Despite the challenges of starting up a company, Smallwood said he loves the freedom. "Because I often think outside the box, sometimes it does not fit with corporate culture," he said. "I felt I was ready to start my own company." He decides who he'll work for and when. He enjoys spending time in his home office in Maple Grove, where he can wear jeans, listen to movie soundtracks and walk around barefoot, surrounded by his family.

His unlikely route to entrepreneurship began when he moved with his mother to Florida. He chose his first name, Paul, and took his step-father's last name, Smallwood. Although he didn't know English when he immigrated, he spoke French and Vietnamese, and later learned Chinese. He joined the U.S. Air Force as a technician and afterward studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His career began at Westinghouse, where he worked on the Seawolf stealth submarine. That led to a stint in marketing, which ultimately returned him to Vietnam and other Asian countries, about 20 years after he left. He moved to Minnesota and over the next 10 years worked in marketing for a series of manufacturers, including McQuay, Honeywell and Burkert. After working for such large companies, Smallwood is happy to be in charge of a tiny one. "We're small enough to make changes. Corporations can't do that as well," Smallwood said.

Yet his clients include major corporations such as 3M, Honeywell and Schwan's. Honeywell senior plant engineer Jess Cristobal hired FlowSense in part because of its size, to help build a $60 million facility in Plymouth. "That's a benefit for me because they focus on my project because they're small and I get what I want," said Cristobal. "[Smallwood] can manage it really well and respond to customers' needs, my needs, and that is important to us.

" Large companies use small businesses like Smallwood's more and more often, said Sharon Kurtt, director of the Institute of Technology Career Services at the University of Minnesota. "A small company that specializes in one thing and does it well can subcontract that out to another company. It is more common now than 50 years ago," Kurtt said.

She said it is unusual for subcontractors to have such diverse offerings. "He's a real renaissance type of a guy," she said. "He's a guy who has a lot of different skills he brings to his success. For a technical person, it's kind of unusual."

Smallwood said he appreciates spending more time sightseeing abroad than he could at his old jobs. Now he can stay a few days in the Philippines with his wife's family instead of having to meet a corporate schedule.

In November, he'll return to Vietnam to market products from his own company.