LEADERS
‘Sometimes it’s best to lead the train from the caboose’ Darrell Freeman on what Jack Bovender taught him he team at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center early this year launched the Circle Back podcast, which invites successful area executives to revisit their roots and their journeys to success. Among those taking part in the first season is Darrell Freeman, who founded technology services and staffing venture Zycron in 1991. In this lightly edited excerpt, Freeman discusses landing a contract to supply HCA Healthcare and building a mentor relationship with Jack Bovender, the hospital giant’s CEO from 2001 until 2009. At the time, HCA had 35 IT companies under contract and was looking to narrow that group down to three.
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There was a saying my father and my mother would say. That was, “You gotta be twice as good.” In other words: To get chosen, you gotta be twice as good. We got a chance to bid on an HCA contract. I think I spent about $30,000 putting that proposal and the presentation together because I wanted to make sure it was 10 times better than anybody else. When we went in to give the presentation, I mean, we crushed it. There’s very few days that I don’t think about the business lessons I’ve learned from Jack. He led the largest leveraged buyout in the history of the company at $30 billion. And during that
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period of time, as he’s doing this transaction, he and I are spending $10 at Prince’s Hot Chicken eating chicken wings. He would say, “If there is something bad happening in the business, don’t keep it a secret. Yell it as loud as you possibly can. And tell it to as many people who will listen.” When something bad is happening, if you’re running a publicly traded company — I serve on several public-company boards — and there’s something that you need to disclose but you’re waffling on whether you should disclose it, to him, his philosophy is disclose it. Some of his sayings to me over the years were, “Darrell, you know you don’t have to be out front all the time. Sometimes it’s best to lead the train from the caboose.” He wasn’t a person who would chop your head off if you made a mistake. He was a person who said, “I’ll give you a chance to redeem yourself.” And this is probably one of the best things that happened to me. He was a CEO who would say, “Keep people around you with dissenting voices and make sure you establish a culture where people know that they can tell you your idea is stupid.” And they would know that they weren’t going to lose their jobs because they told him that. So he taught me those lessons and, even after 20 or 30 years in business, I can run across a CEO and tell whether they are like a Jack Bovender or not. And I can also tell based on how they treat the people around them whether they’re going to have success or not. Because if you’re a CEO and you only get people around you who are telling you how great you are, you’re on your way out. I was the CEO of Zycron Inc. by default. Nobody appointed me CEO. Nobody did a search and said, “This is the best person for the job.” I’m an entrepreneur. The growth had stopped. I mean, it had stayed at $13 million to $16 million in revenue for two or three years. So I had to realize that I wasn’t good at it. I think one of the biggest downfalls of entrepreneurs is they think they’re the best at it and they don’t want to get out of their own way. They have a great product or service but they’ve got poor leadership skills because they think they’re it. I wish I had fired myself sooner than I did because when I fired myself, it gave the whole company life.
Freeman found a new CEO in Steven Smith. Over the next 10 years, Zycron revenues tripled to about $40 million. In April 2017, Texas-based BG Staffing bought the business born in a broom closet in a deal that was eventually worth nearly $23 million.
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