Ed & Mary Osborne
Ed and Mary Osborne
Ed and Mary Osborne, pictured recently in their Broadmoor-area home, will be presented with one of the area's top business honors for their work at AMI Industries Inc. and in the Colorado Springs community.
LOYALTY, INTEGRITY
The work of Osbornes nets Lifetime Entrepreneurship Award United Technologies Corp. might not have a manufacturing plant in Colorado Springs without the work of Ed Osborne and two colleagues at AMI Industries Inc., which survived bankruptcy to later be acquired by the Connecticut-based aerospace and industrial giant.
Osborne's work at AMI, along with his wife Mary's 39-year career as accountant - including becoming the first female partner of a local accounting firm - netted the couple the Lifetime Entrepreneurship Award from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs College of Business. The award will be presented Friday at a campus luncheon that is a fundraiser for the business school.
The award, one of the area's top business honors, has been presented annually since 2009; a committee of business school officials, alumni and local business and civic leaders selects the winners.
"Ed and Mary have seen tremendous success in business due to their loyalty and integrity," Venkat Reddy, the business school's dean, said in a statement. "Their generosity has deeply enriched our community, extending the disenfranchised, the elderly, artists and those pursuing an education."
Osborne had just retired from the military when he joined AMI in 1982, mere months before the aircraft seat manufacturer ended up in a two-year ownership dispute that would eventually land it in bankruptcy, with little cash and no board of directors to make major decisions. AMI had been sold to California- based Algeran in late 1982 for $8 million in cash and notes, but a dispute between Algeran and previous owner Advance Ross of Chicago hamstrung
the company for 16 months until a court hearing returned control of the company to Advance Ross. The former owners called Osborne, who had been hired as a structural engineer to analyze seats AMI was making for the space shuttle, and two other AMI executives, Jim MacDougald and Tom Elke, to a meeting after the hearing to tell them they had been named to AMI's board.
"They told us that since the court ruling was being appealed, they would not put another penny into the company or take any out. We were on our own," Osborne said. "We were $6 million in debt to California banks and were losing $250,000 a month. "The first thing we did was take the company into bankruptcy to protect the employees and customers, but we had to reduce the staff from about 350 to 180. We also shut down the receiving dock, because we had so much inventory and work in progress that we had enough spare parts to survive for quite a while." MacDougald, Elke and Osborne started quality control, profit-sharing and employee-suggestion programs, and worked not only to keep Boeing as AMI's largest customer but to expand the relationship to include manufacturing flight-attendant seats for all of the aerospace giant's passenger aircraft, Osborne said. The three shepherded the company through a four-year bankruptcy process, persuaded a local banker to lend them $2 million to buy the company, and eventually won contracts to provide crew seats to European aircraft maker Airbus and regional jet manufacturer Canadair.
"We had been turned down by many banks (for the financing to buy AMI), but Bob Baker at United Bank told us that if he couldn't make this work, he shouldn't be in banking," Osborne said. "The first full month we owned the company, we made $125 which was a tremendous improvement from what we had been losing before then, and we only had two months in the 15 years we owned the company that it didn't make a profit.
To get the loan, all three men had to personally guarantee the debt, which meant they could have lost nearly everything they owned had AMI defaulted. By the time the three men sold AMI in 1997 for $30 million to North Carolina-based Coltec Industries, Osborne had become president of the company, sales had more than tripled to $30 million, AMI's workforce had grown back to 350 employees, and the company moved to a new plant.
Ed and Mary Osborne are among the largest donors to UCCS. They have donated millions to the college and have agreed to donate more than $10 million through a trust created as a result of the AMI sale.
In recognition of their support, UCCS named its largest building the Osborne Center for Science and Engineering. The couple began donating to the school through its TheatreWorks theatre company and gave to its "Reach the Peak" scholarship fund, its mechanical and aerospace engineering department, the campaign to build the engineering building, and several other UCCS programs.
"Of all the things we are involved with, we decided the best thing we can do to give thanks to the community where we have been successful is to support the university (UCCS) as the key to the future growth of the community," Mary Osborne said.
The couple, who grew up as high school sweethearts in Long Island, N.Y., ended up in Colorado Springs when Ed Osborne, a West Point grad, was recruited as a faculty member for the Air Force Academy.
Mary Osborne graduated from the College of William and Mary with plans to go to law school, but the newly married pair headed off to Army assignments in Europe. While in Turkey, Ed Osborne was contacted by the Air Force Academy to join the faculty.
First he had to complete graduate school at the University of Michigan. During graduate school, the Army sent him to Vietnam, where he flew 213 combat missions. "I was flying F-100s and was only hit once," Ed Osborne said. "It was my second-to-last mission and we were attacking a 37-millimeter gun site during a rescue of a downed pilot. I was nose-to-nose with the gun and only through the grace of God did I survive. I consider every day since then to be a special gift."
Osborne arrived at the academy in 1969 and spent 13 years there. He was a finalist to become dean of the UCCS College of Engineering and Applied Science, but didn't get the job.
"It wasn't a good fit, because (UCCS) only had electrical engineering and computer science at that time and no mechanical engineering," said Osborne, who ended up joining AMI instead and later helped win a nine-year battle to start a mechanical engineering program at UCCS.
Since retiring a year after the AMI sale, Osborne has served on many nonprofit boards and still serves on six, including three as chairman, the local and national boards of Discover Goodwill, the University of Colorado Foundation and the Theatreworks advisory board.
Mary Osborne has been a longtime board member of the Pikes Peak Hospice and Palliative Care, and serves on the board of its foundation.
The couple also are major financial supporters of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and the Colorado Springs Philharmonic.
The couple share a business philosophy that "honesty and integrity are the key to any relationship. Honesty is about being truthful and integrity is about doing the right thing.
When you mix the two together, that is the foundation of any relationship in business, customer, employee or partner."
