeah.
Tanis: Entrust you to take it to the next level. So, it’s fun to hear your stories. Thank you so much.
Suzanne: Oh, I know. Thank you so much, Randy.
Randy: Thank you for having me.
Suzanne: You’re awesome. Thank you.
Randy: Could you say that again?
Suzanne: Yes. You are awesome.
Randy: So my so my wife hears that.
Tanis: That’s great.
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And don’t forget to join us next time for another in-depth conversation about transformational leadership. Til then, have fun.