Manufacturing
Words of wisdom
How to turn advice into action
By Abby Cymerman
Smart Business Indianapolis | September 2008
Page 1 of 2
Tom Jackson
co-founder and CEO, Jackson Systems LLC
Tom Jackson enjoys the
freedom that comes
with running his own business.
But, he says, there is also a
responsibility that goes hand
in hand with that freedom.
“Most business owners like
the flexibility and the opportunity to make good money,
but if you don’t have a plan
in place, that’s going to dry
up and you won’t have those
benefits,” says the co-founder
and CEO of Jackson Systems
LLC, an HVAC manufacturing and distribution company.
To help him create that
executive game plan,
Jackson meets every other
week with a business coach.
Smart Business spoke
with Jackson about how
those meetings — and the
lessons he’s learned from
them — have helped him
grow his business to 2007
revenue of $8.2 million.
Q. How does having a business mentor help you become
a better leader?
You sit down together, and
the coach’s questions drag
things out of you. It makes you
realize that if you don’t get
your act together here, it’s not
going to be a good thing.
My business coach is very
into all of the proper things,
whether that’s developing
long-term goals, mission statements or core values statements. While sometimes people don’t like all that touchy-feely stuff, it makes you think
about what you want to do. It
doesn’t have to be touchy-feely
if you don’t want it to be, but it
makes you think about the long-term goals of the company, and that’s probably the
most important thing.
In my case, I met my business coach through a colleague here at work, and the
relationship developed that
way. My business coach is a
small business owner himself,
so he has a lot of knowledge
to draw upon. Just sitting
down with him and having
him ask me a series of questions is a good deal, and sometimes he has a specific topic
that we cover, like increasing
sales or how to develop
the culture at work.
Having someone there
to ask you questions,
someone who’s an outside sounding board, is
really important because
that person’s not there
at your company every
day, and that person can
give you a different perspective over what
everyone else in the
operation sees.
Q. What lessons have
you learned to help you
grow your company?
Have your goals written out — people who
write out their goals
are much more successful
than those who don’t have
them articulated on a piece
of paper.
It’s just the power of the
mind. If you take the time to
write down the goals, and
you review them every once
in awhile, your mind just
automatically starts working
on those things. It knows
that is the ultimate endgame,
that you’re trying to get to
this goal.
The other thing I’ve learned
is being smart about borrowing money. We’re not over-borrowed in any way, but one
of my goals within the next
few years is to have no debt.
If times get bad and you
have no debt, it’s a good thing.
But, if times are really good
and you want to grow the
company a lot more, if you’re
not saddled with a bunch of
debt, you can grow even
quicker.
Smart debt management is a
key thing. The best thing that
we’re doing is tracking it every
day. My chief operating officer wrote scripts that automatically generate all of this data
for me; every morning I get a
dashboard report e-mail that shows me exactly how much
money we have borrowed, our
accounts receivables and our
accounts payables.
We have very defined goals
on how much debt we’re trying to get paid down each
year, and it all ties back in. If
you have the goal and you’ve
written it down and everyone
knows what those goals are,
you start working toward that.
