Leadership
Winging it
How Jim Carpenter got Wild Birds Unlimited to take flight by leaving his ego behind
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Indianapolis | September 2008
Page 1 of 4
When Jim Carpenter first told people that he wanted to sell bird
seed for a living, he heard quite a bit of laughter. It was 1981 and
Carpenter had just opened his first small bird-feeding hobby store
in Indianapolis. “Very quickly, I found that the few people who
came in really liked having a hobby store for bird feeding,”
Carpenter says. “I was the first business they had ever been into
that respected the hobby and knew anything about it. That gave
me a lot of encouragement that I was doing something right.”
As more people began to frequent his store, Carpenter began to
wonder if there might be a bigger opportunity than just running a
single store in Indianapolis.
His only problem was he was a bird lover, not a business tycoon.
Turning Wild Birds Unlimited Inc. into the company that now
spans more than 300 franchise locations across North America
was not going to be easy.
“I had no business background, so I was making it up as I
went along,” says Carpenter, the company’s founder, president
and CEO. “I had some advice here and there from a few people, and I went to a few seminars, but for the most part, I didn’t have a serious relationship with anybody who could really
give me good advice.”
What he did have was an idea. He also had a sense of what he
would need to take his business to the next level. And whether
you’re fulfilling a lifelong dream of being an entrepreneur or
coming at it from a different place, you need others to make it
happen.
“I’ve never met anyone who innately knew how to grow a
company,” Carpenter says. “There is a time at which you have
to go from being the technician of your product, maybe you’re
good at writing software or making pizzas or selling bird seed,
to a different skill. Growing a company is a different skill. You
have to go back to school. Not to college, but you have to go to
seminars. You need to ask people for advice. You need to
become a student of growing a company.”
Wild Birds Unlimited has grown and took in $120 million in
2007 and has about 1,000 employees. That growth has been
possible, Carpenter says, because of his willingness to accept
the things he didn’t know and fill in the gaps in his own leadership abilities.
“You cannot just keep winging it,” Carpenter says. “There
are too many things to learn and too many people are
depending on you to do it right. You have to take the responsibility upon yourself to become a better-educated leader.”
Here’s how Carpenter tapped into the expertise of those
around him and slowly applied that knowledge to his own management style to help Wild Birds take flight.
