Balancing Act -You can have a family, a demanding job and a short commute– if you figure out the geography.

Richard Randall pocketed enough money to retire before the age of 40 by taking public a little company called Target Therapeutics, a developer of less-invasive devices for treatment of aneurysms and stroke. But success came at a high price. His marriage failed. The person he cared most about–his daughter Tess–wound up 3,000 miles away.

Rich Karlgaard

http://forbes.com/business/forbes/2004/0705/074.html

More From Rich Karlgaard CEO Network Idea Exchange – http://forbes.com/karlgaard/

For Rick Randall the journey from modest blue-collar beginnings in a Buffalo suburb to riches didn’t add up to much, given that he lost his family in the process. Luckily, he got a second chance. Now, at age 52, he has a new wife, Lori; two more children, Alec, 10, and Hailey, 5; and a promising new medical-device startup. Not only that, thanks to the technology of the Internet he and his family live and work in captivating places and own two splendid homes–one in Lake Placid, N.Y. and another in Wilmington, N.C.–for the price of one executive-style house in Boston or southern California. Randall now combines work and family in a way that many people would envy. How did he do it?

A biology major who once wanted to be a veterinarian, Randall paid his way through the State University of New York college at Buffalo by working summers at the same General Motors plant where his father had been a tinsmith. Tinsmith! Must have been the last one in America. "The best business education I had was working on the GM factory floor," he says. "It was very alienating. You’d ask yourself: ‘What does this part mean? Where does it go? What happens if it breaks?’ But you’d never get answers from the foreman. It was a stupid way to run things. I could see the Japanese invasion a mile off."

After college he got a job teaching high school biology in Syracuse. During summers he drove an ice cream truck, a pure commission job. Taking a route nobody else wanted–through black neighborhoods–Randall did poorly at first. But when he rigged the truck’s bell to sound more like a jazz cymbal, he wound up making more money that summer than he’d made teaching for nine months.

Randall later signed on at a small medical products company. The interviewer hired him on the spot after he told the story of changing the bell on his ice cream truck. He rapidly climbed the rungs in medical sales, but soon topped out on commission. One night over drinks he pressed a colleague for career tips. The fellow advised getting in at the beginning of a new technology. Randall began poring over magazines and journals, looking for that revolutionary product.

One day in 1979 he found it in angioplasty balloons, just then getting approval from the Food & Drug Administration. Randall switched employers, joining U.S. Catheter & Instrument, which brought the device to market in 1980 as a way of opening up clogged arteries. Within four years the procedure took off, and Randall got a sales trainer position with the firm in Boston. "My job was getting salespeople to go toe-to-toe with cardiologists. It all came together for me: my teaching, the factory job, the ice cream truck. I excelled."

But his ambition-fueled long hours at work and the traffic-snarled commutes of Boston doomed his marriage. He found himself putting Tess to bed before he had time to completely unwind from work. He found no time to connect with his wife.

In 1985 a headhunter landed him a job at American Hospital Supply in Santa Ana, Calif. "I loved California, the lack of hierarchy. In Boston I was hampered by a lack of a Harvard or MIT pedigree. In California nobody asked where I had gone to college. All that mattered was that doctors liked me." Still, Randall says that moving a continent away from Tess was the toughest decision he’s ever made. Tess was 4 years old when Janice and Randall divorced. He would not see much of his daughter for the next eight years.

Single and focused, Randall thrived at American Hospital Supply and quickly got himself noticed in the medical-device industry. In 1989 he was recruited for his first chief executive job, at Target Therapeutics, which then made catheters for minimally invasive liver surgery and later for brain surgery. After the initial public offering in 1992 Randall was prosperous, but he realized he’d missed too much of Tess’ childhood and that no amount of success or money could ever get that back.

Determined to spend more time with Tess, Randall moved back to Boston and took the helm of another startup, in sports medicine, called Innovasive Devices. Taking it public in 1996, Randall later sold it to Johnson & Johnson. Now rich enough to retire, the working-class kid from Buffalo just couldn’t do it. So he joined the Vertical Group, a New Jersey venture capital firm that invested in medical-device companies.

There Randall saw a large gap in the device market. "There is plenty of room for products that do only $20 million a year in sales–single products that meet a surgical need." As he describes it, big companies just don’t know how to get at this market. Venture capitalists are uninterested because startups can’t afford the long FDA approval process, distribution costs or establishing reimbursement from insurance companies.

To get at this market Randall started Incumed in 2000. Its purpose is to incubate single-product firms and sell them to a larger medical-device company to get the product through FDA approval. Randall’s latest venture is called TranS1. It makes catheters that permit high-tech spinal surgery, done through tiny holes, to relieve pressure on a nerve from a degenerated disc. The company hopes to get a share of the $2 billion product market from the 200,000 lumbar-fusion procedures done in the U.S. each year. Pending FDA approval for marketing, Randall expects to begin clinical studies later this summer. This follows limited but successful testing in Brazil, where patients who underwent surgery with TranS1 catheters had no postoperative back pain and now lead active lives.

"What I want is high-revenue-to-headcount business," says Randall. "But I also want my family by my side." Randall does this by spending the school year in a five-bedroom house in a golf course development in Wilmington, N.C. His commute to the office is seven minutes. That means he has at least an hour more per day of family time than he had living in Boston or the Bay Area. When not traveling, he puts his two kids to bed every night, sees them off to school and sometimes drives them in a carpool in the morning.

He still travels a lot, about 40% of the time, but regional jet service connecting through Charlotte or Atlanta makes the world accessible. From late June through mid-August the family lives in Lake Placid, in a 3,600-square-foot Adirondack-style home with bright yellowish-brown log walls and vaulted ceilings. During the summer Randall works from there on Mondays and Fridays and spends Tuesday through Thursday in Wilmington. "When you work in odd places, as I do, you have more time to think. You can think independently. You can listen to your instincts." He feels more focused and tuned in to family members when they are together.

Yes, there have been sacrifices. When employees and shareholders are betting their livelihoods and personal wealth on you, you must be there–and be accountable.

"I am usually wishing my wife and kids happy birthday by phone," Randall says. "We celebrate on the contiguous weekend." But being miles away from the urban rat race makes it easier for Randall to shift gears from work mode to family mode. When he’s in Lake Placid, he typically knocks off work at 5:30 and dives into the lake with his kids.

The Internet allows Randall and his Wilmington colleagues, he says, to "open up the world as one resource, tapping talent from Boston or Tokyo." No need to be in Manhattan, Boston or San Francisco to do that.

"We’ve acquired specialized laboratory equipment at tremendous savings on Ebay. Monster.com has been a source of finding and networking with quality people," he says. Technology has liberated him. "We do not need to be geographic captives to the industry in which we work."

He goes on: "It’s okay to have a personal life and devote some time to it. My wife would assert that I am not completely reformed. But even she would admit that time, experience and location have made me a better dad and partner."

Adapted from Life 2.0: How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness, by Rich Karlgaard (Crown Business, July 2004). Go to http://www.life2where.com for more details