Some Help In Taking The Long-range View

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While giant corporations often rely on 10-year plans to chart their growth, small companies tend to fly more by the seat of their pants. To most of them 10 years seems like an eternity.

But a group of presidents of small businesses in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are helping each other set 10-year goals -- and stick with them. They call themselves "3655," approximating the number of days in a decade.

"We're all reasonably successful, but we have ambitions to go far beyond what we've already accomplished," says founder Carter L. Schelling, president of McArdle-Desco Corp. of New Castle, Del., an industrial plumbing supplies distributor with about $10 million in annual sales. "We act as advisers and as a conscience for one another, sharing all our hopes and dreams -- as well as our financial figures. We force ourselves to do the kind of long-range thinking that separates the truly extraordinary companies from the mediocre ones."

The presidents, 10 to 15 in number since the group's founding in 1979, meet eight times a year in-day workshops. At four of the gatherings, they receive instruction from a management consultant; at the remaining four sessions they review their progress in putting what they learned into practice.

Jack Holloway, president of Holloway Bros. Tools Inc., an industrial supply company with 45 employees in Wilmington, Del., says the meetings accomplish much more than similar seminars sponsored by such organizations as the American Management Associations in New York. "At an AMA class, I would probably be in a room with 100 other people -- and after it was over, I'd never see them again," he says. "3655 gives me access to top professionals that I couldn't afford to hire myself -- and it gives me a discipline to make plans and carry them out, because I have to sit down later with my peers and show them what I've done."

Last year, for example, Donald J. Jonovic, executive vice-president of the Center for Family Business in Cleveland, gave a seminar on why it is important for a small company to set up an outside board of directors. As a result, Holloway and five other members reevaluated the use of their boards.

Members of 3655 each currently pay $2,400 a year in dues -- most of which goes to hire the visiting consultants, who typically command $2,000 or more for a one-day seminar. The group is organized as a for-profit division of Schelling's company, though he says he hasn't made any money on it so far, and that profit wasn't the main goal behind the idea. "I set up the group to get help with my own business," he says. "I'm not a consultant or educator -- I'm a user of this information. I need the peer support and criticism in my business."