Parsec Moves Mountains in Time and Technology

When it comes to expert service and technology, timing is everything. And nobody knows this better than the watchmakers and technicians at Parsec Enterprises.

When Marc and Diedre Young began Parsec Enterprises in 1977, they could not have imagined the success 33 years would bring. Embarking on a quest for opportunity with limited knowledge and a will for change, the couple founded what is today respected as one of the largest watch facilities in the nation.

Marc spent his early years working in the Indiana Department of Public Welfare. In the mid-1970s, he worked in consulting after graduating from Indiana University in 1973. But bureaucracy, Marc claims, was not his forte. “[My wife and I] were really looking to do something different,” he says.

Over time, Marc became intrigued by the quartz watch, which was all the rage in the mid-1970s. “It was a little bit like the iPod in that industry,” he says.

The quartz watch brought major shifts in horology—the science of timekeeping.

And no wonder. With the ability to measure time by means of a paper-thin piece of synthetic quartz, the unique timepiece possessed the technology to perform much more accurately than the mechanical watch. Quartz, claims Marc, “revolutionized watch making completely.”

With watch repairers accustomed to manipulating the gears and moving parts of mechanical watches, technicians attempting to fix quartz digital watches found themselves in a quandary.

“It was a paradigm shift in the entire industry,” Marc says. “The people who were doing repairs, they looked at a digital watch and didn’t know what they were seeing. There were no gears, there were no springs, there was nothing mechanical at all…It was a tremendous shift, a tremendous change, and for some reason, this came to my attention.”

Marc began asking numerous jewelers and retailers how they would repair a digital watch. “Throw it in the trash” became a popular answer. “I think it was just a matter of seeing that nobody was fixing these things and nobody really wanted to,” he says.

Although they lacked sufficient training in the industry, Marc and his wife set out to “build Rome” and establish their own watch repair company.

Small Beginnings
Marc and Diedre’s pursuit began as a part-time job. About two months into their work, Marc decided to “go all out with it.” The first week, they had just eight watches to repair. “It was tough for about five years,” he said. “The industry was changing.”

Still, he and his wife worked around the clock—no pun intended—to keep the business alive. After Zales Jewelers closed its service center, Stanley Zale gave Marc a corporate list of all the company’s stores. Watches were shipped to Marc from across the country. Demand skyrocketed from eight to 80 watches a week.

After setting up an exclusive situation with Gordon’s for a time, Marc and Diedre eventually moved from Indianapolis to Peoria in 1983, where they worked from the basement of their home. Today, Parsec has serviced more than 1.4 million watches of nearly every major brand and has 35 employees with a total of over 150 years of bench experience.

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