WHEN ASKED about the future of the telecommunications equipment industry, Peter Chase, CEO of Purcell Systems Inc. in Spokane Valley, paraphrases a line from the film The Sixth Sense.

"I see cabinets. Everywhere I look, cabinets," Chase says while touring Purcell's manufacturing plant, which is lined with rows of radio and equipment cabinets wrapped and ready for shipment.

"The telecom market is a roller coaster," he says, now serious. "You have to roll with it."

Chase exudes a deceptively breezy demeanor. In his favorite Magnum P.I.-style red Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and flip-flops, this CEO is better cast for the Hollywood role of accidental protagonist than cunning businessman. And rolling with the punches is his trademark move. Indeed, Chase is a Zen master of the pratfall, with a remarkable knack for walking away from the hardest of landings with barely a scratch.

Since founding Purcell in 2000, Chase has survived a dot-com crash and intense competition. There were times when the company looked like it might fail, yet this year he expects sales of close to $90 million, up from $24.5 million in 2004. The electronicsfilled cabinets that Purcell engineers and manufactures for telecom companies now dot highways and neighborhoods at cell tower bases, on rooftops and on utility poles.

The secret to his success? As Chase says to employees, "This is a sales-driven company; you either work in sales or you support sales." And Chase is Purcell's top salesman. Only his job now is selling himself as a leader. Through good times and bad, Chase's charisma and dogged optimism have kept team members motivated and customers engaged. When the economy nose-dived in September 2001 and again in 2003, following AT&T's announcement of its merger with Cingular Wireless, the entire industry ground to a halt. The company went months without receiving a single purchase order, Chase says.

Dan Soltan, Purcell's director of operations, recalls the time about six months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when Chase gathered his few dozen employees to announce there would be no paychecks. Employees could have found jobs at more established competitors nearby. But no one left. They stuck by Chase. He convinced his team that things would get better.

And they did. When Purcell was launched in 2000, there were 100,000 cell sites across the country. Today, there are double that number. And Purcell's cabinets have found their way into a highly competitive overseas market. The company made the Inc. 500 list for the last two years.

Salesmanship courses through his blood. Fresh out of college with a degree in marketing, Chase landed a job at Radio Shack. Since the company evaluated its sales personnel based on the average total amount spent per customer, if someone came in to buy a battery he would immediately try to think of what else he could sell the customer. "It didn't matter that the last customer bought $200 stereo speakers," says Chase. "That $1.50 Duracell was going to cut my average in half."

Never quit. That's his motto. When Chase first envisioned Purcell, it was with the competitive local exchange carrier market in mind, those start-up telecommunications companies trying to compete with the Baby Bells. But that market tanked just months after the company was founded. So he switched gears and started providing products for fixed wireless carriers, such as XO Communications, Prairie iNet and Little Feet. He recognized quickly that midsize telecom customers were unhappy with the large equipment carriers that treated them poorly. Having worked for one of the large suppliers, he knew that he could break into the market by offering speed of product delivery, flexibility of product design and attentive customer service. The idea worked so well, Purcell filed a trademark on the phrase "Speed, Flexibility, and Fanatical Service."