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).

Small Business

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.

Larger Than Life

Paul “walking on water”.
That first house.

When Paul Simmons was 22, he built a house in Acushnet, just down the road from his hometown of New Bedford, where his father had a concrete form business. He built it from the ground up – the foundation and everything else too. He and his first wife raised two sons there.

For the last 30 years (since he was 32), Paul has battled multiple sclerosis. He was diagnosed a few days after the morning he woke up, got out of bed, and crumpled to the floor. He had no feeling from the waist down. When the doctors finally figured out what was wrong, one of them, a neurologist, told Paul he would never walk again.

“Give me that goddam wheelchair,” Paul replied. He pulled himself into it, wheeled to the door, and left the room, only looking back to say to the doctor, “I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

Three weeks later, Paul shoved the wheelchair against the wall and asked his wife for a walker. He got up. He learned to walk. A few months later, he went skiing! Paul has always loved to ski. It was the favored family activity when his kids were growing up, but in recent years, his degenerative MS has made each run more difficult.

Last year, he tackled Wildcat Mountain with his grandkids. From the summit, he looked across the valley to Tuckerman’s Ravine at Mt. Washington, remembering the times he had hiked and skied the headwall, the good lines, the beautiful days. The day before, skiing with the kids, Paul had fallen and couldn’t get up. He did, somehow. Now, a day later, he could feel that this run was going to be trouble. Maybe his last one.

He told the kids to go on ahead; he would catch up. It took him an hour and a half to struggle down the mountain, in part because it was such a monumental effort and in part because he kept stopping, looking across the valley, savoring his last run.

One of Paul’s largest scale projects.

Paul takes after his Dad. His company, L.P. Simmons (it used to stand for “Lonely and Poor” after his second divorce, now it’s “Level and Plumb” deep into his third marriage), has built all our concrete foundations for the past few decades. The rough-and-tumble, boisterous nature of Paul and his cohort overlays consummate professionalism, tremendous skill, and a remarkable breadth of experience.

Paul is very good at what he does.

Paul with son Tim circa 1992.

He has skied hundreds of days and built hundreds of foundations with no feeling in his knees. These days, he can’t manage the hard physical work; his son, Tim, manages the on-site aspect of his business. Tim says his Dad is his number one priority (don’t tell his partner Aja). He says Paul’s a genius. “He looks at a set of plans and immediately sees everything. And he can do anything. But he should have been a critic – that’s his real calling. Food, movies, me – he’ll tell you what he thinks about all of ‘em.” Tim has been through some rough times, too, and beat the odds. He feels that his father’s love was a big part of what carried him through the rapids.

Paul’s physical limitations don’t stop him. Remember that house he built 40 years ago? Since then, he has built half a dozen more in his spare time. Today he lives at the end of a dirt road in Vineyard Haven with his wife Ann. Recently, he took me for a tour. The house is chockablok full of hand-crafted treasures – ingenious woodwork (much of it made with reclaimed lumber from our yard, from jobsites, and driftwood). There are curvy polished concrete counters and fine tile work. There’s even a recent addition to the house with a beautiful iron and wood stair railing. He still does everything himself (mostly).

Paul with wife Ann in their Vineyard Haven home.

He has a tiny shop in the basement with rudimentary tools. He carefully figures out everything he needs, goes downstairs, cuts the pieces, and hauls them up. Once they’ve arrived upstairs, they don’t go back down for corrections. It’s too hard to negotiate the stairs. He measures twice and cuts once.

Whenever Paul comes to our office (these days assisted by a cane) to drop off a quote or pick up a check, he lights the place up. He’s as friendly as he is loud, and he brings a bit of joy into the day, no matter how he’s feeling. As our Director of Finance, Siobhán, describes it, “Everyone starts smiling. He’s larger than life.”

We’re lucky to work with him, to benefit from his vast experience, to enjoy his friendship, and to endure his good-natured insults and admonishments. The positive spirit and defiant optimism that pulled him up out of that wheelchair 30 years ago continue to define him. He’s a lesson to us all.

Eddie Cottle Sr.

Ed and his wife Betty in their Lambert’s Cove home. Photo by Mark Alan Lovewell, courtesy of the Vineyard Gazette.

Eddie Cottle Sr., the founder and longtime proprietor of E.C. Cottle Lumberyard., died on November 9th at the age of 87. Quiet, fair, modest, and generous, he had a big heart and a fine sense of humor. He lived on Lambert’s Cove Road in West Tisbury, where the yard is located, for almost his entire life.

For the last 43 years, E.C. Cottle has been South Mountain’s primary lumberyard. It was there long before we were here, opening in the early fifties when Ed was in his early twenties.

As it says in Ed’s obituary, “He worked tirelessly to make the lumberyard a very successful and well respected business. He appreciated his customers and his employees. He never forgot his humble beginnings and would often, very quietly, help a contractor or anyone else if he saw that they were struggling.”

Many years ago we needed a stationary shaper for our shop. There was one in the E.C. Cottle shop that was never used; it had a thick coating of dust and was piled high with Playboy and Penthouse. I asked Ed if he wanted to sell it.

“Sure,” he said. “We never use it.”

“How much do you want for it?” I asked.

“Oh I don’t know,” he replied, “Just put the magazines on the floor, take the shaper, and we’ll figure it out later.”

We moved the shaper to our shop. And for years after that, whenever I saw him, I’d say, “Hey Ed, we need to settle up for that shaper, remember?”

He’d mutter something and never answer the question. One time he said, “Oh forget it, we’re square.”

It became a refrain. Whenever I saw him, I’d say “when are we gonna settle up on that shaper?”

He’d chuckle and say, “We’re square.”

South Mountain still uses the shaper today.

My friend Richard Greene told me, at Ed’s internment, that the last time he’d had a laugh with Ed was at the opening of our new shop 20 years ago. The two were looking at all the beautifully crafted woodwork made from reclaimed lumber, full of nail holes and defects. Ed leaned over to Richard, grinning, and said, “Where I come from we throw that stuff away.”

Where Ed came from business was done on a handshake, loyalty was a virtue, and there was nothing but the truth. That’s good business, in my view. He was a good man.

The Amicus Cooperative – Stronger Together

South Mountain is proud – and lucky – to be one of the co-owners of the Amicus Cooperative, a collection of 50 of the most progressive solar companies in the U.S.. Amicus exists to support smaller regional solar companies by leveraging national scale purchasing power, sharing best business practices, and combining collective brainpower. My colleague Rob Meyers, who manages our Energy Services division, never misses their semi-annual gatherings. I have gone twice, once in 2015 in Phoenix and once this year in Denver.

It is not an overstatement to say that both times the Amicus group took my breath away. The intelligence, the heart and soul, the culture of civility, humility, humor, inquiry, fellowship, and friendship at these gatherings are extraordinary.

We’re happy to be able to share this piece about Amicus written by Sarah Stranahan, a senior editorial associate at The Democracy Collaborative and a leading member of its Fifty by Fifty employee ownership team.

The Democracy Collaborative is another remarkable organization which does cutting edge research and “works to carry out a vision of a new economic system where shared ownership and control creates more equitable and inclusive outcomes, fosters ecological sustainability, and promotes flourishing democratic and community life.”

Good stuff all around. These are important below-the-radar antidotes to the sorry, sleazy, sadistic mess of national politics today. – JA


Amicus Solar Purchasing Coop Spreads Employee Ownership
Achieving Scale while Maintaining Local Impact

By Sarah Stranahan

Amicus Solar is one of more than 250 purchasing cooperatives in the US, including such well-known brands as Ace Hardware and Best Western Motels. By forming a large national cooperative, small producers or retailers increase their purchasing power and access to project financing, while remaining independently owned and operated. An additional benefit, it turns out, is that a purchasing co-op can be a particularly effective means of spreading employee ownership.

Amicus Solar was founded in 2011 by six independent solar companies, including employee-owned cooperative and certified B Corp Namaste Solar and South Mountain Company. Amicus Solar is led by cooperative veteran and former Namaste Solar employee-owner, Stephen Irvin, who serves as its president. Today Amicus includes 48 local and regional solar photovoltaic (PV) installers and developers who openly share and collaborate on a wide range of business issues, from operational efficiencies to sales and marketing strategies.

Similar to Best Western and Ace, Amicus is democratically owned by its members, 40 percent of which are B Corps and a growing number of which are employee owned. With five Amicus members having joined the cooperative as employee-owned companies, Amicus has made a conscious effort to educate its members about worker ownership. As a result, five member businesses (ReVision Energy, Technicians for Sustainability, SunBug Solar, Positive Energy, and Sunlight Solar) have converted — and another five are considering converting — to either become worker coops or employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). The purchasing co-op has become a means of “industry contagion” — a way of rapidly spreading employee ownership.

Staying Local While Creating a Competitive Advantage

Since the Great Recession, there has been an increased interest in localism (also called subsidiarity) — the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest practical level or closest to where they will have their effect — because small, local mission-driven businesses have three key advantages for nurturing a more democratic and sustainable economy:
They invest locally, capturing and multiplying value, particularly when they sell locally produced goods;
They are more successful at participatory management because it is easier to cultivate personal trust and accountability in small-scale, local organizations; and
They are more likely to care about and be accountable to their communities in terms of environmental health, social equity, cultural vitality, and good governance.
Localism, however, faces challenges when it comes to economies of scale, which can increase efficiency and reduce the costs of production. Scale is also required to meet the needs of densely populated urban centers, where a larger and larger portion of the world’s population lives.

Small solar installers have faced intense competition from large national companies such as SolarCity (recently acquired by Tesla), SunRun, and SunPower. By coming together in a purchasing co-op, the relatively small businesses that own Amicus Solar have leveled the playing field with their larger competitors, particularly in terms of purchasing power, while maintaining the advantages of staying local.

New Ventures

In addition to taking advantage of cost and marketing efficiencies, Amicus members share best practices and develop joint strategies to advance their common goals. For example, in 2016 Amicus won a $358,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to found a new cooperative to provide high-quality operations and maintenance (O&M) support to large-scale solar installations. Today Amicus O&M Cooperative includes 20 member organizations that have set collective operations and management standards to ensure that commercial and utility-scale solar PV systems fulfill their performance expectations over the long term. Amicus O&M Cooperative is being led by another cooperative veteran and former Namaste Solar employee-owner, Amanda Bybee.

In 2017, Amicus members helped found the Clean Energy Credit Union (CECU), which received the first federal charter for a new credit union in Colorado in 31 years. CECU’s mission is to promote clean energy, environmental stewardship and cooperative enterprises through the financial services it offers its members. Using the federally insured deposits of its members, the credit union provides consumer loans to reduce the cost of clean-energy products and services. “We envision a world where everyone can participate in the clean-energy movement,” said board chairman Blake Jones, co-founder of Boulder-based Namaste Solar. This new federally chartered credit union will make it easier for people to both invest in and use clean energy in order to help protect our environment and improve our economy.”

Jones is leading another venture in this growing ecosystem called Kachuwa Impact Fund, which has provided capital in support of multiple Amicus members. Kachuwa’s mission is two-fold:
(1) To provide privately held “impact companies” with mission-aligned, long-term, and non-controlling capital; and
(2) To provide “impact investors” with diversified, impact investment opportunities outside of Wall Street.
Kachuwa’s multiple “impact themes” include cooperatives, certified B Corps, and companies that are owned by employees, women, or people of color. Kachuwa itself is aiming to convert to an investment cooperative structure in 2019 and, among other things, to increase its support for companies converting to employee ownership both within the Amicus ecosystem and beyond. Improving access to values-aligned capital is a critically important part to growing the cooperative and employee ownership movements.

Democratic Governance

According to Irvin, president of Amicus, Namaste Solar has had powerful influence on the culture of the purchasing coop and its members. It was at Namaste Solar that Irvin learned about cooperatives, democratic processes and governance, and the importance of facilitating a process to reach consensus. Like Namaste Solar, he says, Amicus uses an open-book management policy to keep everyone fully informed and a committee structure to facilitate decision making.

Irvin told Solar Pro magazine in 2014, “[Open-book management] is important since the members are equal owners. Consensus building can take time — but once we’ve come to a decision, you see more engagement and commitment from everyone.”
Democratic governance has not only contributed to the purchasing co-op’s success, but has shown members that ownership, mission, governance, and culture matter. Today Amicus Solar is an important driver of employee ownership across an entire industry.

The Ultimate Customer Service

There’s a saying that “Customer service is an attitude, not a department.” The story that follows might be a perfect illustration of those wise words.

In 2009, as part of a renovation project, we re-built 2000 square feet of wood deck surrounding three sides of a house near the water. To frame the deck we used a highly anticipated, well-regarded (by respected sources) new lumber product called TimberSIL. Touted as pressure treated lumber without the chemicals, it was infused with a baked-in, supposedly rot-resistant glass barrier. The material was guaranteed to last for 40 years, and contained no residual chemicals so that when the wood reached the end of its useful life, it could be chipped up and used as mulch. The TimberSIL slogan was “Locked in for life”. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a pathetically short life.

Fortunately the material was so problematic to work with that we never used it again. Unfortunately, that one time we did use it was for a very large job. This year it failed, miserably. From a serviceable deck to a major hazard in no time flat. We discovered that there have been other major failures, most notably in the case of Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, which used it on houses they built in the post-Katrina 9th ward re-building, only to experience severe failures. Not surprisingly, the company is out of business and nowhere to be found.

We learned that that our liability insurance doesn’t cover this loss and that our client’s Homeowners’ coverage has a limitation for rot coverage that wouldn’t come anywhere near the cost of the new deck.

We felt that our clients deserved a new deck, but we also felt that they should participate in the replacement cost as they got eight years of service life and will now get a new deck. They agreed, but a very large chunk of the financial responsibility was on us.

I took Sandy Ray, the owner of Martha’s Vineyard Insurance (he sold it to a larger company five years ago but is still involved) out to see it. He said, “your liability insurance carrier would only cover if there was an incident and something or somebody were damaged.”

I said, “Look at this, Sandy, it’s an accident waiting to happen. Doesn’t the insurer want to avoid an accident?”

He said, “you know, John, it makes sense, but insurance companies are not known for their foresight. And there just isn’t any coverage.”

“I get it, Sandy,” I said, “but here’s the thing. Over the past four decades we have paid your company literally millions of dollars for insurance and never made a claim. Now we have a problem and we want help. There must be something you can do. I hope you’ll get creative and come up with something. I know you can do it!”

Three days later, he called and said he wanted to come talk to me. He said they can’t refund premiums or commissions, but, he said, “My son Matthew and I are going to do the dismantling of the deck for you.”

“You’re going to what?” I said.

“It’s something we can do to help,” replied Sandy.

It’s no exaggeration to say that he got about as creative as you can get – and then some! When he said he and Matt wanted to do the de-construction of the deck as a gesture of participation, I was startled. It was way more than a gesture! It was 100 hours of grueling work. Sandy, at the age of 73, worked throughout, long days. They did a beautiful job, they did it promptly, and they did it with great humor and plenty of pride.

I said to Sandy, “I’ve heard of good customer service, but this takes the cake!” We are grateful, impressed, and appreciative.

The new deck is complete. Ultimately, the cost has been equitably shared by all. Everyone’s feeling pretty good. Bad situation, sweet resolution.

I have no idea how much of this inferior product TimberSIL sold. There doesn’t appear to be much information available. I hope it wasn’t much.

It is not uncommon for us to be faced with evaluating new products that appear to be improvements over old products. We generally do so warily and carefully, with the understanding that when we choose to experiment there’s risk involved and that we may have to make good on failures that occur. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often. It’s heartbreaking when it does. In this case it was a good example of plain old bad judgment. But when you receive “the ultimate customer service “ it sure does take the sting out of it!

It’s looking a bit better now, isn’t it?

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.