Ladies and gentlemen, I’m honored to be here and particularly in the presence of Senator Bennett. I just mentioned to him as I came up here to the podium how much I admire him as an entrepreneur. And we’re men who like to go out and make differences. You’re doing a great job in Washington for us and we salute you for it sir, and recognize that you understand business.
An important part of our conversation today is we have a leader in politics who understands what business people are all about. So I’m pleased to be here and also to be in the presence of President Albrecht. President, it’s a treat for me always to come back to Utah State University. I love coming up here. There’s a great feeling on this campus and, this institution’s run by a great man. And I want all of you to know I recognize that about him.
I welcome all of you here. I recognize that most of you are business people. I hope you are, and for whatever your background might be. My purpose today is to impart to you some advice, some counsel, some of my experiences. I recognize that many of you could also come up here and do the same thing.
As I go through a couple of points that might be of interest to you, you might say, well I already knew that. And you probably next year will be invited to come up here and speak. So I don’t think I’m going to teach you something that’s revolutionary. I’m going to teach you some basic principals that I’ve learned over the course of my business life.
To do that, I’m going to tell you at the start that I’m just kind of an average guy. I’m going to just quickly take you through a couple of slides to kind of give you a little bit of a different background of what you would read in my biography because I want you to understand a little bit about who I am in terms of the way I think. And some of this will lead to then some of the key points that I want to share with you over the next couple of minutes of my presentation here this afternoon.
I was born in Ogden, Utah in 1945 so I am now 62 years of age. I have two brothers and I have two sisters. My dad was a pharmacist and having grown up in Ogden, a part of a middle class family, great noble dad who I love and a mom who I cherished. My mom and dad had really set for me the values that I have today and so I have to honor them.
I’m an Ogden guy. I grew up in that wonderful community. But I have relatives that went to Utah State University and I have the pleasure of traveling across the state of Utah visiting all kinds of communities. I enjoy what this state has to offer in terms of the good people here, the great communities are here. It’s an honor for me to be here in your presence no matter where you are across the state.
I went to Ogden High School and graduated back in 1963. I was a student body officer. I played on the basketball team. As a young man I worked in a lumber yard. I drove a lumber truck. I had to deliver lumber out to these homes that were being built. I focused my attention much more if you will in the social aspects of going to school. I just couldn’t wait to get to Ogden High every morning to visit my friends.
My wife is a counselor of students at Ogden High, recently retired from that. She had access to the grades in the vault. And we have a tradition in our home, that the children drive the car if they get straight A’s. One night she came home and she said, “We need to talk Alan.” I said, “What’s the problem?” “Dear,” she said, “I’ve been into the vault, I’ve seen your grades and you can’t drive the rest of your life.”
So I want you to know I’m just an average guy. I have since learned to get better grades. I have since learned to study. I think I’ve accomplished that.
Following, high school and a year at Weber State, I went on a mission to Guatemala. And I tell you that because this was one of the unique turning points of my life where I learned about people. People that live in poverty. Those who each day have to figure out where they’re going to find their next meal. I learned to speak Spanish. I learned to love these people.
That two-plus year experience for me drives how I think and feel about people. And so I want you to recognize that that had a tremendous impact on me.
When I went back to Weber State, I thought, well I’ll be a dentist, and then I thought, I’ll be an archaeologist; I was trying to find myself. I eventually settled on psychology because it was about people and that has served me well. I had some leadership experiences while I was at the university at that point in time, and then I met this beautiful girl here. She was a senior at Weber State.
She was the top psychology student. I was still trying to figure out what kind of student I was. But here was this beautiful young lady, who has a great singing voice. Today she sings in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. She’s just an outstanding, beautiful girl that I’ve been married to for 38 years, and she and I were married in this community on June 11th, 1969. So coming back to Logan kind of has significance for us. We’re grateful to be back in this area.
When we graduated from Weber State it was the height of the Vietnam War. We were seeing body bag counts on the news if you’ll recollect, those of you of that age. And I went to my draft board and I said, before I go to Vietnam is it okay if I serve my country by being a peace corps volunteer?
They gave me a one year deferment and lo and behold Jenny and I are sent as a young married couple of two weeks off to a place called Bahia, Brazil. And in Bahia, Brazil we were what they call leadership community developers. We worked with the little community of several thousand people to help them to advance their own community. We lived in an adobe hut and were paid 11 cents an hour.
When you come back off that experience, you’re grateful for a drink of water. You’re grateful for a bed to sleep in that doesn’t have fleas in it. My good wife was willing to sacrifice with me and go into that jungle and we learned a lot. Again that forms a lot about who we are.
I came back and both of us went off to BYU. I received my MBA down there. She received a Master’s in psychology and in counseling. And then I started kind of with Jenny now our family and so today we have six children with spouses and 13 grandchildren.
And again that is a very pivotal thing I would share with you about who I am and how I think. Because these people are the most important people in my life. Everything I do comes back to focus on these wonderful people. You need to understand that about me.
I’m kind of like Senator Bennett. I did find a job but I really was an entrepreneur. I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do in my life. But from the time I left graduate school even up until now, I’ve had seven jobs. And they were not a career path. I wasn’t in banking, I wasn’t in something that was as strategic in terms of a vertical. I wanted to just have all kinds of general management experiences.
One of those for a time, I was the president and general manager of Ballet West. I’d never even seen a ballet before when I became the president. And I was out raising money for these ballerinas and trying to keep this great art form going. So my life has been having all kinds of jobs, trying to advance and have stepping stones, experiences, and learning skills all the way along my life. Which I want you to understand it because I’m not a single focused individual.
I learned long ago like Senator Bennett that I’m really an entrepreneur at heart. That’s what I think about. Everyday I get up I’ve got another business in my mind and I’m going to tell you how I kind of control that particular addiction of mine. But I learned long ago that I was an entrepreneur, I was a businessman who wanted to start and grow things.
Now if you will, what I’m going to do is I’ve got seven little points that I wanted to discuss with you over the next couple of minutes about what I’ve learned over the course of 35 years of running businesses and operating businesses. So if you will please.
I want you to know that one of the ideas that I had was a company that I started out with that was called Temp Reps. And Temp Reps was an idea that came to me when I was president of a little company in Provo, Utah. I needed somebody to go out and educate the public about our new technology, about our new product. I couldn’t find anybody to do it.
And so I thought, well if there is nobody out there who can provide this service, perhaps I should start my own business. Temp Reps was the beginning of what today has become MarketStar Corporation. So back in 1988, I second mortgaged my house. I told my wife at age 43, that I had to do this. I had now the experience; I had enough scars on my back. If you took my shirt off you’d see all these errors and mistakes that I’d made. I told her I felt comfortable in moving forward to start this business and would she be willing to second mortgage our house?
Now I want you to know that’s when I had those six children, they were smaller. I recognized it as I went to the bank that in second mortgaging it as she did, that if this thing fell apart, we would lose the house, we would end up sleeping in a park and a tent. Now that isn’t something you want your wife to understand at the start of this enterprise. But that was the risk we were about to engage in by starting this particular company.
Four businesses before that were entrepreneurial companies that I had started that failed. And they had failed for good reasons. I had learned along the way what those failures now constituted so my hope was I would do a better job with this company I was now going to form which has become MarketStar Corporation.
So MarketStar today has become one of the largest companies in the state of Utah with several thousand employees. We have operational capabilities now in 100 countries around the world. This year we’ll do about five billion in sales on behalf of our customer base of 30 large technology companies.
So in effect, we are the sales company, the sales team for very large technology organizations, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Verizon, you name it. We have become the sales team that goes out and drives sales on behalf of large technology customers.
The reason I want you to understand about my background as a salesperson is most of my presentations I’m going to take you into has to do with selling your products and services.
So MarketStar started in 1988. We’re now going to begin our 19th year of operation is a company that does nothing but help technology companies move their products worldwide. And we’ve become world class at what we do. We know exactly how to do it and we’ve become very proficient. Enough so that large technology companies come to us and say, we need help to take our products to the medium to small business market space. And that is our expertise. That is what we do. So what I’m going to do with you now in just a moment is walk you through some of the experiences that I think are relevant to this meeting here today of what I’ve learned in operating not only the four that failed but this one that has now become a big success.
The last thing I would tell you on the slide as it’s mentioned here, is in 1999 I sold this business to a publicly traded organization called the Omnicom Group in New York City, a very large serial financial holding company that buys marketing and sales companies. And they own all the big advertising agencies, all the big public relations agencies, direct, promotion, you name it.
There are 170 different businesses that roll up under the brand Omnicom. MarketStar happens to be one of those particular brand out of those 170. I’ve been reporting in to the president of Omnicom now after the sale has been completed. Now, this last year, I’ve had my final earn out from this experience. I serve as chairman of the board of MarketStar and continue in some ways to help Omnicom buy other companies on a worldwide basis.
So I’ve grown something that was in the basement at high risk to now 19 years later with lots of experiences that now has become a global business and doing very successful. So I hope that gives you a background, a little bit of who I am, where I’m going. I want you to know I’m associated with the big business and at the same time I understand small business as well. Thank you.
So I’m going to walk you through what I wanted to tell you today. Basically seven key things that I would have you take away today. I hope these will be things that would be appropriate for whatever business you’re in, that makes sense to you as you go forward.
At the end of my presentation if you have questions relative to these particular points, I will address those and anything else that you might have in mind. So let me go to the first one if you would please.
I think the number one thing that I find in businesses that succeed and businesses that fail, those that succeed do so because they understand their customer. They just get it. They know exactly how these customers behave, they know how they buy, they know what they want. They understand everything about the nature of a customer.
So if you think about your own business and where you’re located or businesses that you support, the number one thing I would have you consider is how well you know your customers. Those that greatly succeed and greatly benefit and prosper do so because they really have this nailed down. And statistics show that those who really understand their customers spent half of their business life in the marketplace with customers.
So you might ask yourself in the course or your normal day, as you’re doing all the kinds of things that a business executive has to deal with, how much of that time is spent on talking and visiting with your customer base? I would dare say that most of us are not spending half of our time doing that.
But the reality is we need to be as close to that particular customer and that customer base, those prospects, those customers that we already have as anything we do, because it drives the business in terms of it being successful.
Now let, let me just tell you, in the course of these 18 years of MarketStar, how have I done that? We don’t have a lot of customers. We only really have 30. They’re big. Our strategy each year then is to visit with all 30 of those customers. We sit down with them, we come to them and say, we’re not coming to sell you anything, we’re coming just to listen, we’re coming to learn. We want you to tell us about your pain. We want you to tell us about your needs. We want you to tell us about trends, where you’re going.
We’ll actually spend several hours sitting with the senior executive to understand everything we can about that particular business. Then we can come back and strategize how we’re going to support them and help them with our products and services. May I suggest then to all of you here that you put potentially more time around that topic of getting to know who your customers are.
A short little story that I would tell you is that, in terms of MarketStar’s success and times when we’ve had bumpy roads is when we weren’t very connected to our customers. We got a little bit arrogant. We thought things were going to well for us. We thought that things would take care of themselves. And that’s when we face rejection from customers, that’s when they started to disappear and go somewhere else. So it’s something you must always keep on the top of your mind.
Now that we know who are customers are and we’re spending a lot of time with these customers, we’ve got to sell to them to survive as a business. And I’ll tell you a little story about one of my portfolio companies and a little entrepreneurial effort that I’m involved with. It’s a company called Elemental Business.
Elemental Business, we gave them about $50,000 to kind of start their operation and get going. And one day I was sitting with them and talking about how they were doing and they were bemoaning the fact that they had only sales of about $1,000 a month. So on an annual basis they’re only doing about $12,000 in sales and there are several employees. If you look at that financially they’re upside down. They’re not bringing enough revenue in to cover their payroll. They’re just suffering.
There they are sitting around the table and they’re talking about what’s going on, like what’s wrong with their product. And I said, “Fellas. If I were to give you the best counsel as an investor today, it would be that the three of you leave this building and don’t come back until all of you have sales today. You’ve got to get out of this building. You’ve got to go out and talk to those customers and you’ve got to go close sales. Fellows, don’t be sitting here waiting for the customers to come to you. You’ve got to go out and talk to your customers, get in front of them. You understand their needs if you’ve done your marketing right by knowing your customer. And you’ve got to go out and sell.”
My experience with business that are good and those that aren’t so good is that the leader of a business – let’s call it the CEO, the president, whoever it is – that person should be the number one salesperson. All too often the senior executive of the business likes to delegate that to somebody else. That person who’s an employee does not have necessarily the same drive or interest as the owner or CEO does or that person who is charged with going out and making the company successful.
May I suggest to you that you can delegate it, but you always own it? You need to make sure that you are the number one person if you are the head of your business who is responsible for the sales of your organization. And that means that you’ve got to plan that you’re out asking for the sales. You’re generating the revenue because you at the end of the day as the leader of your business are the one responsible to get the thing done.
Let me go onto the third item which is to take care of your customers. So if you see where I’m taking you along this path – we know our customer, we’re selling to that customer and you have to remember, ladies and gentlemen, after you’ve had the sale, you’re not done. You’ve got to continue to cultivate and work with that customer and do everything in your power to make sure that they’re happy.
Now I’ve got a couple of key points that I would have you make note of today that I think will be valuable to you. Most companies that don’t make it – they just don’t prosper, they don’t succeed – have failed to do what I call 100 percent execution. They’ve made the sale. Now they’ve got to deliver the product or the service and they don’t do it well.
They close the sale. They’ve got this document in front of them and they may even have the check. But they don’t execute now on what they said they were going to do for that customer. It’s a big failure for companies big and small. And so I would have you look at the following couple of things and write these down.
You must understand the tasks that are to satisfy your customer. What are they? What are the steps? What are the elements? And once you understand that you develop a process, a process that is written, a process that everybody in the business now sees, and everybody understands, and everybody follows. Once you have that process, you want to measure people to make sure that they are in compliance with the processes that you have outlined. And lastly then you want to manage that by rewarding and sanctioning those people who do and don’t take care of the process.
Everywhere I go as I look at businesses, and I looked, we looked, at 700 businesses last year to invest in. This seemed to me to be one of the major problems in why businesses don’t succeed. They do a very poor job of process and how they do their business.
The next thing is I would like to describe to you, the value that customers look at. If you’re going to take care of them they expect a value from you of what you’re delivering. I’ve got a formula for it and here’s what it is: value equals the price, plus the product, plus the support, plus the buying experience. Value equals price, product, support, and the buying experience.
Now all of you go out and buy things everyday in your life. How many of you have had a very bad buying experience where you thought you were going to get something and you didn’t? Raise your hand. You know that’s like a 100 percent of you in the room. What does that say about business? It says we’re doing a crummy job isn’t it?
So I’ll tell you in a minute of a story of an individual who had a car and needed to get it fixed. The dealership said we’ve got the product here, drive down and get your product, we’ll put it on your car. The individual drives to the dealership, it’s 30, 40 miles away, gets down to the dealership and lo and behold the product’s not there. So how does this customer feel?
Are they happy that they’ve driven to the dealership and the product’s not there? They’re not very happy. The managers says, sorry about that. Come back next week, we’ll take care of it. The individual goes back the following few days, he gets down there and the, the repair person that was supposed to put on the sophisticated part has taken the day off. Is this customer happy? This customer wants to ring the manager’s neck.
This customer’s going to be on the news at ten having tried to kill the manager of the car dealership. Why couldn’t the manager have called to say, the product’s not here, the fellow’s not here. The phone was never lifted on the other end to tell that customer the situation. At the end of the day the price was right, the product was applied, the support was appropriate but the buying experience was terrible.
In American business if you’re going to succeed and you want to keep your customers, you want to value them and you want to take care of them, you must make sure that this buying experience is an enjoyable one, it’s a good one. We tend to abuse one another when we buy and sell things don’t we? Good point.
Now let me if I can continue to move on here to the next one. I hope this slide will be valuable to you. So we, here we’ve got customers, we’re selling to them, we’re taking care of them, we’re valuing these. Now, we need employees to help us out. But I’d say the next big thing that I find with companies, those who make it and those that don’t, is that they are bad at hiring employees.
So let me give you the formula that I think will make sense to you around how you hire better employees in the future. I have plenty of experience of firing employees. Senator Bennett, I could never run for governor in the state of Utah because I’ve fired so many people, they’d never vote for me. It’s not their fault, it’s mine. Now let me tell you what should be done and I’m now doing it going into the future.
I call it the five C’s of hiring. If you do these you will be much more successful with your business. So what are the five? The first one is hire people who are competent. Competent means they match up with the job description. It’s really just that. They’re capable, they’re competent enough to do the job. And do you know what most people do?
That’s where they end. They’re done. They look at the resume, they look at the job description, they do an interview or two, they’re done. And they hire people just on the fact that they’re competent. That’s a start but there’s four others that should be done. Let me tell you what those are.
The second one is you want to hire people that are capable, they can grow with their job. As a matter of fact they can grow out of the job and be promoted. They can replace you. They’re very capable people. You need to know that they’re that.
The third thing is you want to hire people who are compatible. We talk about chemistry with people that are coming into your business that are going to get along with one another; people that have shared values; people that like to associate with one another. How many times in our lives do we hire somebody, at the end of the day we didn’t check that point out? We didn’t check out the chemistry. We didn’t check out the compatibility issue and they don’t fit.
It means you’ve trained them, you’ve educated them, now you’ve got to let them go. You’ve got to pay them severance. It’s a very costly thing when you don’t hire people that are compatible.
The fourth thing is you want to hire people who are committed. They’re going to stay with your business. They’re here for the long haul, they’re just not here as a temporary stepping off place until they find another job. And lastly, you want to hire people with character. That’s my fifth C, character. I mean they’re not characters, they are people with character. So they, they understand to be honest, to be trustworthy, that they have these kinds of intrinsic values inside of them so that you can trust these people. You don’t want to bring somebody into the business you can’t trust.
So I would have you go back to your businesses and in the future as you hire your next person, go through those five C’s, that they are competent, capable, compatible, committed, and they have character. You’ll find that you’ll be hiring wonderful employees who will do a great job for you.
The other thing I would recommend is, as we call it, a 360 degree background check. And here’s what I mean by that. You want to look at people around these five categories by, by talking to their last boss, to their peers that were equal to them and to their subordinates. And that’s the 360 degree circle I’m talking about.
You know what? Most employees do everything they can to get a good reputation going with their boss. They pretty well do a good job there. But how do they behave with their peers? People that they have to relate to. You’re going to get some real evidence and real good information by talking to their peers. You’re really going to get some good information by talking to their subordinates and the people they had to manage. Does that make sense to everybody?
If you ask those five questions around the hiring, around that circle of people, you’re going to really hire great people in your future. Let me go to the next slide then in terms of valuing the employees that you now have hired. This is all about basic building blocks of running a great business. And you must do everything in your power to take care and value these employees that you’ve brought into your system.
Some time ago I was taught by the Omnicom people at a Harvard University seminar by a Doctor Meister a concept called the service profit chain. Now let me describe it to you. It means that you hire the right people in the first place. You take good care of those employees. They then take care of their customers. Customers reward you with profits and reward you with referrals.
It’s almost the opposite of the way American business generally operates. Here we say, hire good employees and take care of them. Most businesses say, let’s make profits first and we’ll go through employees as fast as we have to. We’ll just replace them. It’s kind of a dichotomy on one side. To this side what we’re proposing is that the employees are the most important things you have in your business. You must take care of them because they at the end of the day will take care of your customer. And customers will drive revenue. So we must ask ourselves, how good of a job are we doing with our employees? How happy are they?
Well, one thing I learned from Omnicom going through this experience and senior training course with these Harvard professors, was that Omnicom now monitors MarketStar’s performance in two ways. Because we’re a publicly traded company, they look at our financial results. That’s where most companies stop. This organization Omnicom then monitors the company morale of how happy our employees are.
They have found that there’s a one to one correlation between happy employees and financial results, that they can tie those together scientifically. So the reverse is said, if you have unhappy employees – they don’t want to come to work, they don’t like you – they’re not going to generate the revenues that you could maximize. We have taken that principal to heart.
And so over the course of the last number of years since I sold the business, we followed that model. MarketStar, of the 170 companies, is one of the top five companies in their worldwide firmament of companies where we have the best relationship between company, employee morale and financial results. So I have been able to see by the way we take care of these employees, that we are indeed succeeding.
What does it mean to take care of our employees? Clearly they want competitive wages, they want benefits, they want good policies, they want procedures they can follow. They want bonuses, promotions, they want educational experiences, they want you to celebrate successes. They want you to have values.
If you went back to all your businesses and sat down with your employees and said, I want you to be honest with me – maybe it could be a blind survey of some sort – tell me on a scale of one to 10 how happy you are coming to work here, with 10 being the highest. Do that with all your employees. See where you stand.
More likely something will show up that there’s some dissatisfaction. Talking to employees about what would make it happier for them is then what you as the manager, CEO, head of your business must do to fix things. I tell the employees at MarketStar, if there’s something we’re doing wrong – and we have these several thousand employees around the world – if there’s something that they’re unhappy with, this is my phone number, this is my email address, you tell me what your heartburn is.
And in the course of a year, I’ll get a half a dozen people saying, I didn’t get paid on time or I didn’t get my expenses paid or this policy of yours is stupid or whatever it is. I want them to tell me what it is so I can fix those things so that they’re happy. That’s one of the great lessons I’ve learned in my life is take care of these employees.
The next to last thing I want to share with you is: people want to be part of a winning culture. Now let me describe culture to you. We all live in one. We grew up in a home with a culture. Culture is about how we behave, how we treat one another. Our neighborhood has a culture, our church has a culture, our business has a culture. It’s how we behave.
And there are some cultures that I won’t work with. I won’t work for IBM. I will not do business with IBM. If IBM came to me and said, you know Alan, we’ll give you a $100 million contract, I’d turn them down. Because that company has changed so much in the last number of years, it does not focus on the same values I have. So I’m not going to take their business.
I have a real hard time with Microsoft. They have a tough culture. And it’s a culture that harms my employees. So businesses have good ones and they have bad ones. And I’ve chosen then to do business based upon what our culture is. If we do business with a customer who does not have that shared culture, we do not take their money, because it will come back to harm our culture, harm our people and I’ve got problems.
Let me tell you what our culture is. I’m never afraid to say this to executives at the big companies we represent. There are five pillars to the culture at MarketStar. The first one – and this is in this order and then we look to have a balance around this – the first one is that we have a love of God. The second one is that we have a love for ourselves. The third thing is we have a love for family. Fourth is we love our work. And fifth is we love our community.
Now I preach to my employees and everyday that those are the five pillars upon how we will govern our business. That’s how we will treat each other. So if you look at it, the fourth thing in my list of priorities was work. It wasn’t number one, it was number four. There were three others ahead of it. Family was ahead of it, yourself was ahead of it, and God was ahead of it.
Let me describe just briefly what those mean. God, for us, is we just want people whatever their faith is, whatever their belief is, that they have some respect for values and deity and life is precious, that we are, are sons and daughters of a God. We ask people to love themselves by doing good things. Get rest, eat well, exercise, don’t take harmful things that are going to hurt you.
We want people to leave work in the middle of the day if there’s’ a family event that is important to them, to talk to their immediate supervisor and say, I need to go off to watch my daughter in the school play. Or watch my little kindergartner or whatever it is, I’m going to leave work to go do that because that is more important to me and to you Mr. and Mrs. Employee than work. You go do that. Life is too short for us to work our tails off all of our life and never have the joy of experience number three, the family. We let our employees go. We know that they’ve got to come back and work and finish their tasks, we recognize that. But we give them that flex time.
We want them to work their tail off at work. We want them to keep those customers happy, don’t we? So we expect 40 hours great hours of hard work, their best effort. Then we say to them, your community has supported everything that you now enjoy, the roads, the hospitals, the schools, the parks. Whatever tax dollars have bought, whatever other citizens have contributed to our society, it’s time for us who make a wage to give back to our communities. That can be done in terms of some money, it can be done in terms talent and time and volunteerism. It can mean you go vote, but we want every one of our employees involved thoughtfully, everyday, thinking about how they can give back to their community. They have taken water out of the well of the community; we want them to put water back into that well.
Those five principles then require balance. Sometimes I’m on the road for a while and I don’t even get to see my family, I don’t even get to run to the gym, but I recognize that there is balance and it will flow back and forth. Does that make sense to you what our culture is?
So you have to ask yourself, what’s the culture in our business? Have your employees sit down with you and write out what it is they think you are all about. See if you have a common agreement about who we are, what is the culture of our business, and can we improve upon that culture?
This is a really important one to me and the reason why I gave you the first few slides about myself. Remember how I talked to you about being a Peace Corps volunteer and going on a mission to Guatemala. Those experiences coupled with my background in psychology have taught me that those of us sitting in this room are very fortunate. We are very blessed with, in many cases, financial resources. And I have to tell you that because of my faith, I recognize that the money that I have received over the course of time, I give the Lord credit for what I have. My wife and I believe that it is not our money, that we’re stewards over the money, that we manage the money. Now the IRS says, no Alan, it is your money, but we look at it from the perspective that we’re here to be stewards of the money that we have got, to manage it , to provide jobs, to take the excess that we have and do good things with it. And it swells our hearts with joy to think that we can take that approach.
So here is what we’ve done, Jeanne and I have decided that one of the principles that we’ve learned over our years of being together is that we want to give back to our community, putting that water back into the well. So what we have done is we have started a family foundation called the Hall Foundation where we put this excess money. I have to back up and say that when we sold Marketstar, there were three pots of gold that I had come to me or I took the gold and put it into three pots. The first pot was to Jeanne Hall. Now why would I give Jeanne Hall a pot of gold? Did she second mortgage the house? Did she risk this with me? Did she sacrifice her family to let me do this? Yes she did, so she gets the first pot of gold. If I don’t show up one morning, I’m hit on the highway and can’t bring home a paycheck, she has her own money. Second then is we took that money and put it into the Hall Foundation to give it to the needy of the state of Utah. So we started in Weber County and Davis County. I recently made two gifts in Logan because I appreciate and love the people up here. So one is going to the hospital, the new cancer facility, and another gift’s going over to the Utah Festival Opera because I believe this community ought to have the arts.
So we will continue where we can to push money into places where money will help the lives of needy people. The next thing I thought is it’s great to take this money and give it away over the course of time but why don’t I find another mechanism where I can replicate what I’m trying to do. We started Grow Utah Ventures. It’s a charitable group that focuses on helping entrepreneurs be successful, like yourselves.
So the Hall Foundation, back to helping the community, we look at health care, we look at education, we look at the things that make a difference in a community, the things that you and I take for granted, we’re putting money into things like this health clinic in Ogden.
Grow Utah Ventures is all about this list of goals. Our first goal is we’re going to invest in 100 companies over the course of five years. Craig Bott is the day to day CEO and president of Grow Utah Ventures. I’m the founder of it, but Craig runs it and makes it happen. So we’re investing in 100 companies. To date we have invested in about 60 of them. We’re going to educate hundreds of entrepreneurs across the state of Utah on how to start, run, and grow businesses. We’re going to create, we hope, in the process 4000 new jobs across the state with successful entrepreneurs learning how to do it well. Doing the math and putting the multiplier effect around it, it’s about a half a billion dollars a year if we can succeed at what we are doing.
We want to encourage the formation of angel groups, those like-minded investors who can invest in these companies that we’re supporting. We have a group here in Logan, we have one in Ogden, Kaysville, one in Salt Lake, and one in St. George. We’ll continue to grow our angel network to help and the other is to establish these incubation facilities where entrepreneurs can come into a facility and start their business and we can help them with all the infrastructure things so that they can be up and running sooner than later. This is private money going into this to grow the state of Utah. It’s my way of saying, if I could do it, can I find 100 more people who can have a great experience and replicate what we’re trying to do? The end goal is to help people, to bless the lives of people and when we have that approach to it all of us can get together and grow our economy and therefore, mayor, we’ll have jobs where your children can come back to work.
I still have energy and one of the things I want to do now is take this to a bigger scale. Marketstar has given me a unique opportunity to do a global business. And now I recognize that I can form a venture capital fund of a couple hundred million dollars where we can invest in high technology companies worldwide, not just in Utah. The proceeds that would come to a venture capitalist like myself, that money will go into the Hall Foundation, that money will go into the Grow Utah Venture group so that at the end of the day I can find more money to put back into the lives of people, to grow the lives of people. This is just another way that I have discovered should be highly successful with an end goal to help others. It’s kind of the capstone of my career, if you will, to keep finding ways to generate money to bless the lives of people.
So I hope my points have been valuable to you. I hope they make sense, I hope you can go back and use them appropriately within your own organizations and I thank you for your time here today. |
