Listen More, Talk Less: A Business Leader's Secret Weapon

I was the number one salesman for IBM. And I like to say that was the last time I made real money. That launched a career within IBM. They had a habit. If you could sell, they would move you up the line. And we moved from New York to Philadelphia because Jackie went back to grad school at Bryn Mawr for a master's in social work. And I worked in the city. And then we moved and moved many, many, many times as I went up the IBM ladder. Marketing manager in Pittsburgh. I was on staff in Philly again. I got to know the PA Turnpike really well because Jackie was getting her advanced degree at Pitt and she didn't want to move. And so I said, OK, I'll commute back and forth. And then I became branch manager up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which at that time was a very large office for IBM. because of not the universities, but also Air Products, Best Steel, Mack Truck, and an awful lot of Tobian Army Base.

And we had Scranton in the mix, so I had a sublocation. It was the bottom performing branch when I took over. And I'm pleased to say we got it to number three in the country, not because of me, but because I had the brains to hire some really, really good folks. Had a really fun run. Great job. Our daughter was born in Bethlehem. And as a result of kind of doing that, I moved up to be administrative assistant to the president, which was a great development job. Commuted back and forth because it didn't make sense to move. Coming out of that job, I became a regional manager in Detroit, which was not on our list of towns we wanted to go to, but we went. Had a very interesting experience there. This was in the mid-80s, and let's just say the economy was tough. Came back to Connecticut. We moved to Newtown, Connecticut. before the tragedy.

And I went to work with an IBM subsidiary, Rome, which they had acquired, ROLM, which was an interconnect company and was famous for voicemail. I can give you the origin at Digi, the voice, and a lot of technology there. I worked on a project where we couldn't understand why Digi wasn't working. And then we discovered that women's voices in two tones actually simulated the keys that you hit with zero pound. And zero pound was the hang up at the time. So, you know, all these bright, you know, million dollar scientists and research guys. And we finally figured out that it was. So we had to change the tone and flexion, just one of the little silly things that you remember in a career. But anyway, when I was in Newtown, my son was born. And so we had two small kids. We had moved around a tremendous amount. And on a personal note, we have alcoholism runs in both our families. And both of us. decided it was a really good idea to get sober.

We had two small kids, and we looked at each other after that experience and said, you know, this moving around and family, and at the same time, John Akers had gotten let go. IBM was going through some really, really tough times, and they made the mistake of offering a package that you had to be an idiot to not take. Two years salary, vesting of options, not that that's a great deal, and five years on your retirement. I mean, it was so I left on a Friday and Monday I went to work for MCI, running marketing for the business division. Culturally, that was like going to the other side of the moon. It was run and gun. That was just a fascinating lesson that there's a whole other world out there. Had a good run there. And then, as I said, my wife and I said, you know what? Do we want to do this? Bill McGowan, the founder, died. And all of a sudden, we had a change of control. So we had another transaction that was interesting.

And we decided we didn't want to move anymore. And we had one more move in us. And her dad had a business that I've been on the board of in Bristol, PA, called Modern Group,

material handling company, a heister dealer, if you remember, Ron. Yep. And I had the opportunity to buy into the business and joined the firm. I've been on the board. So we moved down there. And in 1993, we moved to New Hope. And we've been here ever since. I worked my way up to the company, which I am grateful for. They didn't just start me, you know, at the head and really, really loved the industry, loved the people. We had a philosophy of sharing the wealth with the employees that Joe had that I really, really respected. And we got smart. created, we were Vanguard's second 401k, and we became an ESOP 20 years before we went to 100%. And the beauty of that was we planned it so that we didn't have to leverage the company, because every year we put money into both retirement plans and did some other things. And we had a nice run. We grew quite a bit.

And somewhere along the line, I guess in 2000 or so, I got brought on to the Mejita board, was president of Mejita in 05. Again, great experience, great friends. Deep, deep respect for Liz Richards and her team and everything that she did. And just really had a lot of fun growing the business. You know, I've seen my kids' soccer games. You know, all the things you dream. And again, you know, leading a clear and straightforward life. Got active in our church here and had a terrific run. And then in 2003, we went ahead and pulled the trigger. Joe wanted to cash out. And we had. family, other family members who own shares. And we pulled the trigger on the ESOP. And the guys asked me to stay on as CEO. We had an outside board, which was really, really critical. And I'm a big fan of outside family boards. And I hired a team. We went through a number of expansions, became a Generac dealer.

In the middle of that mix, we dropped Heister and picked up Hyundai. The Heister-Yale situation just wasn't necessarily a good deal for the dealers. I have a lot of respect for the guys at Heister-Yale. Don't get me wrong. But, you know, we needed to do what we needed to do. And, frankly, the Generac business and the Arbor's business and some of the other things just really took off. And so we do the ESOP. And then all of a sudden,07,08,09, you might remember the phone stopped ringing. And we got through that experience. And the ESOP wound up to be a huge strategic weapon. We had technicians come to us and say, hey, Dave, we'll work 30 hours rather than laying people off. Yep. So everybody got it. The stock got hammered. but the 401k protected. And we got through it like lots and lots and lots of people did in the industry. But I'm really proud that we were able to do it in a way that was tough. We got out of the rental business.

At one point, we were the 24th largest rental company in the U.S. We were super regional. But you could see United and Sunbelt and those guys coming. There was no way we were going to compete. And Paul Farrell, who works for me at the time, was my COO, figured out a buyer, did a hell of a job moving it. And frankly, that capital got us through the recession. But the phones literally stopped ringing. It was quite a lesson. A lot of soul searching in those times, as many of my good buddies and colleagues. But, you know, it's always darkest before it's absolutely black. And we got through it. Sun came up, different world, restructured the business. And then when I turned 60 in 2013, it was time for me to get out of the way. I wanted Paul and Steve to have the opportunity to run the business. They asked me to stay on as chairman, which I still am today. And I thought I was going to do an early retirement.

And my bishop called me and said, Dave, I need you to come down and run Episcopal Community Services, which is a large, at that time,142-year-old nonprofit in the city of Philadelphia dealing with the issues of poverty and homelessness. I didn't think it was a great idea. I didn't think I was a good match. But I went down and interviewed and, you know, answered the call. My wife thought I was crazy. She said, what do you know about social work? And thank God she was my secret weapon. I come home and, you know, say, you know, they're talking about this. They're talking about that. You know, what do they mean? And I didn't look too stupid. non-priest, non-social worker to run the agency. And the board wanted somebody with business experience. And we went through a really, really fascinating transformation. My conclusion was a lot of agencies were doing maintenance. My team wanted to do transformation.

And so I applied the lessons I learned with my team. I went out and hired the very best and the brightest I could find. And that turned out to be working moms with social work degrees. And I made it easy to have kids at the office. We paid fair wage. And I built a team that was just phenomenal. I mean. I would go to war with my CFO, really strong. I had to fire the CFO I had. The board was a little bit asleep at the wheel on fiduciary responsibilities. And we were using restricted funds in the wrong place and all stuff that we've all dealt with. And to make a long story short, we decided to take on the issue of poverty in Philly. And to do so with a different methodology that had been developed up in Boston from an outfit called Empath, the old Crittenden Women's Union. And based on the principle that when you are in deep, deep crisis, your cognitive function is zero. Cognitive function is problem solving.

Well, poverty is one of the deepest crises you can be in. And for the folks who weren't addicted or didn't have behavioral health issues, it's soul crushing. And what we discovered and we worked with is that if we could coach a person on small goals at first and then larger ones across the spectrum of things like housing, workforce development, medical care, set goals, the brain would start to heal and cognitive function would improve. And our basic goal was to add a poverty was a living wage with benefits and assets in the bank. We had a large endowment and we did a savings match of we would match dollar for dollar up to $10,000 so that when you left the program, you had 20 grand in the bank. You had a job if we coached you right and worked with you on all the issues at a living wage or a path to a living wage. and jobs that had benefits. The efficacy rate of that went from 28 to 32 for traditional percent to mid-80s. Oh, my.

And just, and again, I give full, full credit to the folks up in Boston. But the savings match was something we added. And now there's about 130 agencies, probably more since I retired, who have adopted the methodology. Basically, it's transformational, not maintenance. And my whole complaint with the system is, you know, you got to maintain people when they're in crisis. But just doing that forever is not a long-term solution. And that's how I spent the last 11 years. When I turned 70, I retired, handed it off to a brilliant woman who we had brought in from another agency. and thought I was going to retire again. And then my good friend Hank Landis calls me. And he said, well, you know a little bit about family businesses. And I've been on a bunch of boards, both for-profit and non-profit. And he said, I'd like you to come, you know, start coaching family businesses and maybe working with us a little bit. And maybe you could attract some folks.

Yeah, at the same time, I was a trustee at Drexel. I was chairman of the Academy of Natural Sciences, was doing some other stuff. And I tried retirement for a month, and my wife said, I'd really like you to go talk to Hank. And off we went. So that's a long, long-winded background. But, you know, I've got a lot of scar tissue. I write a little bit. I coach a little bit. And just trying to give back. My wife and I have a simple philosophy. We want to die with the dollar and have the last check bounce. And we believe we've been blessed. And so we're trying to support causes that we care about and stay active. And that's kind of the bio. I don't know if my definition is short, but there you go.

But we all need help.

Well, I worked for Bob LeBont, who was president of the U.S. He reported to John.

Yeah, and I spent a lot of time in the chairman's office because of that relationship. I would argue that John was a tremendous sales leader. The challenge, in my opinion, and lots of us, is IBM, at the end of the day, was much more a manufacturing company. And the large iron that it made was the backbone of IT for many, many years. And the debate that occurred, were we going to be... the low cost manufacturer because of our balance sheet and our costs, or were we going to be, we, we, we, we really didn't see the software revolution and the application revolution and the PC revolution and the handheld device coming. And I mean, there's certainly brilliant scientists there that did, but. You know, from my perspective, limited as it may be, those of us in the field saw what customers wanted and they wanted application solutions. They wanted things going.

And, you know, one of the things you learn when you go to school in this field is Moore's law, that every four years it's going to shrink in size and it's going to be a fourth as expensive technology. And so if you want to be the low-cost manufacturer, at some point that rule kicks in and margins and everything else shrink. And the real gold is in the software and the telecommunications and the interconnectivity. My specialty as an SE was communications. And, you know, I switched to sales and it was almost unfair because, you know, I could understand what would work and what wouldn't work. But, you know, the real gift was, you know, talk to the customers. And, you know, I, you know, you learn in a hurry that if you can, you know, find the pain and fix it with a customer, you can go a long way. And if you can, you know, my favorite question was, tell me how you make money. And sometimes it'd be as a business. Sometimes it'd be as an individual.

And, you know, they said, well, OK, let's let's go to work on those things. And I have some fun examples of those. But I'm not sure, you know, I've seen this with a lot of big companies where they start to believe their own stuff. And, you know, business evolves. It's evolutionary, and there's always new developments, new technologies. I learned very early on that you've got to practice radar. And what I mean by that is you've got to look at, are there opportunities or threats that are coming at you? And what are you going to do with them? Are you going to take advantage? Are you going to hunker down? Are you going to be an early adapter? It's like when I sold the rental company. It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that, you know, United Rental and Sunbelt and those guys were going to dominate the market because of their public size, public funding. They could buy 3,000 AWPs, area work platforms, when I was buying 200.

And rental rate was a function of acquisition cost. And so they could, I could lose money and they'd be making money on the same price. So, you know, we got out of that business. We didn't want to go public. We didn't want to go big. And I just think there's a million of those kind of decisions every day in business that you got to have the chutzpah to move on. And if you don't move on, you get caught. I think on a much larger scale, that's what happened to Big Blue. Now, Sam Palmisano, very good friend of mine, was AA in the office, became chairman. And I give Gershner great credit that he moved us into a software services business. I don't know that. I mean, you know, IBM's got a lot of money. It'll take them a long time. But, you know, we're back into software. We're back into solutions, providing and outsourcing. But Microsoft, Amazon, Google, you know, you can argue even now some of the chip manufacturers. that are blowing it out.

That could have been the world if they had been willing to risk and be innovative. Still a great company. Still a great company, but not what it could have been.

Yeah, I wasn't in that meeting. There's a lot of debate. All I know is he fired the two sales leaders, who was my old boss. And, you know, he was take no prisoners kind of guy.

The company was in real trouble and it needed to have some massive surgery. I respect him a lot for taking it on. My sad part is, look, you've got to listen to your customers. You've got to listen to the people on the front line. And I don't think we did a very good job of that because there were a lot of us who saw what was coming. And it got hung up in large company politics and doing this and protocol. You know my theory of muddy boots. You go into the field, you get your feet dirty, you ask two questions. How are we doing? What can we do better? And you shut up and you listen. And I think any business, any leader needs to practice, you know, nothing like firsthand customer feedback. Anytime I work with the board, I ask the CEO, I said, okay, who are your five calls this month? You know, go see a big customer, go see a customer you don't have and go see a small one. And, you know, stay fresh.

Well, you know, look, my lifelong philosophy has been the better the talent, the better the impact, the better the income. And so my view of a leader is to be the curator of talent. curator of strategy and to do that as a team sport. You know, this idea of, you know, the mythological leader, you know, save the day. Business is way too complex. And, you know, my... My goal was always to try and be the dumbest guy in an organization. My wife would always tell me I succeeded way early. But it's, you know, you think about it. I mean, you just, you really need to build a team, turn them loose, and give them, you know, some bandwidth and give them some guardrails. You know, good things will happen. Some of these young kids that are coming out of school right now or with five or six years experience, it's extraordinary what they know how to do.

And and frankly, we don't you know, I think there's an obligation to let them get experience, let them get exposure. But Christ, you know, the energy level that these kids have right now, you know, is phenomenal. They, you know, all they want is a little respect and the opportunity to learn and, you know, an opportunity to be rewarded if they hit a home run and, you know, get credit for it. I mean, it's not that complicated. I just think the CEO's job is so much about talent that it's, you know, it's not a skill we're necessarily taught and how to recruit. how to manage, how to coach. You know, God, I would have killed for when I was a marketing manager in Pittsburgh to know what I know now.

would

Well, that's what got IBM in trouble. We've promoted all the good sales guys. We should let the good sales guys to be salesmen. And if they wanted to move up, fine. But, you know, let's look for best talent across the spectrum.

That would be interesting.

Well, yeah. And I mean, it's, well, I also think just, you know, Staying active is just vital. I mean, I will work till the day I can. And, you know, and work is loosely defined. But it's, you know, it might be volunteering. It might be, you know, doing whatever. But it's, you know, sitting around. I mean, you just can't play that much golf. You might be able to fish that much. But, you know, that's.

Well, yeah. And that's where I think board service and outside board service is is such a field that. You know, I think more businesses really need to evaluate. I mean, people get afraid of outside directors. And, you know, I just sent you the article on fiduciaries. I mean, it's really important to have outside directors in a business. And the optics are good. Getting advice is good. Having somebody who cares about you. And the business is willing to speak truth to you. You know, they don't have to have Sunday dinner with you. That's the great value of an outside director. Yep.

Yeah, well, it needs to be one which data. One was dialed. Well, actually, they were both data. But no, my big claim, I still get nine bucks a year from the government for my compression bandwidth check bit. Me and a fellow guy, we got down, we had a customer. And in those days, data, you know, it was dirty. I mean, the line was dirty. And so you had to. punched through what they call check bits on it. And we figured out an algorithm that was a hell of a lot more efficient. And so if the algorithm was sent at the start and at the end and they matched, you would make the assumption that what was transmitted was fine. And if it didn't, you resend it. And so the efficiency of that was good. And there was a lot of struggle to figure out the right algorithm that would give you a true pattern. And we sat down one night. Back in the days, we had a six-pack probably, and we figured it out.

And that now is used in two satellites that are still up in orbit. And again, we get nine bucks a year. That's our deal. I refuse to cash them just to piss the government off.

Well, I just look at the macro language translators and the artificial intelligence. And, you know, I just had my wildest dreams. Yeah, it's a whole different discussion.

Well, and we also got to remember the other side of that is to be really good listeners. And, you know, the older I get, the more I realize the importance that, you know, there's a lot of new dogs in town. And, you know, you just need to, you know, I think curiosity is one of the great traits. It

You know, just kind of, well, how does that work? And why do you do it that way? And, you know, and, you know, and just, you know, kind of looking beyond the obvious. You know, I have a story I tell, you know, we talk about finding the customer's pain and fixing it. at a young salesman we walked into a warehouse and uh i walk in with him i'm you know running modern at the time and all the forks on the on the forklifts are bent some of the overhead guards are bent there's like broken in the corner and i'm kind of looking at the rack and there's not too many corners that have been made clean And so we go into the offices. The guy was with a competitor. We were trying to get introduced. He brought me thinking that would help. And so we sit down. We go through press days. And I said, do you mind if I ask you a question? And he said, no, sure, fine. He says, how's your workers comp? And he turns white. And I said, why do you ask?

He says, well, I'm willing to bet your mod rates way over one. And you're probably getting hammered. As a matter of fact, that that's accurate. I'm not too happy. But what's that got to do with with you guys? I said, suppose we could address that. He said, what do you mean? He says, well, I'm getting that most of your workers compacts. And so guys running into things, breaking things, getting injured, cleaning up. And the guy said, well, yeah. I said, so what if we put telemetry? on the truck that measured G-forces and would shut them down over a certain limit and wouldn't start unless you went through a safety check and the seatbelt was on and all that good stuff. And the guy says, you can do that. And I said, yeah, we could do that. And he said, well, you know, I've got these trucks that are competitive. I said, well, why don't you let me put them on the trucks. Here's what it'll cost.

And I'm willing to bet six months later, you and I will be able to talk. We put the telemetry on. You know, it's the G-force measure is standard in the industry now. This was in the early days. And to make a long story short, when the time came to renew the fleet, the guy calls me up and says, send your salesman over. Salesman goes over. And he said, what are you looking for? He gave me the number. The salesman went over, gave him a quote. The guy didn't ask about price. He did not ask about price. And I use that story all the time to say, find the customer's pain and fix it. And the young salesman said, how did you know? I said, well, you're in the industry. What were you looking at? I said, you got to you got to know your territory. You know, if you ever go deer hunting, you know, you don't sit in any tree in the tree stand. You look for the trail to where the deer have been going by the same thing.

I had more fun coaching that young man than anything I've done in a long time. And you see, I think that's the joy of being in management and being a leader is taking these young pups and, you know, showing an interest in them, seeing that I get great joy in seeing them succeed. I do. And by the way, that was his sale, not mine.

I was looking at it with trained eyes. And my point is, that's what I was trying to teach salesmen.

I see that all the time now. And I say, look, ask the question. How do you make money? What's your bonus based on? What's pounding you? And then, you know, rather than going in with read speeds and feeds, as the old IBMers would say, figure out what in your product line can help this guy or somebody you know can help him. You know, partnerships go a long way to, you know, to having a relationship. But this has been really fun, Ron. Thanks.

They're probably asleep, but that's okay.