No Vision All Drive, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8 The Sale to ZOLL

The sale of Pinpoint to ZOLL Medical started in much the same way as the experience with Constellation: it began as a practice exercise in negotiating an acquisition. What changed is that they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.

I’d met Rick Packer, the president of ZOLL, by sheer coincidence: I sat next to him at a lunch at a user conference being held by WesTech Mobile Solutions in Vancouver, Canada, in August 1998. I believe that this chance encounter set things in motion and ultimately led to the sale of Pinpoint to ZOLL.

WesTech Mobile Solutions was based in Vancouver and had developed a product that complemented our dispatch and billing products. Their software product, EMS Pro, charted events that occurred in the ambulance, such as the administration of drugs and the taking of vital signs. Their product ran on a tablet-style computer that was portable and supported handwriting recognition.

ZOLL, based in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, was the world’s second largest manufacturer of defibrillators—devices that restart the heart after a person goes into cardiac arrest. Defibrillators and the WesTech system capture a lot of the same information, so ZOLL had purchased WesTech in 1996.

Pinpoint had an informal relationship with WesTech. Keith Lyon, the general manager of WesTech, had sought us out to see if we could do some joint marketing activities. As the relationship grew, Keith introduced me to some of the higher-ups in the ZOLL organization, ...