Interview with Steve Bostic, who has launched innumerable start-ups, in which he advocates intensive planning.
If you really want to grow your business, says Steve Bostic,you have to minimize risk and plan, plan, plan
The first time we met Steve Bostic, he was perched atop the 1987 Inc. 500, having taken his American Photo Group from $149,000 to $78 million in five years -- a 52,244% increase in sales. The next time we met him, he had just sold his company to Eastman Kodak Co. for a reported $45 million. We quickly deduced that he was not your average, everyday, garden-variety entrepreneur.
Indeed, he is not. On the contrary, he challenges all the popular notions about the kind of people who build extraordinarily fast-growing companies. He does not operate on instinct. He never shoots from the hip. He did not pull himself up by his bootstraps. And risk is not his middle name. Nor does he think there's any magic to entrepreneurial success. He does not believe it requires special talent, or charisma, or something mysterious in one's genes. If you want to build a business, he says, what you really need are training, discipline, and a passion for planning.
Bostic is not the only one who's defying the entrepreneurial stereotypes these days. To some extent, he represents a whole generation of big-company managers who have left the corporate womb in the past decade, voluntarily or otherwise, and gone on to start their own businesses. He is not the first person to challenge the entrepreneurial mystique, either. Peter F. Drucker expressed similar views when we interviewed him four years ago. The subsequent article, published in our October 1985 issue, remains one of the most controversial we have ever run.
What distinguishes Bostic is the range of experience from which he speaks. A native of Peru, Ind., he spent most of his twenties on the fast track in big companies. By the age of 27, he was marketing vice-president of PepsiCo's North American Van Lines -- one of the youngest vice-presidents in the entire corporation at the time. Five years later he'd moved up to division general manager and appeared destined for a bright Pepsi future. Instead, he left to become president of the photo-processing division of Berkey Photo Inc. Bostic's understanding was that he would be Berkey's next corporate president, but he had a falling out with Ben Berkey, the company's aging founder, and departed after just three years. There followed a stint as president of a hot start-up that had developed a 3-D camera. When again the founder reneged on promises, Bostic cashed in his chips and headed off to launch American Photo Group.
The sale of American Photo to Kodak did not end Bostic's career as a company builder. He is already well along on his next start-up, R. Stevens Corp. This one is built around an automated photo machine, or APM -- a kind of automated-teller machine for photo processing. Within five years Bostic expects the country to be blanketed with APMs, and R. Stevens to be worth $1 billion. That may not be a goal to which many people can -- or choose to -- aspire. Then again, you don't have to share his goals to find his ideas compelling and relevant to all kinds of businesses.
Bostic talked about an orderly approach to company building with Inc.'s George Gendron and Bo Burlingham.
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INC.: We hear a lot about the chaos of fast growth -- the sense of always being a step away from the next crisis. You've had one company that grew more than 50,000% in five years, and now you've got another that's on an even faster track. How do you keep your sanity?
BOSTIC: For one thing, I don't agree that growth has to be chaotic. I think that's a total myth. There may be chaotic moments and times of crisis, but it's completely unnecessary to deal from crisis to crisis. In fact, that way of managing undermines your ability to grow.
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INC.: I can assure you that many companies do grow that way.
BOSTIC: Yes, but I'll bet most of them can't keep it up. If you want to achieve significant revenue growth, you need order, not chaos. You need to have things well planned and well thought out. Everybody has to be singing out of the same hymnbook.
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INC.: Are you saying that someone can actually plan the kind of growth you've experienced?
BOSTIC: I'm saying it has to be planned. You have to take your vision, think it through, and turn it into a consistent strategy. And then you have to get it on paper. That's key. I maintain that if you can't put your vision on paper, you can never do it in the real world.
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INC.: Wait a minute. There are thousands of successful companies founded by people who don't have a consistent strategy and who wouldn't dream of putting their vision on paper.
BOSTIC: You're talking about companies that are one-man shows. I think there are severe limits to what those companies can achieve. Yes, if you're guiding the ship out front and pulling everybody else along, you don't need to write it down. But if you want to be able to walk out of the room and have life continue in an orderly way, you'd better put your vision and your plan on paper.
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INC.: This is beginning to sound a lot like strategic planning.
BOSTIC: No, not at all. With strategic planning, you have a separate group that creates the plan, and then everybody is told to go out and follow it. That's never worked, and it never will. I'm talking about the opposite. I'm talking about planning as a way to get people on board. I want people to buy into the plan, so it isn't just my plan anymore. It becomes theirs as well. That way, I know everybody is following the same road map when we go out into the real world. But the process begins with putting the vision down on paper. If people never see the vision -- or if it's here today, gone tomorrow -- there's no way they can get into it, and there's no way they can buy into the plan.
