Creating a Profitable New Venture

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at the Chicago GSB to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Bill Strickland, who is the president and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, an organization that has created a model of art education, training, and, most importantly, hope. In the course of his remarkable journey, he has won a MacArthur “genius grant,” served as the focus of a case study for Harvard Business School more than a couple of times, and lectured at Harvard Business School. We're going to have to bring you here, Bill, at some point.

Bill Strickland: I'd love to do it.

Anita Brick: And served on the board of the National Endowment for the Arts. He also founded the MCG Jazz Series, the longest-running and most successful jazz label in America, which has produced over 1,200 concerts and garnered four Grammys.

Bill, thank you so much. You know, we had a lot of interest and lots of students and alums submitted questions. And your book is amazing. It is really an amazing, amazing book. Tell us a little bit about Manchester Bidwell.

Bill Strickland: Manchester Bidwell is an organization that is principally located within the context of the inner city of Pittsburgh. On the Bidwell side, we service former steelworkers, welfare mothers, single parents, people who have been effectively eliminated from the economic life of the community for one reason or another. The other is Manchester, which serves about 500 at-risk kids from the Pittsburgh Public School System, grades K through 12.

And we use arts as the strategy to work with these kids to get them to finish school and, in many cases, to go on to undergraduate education pretty successfully. So Bidwell is vocational education, Manchester's the arts, and Manchester created the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, MCG Jazz label, which has been presenting jazz concerts since 1986, starting with guys like Dizzy Gillespie.

Anita Brick: Wow. This is a very interesting hybrid. The model is sort of a nonprofit, for-profit hybrid. Why did you create it that way?

Bill Strickland: Well, because it gave us a larger platform to have a conversation. I think you have to have a diversified revenue strategy in today's very complicated world. Two, I don't think it's entirely a charitable model. I think that the message here is that we have the capacity to generate revenue and earn our way, in addition to doing philanthropic and charitable things with the constituent population with whom we work—but it also allows you to have interesting conversations with companies like Bayer Chemical Company, for example, where we train technicians for them, but also they help support our jazz label by donating the polycarbonate, which is the actual plastic that goes into CDs.

So by creating this dual strategic opportunity, it … two plus two in this case ends up equalling 9 or 10. And it's sort of that point of view and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives the center that is one of the reasons why it's considered so innovative.

Anita Brick: From the experience that you've built in this primarily nonprofit—but obviously with this for-profit arm—what can be learned from people on this call who may be looking at a for-profit venture, but what can they learn from your experience?

Bill Strickland: There's not that much difference between for-profit and not-for-profit from the operational standpoint. The income and the tax consequences are obviously very different, but the way you run the place, I think, is very similar. And at the core of it is innovation and creativity, having a good operating platform to work with your staff, creating a cultural environment within the organization that listens to people, responds to the needs, makes adjustments accordingly, and celebrates people for bringing innovation and new ideas to the conversation.

So that's a very entrepreneurial approach, not a bureaucratic approach. And I believe that that's really fundamental, particularly with organizations that are just starting out.

Anita Brick: Obviously, this is not a one-man show. It's not the Bill Strickland show.

Bill Strickland: No, fortunately.

Anita Brick: How do you propagate your passion throughout the organization? Because we've heard, especially in job training kinds of environments, it can be really depressing and …

Bill Strickland: It is depressing, generally, as an industry.

Anita Brick: Why are you different and how do you disseminate that passion and really infuse the whole environment and the people in there with that passion so …

Bill Strickland: Well, you hire good people and get out of their way. Let them do what you hired them to do. So I find innovative people—nowadays, it's no trouble finding them because they all want to work there because they've heard about the place. It's created a very nurturing environment that celebrates the faculty as much as the staff—I mean, the students—and you allow them to play out their hand in terms of the ideas that captivate them. And many times, those ideas take you into new territory even beyond your initial idea.

Anita Brick: OK, so give me an example. I mean, OK, let me not be coy. Tell us about how the whole label got started and even the concert series got started.

Bill Strickland: Well, I like jazz and I knew a little bit about the music, and I said to myself, if I ever have a chance to build a school, I'm going to include a music hall so we can listen to this music in an environment that truly celebrates it for what it is, and allow these extraordinary performers to be in an environment where they don't have to fight with cash registers and people smoking and drinking and stuff, but people who came to hear the music because it deserves it.

That was the genesis behind building the music hall when we built the building.

Anita Brick: And how did the leadership of that part of your organization emerge?

Bill Strickland: I got lucky, as I often do, because a fellow named Marty Ashby showed up at the front door after I'd built the hall, and he was a jazz musician, was working for the symphony at the time, was also very good on booking and telemarketing, and he saw the center and said, I want to work for you. So I basically gave him the key to the music hall and said, have a good life.

And he's been there 22 years. He knew all the jazz musicians. He's recruited them. We've had concert series; we built a recording facility. We've recorded and won Grammys. So by getting Marty on board, he brought a wealth of industry experience and a lot of context to the conversation, but that's frequently how the enterprise actually operates. We hire these very innovative people who have heard about us, give them a portfolio, then let them go play it out.

Anita Brick: How do you make sure you have the right array of functional expertise, so that you make sure that … it's great to have all this innovation, but you also need to keep the doors open. How do you make sure that you have the right kind of mix of experience and skills?

Bill Strickland: Well, my job is to keep the doors open. That is, I do a lot of the corporate fundraising, a lot of the private foundation fundraising, and a lot of the government relations work. And I have a very capable team. A CEO, Jesse Fife, and a financial person, Carole Bailey, who really run the day-to-day operation to make sure that the lights are on and the staff gets paid, you know, the carpet gets cleaned and so forth.

So they're very, very good operations people. I also have a very good board of directors that are made up of corporate directors that really understand the fiduciary responsibilities of running an enterprise of this kind, and they're very bright and they're good at what they do. So our audits are good, our financial management is good, our development office is tracking perfectly, and so forth.

So we have good business fundamentals associated with the organization.

Anita Brick: How do you make sure when you are recruiting people or when you're screening them or interviewing them—and also when you're looking for strategic partners, like you had mentioned, Sony and Bayer—how do you make sure that you find people who think, behave and have the same values as you and as the organization?

Bill Strickland: In the companies we're working with?

Anita Brick: In the companies you're working with, but also when you're hiring people?

Bill Strickland: Well, it's called experience. I've been around this stuff for 30 years, and even I am capable of learning from my mistakes. And over the course of time, you develop a feeling for people. The way they answer questions, the way they look at you, the way they appear, their enthusiasm or the lack thereof. And you sort of get a gut feeling about certain people.

And I've gotten pretty good at this over the years through a lot of trial and error. But also on the corporate side, you get people that are very excited about your work and want to help you. They want to be a part of your organization. They like the fact that it's not bureaucratic; it's fresh air. And you'd be surprised at the number of people who are working in corporate situations and who don't want to be there.

Anita Brick: Oh yeah.

Bill Strickland: Who would just love to be able to contribute something as a part of their day's work. Well, I've been very, very blessed in arranging and organizing a whole group of those people, almost in every aspect of what it is that we do.

Anita Brick: You had mentioned that you learned from experience. What were some early, perhaps, missteps that you kind of made either at Manchester Bidwell or even prior to that at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild that you had to turn around?

Bill Strickland: One was when we built our—what is now an older building, but it was a new building 20 years ago. We built it around the building trades because that was the vocational education program for Bidwell. I built this building. I had carpentry, bricklaying, and electrical wiring, and all of a sudden the industry collapsed and nobody was hiring construction people.

So here I am with this brand new facility, well equipped, well staffed, with no place to go because the people that we were training had no employment opportunities. So I had to dig up brand new concrete and reposition the organization to do different kinds of training and different kinds of services. Had I not done that, this conversation probably would not be happening because I would effectively be out of business.

Anita Brick: How did you have the inner wherewithal to not succumb to doubt?

Bill Strickland: Because I was determined that this organization was going to survive and that as the CEO, unfortunately, sometimes you have all the tough decisions to make on your own, and I had to make those decisions. And there were people that I laid off who were friends of mine for years. But had I not done that, the organization would not have thrived, it would not have grown, and we would not be having any of the conversation that we're having now, because we probably would have been out of business.

That was a very painful and very difficult decision, but one that was absolutely essential to repositioning the organization. It's the same thing that a good company does. You know, when the market's down or the product is not being accepted in the marketplace, their earnings are down, their staff getting a little stale … they have to reenergize and redeploy the strategy in the company. And nonprofits don't get a free pass just because we're helping people. You got to be also run like a business.

Anita Brick: So at that point, when things were really down—in the book, you talk about this a little bit. Why didn't you just choose a more conventional path? Why not just …

Bill Strickland: I don't know how to live like that. That's the real answer.

Anita Brick: OK. So you .. it doesn't sound like you chose entrepreneurship. It sounds like it chose you.

Bill Strickland: Oh, yeah. Sure. No question. I didn't realize I was an entrepreneur till I showed up at Harvard Business School ...

Anita Brick: Oh, OK.

Bill Strickland: to give the talk, and they said, you're an entrepreneur. I said, well, that's great. What's that? They said, well, that's what you are. So it's been a great relationship with Harvard over the years, a couple of cases have come out of it and so on. But I was following the things that made sense to me: left foot in front of right; to try to speak to life experience in the community in a way that would be useful and helpful and relevant.

To do it honestly, to do it in a forthright way, and to try to get a return on investment, outcomes that you could measure, you could feel, you could feel good about, and so on.

Anita Brick: One of the Weekend students asked the question about one of these challenging times. And the question is, based on your experience with the Denali Initiative, what would you say works and doesn't work when it comes to teaching entrepreneurial skills?

Bill Strickland: The thing that fundamentally did not work was you have to have people who have these skills inside of them to begin with. It's very difficult to teach them if it's not there in some form.

Anita Brick: And what does that mean?

Bill Strickland: It means that you have to sift through a lot of sand to find the gold nugget, and every community's got them. But you have to get into a reconnaissance process in order to find them. These left brain, right brained, left brain, right brain types who do exist in communities, you know, some of them are going to business school, some of them aren't.

But they are a certain kind of a personality type that really are able to integrate very complex ideas and live out a business strategy that really makes sense within the context of the community, where you find them. So we learned a lot from the Denali Initiative because we did not pick those people based on that. We picked the fact that they had created organizations in the past and survived to tell the story, but we … didn't look at the entrepreneurial side of their enterprise.

That was what we hoped to teach them, and we learned some important lessons from that process. It's still possible to do it, but it takes an awful lot longer than we had originally anticipated.

Anita Brick: So let's say that someone is listening and they want to self-reflect and really see, do I have those skills inherently? So what kinds of questions should they ask themselves?

Bill Strickland: Fundamentally, they've got to ask themselves, what is it about their life up to this point that has been successful that they find satisfying? Two, what are they most passionate about? What are the things that really help you make sense out of your day, and what you imagine would help you make sense out of your future? How do you really want to earn a living?

Not what you're supposed to say, but what you really want to say. Tell yourself the truth, and then go find somebody—a third party that doesn't have a vested interest in telling you everything you want to hear—and get them to evaluate your story. Go to a local business school or graduate business program that has faculty willing to work with you.

Go to another successful organization that has a CEO that you admire, and spend a little time with those people to really try to see if you can develop a better sense of what you're trying to do.

Anita Brick: What if you don't have the passion? One of our Executive MBA students from the North American program said, I don't feel passion right now. How do I find it?

Bill Strickland: You find passion by rediscovering yourself. Everybody has got passion. Some people cover it up more successfully than others, but they have it. And it really becomes a question of putting yourself in a position where you have some time to contemplate, to think a little more clearly, take yourself outside of your stress environment—you know, go sit on the beach kind of thing—but also to put yourself in a place where you can be exposed to people that you admire from a distance, people that you've heard speak, you'd like to meet; you know, read books like Bill Strickland's, you know, it's very devoted to that sort of idea. But acquire the experiences in order to see if you can rekindle what I think is always there in people. It just gets covered up.

Anita Brick: Got it. You know, you mentioned your story, and I know in your book you say you talk about how you never make a pitch. You always tell a story. Is there any time where a story that approach hasn't worked for you?

Bill Strickland: You know, the stories have always worked. I may not have gotten everything I asked for, but the stories have always worked. Most people—I'd say these days, the vast majority of people I meet are really encouraging to the work I do, who really say, you know, this is fresh air, this is good stuff. Keep doing what you're doing. I want to join you. I'd like to do it myself. That's been pretty amazing to see.

Anita Brick: How have you had the endurance and durability? I mean, this is … you've been doing this in some form or another since the late ’60s. How have you not succumbed to overwhelming negativity at some point?

Bill Strickland: Because I believe in the vision. Apparently I'm a visionary, whatever that is. But apparently I'm one and I am driven by the pictures that are in my head, but also by the accomplishments I see around me. I'm very thrilled to be able to save a life. It actually matters to me. I feel better because I've actually pulled a kid out of the fire, and that kid’s going to college, and now he's back with a degree and he's got a family and he's got kids, and that human being is standing there because of something that I did.

You know, to be in the concert hall full of people. And Ahmad Jamal is playing and it's a standing ovation, and to realize that that experience is there because you put it there is huge. Or the opportunity to meet really extraordinary people like you. And you say to yourself, you know, man, you're living a good life because you're meeting creative people who are energized by what you do.

They energize you. And this is what you do for a living every day. And you're able to take those opportunities and apply them to real-life situations. That's pretty special. And then, you know, to be able to lecture at the Harvard Business School, to be a double presidential appointee, to have a book, to be able to give speeches around the world; to sit and have a bowl of soup with the Dalai Lama, which I did in Austria last year …

Those are all things that tell me that the work I'm doing has real value. I mean, not sort of value, but real value. And now we're beginning to replicate the idea of this center around the country and eventually around the world. Literally. Three open: Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, San Francisco; five in planning: New Haven, Columbus, Cleveland, Philadelphia, basically, Charlotte, Austin: and four countries are talking about business centers: Israel, Ireland, Costa Rica, and Mexico. And possibly Nova Scotia.

Anita Brick: Well it's awesome. What do you wish you would have known?

Bill Strickland: I wish I would have known that the future is in your hands. I didn't understand that until recently, because if I had known that, I would have acted more confidently early on. But, you know, hindsight's 20/20 and you are what you are, and you did what you did. And I'm here and I'm a lot smarter as a result of the experiences and a lot more confident that we can help others do the same thing.

Anita Brick: That's very cool. So just a couple of final questions. One person asked, let's say you are contemplating entrepreneurship, from an alum. How do you balance your focus, your dedication to your current responsibilities and to the entrepreneurial venture at the same time?

Bill Strickland: Well, if you get consumed by your vision, that's the wrong vision. You've got to start there. You have to survive the experience that you've created for yourself. You have to make sure that you maintain your health, both physical and mental. You can't become so preoccupied with your vision that you forget to eat breakfast, right? It's really important to be able to nurture and sustain your relationships.

Significant other, wife or husband, kids, and so forth. Because at the end of the day, that's really ultimately one of the important measures of your success is how's your family doing? Other is to get into a field that you really dig, that you like. Don't try to go into a field that you don't like because you're not going to be very good at it.

Do something that really lines up with your passion that you would be passionate about whether you made a million dollars or 15 cents, but you'd still do it. I'm doing this work, as you can tell, probably, because I believe in it. I can speak about it at 2:00 in the morning without rehearsal. Whatever field of enterprise you get into, you got to feel it at that level.

I know guys like Howard Schultz at Starbucks. Howard believes in coffee, man. The man talks coffee; he believes in the environment, he believes in the product. I'm familiar with companies like Southwest Airlines. You meet any of their people, they're enthusiastic about the company. They live and breathe it. They believe in it.

All the innovative companies—Steelcase comes to mind. The furniture company is both a product and an attitude about how to do business. eBay is another one. You know, they're all characterized by these visionaries, these entrepreneurs who really get it, who really understand that the world is important and their company is important, that the two are connected to each other.

Anita Brick: Well, you've been doing this a long time.

Bill Strickland: A long time.

Anita Brick: If you think about this, you think about from the beginning, in the late ’60s, what do you consider to be your greatest victory?

Bill Strickland: Building a center and an experience that is now independent of me. For example, a couple of months ago, I walked into the center and one of the kids turned to me and said, can I help you? I said, oh, I was with the tour group, I got lost. Nice place you got here, kid. The point of the story being, I'm no longer directly connected with everybody that comes there that's a beneficiary. That's a huge accomplishment-—that they've now internalized values in the process of the center. That's incredible.

Anita Brick: Now that's … and that's usually where things will die. So that's really great.

Bill Strickland: Oh I got a couple of kids I really like, I got a wife I like.

Anita Brick: This is good.

Bill Strickland: So I got, you know, some fundamentals in place too. So I'm not some guy sitting up there in a monastery, you know, with a vision of the world that’s unable to live in it. You got to live it, not just preach it.

Anita Brick: Great way to end. If anyone would like to …. Or obviously, there's a chapter of the book that you can download on the site. If you want to read more about Manchester Bidwell, you can go to www.ManchesterBidwell.org. And Bill, I took one of your … took a quote from page 152 of the book. It's up on my bulletin board. I'll end with it. You said, “So instead of giving up on my dream or scaling back my aspirations, I made the dream bigger.” And I think that sums up your entire life.

Bill Strickland: Man, is that the truth? This has been fabulous. What a nice way to spend a morning.

Anita Brick: Thank you so much and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at the Chicago GSB. Keep advancing.