My Values in Business Were Shaped by My Father’s Firing

With over 25 years working across operations, finance, growth, M&A and turnarounds, I have learned that sustainable performance rarely comes from one person. It comes from creating the conditions for an entire organization to perform. 

And one of my core beliefs is that I don’t fire people when I join a new company. I invest in them, and time and time again, they rise to the challenge. This belief might seem counterintuitive, but when I was a young man, my own father was fired by his employer. My father was kind and smart, and he was a good worker. I couldn’t get over the injustice of putting a good man out of work without warning.

Turning around a company can be tough. My arrival typically finds the company in trouble, and that’s usually because the vision for the company isn’t clear. It isn’t that the people aren’t capable. It’s that these people don’t know the vision, and therefore they can’t work to their highest level.

My military training taught me that it's the leader's job to help people perform to their potential. A failing team can quickly become a great team with the same people. They just need a clear vision to understand how they can contribute.

In one case, I joined a $4B healthcare company that was ranked 45th in the state based on performance. It was a large, complex organization, and in nine months time, we were ranked 1st in the state - only turning over percent of our staff, mainly through normal attrition. 

The business results were impressive, but as a healthcare company, I am proud of the real impact we had on patients’ lives. We also invested in the long-term education of our employees. Years later, I ran into one of the janitors who took up our offer to pay for night school where he earned his degree. He’s advanced his career and is grateful for the opportunity for the company to invest in him.

Without witnessing my father’s firing firsthand, I am not sure I would have believed a team could turn around a failing company so quickly, but my belief in empowering people has been a cornerstone to my success.