Dennis Nash took the big step in 2004, when he turned down a finance position with IBM to launch software startup Control Station. “Big Blue was in my blood,” said Nash, a Connecticut native whose father worked for the tech giant. At the time, Nash was about to graduate from UConn’s MBA program. At 35 […]
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Dennis Nash took the big step in 2004, when he turned down a finance position with IBM to launch software startup Control Station.
“Big Blue was in my blood,” said Nash, a Connecticut native whose father worked for the tech giant.
At the time, Nash was about to graduate from UConn’s MBA program. At 35 years old and with a family to support, the allure of job stability with a big corporation wasn’t enough to steer him away from the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship.
“At the time, IBM had 350,000 employees,” Nash recalled. At Control Station, he was the first and sole employee, but he had the CEO title.
Nash, now 54, has been leading the Manchester-based software firm ever since. Control Station has evolved into a multimillion-dollar privately-held business that sells software to help manufacturers fine-tune their industrial production processes.
For example, its software can detect and then send a warning about mechanical, tuning and other issues within a manufacturing plant, to help prevent the high costs of unplanned downtime.
Customers include about half of the businesses listed on the Fortune 500.
Based in the historic Hilliard Mills complex, Nash leads a small team of less than two dozen employees and a customer base spanning over 70 countries, with products translated to support multiple languages.
Given about half of most small businesses and nearly two out of three tech startups fail within five years, Nash’s track record at Control Station is winning kudos. This past March, he was named Connecticut’s Small Business Person of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Catherine Marx, SBA’s Connecticut district director, called Nash a “forward-thinking strategist.”
Nash’s career path as a small business leader hasn’t followed a straight, well-planned line.
A graduate of Greenwich High School and the University of Notre Dame, Nash first threw himself into politics in Washington, D.C., working for Congressman Tim Roemer of Indiana and waiting tables at night to pay the rent.
He eventually moved on to business development and sales positions at a string of beltway high-tech startups, some later absorbed into big names like Sirius XM and MCI Communications, learning skills that apply today.
“These were venture-funded, fast-paced startup environment gigs — you just had to get stuff done, first mover advantage was always key,” Nash said.
Laid off after the dot-com bubble imploded, Nash decided an MBA could lead to managerial positions. He earned a scholarship to UConn’s graduate program and tested the waters at IBM during a summer job between his first and second year.
It wasn’t a good fit.
“Everything I found to be scintillating about startup environments seemed to be snuffed out in a company the size of IBM,” he said. “There’s just too much bureaucracy and I felt constrained.”
Nash was also exploring opportunities in Greater Hartford’s small venture capital community. He and his wife, Marcella, married in 2000, were new parents of twin daughters and wanted to stay in the area to be close to family.
Then came an email about two local entrepreneurs with UConn roots looking for someone to draft a business plan for a startup. Control Station was essentially a hobby business founded by Douglas Cooper, now a retired UConn School of Engineering professor, who created a software educational tool for undergraduate chemical engineering students to better understand the principles of process control and flow automation — cornerstones in industrial operations — that he was also licensing to other universities.
Cooper and Kevin Bouley, president of Nerac Inc. — a Tolland-based research and advisory services firm and also a UConn School of Business alumnus — were evaluating the product’s commercial potential.
“Neither Doug nor I had the time or inclination to kick it off as a business,” said Bouley, an early investor in Control Station and a board member.
Nash’s draft won him the CEO position, even though he was a newly minted MBA.
Nash, Bouley said, has demonstrated three qualities of a good entrepreneur — “resourcefulness, resilience and relentlessness.”
During Nash’s tenure, Control Station has transitioned the academic tool, which continues to be licensed to universities, into a portfolio of process monitoring, diagnostic and optimization software technologies and services used by manufacturers worldwide to increase their production efficiency and throughput.
“Even slight improvements in production can mean millions of dollars in bottom-line performance,” Nash said.
To carve out market share, Control Station has gone head-to-head with competitors small and large, including behemoths like Honeywell and Siemens, on product innovation.
Many hires from UConn are behind that brainpower, he said.
Growth hasn’t come without challenges, including the Great Recession in 2007-09, and the pandemic, both of which posed risks to the bottom line, Nash said.
“We’ve always been able to hold it together, though there have been lean and challenging years,” he admits.
Today, one-third of Control Station’s revenues are generated internationally, he said, including through partnerships with firms located in Australia and Brazil, as well as a joint venture in Ireland. Nash said he expects consistent growth in global revenues as manufacturers continue to become more technologically savvy.
He declined to disclose total revenues.
In 2018, the SBA recognized Control Station with the Connecticut Exporter of the Year award. Last year, Control Station was among 19 organizations honored with the President’s “E” Award for excellence in exporting by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
When he isn’t working, Nash said he enjoys family life in West Hartford with his wife, also an entrepreneur about to launch her own business, and son Thomas, a high school student, with twins Alexandra and Emily now sophomores at different out-of-state colleges.
He’s also been an active UConn alum over the years, supporting students and graduates and the local entrepreneurial community.
A longtime soccer enthusiast, he splits his time as an active player in a competitive league for the over-50 crowd as well as Sunday Soccer, a local organization that includes players from ages 14 to 65.
