CEO of One of the Fastest Growing Companies in America
(This story first appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of Allegheny magazine.)
Forbes ranks his company among the "Best 200 Small Businesses in America," and Individual Investor places it on a list of "America's 100 Fastest Growing Companies." The Cheswick, Pa., company is Tollgrade Communications Inc. The chairman, chief executive officer and president is 38-year-old Chris Allison '83. And he was an English major for goodness sakes. Go figure!
Allison's father, R. Craig Allison, founded Tollgrade in 1988 and hired five employees (including Chris) to develop innovative products for the telephone industry. With Chris tapped early on to manage the company's day-to-day operations, "because nobody wanted the job," he says, Tollgrade has grown steadily. Today, it employs more than 200 people and has annual revenues exceeding $46 million.
Tollgrade's copper-imitating fiber-optic hardware assists companies such as Sprint and all of the Baby Bells to detect telephone line problems by upgrading aging test systems, thus diminishing the need to dispatch technicians.
Though he did not envision a career in high technology (he was working in public relations at Ketchum when his father founded Tollgrade in 1989), Chris jumped at the chance to work with his dad. When he was a student at Allegheny, majoring in English and working at the Meadville Tribune as a stringer, Chris wrote an article for ALLEGHENY describing the indebtedness he felt and the respect he had for his father. Chris depicted Craig as a determined parent who attended college full time while working full time in a plastics plant to support his children in hope of ensuring them a better future.
Chris was named chief executive office before Tollgrade went public late in 1995. When Craig died last year, Chris added the title "chairman" to his business card. "My Dad and I were a lot alike, but we're also a lot different," he said. "He really filled a room because he loved 'the big idea.' I have to keep digging every day because I tend to focus on the simple."
Chris intends to continue Tollgrade's fast-paced performance. By instilling a philosophy of laser-beam teamwork and no-frills communication in his employees, Allison says, he ensures that his staff maintains the drive to keep Tollgrade competitive and successful.
Allison says Tollgrade will stay focused on helping telephone service providers and cable television companies keep their customers happy by providing them with easy-to-use tools to troubleshoot service problems. In short, they want to deliver "network assurance simplified" as his company's logo reads. Tollgrade's new test system, Digitest, which is being developed under a partnership agreement with Lucent Technologies, is designed to help the Baby Bells deliver the Internet by "pre-qualifying" a customer's telephone line for service, and then troubleshooting that line when there's a problem after it's been installed.
"I don't think being effective at your job is brain surgery," he says. "It takes common sense and a lot of hard work. That's how my Dad approached life, and it seems like it's working all right for me so far."
- Kyle Kopnitsky '00
