My career with varied companies and executive positions has given me the necessary life experience. In March of 2004, I was ready to leave the corporate world and spend more time with family including grandkids. At the same time, I wanted to leverage my life experience and business skills into a career I could enjoy at a later stage in life to help other business owners grow their businesses, creating even more jobs for others. ActionCOACH, whom I joined in 2004, has allowed me to do just that.
Having started with your crowning achievement, take me back to the beginning.
Born in Australia, I first came to the USA in 1962 for post-graduate work in finance and marketing as an East-West Center Fellow that has included studies at the University of Hawaii, Columbia and Harvard. My first business opportunity in America was a 2-year stint with the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Company, as a product manager—ketchup, of course! As agreed, I went with Heinz back to Australia—but also with my bride Madge, of Detroit, whom I met with her mom while vacationing in Mexico.
I bet there’s a story there.
Yes. We three shared a limo on tour in Mexico City. At its end, her mom said, “If you’re ever in the Detroit area, stop by.” My graduate research into the use of computers in the American steel industry brought me as close to Detroit as Gary (IN) and Toledo (OH), so I “stopped by.” If you say “stop by” to an Australian, we think you mean it.
After marriage, then what?
In Australia we raised four sons and I later went into business for myself. But the United States (NYC, Knoxville, Minneapolis and Madison) has been our home since 1978.
So what brought you back here?
After Heinz, my own ad agency became the fastest growing in Australia, it was bought by Doyle Dane Bernbach, a top ad agency worldwide. DDB transferred me to their headquarters in NYC, where I oversaw worldwide advertising for Polaroid and Atari, including spearheading the video game revolution in the early 1980’s.
You helped launch Pac-Man and Space Invaders! How do you top that?
After leaving DDB, I spent the next 20 years as CEO of five companies on behalf of venture capitalists and investment groups. I grew the company who had the Procter & Gamble and Coca Cola accounts, doing good, even getting $500K from Coca Cola to launch the charter school movement. Another company I ran and resold was into biotech and another into magazine publishing. By Year 2000, I arrived in Madison to work with Pleasant Rowland, the founder of the “American Girl” dolls. I helped grow her business vision and to take it international.
You mention venture capitalists. Is that different than angel investors?
Angel investors help start-ups, while venture capitalists help small businesses take their company to scale, even worldwide. A nurse who invents some therapeutic skin care product may lack the business skills to do any more than peddle her product to hospitals and nursing homes. We invest capital that takes this nurse’s 5-person company from $365K annual sales up to $14M. With such added value, we can then sell it to one who sustains that growth and keeps the 100 new jobs we created.
You are a business coach and an executive coach. What’s the difference?
A business coach mentors owners of smaller companies, while an executive coach works with the CEO and senior leadership (department managers or section leaders) of a larger company. With both groups I have a proprietary curriculum I lead them through. When it’s their company and they want changes, I can help. I don’t work with start-ups; the founder’s passion and beliefs about running things—all good and to be encouraged - often are to the exclusion of experienced ideas I might have. Only when they hit a certain growth and pain threshold, do I get called in. Also, I don’t work with companies run by honorary boards or committees; sole decision-makers are more successful to execute change.
What goes into that curriculum?
Five elements. Motivation & communication with staff, which is 80% of a CEO’s job. I work on roles, responsibilities and outcomes. I help the CEO with effective financial management, not an audit for compliance purposes, but using my trademarked model for consistently forecasting cash flow. Then we standardize systems and procedures to make them repeatable and self-generating. Lastly, I help CEOs recognize and optimize market opportunities that lay before them.
Inquiring minds want to know which sport do you like better: Cricket or baseball?
I have played both at the highest levels in Australia.
ActionCOACH is the world’s number one business coaching and executive coaching firm, with more than 1,000 offices in over 40 countries, coaching more than 15,000 businesses every week. To learn more, go to http://www.actioncoach.com/iainmacfarlane