Tending to Business Steve Mitchell's no entrepreneur, but he knows how to make a business make money By John Dunn Photography by Caroline Joe
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"People accuse me of being an entrepreneur, but I'm not at all. I'm a nuts-andbolts manager. I'm very detailoriented and very organized."
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f you're tooling recklessly about town sporting one of those "How's My Driving?™" decals on your vehicle, you can bet that Steve Mitchell knows the answer. Mitchell's the guy at the other end of the 1-800 number, and bad drivers set his phone ringing. Stephen M. Mitchell, who earned a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech in 1965 and a master's in 1966, runs the Atlanta corporation that the company DriverCheck helps drive. Mitchell is chief executive officer of Sertec Corp., which stands for service technology corp., an organization of companies targeting driver safety, customer service, insurance claims reporting and, most recently, finding employees for such organizations as McDonald's. Their common characteristic is that all are telephone-based companies operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with online data entry and electronic transmission. And like many of the 15 companies Mitchell has owned or operated during the past 30 years, Sertec wasn't a moneymaker until he began running it. The company that asked How's My Driving? was running on empty in 1995, when Mitchell teamed up with entrepreneur George Zimmerman, Sertec's founder. In a culture that reveres entrepreneurs, Mitchell professes not to be one. "People accuse me of being an entrepreneur, but I'm not at all. I'm a nuts-and-bolts manager." Entrepreneurs are inspired free-thinkers, usually with a flair for sales, but not for details, Mitchell states. "I'm the opposite of that. I'm very detail-oriented and very organized." While entrepreneurs may have the genius to start a company, he says, running the company often bewilders them. "The entrepreneur goes as far as he knows to go—or runs out of money—and that's where I come in," Mitchell says. "I'll buy into a company, using my own money, and I manage the company.
GEORGIA TECH'Fall 1999
That's what I know how to do." Although Sertec wasn't making money, Mitchell was impressed with its fast growth and sound concepts. All of its companies had potential: DriverCheck operates in conjunction with the National Safety Council and is sponsored by 45 insurance companies; ServiceCheck operates a customer-satisfaction hotline for more than 1,000 participating businesses, and Actec is an insurance claims-notification service for 150,000 companies nationwide. All operate all day, all year. "It was a great idea with great concepts," Mitchell says. "But the execution was terrible; quality was terrible, and the turnover rate was out the roof. There were no performance or cost-accounting measures, so we didn't know what the costs were." In the first month after Mitchell took over as CEO, Sertec began operating in the black and continued to have 13 record months in a row. During the four years since he took over the organization, it has tripled in size.
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lthough Mitchell has been called a turnaround specialist, he says his philosophy and methods are very different. "The classic turnaround specialists, as I understand it, come in, put in their own team and try to straighten things out," Mitchell says. "Typically, that's a hired manager who doesn't own the business. "I have found that when you go into a business, there are generally good people there," Mitchell says. "I very rarely have changed a manager." Mitchell interviewed every manager at Sertec before deciding to buy into the organization. "That is probably the best single group of managers I have ever been associated with," he says. "Only one manager left, and that was to make a career change." Working with the same management team, Sertec began operating in the black. "I'm a manager who manages by evolution, not