When I think of ex-baseball players, I think of guys who are now high school coaches or minor league assistant managers or somebody who sits in a booth doing play-by-play for a small-town team.
The word “entrepreneur” doesn’t jump to mind.
(Micha Auerbach/HI-G-TEK INC) - Hi-G-Tek's partners, from left, are Keith Nalepka, vice president of business development, CEO Micha Auerbach, and Elio Oliva, vice president of sales and marketing.
But it applies to Keith Nalepka, 39, an ex-jock and Silver Spring native who smartly parlayed his baseball talent into a college degree and a set of life skills that brought him his own company.
The former high school slugger for Good Counsel (his batting average was a whopping .444) is an executive and part owner of a technology company called Hi-G-Tek — split between Rockville and Israel — that has a cool mission: It builds and installs postage-stamp-size electronic sensors that keep an eye on everything from nuclear materials to brain cancer drugs to gasoline.
If you bring a shipping container full of television sets into Ethiopia bound for a neighboring country, Nalepka’s sensors are going to know if someone opens the container five miles down the road and sells them on the black market. Hi-G-Tek’s client is the government of Ethiopia, which wants to collect duty on those televisions if they are sold inside the country.
If Barrick Gold, the giant Canadian mining company, wants to know whether someone is pilfering fuel from its house-size dump trucks, Hi-G-Tek sensors lets them know if a fuel valve has been opened.
And if the $2 million worth of an experimental brain cancer drug in a messenger’s case is tampered with, Nalepka’s company will know.
Same with nuclear material in hospital drawers, or a store of temperature-sensitive insulin.
“We keep an eye on high-value assets,” Nalepka said.
The company should break even this year on about $6 million in sales. Its diversified group of owners includes a radiologist friend of Nalepka’s named M.S. Kim, who owns the biggest share of the company, while Nalepka and two partners, founder Micha Auerbach of Israel and executive Elio Oliva, own the rest.
What intrigued me most about Nalepka and Hi-G-Tek, aside from serving a niche that I had never known existed, is Nalepka’s appetite for entrepreneurship and the smarts to use baseball to get there.
He may not have made “The Show,” as baseball’s major leagues are called, but it looks like he didn’t whiff on some big decisions.
One of the keys of success, I believe, is trying to put yourself in positions where opportunities arise and then making the most of them. You don’t have to get every decision right, but you have to hit some squarely.
Nalepka knew all along that getting a college degree was going to be key. When he signed with the Texas Rangers right out of high school in 1991, Nalepka banked his bonus and eventually put it toward his degree from Maryland. He lived during the baseball season on the $2,500-a-month paycheck he earned catching for the Rangers’ farm teams in Butte, Mont., and Port Charlotte, Fla. He went to school during the offseason.
He never made it to the majors and left after five years for a job, which friends helped him find, selling an asthma drug for Forest Pharmaceuticals on Long Island.
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