McFaul In His Own Words

Editor's Note: This profile was reposted with permission from the long-defunct First Moves Magazine, January/February 2003, by its original publisher Medical Distribution Solutions Inc., now known as Share Moving Media Inc.

Knew you were a success when...
When people would call me and ask me to write articles. Or when I was asked to serve on editorial boards. And when I was getting three or four calls a month from people who wanted me to make presentations and speak to their organizations.

Biggest creative crutch:
My nest, which is my desk. Before I can be creative or do anything innovative or whatever, I have to be current in everything else I'm doing. It makes me a workaholic to get all of the crap out of the way so I can get to the stuff that I enjoy doing.

Most creative thing you've ever done:
Creating the concept of consumption analysis. It's very basic form was back in the late 1970s.

What's the best and worst advice someone ever gave you?
Best: When I first got involved to form McFaul & Lyons a sales rep friend of mine that I had known for years asked what I was doing, and I told him. Back then we were trying to help hospitals manage their product evaluation processes. We would go in and sit in their product evaluation committees -- chair it, consult to it, provide assistance to it, whatever. We were charging a hospital something like $6,000 a month for services associated with that. My friend said that the amount of time and energy it takes to do that is probably the same amount of time and energy needed to sell a $60,000 project. And the rest was history. I just had to expand what we were doing to the point where it became more valuable to the client and could justify the higher fees for more involvement. Of course, you can't charge $60,000 for one day's work. We had to expand the concept and that got me thinking about what other avenues could we address and the rest is history. Worst: Invest in technology stocks in a big way. I kid you not. [Editor's Note: Unfortunately, he listened.]

What's your secret weapon in management?
Making decisions and moving quickly. Never being satisfied with a concept, too. Expand, enhance, modify, recreate using different perspectives. Whatever it takes to keep challenging yourself.

Your employees respected you because...
I'd actually do the work. I could have had people out flying all over the country instead of me, and sit back and delegate it, but I didn't do that. I'd go out and fight. If there was a really difficult project, I wouldn't do the whole thing but I'd go out and lead the team and bring them all together.

Your boss respected you because...
I took on all the tough projects. I always produced results. A lot of other people would put the routine stuff aside and procrastinate. I would get that out of the way and move on to have more time to create things.

Your employees couldn't stand you because...
I made the tough decisions, and I would lead the drive for change. After each project we would analyze the results and find better ways of doing every single thing we did. But keep in mind that I didn't have a lot of people reporting directly to me. But I was a stickler with the managers who reported to me. I associated with all of the staff. I saw them all of the time and talked to them. We had over 200 employees at one time. I knew almost all of them. I made a point of that. They didn't view me as being tough or a bad guy. They didn't even know I was the guy making all of the decisions. I was just a good guy laughing, having fun and clowning around with everybody. But to the managers I was the tough guy.

Your boss couldn't stand you because...
They couldn't get to know the real me. Nor did I want them to. I'm just a little private personal me. I didn't have time for a lot of the socialization.

Recall a pivotal moment or turning point in your career.
Probably when I was contract managing MAGNET and I decided that I wasn't making enough money doing it. I had wanted to expand the business, but I couldn't do that and manage MAGNET, too.

What's a must-have accessory for you?
A soft-sided expandable briefcase. You'd be surprised how much crap you can squeeze into one of those babies. And you don't have to check it. I used to travel literally for five days in a garment bag and one big heavy soft-sided expandable briefcase. I couldn't live without it. When you're on the road and you're going to be in a different city every day for five days and you check your luggage with all of your presentation materials in it and they lose it you're screwed.

What advice would you give to people just entering the industry?
It depends if they want to have career advancement. Some people just want to get in there and survive in a job. But assuming that they want to have career advancement they need to develop very good interpersonal skills. The operational aspects of resource and materials management are not rocket science. They can be easily learned. Some people just don't have the personality for the interpersonal skills. Too many people get locked into the mindset where they want to become an expert in all the products or services. That's wrong. It takes too much time. They want to pull people together, create win-wins, recognize the experts. Let those people come up with the solutions. If other people come up with the solutions, they're going to make it work. It's their solution; it's not yours. That's very basic in the psychology of change and it's one of the things that we used to teach to all the thousands of department managers. All of our staff were trained to do that — to get people to buy into it and create win-wins. That's not being lazy. Another thing: Don't be afraid to looking for the most acceptable solution. Optimal solutions may not always be practical. It might save the very most money. But you need to know when to back off and know why you are accepting less than the optimal. You identify what the optimal is but find out what's practical and do that. At some point in time, you may revisit with the optimal but if you try for the optimal upfront you might not get anything.