October 10, 2024

Building the Team: Bill Courtney Offers Leadership Lessons on the Field and in Business

Bill Courtney: Lance Murphey for The New York Times Bill Courtney: “The great thing about all of this is that anybody can do it.”

Building the Team

Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.

A couple of weeks ago, I took to Twitter with the following imperative: “If you haven’t seen the film Undefeated, you should asap. @IamCoachBill is a real #leader who draws out the true #character of his players.”

I tweeted this message after watching “Undefeated,” which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2011. The inspirational film takes place in Memphis and follows Bill Courtney and his Manassas Tigers high school football team through their 2009 season. It is a compelling human interest story — a school based in an impoverished part of Tennessee, where the average median income is less than $10,000, more than 70 percent of the homes don’t have a working car, and only 6 percent of the homes have a college graduate.

It is a great sports story about a football team that in the 10 years leading up to 2003 had accumulated a record of 5 wins and 95 losses and just six years later was casting an eye toward its first playoff appearance. Most important for readers of this blog, it is an extraordinary story of leadership.

Coaching football isn’t Mr. Courtney’s only accomplishment. He is a husband – celebrating his 22nd wedding anniversary this December — a father of four, and a successful entrepreneur. He started his lumber company, Classic American Hardwoods, out of his living room in 2001. Today, it employs 120 people and expects sales of approximately $40 million in 2013.

Mr. Courtney responded to my tweet. We exchanged e-mails and then had the chance to chat by phone. Here’s what I learned about his approach to building and leading a team.

Recruiting

In the film, you were shown recruiting folks at school to join the team. How did you approach recruiting?

I was always recruiting. I would be recruiting all day, every day with a smile and a pat on the back for students as they walked by in the school. If you walk in the hallways, recruiting kids, and they’ve already heard from their peers that you love the heck out of your team and help to get the best out of them, word gets around. All it takes is a sincere reaching out.

I also recruited great coaches to be on my staff. It wasn’t just me. I had nine men on my coaching staff, many of which had played big time college football. All of these guys were volunteers, but they bought into the vision of the football team and the vision for what we could do for the kids.

Practicing

What was your philosophy on practicing and training?

Kids at Manassas worked hard. I approached practice as key to our success and ran it like I run my business: coaches for different positions, organized, on time, and on schedule. The point of practice was to take the natural raw ability that we had recruited onto the team, and then teach them to be good at the fundamentals of the game – both general skills and specific positions.

Motivating

How did you get your team to work so hard?

By working hard. I really believe that. If you’re going to build an organization – a sports team, a business, or any organization, you have to figure out how to get the team members to work hard. At Manassas, the kids knew that I was running my own business, and had a family and my own kids at home, but they saw me working hard every day, volunteering at the school to be their coach. The kids on the team knew that I cared about them and worked hard for them, and as a result, they worked hard for me.

Data-driven decisions versus intuition

In the movie, you are shown watching a lot of game film, using data to inform your strategy. Yet, in one game, you made a spur-of-the-moment decision to put a different player, Chavis, in on defense. He was clearly a talented athlete, but he had never played the position before. How do you balance between data-driven decisions and intuition?

We do that every day in business. We’ve got systems, policies and procedures in place to make decisions based on information that we have gathered, but sometimes you have to make decisions that aren’t in the playbook. You go in with one plan, but you better have backup plans and instinct. The truth is, you’re not risking much when you make a decision with instinct, because what was currently happening wasn’t working. It also comes down to knowing the talent on your team. Players win games, not coaches. I knew Chavis, and I knew he would do what I asked him to do, and that he would win the game for us. Talent would prevail.

Doing something meaningful

One of the most moving parts of the film was when you arranged a sponsor for Money, one of the seniors on the team, so that his entire college bill would be paid. How did you think about doing things that would make such a big impact on the lives of these students?

When I first went to Manassas, long before the cameras were there, I went there to coach football. After a year, it became obvious that there was so much more to do than coach. As time wore on, and as the relationships became deeper, we recognized the opportunity to make a positive impact on kids’ lives.

Mr. Courtney stopped coaching at Manassas so he could spend more time with his family and at his company. He applied the same leadership skills to Classic American Hardwoods that he did to football, and his business has thrived. He had started the company after spending four years at another lumber company, where he rose to become executive vice president of sales. He realized, however, that he needed to start his own business.

Why do you think your company was a success?

Honestly, I tell everybody this, the exact same fundamentals that you use to build a football team are the very same things that enable you to have success in business:

  1. Act with character and integrity.
  2. Out-work the competition.
  3. Understand that sometimes you are going to get knocked down and just get back up.
  4. It’s not whether or not you make mistakes – you will – it’s how you handle them.
  5. Surround yourself with like-minded, hard-working people. Experience doesn’t matter. Character and hard work matters.
  6. Treat people well. Give them the help, tools and training that they need. Then get out of their way and let them grow.

Your business success is even more amazing in the context of raising a family of four and coaching the Manassas team at the same time. How were you able to do it all?

I know I’m repeating myself, but I cannot emphasize enough how important hard work is. In 2003, when the company was only two years old, and I started coaching the Manassas team, my schedule looked like this:

5 a.m.: at the office
2:45 p.m.: leave for practice
3-5:30: practice at Manassas
5:30: leave to attend my kids’ practice
6:30-8:30: kids’ practice
9:00: dinner
11:00: go to bed

Do it all again the next day. There’s no silver bullet. It is hard work. The great thing about all of this is that anybody can do it. To achieve success in America, you don’t need to be a Rhodes scholar or have a Harvard degree, great connections, or tons of money. You just have to be willing to work really, really hard. Isn’t that great?

Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/bill-courtney-offers-leadership-lessons-on-the-field-and-in-business/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Thinking Entrepreneur: An Entrepreneur Reviews What Worked and What Didn’t in 2011

Thinking Entrepreneur

An owner’s dispatches from the front lines.

The beginning of the year is a great time for reflection, revelation, resolution and even a little celebration. We did do some things right last year, and the results are starting to show. I also did some things wrong, which I intend to rectify in the near future. Move out of the way, 2011.

We hired about 10 new people last year. Nine have worked out extremely well. One quit for “a better opportunity.” Nobody crashed and burned. These are very good results, especially compared with the old days. What changed? I am no longer leading the hiring process. I have a human resources professional who has been with me for several years.

She has come to fully understand the nuances of my different companies, and she continues to fine tune the process. Many small businesses are not big enough to warrant a full time H.R. person — mine wasn’t until I had about 100 employees — but there are a couple of things that anyone can do and that I believe can be game changers.

There is a huge difference between hiring from the best candidates who show up at your door and hiring from the best candidates in the market. Increasing the pool may require placing more ads, placing better written ads and being patient enough to wait for the right candidates. It may also require more creative recruiting strategies, like finding candidates who aren’t actively looking for a job through social media sites like LinkedIn. That’s the first step.

The second step is reflecting on who is doing the hiring. Is it you, the owner? From my experience and observation, the characteristics that make one a successful entrepreneur frequently make one a lousy hirer. Entrepreneurs love their companies and their missions. They talk about them too much, and they don’t listen enough; the candidate should be doing most of the talking. Owners also tend to be in a hurry. They have 10 other things they need to do, and it is very easy to rush through the process and rationalize choosing a less-than-stellar candidate.

If you believe that hiring is not your strong suit, have someone else do it. There are companies like A Hire Authority that offer contract recruiting services for large and small companies. They write and place the ads, do the interviewing and check the references. Miriam Berger, president, told me that she was seeing an increase in the hiring activity of large and small companies. Improving your hiring protocol will not only make your company better for your customers and other employees, it will make your life easier.

So what do I need to fix this year? This was another revelation. While I have five outside salespeople and five inside support people selling art and framing to businesses, I have been a retailer all of my life. I have learned that running and growing a successful outside sales staff requires a very different mentality and skill set.

Retailing is more of a “pull” business. You put everything together and customers come in and keep coming back. Outside sales requires managing the whole process, from prospecting to follow up. We have been using software to keep track of leads for more than 15 years. Our system was pretty progressive — when I bought it 15 years ago. Today, it is outdated and only does a small fraction of what new technology offers.

I have come to recognize (years late) that we need to get one of the new C.R.M. — customer-relation management — systems. We have been looking into salesforce.com. It operates in the cloud and has the ability to track business and customer work flow and to give real-time reports. It also helps build social interaction and community with a feature that looks and feels like Facebook. This will give us better communication among staff members, better ways to interact with customers and better controls to help our sales manager track what is going on. (All advice on choosing and implementing a C.R.M. system is welcome!)

This year, I have decided I’m not setting goals. Goals come and go. Instead, I want a plan. There were numerous things that I wanted to do over the last few years that I put off because of the soft market. It is time to play catch up. I know there are many companies in a similar position. It is this pent-up demand that is slowly increasing business for many of us. Welcome, 2012. Out with the old, in with the bold.

Jay Goltz owns five small businesses in Chicago.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b52e278149d1949af760adb0c3fe6d81