John Lacy became the president and chief operating officer of Idea Grove in 2019. He joined a company that has been climbing up the ranks as a tech PR firm, having been named by O’Dwyer’s as the top tech PR firm in Texas in 2017. With his new position, he looks to bring his vast experience as an executive to bring the company to greater heights.
At Idea Grove, John Lacy “oversees one of the fastest-growing and most forward-looking public relations and inbound marketing agencies in the southwestern United States.” The company also works together with various clients, ranging “from venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 companies.” With Idea Grove, these clients receive well-needed support to establish their brands and set themselves apart from the competition in today’s crowded marketplace.
John Lacy also brings his “extensive senior leadership experience and a proven track record in driving agency growth.” Prior to joining Idea Grove, he was the COO of Imaginuity, which is a “prominent digital media agency.” At Imaginuity, he “implemented various process improvement systems and helped support rapid revenue growth over a three-year period.”
As an executive, John Lacy has worked for “over twenty three years…in operations and information systems with private & public companies and a multi-national consulting firm.”
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Jerome Knyszewski: What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
John Lacy: Idea Grove stands out because of the people that work here. We are a collection of technology lovers that really love getting into the technology of our clients and telling our client’s story in a way that non-technology-oriented people can absorb and understand. We are also outstanding because of the culture we have created here. Our hiring process is VERY tuned towards making sure that new employees are a cultural fit before they are a skills fit. When I arrived at Idea Grove, just over a year ago, we definitely had some very talented individuals that were not a cultural fit. They were doing great work, but wreaking havoc on the teams. Once the leadership team was introduced to a culture-based evaluation technique, they were able to identify those people and gently ask them to change their behaviors and/or coach them out of the organization. Once the cultural mismatches were gone, the teams leaped-forward in their performance, both in team cohesiveness as well as the quality of work product for our clients.
Jerome Knyszewski: Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
John Lacy: There are a couple of recommendations I would have here. The first one is finding something you love doing, with people you love doing it with. Nothing gives me more energy in the morning than knowing I get to come to Idea Grove and do what I love to do and know that I have a great team I’m working with each and every day. We spend way too much time at work to not love what you do! The second is taking time away from the job. No matter how much you love what you do, you must take time away to recharge. I am the type of person that takes time off a couple of times a year… But what I really look forward to is our winter break when the office is closed between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. I usually end up taking the week before the winter break as well and really try to disconnect from the day to day. I spend a LOT of time thinking about the things we want to accomplish in the coming year and doing a lot of pleasure reading.
Jerome Knyszewski: None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
John Lacy: I am very grateful for many people throughout my career that have helped me along the way. Starting first with the interviewing manager at Arthur Andersen that took a shot on me, to the many mentors I have had along the way. I hope to be able to repay them someday by paying it forward to future generations of leaders.
A couple of people that come to mind are David McGuire, Frank Iannelli & Michael Kramer. I worked for David at a startup during the internet boom as his CTO. When the boom went bust, David went on to a turnaround, consumer goods company. David did not even hesitate when he got there. He called me very shortly thereafter and asked that I come work for him again. This time in an industry that I had never worked in before, taking the chance on me expecting that I could keep up. In addition to David, I got to work with two of my former Arthur Andersen colleagues who also went on to become influential in my career. Frank Iannelli and Michael Kramer both mentored me into that new industry and have remained friends and advisors ever since.
I am also very grateful for a close-knit group of gentlemen that have also contributed, directly and indirectly, to the success of my career. Chris McKee, Michael Adams, Christopher Brown, and Manuel Morin are a group of highly successful businessmen in their own right, that I have the honor of also calling my friends. This is my forum of businesspeople of which I get to bounce crazy ideas off, and from which I learn as much about business with the crazy ideas they bounce of me.
Jerome Knyszewski: Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. The title of this series is “How to take your company from good to great”. Let’s start with defining our terms. How would you define a “good” company, what does that look like? How would you define a “great” company, what does that look like?
John Lacy: Good companies need to focus on two things: Being profitable and generating cash. Some will say that they must generate a return for shareholders, but without doing those two basic things, there will not be a return for shareholders. Great companies do these two basic things with the addition of a healthy culture and engaged employees participating in the success of the company. There are many, many good companies out there. But fewer truly great companies. We’ve implemented a lot of the business theories from Patrick Lencioni’s set of fables, as well as the concepts from Crucial Conversations, in order to ensure we have the healthiest organization possible.
Jerome Knyszewski: What would you advise to a business leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill? From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth and “restart their engines”?
John Lacy: I would follow the mantra “what got you here won’t necessarily get you there”. If you have had a string of growth years, and then suddenly fall flat, I would ask that very question. What are we doing to get us here that is no longer continuing to move us forward? This means taking an extremely critical and fact-based top-down and bottom-up deep dive into your organization to figure out what is not working. This can be a huge hit to the ego as you must first admit that something just is not working. But once you get past that, you can dig into the problems and work with your team to find the solutions that will restart you on the path to growth.
Jerome Knyszewski: Generating new business, increasing your profits, or at least maintaining your financial stability can be challenging during good times, even more so during turbulent times. Can you share some of the strategies you use to keep forging ahead and not lose growth traction during a difficult economy?
John Lacy: I will go back to our implementation of the Great Game of Business here. Without having put in the work to educate the entire employee base, from the office manager to the CEO, on how the business works, we would not have pulled through the public health crisis as we have. We are still not out of the woods, but with the entire team pulling together, I know that we will make it out just fine.
Jerome Knyszewski: In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
John Lacy: The most underestimated part of running a company is the soft stuff. It is the leadership development, the team building, the crucial conversation training, and the culture building. It is building an environment of trust and hyper-transparency forcing out the drama in the organization. In Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage, there is a quote on the very first page after the introduction: “The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it.” This is the mantra I have tried to live by and continue to learn by.
Jerome Knyszewski: Great customer service and great customer experience are essential to build a beloved brand and essential to be successful in general. In your experience what are a few of the most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience?
John Lacy: For Idea Grove, a great customer experience is built through the trust we build with the client and the work product we produce. We are not perfect, and we know it. But when we make a mistake, we own it, apologize for it, work to make it right. Through this process, we continue to build trust with our clients. We have found that when we make a mistake, that owning it and making it right builds a greater level of trust with that client, creating that Wow! experience, and leading to the great reviews we have garnered for our work.
Jerome Knyszewski: What are your thoughts about how a company should be engaged on Social Media? For example, the advisory firm EisnerAmper conducted 6 yearly surveys of United States corporate boards, and directors reported that one of their most pressing concerns was reputational risk as a result of social media. Do you share this concern? We’d love to hear your thoughts about this.
John Lacy: As a marketing company with a social media practice area, we are always thinking about this, both for ourselves and for our clients. Social media has become a bit of a double-edged sword for companies and you must carefully think through your posts, as they will live forever. But within that, you must be true to your own authentic nature.
Jerome Knyszewski: What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
John Lacy: The most common mistake I have seen is when the CEO or founder tries to do everything themselves. I was brought to Idea Grove by our founder, Scott, because he is a great visionary, but he will tell you that he is not a great integrator. While I excel at getting a company from “here” to “there,” I need a partner in crime to analyze the market and determine where the “there” is. Business is a team sport. You must know your own blind spots and fill those in with teammates who complement you in that blind spot.
Jerome Knyszewski: Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
John Lacy: I would create a movement around the book Crucial Conversations. If everyone in the world could get to a point where we could have a dispassionate conversation coming from a place of understanding the other person’s point of view, regardless of topic, the world would be a much better place! We must re-learn how to have Crucial Conversations around politics, religion and other sensitive topics that seem to be driving divisiveness in our country and around the world. We, as human occupants of the great spaceship Earth, have more in common with each other than we have differences.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
John Lacy: Quite ironically, as a company that provides social media services for our clients, I am not found on many social media channels. I can be found on LinkedIn, and you can also check out Idea Grove’s website and learn more about Trust Signals here.
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
