Profiles in Giving
Paul Beswick '57
“Worcester Tech came along and gave me the opportunity I needed. They gave me the tools, the experience, the self-confidence, and the self-esteem to get where I am today. As I see it, it's my turn now. I owe them.”
The Gift of Innovation
Take a walk through the offices of Beswick Engineering, and you'll see signs filled with words like teamwork, pride, support, and gratitude—words that reflect not only the way Paul Beswick has led his company since 1968, but the values with which this WPI graduate lives his life. Such words also capture Beswick's approach to philanthropy, and his inspiration and motivation for giving to WPI.
"As a young man, I was thrashing about, not sure about my future, and because of my family's financial circumstances, unable to pay for college," he says. "Then Worcester Tech came along and gave me the opportunity I needed. They gave me the tools, the experience, the self-confidence, and the self-esteem to get where I am today. As I see it, it's my turn now. I owe them."
One of the ways Beswick and his wife, S. K., have expressed their gratitude to WPI has been by allocating funds to endow a professorship, a gift that will help the university attract and support a world-class scholar and teacher. Why a professorship? "It has been my observation that there's too much emphasis on what I call the edifice complex," Beswick says. "While bricks and mortar are important, they are not the kind of thing that changes our culture or truly improves a student's life. It also takes the skill and imagination of the person at the podium—the professor."
For Beswick, the professor whose skill and imagination made all the difference was Fred Webster, head of WPI's Heat-Power program in the Department of Mechanical Engineering during the 1950s. "Some people might be surprised to hear that," Beswick says, "because he wasn't someone who stood out, or called too much attention to himself. He had a way of listening, rather than lecturing. He opened up the space that allowed me to figure out where I wanted to go. I am forever grateful to him."
Helping know-how flourish
Today, as the head of a company with nearly 50 employees, Beswick is following in Webster's footsteps, opening up the kind of space that allows others to do their best. "Paul is a great innovator and that's what this company is all about—being innovative," says Mike Donati '82, vice president of sales and marketing at Beswick Engineering for the past 23 years. "He creates an atmosphere where learning and know-how really flourish."
"As I see it, we all work together at evaluating and appraising prospective product ideas while working closely with the customer's design engineers," adds Beswick. "In fact, we have a couple of new product ideas in process now that are, possibly, the biggest things we've ever done."
Founded in Beverly, Mass., in 1963, Beswick Engineering has grown from a small engineering consulting firm to an industry leader, known for developing innovative applications and serving dozens of high-tech and medium-tech fields, such as aerospace, biotechnology, bomb detection, computer chips, fuel cells, medical electronics, robotics, and toxic gas detection. After operating in Ipswich, Mass., from 1972 to 1995, the company is now headquartered in Greenland, N.H., with a branch office in Singapore.
Topping Beswick's innovations has been the design and development of the first 10-32 threaded O-ring face seal fitting, which incorporated a single-edge barb design, and proved to be easy to use and leakproof in the application. "This is the essence of our approach," Beswick explains. "We take a basic element and add some innovative technology." While the knife-edge barb and the O-ring seal continue to be the company's most widely known innovation, Beswick has incorporated into its product line hundreds of items and built a customer base of more than 1,000 over the past 36 years. Today, the Beswick catalog is 112 pages, and can be viewed at www.beswick.com. More than 50 of its products are proprietary designs and over a dozen are patented. Beswick and Beswick products have garnered numerous national recognitions and awards.
What has made his company successful, Beswick says, is a commitment to superlative service and an enthusiasm for talking with customers about the products they really need. "For me it's easy to go off into a corner and invent things, but far more important is the linkage to the customer who can use it," he says. "Even better, is the customer who is cheerfully willing to pay a fair price—and whose check clears the bank!"
According to Beswick, another factor in the company's success has been the presence of a number of WPI graduates throughout the years. Today, there are five on staff. "WPI is up and down the corridor. They're part of the family. I find that they're clever and good at 'seeing around corners.' They are more into the project itself than in simply finishing it and putting it in an outbox."
Little achievements, big successes
Whether in business or in life, Beswick readily admits that his success has depended in large part on his family, especially his wife, S. K., and their 18-year-old son, ChanLing. Beswick first met S. K. on a business trip to Singapore in 1985. They married a short while later and today S. K. serves as operations manager for Beswick Engineering, where she handles the buying and finances. Fluent in Mandarin and three other Chinese dialects, she is an integral part of the company's Asian operations. She is also an avid gardener, whose skill and creativity are evident across the grounds of the Beswick home. ChanLing, a gifted pianist and musician, attends Berwick Academy, an independent school in South Berwick, Maine, where he is an outstanding student. He is applying for early decision admission to the Class of 2011 at WPI.
An active and engaged father, Paul Beswick serves as a trustee and a member of the executive committee of Berwick Academy, where he has had the opportunity to witness the importance of philanthropy to the strength and competitiveness of an institution. "I have come to realize how important alumni participation is to the health and well-being of any school. At WPI, it seems there is a much greater presence of loyal alumni than the number of donors participating would indicate. We need to turn that around. Giving is a good thing to do."
In addition to his generous giving, Beswick lends his time and talents to new generations of WPI students and faculty. He serves on the advisory board for the Management Department's Collaborative for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Beswick's life and career have taken many interesting turns. The early years of Beswick Engineering, although successful, were complete with hard knocks. Being undercapitalized, experiencing credit problems, bad debts, and pilfered customers all led to a "do-it-yourself, trial-and-error MBA." Although difficult, these lessons and struggles set the stage for a flourishing enterprise.
Before founding his own company, Beswick worked for six years in the aerospace industry developing ultra-top-secret reconnaissance cameras for orbiting satellites. It was in that setting, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis and when national defense and security was at considerable risk, that he was assigned huge mechanical design responsibilities. "That's when I discovered my innovative and creative talents," he says.
But he traces his enduring interest in engineering and problem solving to his days as a child, spending time with his father in the family home machine shop. As a youngster, "with Mom managing the cash flow," he had a paper route that grew from a dozen customers to more than 100. "You might call it self-taught marketing," he says. And as a teenager, Beswick became a "hot rod nut," taking apart and putting back together his 1932 Ford several times to make it a more high-performance vehicle. "Little achievements like that are largely what I have built my career on," he says. "I explore. I try novel ways to make something better."
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