Solving Any Problem

If there is one thing that Charlie Nahabedian refuses to leave the house without, it’s his jackknife.  “I have all different kinds,” he says.  “I still have my first pocketknife from the Boy Scouts, and every weekend I pull out my Swiss Army Knife to help out with whatever project I have to do around the house.  I keep them around because between my brain, my hands, and my jackknife, I can solve just about any problem.”

Charlie will readily call himself a handyman, but his ability to problem solve with just his own talents and the simplest of tools goes deeper than his hobbies, or even his prestigious education and experience as an engineer.  His father immigrated to America from Armenia in 1921 with nothing but integrity and work ethic to his name, but somehow, he was able to use his God-given talents to make the most of his chance to live in the land of opportunity.  “He was able to learn the language, open his own business, and raise a family of eight children with only a sixth grade education,” Charlie says.  “I realized early on that, if he could do that, and if I have access to a better education, hopefully I can do even better for my family and my community.”

Just as he hoped to, Charlie learned all he could and solved as many problems as he could along the way.  Today, he is the President, CEO, and cofounder of VideoKall, Inc., a company on the verge of introducing a video telecommunication system that will revolutionize healthcare in America.

By the time Charlie began formulating the idea of VideoKall, he had forty-five years of experience in the telecom business under his belt, with expertise across a variety of specialties including technology development, technology and product implementation, service implementation, marketing, and, most importantly, team building.  “I got to a point where one of my professional friends and I were trying to do what we call a leverage buyout of several like-companies in order to pool the resources and assets, build a stronger company, and sell it off for a profit,” he explains.  “One of the companies we approached was being run by Vince Waterson, who later became one of my co-founders at VideoKall.  It turned out the deal we were working on with his company didn’t go through, but Vince, who is a very creative individual with a strong telecom background, approached me about some technology he had developed.”

The technology to which Vince was referring made it possible to hold video phone calls around the world, and he hoped to collaborate with Charlie to build a company around the idea.  While the technology allowed for international friends and family members to see each other at a low price for their conversation, Charlie advised that they fine-tune the idea in order to have a more compelling reason for people to use the product.  Shortly after, they developed an application for the technology in international remittances, so that money could be sent internationally faster, at less cost, and with direct access to the recipient through face-to-face communication.  The idea was so compelling that a demonstration of the application won an international award in London.

The company was thus set in motion in 2006, yet because of the fluctuations in the economy, the team struggled to find a good partner that was licensed and strong in international remittances, which prompted them to redirect the application of the technology toward health care.  That idea was spurred when Charlie was describing their technology to the executive of a visiting nurse association.  “She told me they have similar technologies in their association, where the nurses use telephone lines to monitor blood pressure, pulse, and the like,” he explains.  “We realized that we could expand on that notion, so we developed the MEDEX Spot Unmanned Micro Clinic self-service primary healthcare concept with medical and legal advice, and now we can provide outpatient services at better prices to the user than a manned clinic like CVS — to the benefit of patients and their service providers.  There might be a few things we can’t do, like put a bandage on, but we can provide better service.  We can speak their language.  They can choose the gender of the Nurse Practitioner, all at a good price.  With the high cost of health care, an increasing component of these costs is outpatient visits and non-critical emergency room visits.  The majority of these situations can be handled very easily and inexpensively in more convenient locations.  If you can bring quality services, convenience, and low cost to the user, you have a good recipe for a winning operation, especially because we’re likely to see more limited access to primary care physicians.”

Take, for instance, the example of a patient with a fever.  They can go to their local drug store and purchase a prepaid service SMARTcard, which doubly acts as a key to micro clinic “cabin” where the call takes place.  The patients populate the SMARTcard with their medical history, which is uploaded via a communications link to a Nurse Practitioner at a hospital Medical Call Center that may be miles away.  From there, with the vital signs measurements and a quality video phone call, the Nurse Practitioner can send electronically a prescription to the pharmacy nearest to the patient, or transfer the patient to an on-call doctor.  “While it may not be as personal as the beloved family doctor, it cuts out scheduling an appointment and long waits in a waiting room full of sick people,” Charlie confirms.

With the project nearing completion, VideoKall is 30 percent into its Angel investment round, after which it will be four months away from having a market unit ready to be presented to the public.  The company plans on having a nationwide road tour with a MEDEX Spot Cabin installed in a large trailer, which will have a small satellite antenna on the roof. At every city and wayside stop around the country, the cabin will be connected to the hospital by satellite, and visitors to the mobile clinic will have remote medical assessments. Additionally, prospective customers such as Walgreens, Rite-Aid, and CVS will have the opportunity to commit to deployment for their early competitive advantage.  “While the cabins may have to compete with more traditional clinics, Medex Spot service has an advantage in that they need only five customers per day to be financially sustainable – about half the traffic of a manned clinic,” Charlie points out.

Poised at the brink of this remarkable accomplishment, Charlie sees his own contributions as the result of the entrepreneurial seed that was planted in him by his father early in life.  Mr. Nahabedian opened his own dry cleaning and tailoring business shortly after moving to the U.S., which quickly gained momentum.  After saving enough money, he brought his wife, to whom he had been betrothed earlier, to join him in America.

His father’s business did so well that at one point, he had four locations around the Manhattan area.  In the mid-1930’s, he decided to move the family to Boston, where Charlie was born.  He concentrated his business into a single, larger store in the Boston area, where Charlie and his siblings were expected to help out. The children walked or rode their bikes to the shop after school every day.  “I never resented having to do it,” Charlie remembers now.  “It was just being part of the family.  My dad was clever though, because he had a few tricks along the way to keep us motivated.  For example, we were tasked with making sure there was nothing in the pockets of clothing before they were dry-cleaned, so he would put coins in the clothes to give us extra incentive to keep looking.”

Looking back, Charlie credits working at the shop for developing his customer service skills.  “As a service-oriented business, you have to understand that people have unique preferences and different standards,” he says.  “To satisfy a customer, you have to understand their requirements and know how to fulfill them.”  When Charlie was not helping out at the shop, he earned extra spending money through various childhood jobs that included a paper route.  Utilizing his people skills, he also worked as a golf caddie, and when he was old enough, he drove an ice cream truck in neighborhoods around Boston.

Charlie was always a bright child, but since he usually worked in the family shop after school, he rarely had enough time to do his homework.  “It was very typical for my report card to have all A’s, but with comments that said I wasn’t working hard enough,” he laughs.  “I did well on the tests, but I only occasionally did my homework.  Eventually, my teachers had to start talking to my dad to convince him that I needed to back off at the shop and focus on my studies so that I could get a scholarship to college.”

Fortunately, his father was supportive, and Charlie was accepted to Northeastern University, where he pursued electrical engineering.  To pay for school, he participated in a co-op program, where he would alternate semesters between studying and working at Raytheon Company, a technology leader in electronics and defense.  While it took a year longer to finish his Bachelor’s degree, he excelled in his program since he had unlimited time to study—so much so that his professors encouraged him to pursue a PhD immediately after graduation.  Unfortunately, however, the Vietnam War was well underway, and he would only be able to receive a student deferment for his Masters.  Luckily, earning that next degree came at no additional cost, as he landed a graduate assistantship at Northeastern that provided free tuition and paid him to teach, as well as a resident assistantship for free room and board.

During his time at Northeastern, Charlie was enrolled in the ROTC, so that by the time he graduated, he was a Cadet Brigadier General, the highest student rank.  After graduating, he joined the Army, where he went in as a Second Lieutenant in the Signal Corps.  After going through the Signal Corps Officer’s Basic Training, he was sent to Vietnam, where he was the Maintenance and Supply Officer for the multi-site Tropospheric-scatter Communications Company, which bounced high-powered microwave signals off the troposphere to extend radio ranges from thirty to three hundred miles.

For his final eight months of service, he was assigned to the Electronic Warfare Lab in New Jersey.  His projects were Airborne Radio Direction Findings Systems, so that as pilots flew their aircraft around Vietnam, they would directionally detect enemy radios where they could be triangulated, targeted, and destroyed.  “During my Masters program, I had done significant work with the propagation of radio waves within the wave field, so I understood how waves differed in properties away from and around an antenna,” he explains.  While working on his project, he analyzed the data from his test flights and found several anomalies, which he further analyzed with a mathematician.  From this work, rather than having a large probable location for a target, he could narrow the angle significantly, which reduced the size of that probable target by an order of magnitude.  His breakthrough was a huge contribution to the war effort, so he went to his boss asking to file for a patent.  “My boss laughed at me, saying it was classified information, so I couldn’t file a patent,” Charlie recalls.  “I was glad I made the contribution, but it helped me realize that I didn’t want to spend my career there.”

Charlie spent a total of two years with the Army—a time that he looks back on as having taught him invaluable lessons in leadership.  “I’m a walk-around manager,” he says.  “I don’t lead from a distance.  I always have an open door and encourage communication directly between me and anyone else in my company because I prefer unfiltered information.  Inevitably, things are lost or misinterpreted as they are passed from person to person, but I try to minimize that through my leadership approach.”

After leaving the Army, Charlie landed a job with Bell Labs in its mobile telephone department.   At the time he was hired, mobile telephones were a large unit found in cars that required an even-larger unit in the trunk, with a cumbersome antenna.  Charlie’s first project at Bell Labs was to complete the prototype of a portable phone and convince the FCC that the radio waves surrounding us could be used for low-power applications.  Charlie finished his fieldwork in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1982 that the first cordless phone came out, as the FCC had needed considerable time to plan and re-farm the spectrum.  Shortly after field and customer testing of the portable phone, Charlie supervised the development and completion of a coin-telephone system onboard the Metroliner trains running between New York and Washington, D.C.  “My group designed the system, did all the development, worked with the telephone companies, and had the entire radio, switching and transmission systems installed and operating within 18 months of the project’s request,” he says.  “After that, my next team developed the first business communications system using a microprocessor controller to process calls in and out of an office complex.  We took that system from concept to manufacture, so I was promoted and went to work at AT&T.”

Charlie’s work at Bell Labs was so invaluable that the company paid for him to attain his MBA.  It was unusual for a Development Supervisor to earn such a degree, but by that point, Charlie had begun planning the next transition in his career path.  “I had a lot of fun with the technology at Bell Labs, but I also had to do the menial stuff,” he recalls.  “I wanted the bigger picture, and I wanted to be managing more of it, so I knew I needed to complement my education.”

At AT&T, Charlie was initially promoted to a manager position, where he considered telecom products and approved them for availability and support from telephone companies.  In that capacity, he was quickly brought into a project between AT&T and Walt Disney World to create the World Key Information Network.  “Basically, the concept was that there would be kiosks around EPCOT Park that guests could use without any training,” he explains.  “They could find answers to questions, pull up schedules, locate restaurants and other attractions, preview pavilions, and make restaurant reservations.”  Originally, the contract stated that Disney would design and develop the project with AT&T sponsoring it, but eighteen months before their scheduled debut, Disney returned to AT&T asking for help.  “AT&T asked me to go down and talk to Disney about what they wanted, so the first thing I did was sit down with them and rewrite the contract so that the money would stay the same, but the work and patents would go to AT&T instead, as we were taking over development.”

After getting a clear definition of what Disney was wanting, Charlie visited thirteen different departments in Bell Labs to find the perfect combination of architecture and technologies for the project.  Because the project required the collaboration of workers across the gamut of Bell Labs’ expertise, he initially struggled to receive approval, but eventually, Bell Labs President, Ian Ross, his former executive director, gave the go-ahead.  “I wanted to bring everyone together in one department so that we would have all the expertise and knowledge accessible to get the job done efficiently,” Charlie recalls.  “So I took over as Program Director, and we managed to have the system and service ready on time for opening day.  It was a great success story of bringing people together, convincing them that there is a need and a way to get it done, but that everything had to be done just right.”  Just as he had done so many times throughout his career, Charlie proved again—this time amidst extremely high stakes—that he could solve any problem.

After a combined total of twenty years at Bell Labs and AT&T, Charlie decided to look into new career opportunities.  At the time of his departure, he had already been promoted to Director, but he felt it was time to leave when the company continued to downsize.  He moved to a new company that had just signed a contract with LG of Korea to build a portable cellular phone.  The project began with only Charlie and his secretary, but within two years, the company had grown to twenty employees, and they had developed a working model ready for manufacture.  The effort marked not only a giant success, but also Charlie’s first entrepreneurial effort.

Looking to broaden his experience platform, he sold the company to Lucky Goldstar of Korea in 1989 and then went on to work in the venture capital business with Fidelity Investments to develop a telecom project.  Two years later, he moved on to a consulting job in Chicago, but shortly after joining, he was offered the position of Vice President of Corporate Development for a company in New Jersey deploying a radio-based data network for fleet services.  Accepting but determining the job wasn’t a good fit, he voluntarily left to work as the Head of Commercial Operations for a business in Long Island, where they made intelligent antennas for the cellular industry.  Determining the parent company wasn’t really committed, he joined a boutique telecom management consulting firm.

He eventually became Vice President and Partner, but after five years of management consulting, the terrorist attacks of September 11th occurred, putting many companies out of business or on hold.  Charlie left the company and decided to do consulting on his own while also teaching classes on entrepreneurship to undergraduate, MBA, and Executive MBA students at Farleigh Dickenson University, which he did for eight years.  The advice he gave to his students translates to any young person entering the working world today.  “Know yourself,” he urges.  “In the MBA program, we didn’t just teach students how to run a business; we taught them how to get to know themselves.  If you know what you’re good at, and in what role, and how you can best contribute to the business, then you prepare yourself to be successful and progress within that area.  I would ask, what makes you unique?  How can you apply that to your interests and to what you’ve learned? How can you complement your skills and build an effective team?  If you can bring harmony among those things, you will find success.”

Undoubtedly, the advice Charlie offers to young people is a lesson learned from his parents’ success story as immigrants.  “My parents came to this country of opportunity and made the best of it,” he says.  “They passed that along by encouraging their children to always try to do better than they did, which gave me the incentive and focus to understand myself and what I can do.  When I tackle an issue today, I learn all the skills and perspectives I need in order to understand the problem, so that I’ll know how to analyze it, communicate effectively, and find the solution.  I approach everything as comprehensively as I can.”

Today, Charlie foresees a bright future for VideoKall, not only because of his own ability to recognize his strengths and those of others, but because of the positive feedback the project has already received.  “We’ve already won an international award and demonstrated what we can do for the healthcare industry, so now it’s time to raise money and really move this service offering along,” he says.   “It’s time to solve the real problems facing societies at home and abroad.”

With this constructive orientation around solving problems, Charlie’s impact will certainly leave the world a better place than it was when he first came into it.  Whether he’s fixing things around the house with his jackknife, lending his time and efforts as a volunteer at his church and in his community, supporting his talented and professional wife to raise their two successful daughters with grace, or wielding his experience and vision to lead VideoKall to success, Charlie’s example shows the true success that comes from using one’s abilities, whether God-given or man-made, to be the best you can be, and to positively influence others along the way.

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