February 2004

People

Trickling Up
Aaron Slettehaugh, MBA '02

Aaron Slettehaugh, MBA '02, with pump developed for subsistence farmers. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER STEMBER

Combining professional and personal passions is a vocational luxury that Aaron Slettehaugh, MBA '02, hasn't always enjoyed.

In 1999 he traveled to Guatemala through his church and, among other things, helped train a local mason to build efficient indoor stoves. He left a few weeks later feeling his contributions improved living conditions and helped citizens save money, but didn't offer them a chance to earn more money. "I feel those in need might have been better off if I'd just written a check instead of traveling down there," Slettehaugh says. He saw a largely untapped area of appropriate technology—small-scale, labor-intensive projects—and was frustrated it wasn't being better utilized. This wasn't lost on him when he later came to the Business School.

A summer internship in East Africa helping with manufacturing and distributing $75 pedal-powered water pumps proved to be a better fit for him and led to a full-time job after graduation. Two versions of the simply constructed pump are sold to subsistence farmers in Kenya and Tanzania and replace less effective irrigation methods like carrying water in buckets. Once farmers are able to irrigate more of their land, productivity increases and things like building a home, farming more land, sending children to college, and employing others becomes a reality.

"These are new technologies we're introducing," Slettehaugh says. "But unlike a social engineering project, if we were to pull up stakes in East Africa tomorrow, the pumps would still be working." That's what kept Slettehaugh at ApproTEC, where he is director of business development. Another appeal is that the company, headed by Stanford engineering graduate Martin Fisher, is a nonprofit, but its structure is much like a conventional business with manufacturing, product development, distribution, and marketing.

Currently, Slettehaugh and Fisher are looking for donors to help the company develop a stronger pump, increase market penetration in East Africa, and expand to more countries. Every dollar donated to ApproTEC turns into $20 in profits and wages over a three-year period, according to follow-up studies conducted by ApproTEC. Slettehaugh says this type of trickle-up economics already has created $30 million a year in new profits and wages.

"I couldn't have designed a better job myself," he says. "Not only does this fulfill my business interest and passion for international development, but ApproTEC is transforming the way people farm in Africa and subsequently improving their living standards."

ARTHUR PATTERSON

Alumni to Know

Faculty

Newsmakers

Al Trujillo, MBA '88

Archive and Shred
Al Trujillo, MBA '88

For a 28-year-old MBA student, waste management proved to be an auspicious career choice. It led Al Trujillo, now 44, to the top job in one of the largest information management companies in the world.

"The waste business is a great place to develop your management skills," says Trujillo, MBA '88, president and CEO of Atlanta-based Recall Corp. "You not only have to deal with the normal business forces—customers, shareholders, employees, suppliers—but you've got the regulators too. You've got to learn how to balance all five."

After learning the waste business at American NuKem in New Jersey, Trujillo took on ailing CyanoKem in Detroit, then the largest treater of cyanide-bearing waste in the United States. It wasn't pretty. "Detroit was so rough," he says, "we had a line budget item every year for bullet hole repairs in the reactor tanks." After Trujillo turned around CyanoKem financially, the company was sold from under him and Trujillo swore off the waste business. "You get very little reward," he says. "I mean, customers don't call you up and tell you you run a great waste company." But the giant Australian multinational Brambles Industries found him, and after talking Trujillo back into waste for a few years, offered him its global information management division, where Trujillo now manages more than 3,000 people in 23 countries.

"We deal with the entire information management life cycle," Trujillo says. "We don't produce information, but once an organization has created it, we organize it and structure it, either physically or in digital form." Most of the material Recall preserves and protects is paper-based. "People have been forecasting the end of paper for a long time," he says, "but it is still in many ways the most efficient way to capture and store information."

At the end of a document's useful life, Recall destroys it. "Information is like a financial item," Trujillo says. "It can be an asset, but if it's not managed correctly it can be a liability." Worldwide, Recall destroys the equivalent of 90 million reams of paper a year.

Data backup is another of the company's services, one that, for security reasons, it rarely publicizes. Few can forget the horrific loss of life suffered by the bond investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center bombing. But, despite losing more than half its employees, the company was up and running offsite shortly after the disaster. "They were a client of ours," Trujillo explains simply, "and we were able to get them back online the following day."

JANET ZICH