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).

Long Term Thinking

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.

Jabberwocky: There’s Nothing Else Like It

Camp Jabberwocky is a magical place where dreams come true and nothing is impossible. It’s been that way for 65 years.

The first page of Clark Hanjian’s Jabberwocky: A Brief History of The Martha’s Vineyard Cerebral Palsy Camp begins with: “On a small island in the North Atlantic, off the southern shore of Massachusetts, there is a place where hope flourishes. The place is Camp Jabberwocky – a small summer camp for the disabled…”

On September 5th the last campers of the summer left Camp Jabberwocky. Two days later, we began a major overhaul of the main building, known as the Mess Hall, and other parts of the facility. The 14-acre campus, with 17 buildings, which usually falls silent at the end of the summer, is chock full of activity and change. In mid-May, just before the campers return, this transformation will be complete and Jabberwocky will be, we hope, just a bit more magical than ever before.

Last week, as Jabberwocky executive director Liza Gallagher sat with SMCo architects Matt Coffey and Beth Kostman reviewing the proposed furnishings and color schemes for the new space, she told us that the day before, as a session ended and campers departed, there were many tears and some wailing. Some of these campers have been here every season for 30 years.

This is where, as Clark says:
Disabled folks are at the center of a community rather than at the periphery.

The camp started [in the early 50’s] as a small experiment: a handful of children with cerebral palsy, a tiny summer cottage, a director, and a young assistant. From there, the camp has grown to a…volunteer staff of well over forty people [and several paid]. It now serves about one hundred disabled children and adults every summer.

Jabberwocky is a community. It has families and extended families, and grandparents, and children. It has births and deaths and marriages. It has oral history, traditions, myths, and legends. It has people with a full range of abilities, skills, and interests. And these people work, play, eat, and create together. They argue and dance together. They write and cry together. And like people in other communities, they are here year after year. A few come and go each season, but the majority are here living together every summer.

For most of the year, disabled people are in the minority. They are stared at, singled out for special treatment, and generally viewed as outside the mainstream of normal life. For a couple of months each year, the camp provides a break from this routine. At Jabberwocky, people with disabilities form the majority of the community. Their experience becomes the dominant experience. Their needs become the priority needs. Their concerns become common concerns. In these wondrous times the whole community becomes as family.

It is a record of experiments and risks. A portrait of cooperation. Jabberwocky is a tale of bountiful harvest from a few scattered seeds. It is an epic of generosity and thanksgiving. Stories like this are crucial to the existence of humanity. They remind us of what great things are possible in our limited days. And so, we need to keep telling them.

This summer we had the great good fortune to be a part of a new Jabberwocky program. The old red bus rolled into our yard on four occasions with a group of campers who came to do woodworking in our shop. “The campers were positive, upbeat, and hilarious,“ says Jim Vercruysse, our shop foreman. “My favorite time was at the end of each class when we would take a group photo holding up our finished projects and call out ‘JABBERWOCKY!’ It felt great to be part of such an enthusiastic and cheerful bunch.”

At the end of the summer of 1966 a counselor named Linda Yenkin wrote in the Vineyard Gazette:
We are all tired now, but when the children are gone and the camp is quiet, when there is no more Skipper wandering off and calling everyone he meets a pigeon, and when there is no more Kevin yelling in the Mad Hatter’s ear in the very early morning, “Move over, my bed’s broke,” when we no longer hear any more off-key singing in the condemned looking red bus, when all this is gone, then we will miss it all very much, and only then will we realize that we have to wait an entire year for the magic to begin again. But the magic never wears off.

There is, I’m certain, nothing in the world quite like Camp Jabberwocky. And now it will change. Some of the campers said good-bye to the old mess hall and “thanked it for the memories,” said Liza.

The project is part of a fundamental shift in our company’s work or, rather, an expansion of the breadth of our endeavors. Our high-end residential projects, affordable housing work, performance engineering, and solar design/installations continue, but another arena has become central: institutional work for non-profit organizations. At the same time as we have been completing the Jabberwocky plans, we have begun planning for a new campus for Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (our umbrella social service agency which serves 6,000 Islanders each year), and an expansion of the Island Grown Initiative’s Farm Hub.

Our previous experience with institutional work has been limited to master planning efforts, so this is new for us. Each of these projects requires significant learning. But that’s nothing new – we always seem to be doing something different that we must learn how to do before we do it. Exciting stuff. Keeps the blood pumping and the synapses firing. As long as the inevitable mistakes are minor, all’s well.

I can’t adequately describe the thrill of working with this organization and watching this project slowly find its form and round into shape. There are times in life when you know that you are doing what ought to be done, that the work that you are doing is bringing fundamental positive change to a place or an organization or a community. Those are particularly rewarding times.

In service to that notion, some of our recent strategic planning work has focused on committing ourselves to finding ways to engage in as much of this mission-driven work as possible. Now those opportunities are rolling in. Apparently, saying dreams out loud is the first step toward realization. Simple as that.

We’re off on an inspiring, soul-stirring ride at Jabberwocky!

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.

Local Sustainable Economies…And Way More Than That

My colleagues and fellow owners Deirdre, Rob, Siobhán and I just returned from a conference in Boston called Local Sustainable Economies. It was a national gathering, hosted by the Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts, of people and organizations working to localize economic activity and encourage the long haul shift from the extractive economy of the present to a generative economy of the future.

Read More about Local Sustainable Economies…And Way More Than That

The Lease of the Long Now

After a year of design, we’ve just begun construction of a sweet project for a great family on an extraordinary property at Seven Gates Farm. It’s the third project we have done, on different pieces of this remarkable this part of the Vineyard. The first was in 1995, the second in 2004, and now this one.

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Still Goes Up and Down

I went to the MV Hospital for an appointment.  I ran into Sue, a woman I've known for many years.  She used to own the camera store in town.  I doubt it’s there anymore; can’t remember (are there still camera stores?).

In 1979 she built a passive solar house.  We helped her with the design and we installed one of the ingenious monolithic Insulating Curtainwalls (ICW) that were made – in those days – by a Colorado company called Thermal Technology Corporation.

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