A few days before Christmas, 1,400 employees of Starkey Hearing Technologies gathered on the company’s Eden Prairie campus for a pep talk.
It had been a tough three months. Sheriff’s deputies had escorted the company’s longtime president, Jerry Ruzicka, from the premises after his abrupt firing. The company terminated a succession of other veteran employees, and FBI agents searched the houses of several ousted executives for evidence of unspecified crimes.
Now company leaders — led by founder Bill Austin and his stepson, Brandon Sawalich — attempted to rally the troops. They reminded their shocked employees that Starkey was coming off its best year ever. Annual revenue had reached $800 million and was growing steadily. New hearing aids were selling well.
“People think, ‘Oh my gosh, Mr. Austin has terminated four top executives. How does this company survive?’ ” Senior Vice President Sawalich said in a recent interview with the Star Tribune. “Well, we are not run by a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re doing. … We have a deep talent pool. The company is healthy and financially strong.”
Austin and Ruzicka built Starkey into one of the world’s top hearing aid companies through almost half a century of attentive salesmanship and, in recent years, technical innovation. The company and its related foundation are well known for hosting A-list celebrities and the political elite at epic fundraisers each year, as well as for donating hundreds of thousands of hearing aids to the needy.
Now Starkey is attracting a much different kind of attention. At least 20 managers and high-ranking employees are gone, including Ruzicka, who led Starkey for 17 years. Several former workers have sued the company. In one suit, Ruzicka accused Austin and Sawalich of a host of improprieties, from knowingly using defective parts to spending company money on personal expenses.
[“Source-startribune”]
