"To me, courage is not about not being scared. It’s the ability to look at the world and say, “I am down. I recognize it, and I'm gonna keep going anyway.”
Edson Barton Tweet
Edson Barton is CEO of YouScience and founder of Precision Exams. As a 20-year EdTech veteran, he leads YouScience as it revolutionizes the personalization of career education — bridging the edtech and talent tech markets and solving critical education-to-workforce issues such as the skills gap and program equity and diversity. By providing students a more direct and tangible way to connect their education to their future careers, YouScience improves academic outcomes including high school graduation rates and post-secondary enrollment and completion rates.
Prior to leading YouScience and founding Precision Exams, Edson was the CEO and co-owner of ProCert Labs, a standards alignment and validation organization, and served as a senior director with Certiport where he oversaw client activities for Adobe, Autodesk, Intuit, and Microsoft, including worldwide publisher channels. Additionally, he was a sales vice president for Imergent and the executive director for Kids Voting Utah.
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Table of Contents
Let’s learn a little about you and really get to experience what makes us tick – starting at our beginnings. Where did your story begin?
Edson Barton: My story, and what we’re doing as a business, really begins early in my education. In the second grade, I had an experience that’s stayed with me all my life. It also formed some of my opinions on the need to improve education and the lives of individuals.
When I was eight, one of my sisters passed away from leukemia. It was traumatic and affected my studies. Another second-grader, who was apparently a math expert, told me I was bad at math. That “assessment” stuck with me into adulthood.
Because of my family situation, I wasn’t “good at math.” I was preoccupied and not grasping the concepts as well as I should have. And, once you get behind in a system like we have today, you’re perpetually behind.
As I got into middle school and high school, I started to realize that, you know, I really love to learn. I also realized that I didn’t love school. Our school system is built on the bias that “A” students are the smart students, and everybody else isn’t smart. It was the systems and processes that frustrated me, not learning.
I started wondering if I belonged. It wasn’t until college that I realized that I did have something to offer. I was quite an accomplished young man. I managed a small restaurant. I pushed myself. I did other things that most young people don’t.
At about that time, I realized that I wasn’t alone or the problem. It was the system. The system focused on getting students through, not on helping us achieve our best individual outcomes.
It wasn’t that the individuals, teachers or educators were doing anything wrong. It was that the system and the tools weren’t geared to help the individual, just to perpetuate a process.
I decided to help solve some of the fundamental educational system issues. I decided to help every individual discover why they’re learning what they’re learning and who they are and connect that with a successful outcome. Individual futures being the outcome. That became critically important to me and I really wanted to dedicate my life to it, and I have.
Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Edson Barton: I owe my thinking as an entrepreneur and a leader to my father. He was a long-distance trucker. He was gone a lot, but was still a very good father. He was very kind and patient. More than anything, he was always encouraging. I don’t remember a time he left for a trip when he didn’t say, “I’m so proud of you. You can do anything.” I heard that enough that I started to believe him. I’m grateful for that.
He was really an entrepreneur. He started many businesses, many of which failed. When they did, he’d go back to trucking. He worked incredibly hard and always paid off his debts. He also made sure that before he started his next thing, he was financially whole.
He tried and tried and never stopped. For me, that was success. To watch an individual who never gave up and continued his dream of building something and doing something was very inspirational to me.
Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. What’s the worst advice you received?
Edson Barton: I think the worst advice I ever got came from my college counselor. She asked what I wanted to study? I wasn’t sure, which is part of the problem for all of us. I told her I wanted to get my MBA. She latched onto that and said, “Oh, good, then it doesn’t matter what you study, because they’re actually gonna teach you what you need to know in the MBA program.”
That was terrible advice. She told me that the next four years of my life would be basically wasted.
Twenty-plus years later, my daughter’s college counselor said the same thing almost verbatim. That advice is being taught across the country. It’s absolutely devastating our economy. And it’s devastating individuals.
Resilience is critical in critical times like the ones we are going through now. How would you define resilience?
Edson Barton: Resilience to me, is the ability to get back up when you’re hurting. Getting back up, having resilience, is having courage. To me, courage is not about not being scared. It’s the ability to look at the world and say, “I am down. I recognize it, and I’m gonna keep going anyway.”
When you think of your company, 5 years from now, what do you see?
Edson Barton: I see a thriving company that is changing the world. I see educators, students, parents, and our larger community, even industry, and the larger economy as a whole to look at YouScience and say, “There’s the most important education company in the world.”
I want it to be the most important because what we’re trying to solve are fundamental issues within education and for individuals; to create new ways for people to set their lives in motion in such a way that they’ll never be the same. When we can do that effectively, it absolutely changes people’s lives for the better.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?
Edson Barton: The first is being willed to try things and being willing to fail. I mentioned my father and his business failures. Those taught me that just because you’re broke today, doesn’t mean you’ll be broke tomorrow. He built businesses, had them fail, and built new ones and had them fail. I can’t say that our family was any worse off for it.
The second is the willingness to work hard. That comes easier for some people than for others. But there is no substitute for hard work — ever. Luck sometimes, but not often, leads to success. But usually, success comes from tremendous amounts of hard work.
The third is the love of learning. I’m not particularly talented at any one thing. I’m quite the generalist. But I do love to learn. Because of that, I’m often able to find the answers for any problem that presents itself, or I’ve listened well enough or read deeply enough to at least know how to get through some of the challenges I face as a leader.
What have you learned about personal branding that you wish you had known earlier in your career?
Edson Barton: I wish I’d known earlier that it’s important to make yourself heard, to be assertive and confident in yourself and your personal brand. I find it difficult to talk about myself. What I found early in my career is that, because I tended to be quiet and more introverted, I got passed over for opportunities where I knew I could do well.
I also wish I had realized that we’re branding ourselves all the time. By doing anything, we’re branding ourselves. By not speaking up, by speaking too loudly, we’re branding ourselves. Everything that we do is branding. The learning there is to make how we brand ourselves intentional.
How do you monitor if the people in your department are performing at their best?
Edson Barton: I don’t. I set clear expectations and make sure people understand the vision they’re working toward. Without a clear foundation, no one knows where we’re supposed to end up.
It’s incredibly hard to judge whether or not people are meeting expectations without a vision. What ends up happening without expectations is that one person worries that they’re doing their job where another sees themself as doing a great job. That happens because both people have different expectations and are essentially marching to their own drums instead of a shared destination.
Do you think entrepreneurship is something that you’re born with or something that you can learn along the way?
Edson Barton: Entrepreneurship is both learned and innate. It’s not an either-or equation. Entrepreneurship at its heart is the love of doing something new. Every child loves to experiment and try new things, that characteristic is built into all of us. Over time though it gets broken out of many of us for various reasons, some good, some not good.
The part of it we can learn — and that can be instilled and preserved — is the process of — and confidence in — experimenting with something new.
What’s your favorite “leadership” quote and how has it affected the way you implement your leadership style?
Edson Barton: One of my recent favorite leadership quotes comes from John Doerr. John is one of the most successful investors ever. He was one of the key investors in Google and Amazon and similar organizations. He said, “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.” In the last few years, that statement has meant a lot to me.
The pandemic has, for me, driven home the importance of execution. It’s shown that there are a lot of things that can get in the way of our ideas. The execution part is setting up a plan that gets your business and your people through challenges, whether big or small, so you can meet your goals.
The companies that don’t do well are the ones that don’t focus on execution. They get caught up in themselves and never get down to brass tacks. Everybody has to be willing to roll up their sleeves and get things done. Without that, things don’t ever happen, they’re just ideas.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Edson Barton for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Edson Barton or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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