For the Hanratty Family, MCS Office Is Like Home

Patrick J. Hanratty’s office is not your typical corporate chief’s quarters.

The walls are decorated with surrealistic landscape paintings, one of which contains--if you look closely enough--hundreds of tiny computers covered by molten rock in a red desert.

Displayed on his desk are an elephant figurine carved from ivory and a futuristic airplane cut from mahogany. In front of the desk, the family’s 7-year-old German shepherd, Duchess, lies on her bed next to a water dish molded from plastic.

In a corner of the office is a 10-speed Schwinn bicycle, which Hanratty pedals around the company parking lot every afternoon as Duchess trots alongside. On a closet shelf, Hanratty stores such items as his table tennis paddle, an expensive-looking microscope and a 4th-Century Greek vase.

Hanratty’s office has a casual feeling to it. So does the company he runs, Manufacturing & Consulting Services, a developer of computer graphics software used by mechanical engineers and product designers.

The personal style of MCS’s 57-year-old founder, president and chief executive officer is evident throughout the company, from the modern art that decorates the firm’s Irvine headquarters to the heavily used table tennis table and basketball court. Hanratty encourages employees to take breaks whenever they feel the need.

“I’m very consciously trying to foster an environment that people like going to,” Hanratty said. “There is a lot of pressure in this business. I found through the years that I enjoy being at a place that when I want to take a break, I could do it.”

Hanratty is an enthusiastic man with eclectic interests: He collects rare coins, modern paintings and ceramic and glass pottery dating from before 500 BC. As a young man, he dreamed of a career in the opera and sang professionally for a while with a San Diego opera company.

But that dream was dashed on Feb. 3, 1952, when Hanratty, then a young Air Force gunner on a B-29, was badly injured in a crash, his lungs and vocal chords scarred from breathing toxic fumes.

Hanratty would eventually turn his love for music into a passion for math and computers.

“When I took my first course in calculus,” Hanratty said, “I found there was something very akin to music.”

After returning from the war, Hanratty studied math in college and was hired as a computer programmer by the Convair Division of General Dynamics.

In the 1960s, Hanratty worked for General Motors and McDonnell Douglas in a new area of the computer industry that involved creating graphics software for mechanical engineers: a kind of electronic drafting board. The field is known today in computer jargon as CAD/CAM, or computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing.

Hanratty has been called the father of CAD/CAM. He “is a legitimate pioneer and mover and shaker in the computer-aided design business,” said Randall Stickrod, publisher of Computer Graphics Today, a San Francisco trade magazine.

In 1971, Hanratty founded MCS with $1,000 won at a Gardena poker parlor. As he tells it, he paid the company’s bills during its first three years with pay from consulting work and “when I had to, by playing poker.”

The company has grown steadily since then, achieving sales of about $20 million last year. Hanratty, who is also the firm’s chief scientist, and his family have maintained tight control of the privately held firm. His son, Scott, 26, was recently appointed director of marketing. Another son, Brian, 32, is director of product development.

Pat Hanratty owns 65% of MCS’s stock; another 15% is held in the company’s employee stock ownership plan. Hewlett-Packard, the Palo Alto-based electronics company, and Impell Corp., a Walnut Creek-based subsidiary of Combustion Engineering Inc., each own 10%.

MCS has become one of the leading developers of software for CAD/CAM applications. Its products are used to design, for instance, bicycles, aircraft engine parts, orthodontists’ tools and nuclear weapons. The software is also used in factories to operate computer-controlled machine tools.

Hanratty’s company has built a reputation in the industry for technical excellence and innovation. Its newest product, dubbed the Anvil 5000pc, is a $11,500 system that can produce 3-D graphics on a personal computer, a capability that was previously available only on high-powered computer systems costing at least 10 times as much.

The new product “is very significant and will probably be widely copied in the industry,” said Charles M. Foundyller, president of Deratech, a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm specializing in CAD/CAM.

But the nagging question for MCS continues to be its ability to sell what it makes.

“What they do is always interesting technologically, but they really have done a poor job at marketing,” Foundyller said.

One of MCS’s largest dealers in Southern California added: “The company has good products, but there’s a world of people who aren’t aware of it. This is a company that might sparkle with some kind of campaign to let people know who it is.”

Hanratty admitted that salesmanship isn’t the company’s strong suit. “Sometimes,” he said, “I don’t think we could sell a blanket in Alaska.”

Until several years ago, Hanratty was the company’s only salesperson. More recently, MCS has created a direct sales force of about 20 people and expanded its number of dealers.

The company “is very aggressively starting to attack the advertising and public relations world,” he said. “We’re spending more than $100,000 a month in advertising, and for us that’s an ungodly amount.”

And in a move that raised some dealers’ eyebrows, Hanratty recently put Scott Hanratty in charge of marketing, even though his son had no professional background in the field. But he has worked for MCS for seven years--starting out as a janitor--and recently earned a business degree from Pepperdine University, where he studied marketing.

“Instead of bringing in someone who can already add, they’ll be training Scott as he goes,” one MCS dealer said. “It’s a helluva challenge for a guy who hasn’t done it before.”

But Pat Hanratty believes his son is up to the challenge.

‘He Has a Good Shot at It’

“Scott came to me with an elaborate proposal of what was required in the marketing area,” he said. “He laid it out for me, and I said, ‘You think you can do this?’ He said he thought he could. Since he was the one who aggressively pursued the idea, I think he showed by his nature that he has a good shot at it.”

Nevertheless, the company’s lackluster marketing may explain why some much-younger competitors have raced past MCS. One example is 6-year-old Autodesk Inc., a Sausalito-based company whose sales of CAD/CAM software zoomed to $79 million last year.

But Hanratty insisted that his company is poised for explosive growth. He confidently predicted that MCS will be a $300-million company by 1991--a more than tenfold growth in four years.

Skeptics said they have heard similar predictions from Hanratty before.

“He has a reputation for making some exaggerated claims that he frequently doesn’t follow up on,” one industry analyst scoffed. “Every two to three years, he’ll announce that MCS is ready to become the greatest CAD/CAM company in the world, and every year it just grows slowly.”

PATRICK J. HANRATTYAT A GLANCE POSITION: Founder and president, MCS.

AGE: 57.

RESIDENCE: San Juan Capistrano.

FAMILY: Wife, Sandy; sons, Brian and Scott; daughter, Patrice.

EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree, mathematics, Arizona State University; master’s degree, systems engineering, West Coast University; Ph.D., information and computer science, UC Irvine.

BUSINESS PHILOSOPHY: “To run a debt-free organization.”

GOAL: “To be the technology leader.”