A Chat With July’s Profile, Doug Mockett, founder/owner of Doug Mockett & Co.

CS: Looking back at your career, what are one or two of the biggest mistakes you’ve made along the way?
DM: Probably the biggest mistake we’ve made is not expanding the product line soon enough. We stumbled along with the grommets and the wire managers for quite a while. It wasn’t till the late ’80s, early 1990s that we branched out into other components — table legs, drawer pulls and then components to integrate computers into furniture. So we kind of were, “We’re doing great just selling these grommets and this is great.” We decided that we were doing so well with this, why not move into some other stuff? And gee, the other stuff worked. Well, let’s move into some other stuff. It all seems to work pretty well.