Bill Perciballi
Bill Perciballi, age 41, is founder and president of ArmorWorks in Tempe, Ariz. His company makes hi-tech body armor for the U.S. military.
I was always taking things apart and putting them back together when I was little. My first toy was Lego. My father and grandfather were do-it-yourself kind of guys. My grandfather fixed all kinds of things. He was Italian. He was a tinkerer. My dad was the first to go to college. When anything needed to be done in the house, Dad would do it. When my mother wanted a sewing room for her and my sister, my dad would figure it out and build it.
So my dad was always on the go with some chore that involved taking something apart and putting it back together. I would watch him.
Then I started to be able to fix a few things myself. Simple things, like bikes. I could change an inner tube, change a spoke. So when I would do this and there were adults around I would get noticed for it. Or I'd go somewhere to buy a part and someone would say, you know how to fix that?
One summer my brother John got a job repairing lawnmower engines. I used to go and visit him. The shop was owned by a sprint car racer who was paralyzed. He was in a wheelchair but very active. And he had three girlfriends. He let me sweep the floor and earn 50 cents. I was like the shop dog. They had me cleaning parts. I was hanging around, and I'd see these guys take engines apart and put them back together. I'd just be watching. After a while I would figure out that the guys would need this tool next, so I'd get that tool.
I started working on mini-bikes and go-carts, playing around with engines. I would help my dad work on cars, and I started reading books about cars. Then I got this job in high schools at another small place doing transmission repair. All my friends were into Saab cars because they're really good in the snow, and they're really easy to work on, we thought. This fellow had a shop in a barn in a really nice town, and he would take only the cars that were real head-scratchers. He wouldn't take a car just to change the oil. It needed to be a difficult problem. He was a genius. He went to MIT, his daytime job was shooting electrons into things. I started off just cleaning parts, getting them together, and as I learned more I worked on more and more stuff.
There was a guy there that kind of mentored me. He could do the reading and understand the systems on paper, then do the repairs, really difficult stuff.
He thought, some human put this together, so we can figure it out. These were severe cases. They needed serious surgery, there was severe internal damage to these cars. Then, my friends started to ask me if I could work on their car. I kind of got the confidence to delve into big projects, because I felt if I worked on it long enough I could figure it out.
Meanwhile I was taking math, science, and basic engineering courses. I liked my classes because I saw how they would tie together with the mechanical work. Calculus, algebra, geometry, trigonometry – you need those tools to be able to understand, to be able to quantify a system. In my business we say you don't really understand what's going on until you can write an equation that explains it.
A gear tooth, for instance, the shape of a gear tooth in a clutch – it's all geometry and trigonometry. Trigonometry has great use in structural analysis.
In my field – ballistics – there are a couple of equations that explain the response of an armor system. But we use trigonometry for stress and load analysis on a daily basis.
My attitude has always been, I've never been afraid to get my hands dirty. In fact that's the fun part of it, but a lot of that comes from an understanding of how things work and why you would put things together this way versus that way.
When I was working on cars during college, a guy whose car I worked on was always asking me what courses I was taking. I was on active duty in the military for a while, and he said what are you going to do when you get out of school? At that time in New England no one was hiring, and this guy said, "We're hiring, why don't you come down for an interview?" He worked at the Army's Materials Technology Laboratory. This guy was a materials scientist. So I got hired in the Armor Group in 1987. We were doing research on approved materials for armor applications. I was 23.
I was working on armor systems, and one of the materials that had stalled out in terms of popularity was ceramic technology. Not that many people understood it. The army was able to meet its protection goals with metal.
Kevlar was new. People were just starting to look at advanced materials and technology. A little here and little there. Ceramic technology was very intriguing from a technology standpoint, it was very intriguing from a materials standpoint. But there was nothing practical.
The Army would do these reports on it, but it was pure science. You would open these reports and see ten pages of hieroglyphics.
Anyway, I could see it had a lot of applications. I had a friend who had his own business, who said, you need to have your own deal. There's no one who does what you want to do. So I left the government.
Initially, I started my company on a credit card. I needed a computer, supplies, I need to incorporate and get a fax machine.
I had a lot of contacts and a lot of people were interested in having me consult for them. I had this idea that I'd be this hired gun. Originally I thought I'd do consulting and ski. But what happened was, I went for a few weeks not generating any revenue. Then I got a call, somehow or other I found out about a buyer. They were looking for someone to make armor panels for the CH-47 helicopter at the Defense Supply Center, Richmond. Somehow or other I found out that they had a bid open for some armor panels. They were looking for a source to buy these armor panels because the company that had been doing it was out of business. It was 1996. I remember talking to them. I made one simple panel and I bid on the job and I got it. It was a ceramic armor panel. I found some places where I could rent time in people's shops to make it.
One day one of the procurement officers said, "I'm going to send you a drawing for a part that we need. It's urgent, she said, could you make it? I said yeah, but understand I'm a start up, and I don't have a shop, I'm standing here in my gym shorts talking with you." I didn't know the vendor codes. There was all this stuff I didn't know.
So she started setting me up. To this day we're a supplier for that helicopter. So I got in the system that way. Shortly thereafter some colleagues that I knew hooked me up with other jobs.
After the battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, the Special Operations Command wanted to look at advanced armor technology to stop bullets.
Remember the movie Black Hawk Down? There's a scene where a ranger takes off his body armor because it's too heavy. And he gets shot, he's killed. It's in the movie and the book. That scene describes a real problem – that body armor is heavy.
That's the reason we developed a ceramic alternative. That was my first big production job, and it ultimately became what's called the SAPI – the Small Arms Protective Insert.
Do I like having my own company? Yes. I like the ability to get things done. I like seeing my ideas get put into practice, I like providing a forum for people to work and do some good.
My style is to give a lot of latitude to employees and let them figure things out and use their judgment. You do that knowing that they're going to make mistakes along the way, so you try to make sure that you know what the mistakes are in advance, so nothing too bad happens.
The day that I actually get to go back and get my hands dirty at work is the best day in the world. I'm a part-time manager and part-time administrator. But I've also learned a lot of new things. I had to learn accounting. I had to learn about banking, finance. Contract law.
Manufacturing lets me use my creativity to do something important. Manufacturing is great. And it made this country. I'm pro-manufacturing and I worry about the mindset that there's no manufacturing in this country. It's that mindset that I'm going to change.
