South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

This blog provides up-to-date news of goings on at South Mountain Company and occasional musings from John Abrams (and others).

Leadership

Entering the Neutral Zone

On November 19th, at our annual Day of Business, we unveiled the Transition Plan that will lead us to the next iteration of South Mountain. It was a threshold moment, a new hinge point in our 45 year history.

Are you ready? (This may take some time to tell.)

Over the next three years, our company will gradually transition from first to second generation leadership. At the end of that time, I, as founder, CEO, and president, will retire and continue to work very part time for several years. Deirdre Bohan will become CEO and president, and will work in a “first-among-equals” arrangement with the four other members of our strong, capable, dedicated, and well-aligned Leadership Team (comprised of Ryan Bushey, Rob Meyers, Siobhán Mullin and Newell Isbell Shinn). We are tremendously excited, and very confident, that this Transition, which we have been planning for many years, will assure the long term success of the company. It will allow us to continue to serve our clients and our community in the way that we always have.


LEADERSHIP
To thrive, prosper, serve, and endure, an organization needs effective leadership. So does a family. So does a country. Leadership is both a skill and an orientation. Everyone has some leadership skill, just as everyone has some athletic skill and some musical skill, and some of every other kind of skill. Even those who claim no musical skill can still sing a song to their child at bedtime. In the same way, everyone has leadership skill. Some have more of it than others, just as some are better athletes and better musicians. Some people have an orientation toward leadership; they think about it and practice it. Some work hard to learn it and cultivate it. Some have natural leadership ability. Most good leaders combine all three.

As the leader and CEO of this company, I have, over time, had the great good fortune to gather a group of stellar leaders here at SMCo (and people with other essential skills, too – those who can design, and build, and craft, and engineer, and practice finance, and administer, and manage). This has been intentional. In my own career, I have learned to do all of those things, but in most cases, only well enough to recognize and attract people who can do them better than I. That’s what our company consists of – people with 38 unique skill sets and orientations that comprise the whole. We couldn’t possibly flourish without each of them.

Few of my colleagues arrived here as skilled leaders. Our current leaders – Deirdre (our COO) and Ryan, Rob, Siobhán and Newell (our four department directors) had some innate leadership skills that they brought with them, but more importantly, they had a leadership orientation, and they developed those skills here at SMCo. There are other people here besides these five who have a strong leadership orientation and will develop those skills further over time.


BUSINESS TRANSITIONS
According to the Small Business Administration, there are approximately 30 million small businesses in the U.S. Many of them were founded by baby boomers who are aging out. Some will be passed down within families, but fewer than in the past. Most businesses will close their doors with the retirement of the Founder. Many others – those with value – will be sold to a new owner or absorbed by larger companies. None of those things was ever my intention or the intention of any of the other SMCo owners, past and present.

A smaller (but growing) number will be sold to their employees and become worker co-ops or ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans). South Mountain was sold to its employees and became a worker co-op in 1987. Having already made this conversion, we now have the luxury of foregoing the arduous and complex process of figuring out the transfer of ownership, and can direct full attention to capacity building.

Planning for our Transition began six years ago, in 2013. In June of the following year the full SMCo Board (all 19 owners) approved and adopted, by consensus, our first “Avalanche Scenario” (what happens tomorrow if I am buried by an avalanche today) and our “Next 40” projection (what the company will look like/who will lead it in 40 years time).

Despite all of this preparation, I struggled for some time to fully visualize leaving this company. In January of 2019, all that changed. I saw our leadership group taking the bull by the horns and making amazing progress. It was time to give shape and definition to our future.

In Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, , William Bridges writes:

Change is situational: the move to a new site, the retirement of the founder, the reorganization of the roles on the team, the revisions to the pension plan. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological; it is a three-phase process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change brings about.

Managing transition involves helping ourselves through three phases:


  1. Letting go of the old ways and old identity people had. This first phase of transition is an ending, and the time when you need to help people to deal with [the loss].

  2. Going through an in-between time when the old is gone but the new isn’t fully operational. We call this time the “neutral zone”: it’s when the critical psychological realignments and repatternings take place.

  3. Coming out of the transition and making a new beginning. This is when people develop the new identity, experience the new energy, and discover the new sense of purpose that makes the change begin to work.”

We are just completing phase one.


THE PLAN
After my realization, I assembled a plan and brought it to the Leadership Team. Understanding it requires some background.

It’s important to know that we had never considered, in any meaningful way, hiring a new CEO
from outside. We were encouraged by the King Arthur Flour model of a small leadership group – three in their case– becoming co-CEOs. At the time, our discussions with them led us to believe this was the right model for us.

But after further consideration, it didn’t make sense to have five co-CEOs (too unwieldy and confusing) and there weren’t two or three individuals that outshined the others. The five have great complementary skills and personalities, and are uniquely well-aligned. Four of them are department directors and Deirdre’s job has been co-managing the company with me – her job has been like a co-CEO for a number of years. The answer was clear: Deirdre should be the CEO, but in a first-among-equals arrangement with the Leadership Team.

I proposed this at a meeting. I expected some pushback or resentment from those who might have expected to be one of the co-CEOs. There was none. Everyone recognized the impracticality of five people sharing CEO responsibilities and the need for the company and community to have someone that is ultimately responsible for South Mountain Company – a face for the company and a place for the buck to stop. It was as clear to them as to me that Deirdre was the right choice. Since joining our team in 1995, at the age of 28, she has moved from bookkeeper to interior designer to COO to co-manager, developing into a confident, dedicated, skillful, compassionate leader and friend. She never aspired to this position; in fact, for years she did not think herself suitable. Now she knows that, with the support of the others, she is.

Deirdre will not absorb all of my responsibilities; rather she will continue her COO work while adding some new responsibilities. For several years now, we have been working to distribute some of the particular skills and experience I have accumulated to other members of the Team. We meet regularly to develop the details and work on implementation. Each Team member has completed a personal capability analysis and statement – outlining what they could provide and what they need to learn. We continue to work on these together.

For example, one of the key areas of need is in “sales” – the complex process of cultivating in prospective clients a deep understanding of who we are and what we do that leads them to believe we are the perfect fit for them. I had always done that alone.

These days, Ryan accompanies me to nearly every initial meeting and is growing into this role in leaps and bounds. Newell has been having more and more client contact and is starting to have a much larger role in the interface between design and construction. We are finding that both are particularly well-suited to these roles.

As we develop these capabilities, and many others, we think we are also developing the confidence, optimism, and vision which will lead to a prosperous shared future.

From this work, a plan has emerged.

The design of this plan becomes a model for future transitions which will come far sooner than this one has. As a seasoned company, we will never again have a 25 year old leader who remains in the role for nearly half a century. Deirdre will be taking the reins at the age of 55 and anticipates inhabiting the role for 10 or 15 years, at which time we will have developed a new Leadership Team and a robust system of transition for the next time around. Hopefully the CEO to replace Deirdre is with us today.

This transition is a work-in-progress. During the three years from now until the transition, we will conduct further capacity-building, flesh out the details, and test ideas and methods.

For those of us who have been working on it, this endeavor has become a great adventure. Ultimately, I think it will become that for all of us. I personally have one goal, and one goal only: to leave this company, this company I deeply love, in the best shape it’s ever been, ready to go forward as it never has. And to leave the people in this company, who I deeply love as well, in a position to succeed.

In a way it’s like watching a mostly grown child venture out into the world. But vastly different too: the child is young, adolescent, unformed – there’s very little certainty about how things will go. But this “child”, this company, is led by mature, capable, empathetic, passionate, dedicated people. It’s hard to imagine anything but success.

After the Day of Business, in response to a request for feedback, one of our employees, Chris Wike, wrote, “I am grateful to have come to this company when I did, to get a taste of what is was, but I am truly excited to be a part of what it will become.”

I think we are all feeling that way. We will move forward toward this new beginning together.

Peter Blackstone Ives, Friend & Partner

Pete Ives retired last month. Of the many long term employees/owners who have made this company what it is, Pete had the longest tenure (except for me, last man standing, apparently). His illustrious career here spanned 41 years.

He came to SMCo in 1977, just two years after my former partner Mitchell Posin and I came to the Vineyard and South Mountain began. At the time he was an accomplished mason, painter, drywaller, floor sander, tilesetter, and surfer. He’d never done a lick of carpentry. He said, “Just tell me what to do. I’ll do anything, as long as I don’t have to tell anyone else what to do.” He was loyal, dedicated, and skilled, but he feared responsibility.

Back then it was just me, Mitchell, Steve, Pete, and Heikki Soikkeli (I think). By 1985 there were ten employees. Steve and Pete came to me and said they wanted to stay at South Mountain and make their careers here, but needed a greater stake and more than an hourly wage. We decided to become a worker cooperative. Pete became one of the original three employee owners when we restructured in 1987.

And he stayed. Over time he began to find confidence in his work and himself. He learned to be a very good carpenter and then a foreman, first reluctantly, then with pride. So much for not telling people what to do. He was the Clerk of the organization, the only one we ever had until his retirement. He also became an essential part of the Personnel Committee for all those years.

His work at SMCo extended into five different decades. He was the responsible foreman for some of our most emblematic projects, like Sagan, Thistle, Hass, Weinstock, Hamermesh, Field, Howes, Cook-Kraus, Davis, and Lake-Hodgson.

His work culminated appropriately with the wonderfully playful Lee Treehouse.

Pete has been friend, colleague, and co-owner. I have seen his three children at birth, growing up, and grown. Clare has always been a constant, his partner in the truest sense.

My wife Chris always said he was the heart of SMCo. The keeper of the soul. The king of casual. Killing it with kindness. Getting the job done in the most stress-free way possible. If Pete was there, it was surely gonna be fun. And infused with craft. Always craft. He had an unbelievable touch with people and wood. Knew how to make both fit together seamlessly.

We are lucky to know him and grateful for all he’s been and done. His spirit will remain a part of this company for as long as the company endures.

Pete with Steve, Marko, and me in some God-forsaken foundation.

There’s Deirdre . . . and then there’s Rob…

At South Mountain, there are seven standing members of our Management Committee (which we call MCom). An eighth member, always an owner, rotates onto MCom for a six month stint. This allows all our owners to experience and contribute to the management process and learn to understand the complexity and dynamics of running our business.

Two of my management colleagues, Deirdre Bohan and Rob Meyers, have interesting stories. The rest do too (I mean hey, we all do, right?) but these two are particularly compelling because they took circuitous and unconventional paths to their current positions.

Twenty two years ago, when our bookkeeper moved off-island, we hired Deirdre to replace her. Within a year she had developed robust systems and reduced what was previously a taxing 40 hour job to a reasonable 20 hour job.

She came to me and said she didn’t have enough to do. “What do you want to do?” I said.

“That’s up to you,” she replied.

“No, I mean what do you really want to do?”

She told me she had a long-standing interest in interior design; it was one of the reasons she came to work at SMCo. For years we had done interior design partially and unsystematically; we wished to add a serious interior design practice but hadn’t had the resources and had failed to pro-actively seek them. So there it was: we decided to devote the time Deirdre had created (20 hours a week) to her education. She assembled a well-rounded program that combined the resources of several design schools. She was soon leading a thriving interior design business. We hired a bookkeeper to replace her; Siobhán has now been here 14 years and is our Financial Manager and another of our standing MCom members.

In 2004 and 2005 I spent two consecutive winters on sabbatical, writing a book and seeing how the company would fare in my absence. Deirdre was the person who stepped most effectively and thoroughly into the leadership void. The experience, coupled with her innate intelligence and the computer science degree she had earned at Brown, helped her recognize that there were operations issues that weren’t getting the attention they needed. She articulated this and soon became our COO. The operations job became nearly full time, and we hired an architect, Beth Kostman, to fill some of the interior design aspects of her job.

In 2010 Deirdre and her husband Dave had a son, Declan. She was 43. I think the lessons of parenting refined and strengthened her leadership skills, while softening them at the same time. She already had a deep intuitive sense of what makes people tick, but parenting always adds a special dimension – greater empathy and flexibility perhaps.

Deirdre now chairs MCom, co-manages the company with me, manages in my absence, and would become interim CEO (at least) if something were to happen to me (which we call the Avalanche Scenario). I couldn’t ask for a better collaborator. Quite a journey from bookkeeper to now!

And then there’s Rob Meyers.

Rob was hired as a carpenter in 1997. He was an average carpenter, but nothing special. He liked jawin’ more than sawin’. After a few years he packed up his family and went back to Michigan, where he’d grown up. Short-lived detour. Not so good. He came back in 2002 and has been here since. His carpentry improved, but it wasn’t what he really wanted to do, so he began trying on a variety of new and different roles within the company. The shift fueled his ambition and allowed his latent entrepreneurial abilities to blossom.

In 2007 we decided to devote significant resources to wind and solar. We wrote a business plan (I think that was the first time we ever wrote one, for anything). We did it because we had made a number of faltering attempts in past years to start a solar division but somehow it never came to fruition. I’m amazed to say we carried out that plan, and have gone far beyond it, specifically with solar. Today our lively Energy Services division is producing roughly a third of our revenues. Our solar work allows us to touch the lives of and provide something meaningful for far more people than our architecture and building does. It pushes our mission forward. It diversifies and strengthens our business.

Rob now manages this business endeavor with passion, commitment, connectivity, and competence. His gregarious nature and sharp intellect have helped him become a force in the industry throughout New England. He influences policy, and he has a national reach through our membership in Amicus Solar a member-owned purchasing cooperative and peer group network of 50 of the most progressive solar companies in the country (that’s another story for another time). And his mixology skills and lore are second to none.

These two people, Deirdre and Rob, have become true leaders. They came to South Mountain without the experience or the skills to do the jobs they are doing now. And they’re not just doing them, they’re doing them with remarkable professionalism and constant innovation, making it clear that they (along with others of the managers and owners here), are well-equipped to take the South Mountain juggernaut forward into an unpredictable future. One of the most thrilling aspects of my job – maybe the most – is witnessing the growth and development of the people who have chosen to build their careers here. As I often say, “Every morning I walk up the stairs and say to myself, ‘Hey, can you believe I get to work with these people, all day long, and I get paid for this’”?

There oughta be a law. But if there was, I’d have to break it.

Transitions – in life & in death & in business

On January 12th, my wife Chris and I went to see my 95 year old father in Palo Alto CA.  He had recently fallen and hit his head.  I had been to see him after the accident and he seemed to be doing well.  While i was there he and I had a long conversation with his doctor, Scott Wood.

My Dad, who just weeks before had been attending grand medical rounds, playing tennis, and leafleting for Bernie Sanders on University Avenue, was suffering from some cognitive losses, but he was lucid and clear.  He told us in no uncertain terms that if this thing got worse there would be no hospital – only hospice, no food and drink, and comfort.  We agreed.  His doctor commented, “I’m with you – when I go I want plenty of morphine and ice cream, and the ice cream’s optional.”

Read More about Transitions – in life & in death & in business

The Long Hot Summer

It’s been almost two months since I last posted here.  It’s not that I didn’t have time, or that it flew by, or that I didn’t want to.It’s just that I wanted to say something that I wasn’t ready to say, and until I said what I wanted to say I didn’t want to say something else.

I wanted to look back at events of the early summer, but I was still “in them” and had no distance.  Now we’re deep into autumn.  The long hot summer is long gone.  I’m far enough way.  Enough distance.

Read More about The Long Hot Summer