Barry Goss, Pro2Sorve

We stayed in our classroom this week and were visited by Barry Goss of Pro2Serve (Professional Project Services). Barry is the CEO of this company, founded in 1996. They started small, as all businesses do, but now have over 300 employees and eight separate offices. Pro2Serve sells knowledge and solutions, but not products.

Barry has a Ph.D. in engineering and has no formal business training, aside from a few workshops. He began working with SAIC, a large employee-owned engineering organization. He soon began to develop an interest in the business side of things. He went to Europe and the US to determine what was changing in their field and how to compete with those trends. He learned to get a half a step ahead of the market and stated that if you are a full step ahead, you will go broke, and if you are even, you are a commodity. The best place for a business to be is just a half step ahead.

The DOE set up an environmental management organization and needed three people to head it. One was to go find and manage the project, one was a proposal manager, and the other was a program manager. Barry played the role of all three of these on five major bid efforts in one single year. They won all five bids, and created hundreds of million dollars in business. Barry states that the sign of a great business leader is to detect an overwhelming trend and make it their goal.

He likes an atmosphere of new and interesting products being produced by new and interesting projects. He noticed trends, and began collecting articles about them in a folder. Finally, one day, he went through them all.

He says that the experience of being a group senior vice president at SAIC was what taught him to run a business, but the job made him feel like he was wearing golden handcuffs. He didn't want to let them go, but he wanted to try starting a business on his own, from the ground up. The president of SAIC even offered to help him out, but Barry needed to get out on his own. Luckily, though, he was able to take his stock with him and burned no bridges in the process of leaving.

"Built to Last" is Barry's favorite management book of the 90s. He built a company that grew quickly, but he knew that they had to prepare for bad times. They made changes that other people did not understand, preparing them for what was to come. All his changes were made with careful regard for the company's original values. He advises, "Good companies have a core set of values that never change. The market always changes. Be ready." He wanted to establish a company on a set of values that he believed in. They established early in their bylaws that they were committed to giving back to the communities in which they work. Ten percent of each year's profits, dispersed over the next year, is spent on the community.

Pro2Serve does not advertise. They do not hold press releases. They were blessed with angel investors. They have been very lucky.

Governmental contracting requires an auditable financial system. You must figure out what your core competency is and protect it.

Barry's last words of advice were that when you go to work for someone, you should look for a company with the same beliefs and values that you have. If you don't believe in what the company is doing, you will never be happy there.