Entrepreneur focuses on gift of hearing

Bill Austin left Oregon in the 1960s to attend medical school at the University of Minnesota, but he soon got sidetracked after working part-time in a hearing aid shop.

At 25, he founded a company, Professional Hearing Aid Service, in St. Louis Park in 1967, and four years later bought a small ear-mold company called Starkey Laboratories.

He merged the two, kept the Starkey name and built his company into the fifth-largest hearing aid manufacturer in the world. But today, he says his passion is to help improve the hearing of those who don't have access to hearing aids.

Starkey Laboratories has blossomed into a sprawling campus in Eden Prairie that employs more than 3,000 people. Austin has fitted several presidents, actors and entertainers with hearing devices. In 1984, he founded the Starkey Hearing Foundation that helps deliver 175,000 hearing aids across the world each year. The foundation reported revenues of $33 million in 2014.

A spokeswoman for the Starkey Hearing Foundation said Austin was unavailable to discuss his career this week. But during the 2014 Starkey Hearing Gala, Austin urged the audience to help him with this goal of delivering one million hearing aids over a decade.

"The future isn't a guarantee, it's an opportunity and we have to invest in the future if we want to have a good one," Austin said.

Austin is still the only shareholder of Starkey Hearing Technologies. But he says his focus is serving on hearing aid missions across the world.

The foundation says Austin and his wife, Tani, go on dozens of hearing aid missions every year, delivering hearing aids all over the world. He's fitted patients on Super Bowl weekend and in impoverished Third World countries. He told ABC News in 2014 that he prefers helping the hearing impaired over the luxuries he could enjoy in retirement.

"For me a day here is better than any day on any beach anywhere in the world," Austin said. "It's better than any fine meal in Paris. I would stay here and not eat at all and work for these kids and go home tired and say I had a good day."

Austin's work on hearing aid missions has also put him side-by-side with professional football and basketball players, musicians and former world leaders. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have both attended hearing missions with Austin.

"He figured out how to turn his good impulses into a huge humanitarian venture and the world's a better place for it," Clinton said in a Starkey Hearing Foundation marketing video. And those who go on hearing aid missions with Austin say he's a tireless advocate for helping people.

"I know that Mr. Austin will outwork anybody who has ever been on a mission with him," said Starkey Hearing Foundation President and Board Chair Richard Brown. "He is usually the first one there and he is definitely the last one to leave."