Fast Lane
Curb your enthusiasm
How ABG Inc.’s Mike Jackson turns his dreams into a focused vision his employees can understand
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Indianapolis | November 2007
Being an entrepreneur means not only
having big dreams but also possessing the talent and tenacity to make those dreams a reality. But without a clear
goal to shoot for, Mike Jackson says it’s
easy to get overwhelmed by your own
enthusiasm.
The founder, president and CEO of ABG
Inc. led his 130-employee company, which
provides training and outreach to agricultural businesses, to 2006 revenue of $12.5 million by staying sharply focused on his
vision.
“Part of the beauty of being an
entrepreneur is you’re willing to try a
lot, but you have to be able to not outgrow your resources,” Jackson says.
“A deadly way of outgrowing your
resources is to have too broad a
range of attack. You outpace your
capital, and you certainly go beyond
the skills and depth of your people.”
Smart Business spoke with
Jackson about how to sell your
vision and get your employees to
really care about it.
Q: What is the first step to selling
your vision?
People who are entrepreneurial,
often those who start and then
grow rapidly, are very much driven
by their own instincts. They may
mistakenly believe that others get
it. Making sure that you and your
employee set have the same
endgame in mind is crucial.
It starts with the way you actually concoct or expand or sharpen your vision. Get people, particularly
those who are highly influential in your
company, to be bought in and to feel like
they have been part of creating what is
being bought by the entire team.
Build a process whereby on a regular
basis, meaning no less than every year or
so, you go back and you double-check. Are
we going in the right direction? Is the
vision for this place correct? Is it based on
something other than one man’s or
woman’s view? That’s key.
Take a vision and break it down into
meaningful components to each function,
department or individual employee. What’s
that vision mean to me? Why is it valuable?
What does it do for us collectively and individually? It’s appealing to the things that
flip people’s switches in the morning.
Q: How do you figure out what these things
are for each employee?
We put together, and work with every
individual employee to put together, an
individual personal development plan for
the year. They are straightforward things I
want them to be able to do better and ways
I’d like to see that occur. They are agreed to
by the person and his or her team leader,
and then we make sure those things happen.
Q: How do you get employees to care?
Life without an aspiration is pretty boring. It’s up to us to figure out what is one’s
personal aspiration or dream. This may not
be a work-related thing at all, but some
part of it can be touched by work. Finding
out what that is, and then working to link
the work someone does to that aspiration,
whether it’s in a tangible or intangible way, is crucial. All of a sudden, people pay a lot
more attention to that methodology and
hope they learn for the business purpose.
Q: Why does that matter?
The emotional intimacy needed to be
successful in a fast-growth business, or any
kind of business, is significant. When people are giving you not only their backs and
their hands and their minds, but they’re
also giving you their heart, the outcome is
better, not only for the business but
also for the employee. That’s where
true satisfaction resides.
If people feel that, they’ll continue to
work hard to make a difference.
Q: How does vision affect culture?
Culture is not a static phenomenon. It
is a product of the people mix you
bring. People get so busy trying to put
wheels under the outcome that they
have created, whether it’s a merged entity or just starting a new vision. They easily blow past the sensitivity to the need
for culture to be intentionally created,
managed, re-evaluated and recreated on
a regular basis.
Create some window or some door
they can walk through that is creating a
different kind of connectivity among and
between employee groups and their families. We’ve had a number of different
activities. The key point is creating things
that matter to people and not forcing
everybody to fit the mold.
Q: What other advice would you offer a
CEO?
Be very careful not to keep resourcing a
client in the same ways with the same people and the same sorts of products and
services. Bring them evidence that you are
still fresh and that they haven’t mined
every good idea that you ever had.
Create an ongoing repetition and rotation
of people moving in and among and
between client teams. Add new team members and new levels of expertise in those
new team members to clients.
HOW TO REACH: ABG Inc., (317) 415-0500 or
www.abginc.com
