People who have the courage to discard years and even decades of bad business habits deserve applause.
When PM editor Steve Smith asked me to write about my heroes for the January 2000 issue, naturally my first thoughts wandered into the distant past. As with most of you, I thought about my parents, favorite teachers, business mentors and others who had a profound influence on my life. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to view as "heroes" people not from my youth, but from a more recent era. First, a little background.
As I've indicated in a few recent columns, nothing has given me more pleasure in my later years than traveling the country teaching "Business of Contracting" seminars. I feel that I am filling a huge gap in knowledge and giving something back to an industry that has been so good to me. The thousands of students who have attended my programs are highly trained and skilled mechanics, but typically come to class woefully ignorant of what it takes to run a profitable business. Fewer than one out of 10 know the correct arithmetic about how to calculate a selling price based on their firms' direct costs, overhead and desired level of profit. For the most part, they have nowhere else to learn it. Even their accountants, who should know better, tend to tell them to charge what everyone else in the market is charging, or they'll go out of business.