Business Career
Fully expecting to return to the hotel business after the war, Dahlberg wound up working for Telex, a company that made hearing aids. In 1948, Dahlberg founded Dahlberg Electronics, a subsidiary of which is the Miracle-Ear hearing aids manufacturer. His company is credited with the first use of the newly invented transistor in a consumer product. By 1959, Miracle-Ear had evolved into a subsidiary of Dahlberg, Inc. with USD 100 million in annual revenues. A national advertising campaign that Dahlberg, Inc ran from 1988 until mid-1993 was subject to charges of false advertising by the Federal Trade Commission, which were settled in 1995 when the company agreed to pay a $2.75 million civil penalty. In the summer of 1993 Dahlberg sold his company to Bausch & Lomb for $139 million.
In 1995, Dahlberg started the venture capital firm Carefree Capital, whose investments include the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant chain. As of 2010, Dahlberg lived in Carefree, Arizona and still piloted a Cessna Citation jet.
Read more about this topic: Kenneth H. Dahlberg
Famous quotes containing the words business and/or career:
“The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life,—chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)