AL KENICKELL: My name is Al Kenickell; I’m the President of the Chemical Group in Savannah, Georgia. And we were just talking about the fact that the industry is changing so much, how does a CEO drive his company to be able to make those changed.
You know, a lot of people talk about it. A lot of people talk about they need to get in the marketing services, they talk about all the things that are different now in this industry, but actually, the ones that make the changes, there are very few that are actually doing that right now because it’s hard to make change. It’s just not easy to do. But one of the things that a CEO has to do, a CEO has to take the time to read, study, learn and reeducate himself. And there’s not many ways to do it other than working weekends or working after hours. It’s very difficult for a guy running a business to sometime between 8:00 in the morning and 5:00 in the afternoon to devote two or three hours to education, to reading something, to just spending time in study. And what I have found, and I think this is a very fundamental rule that a lot of successful CEO’s are doing, but a lot of people don’t know about it because they just don’t think about it. But what I find is you need to work weekends.
Now a lot of people think they work very hard during the week and they shouldn’t have to do it, but I worked in the last year, I’ve probably worked 40 of the last 52 weekends. Usually it was four or five, six hours on a Saturday and then occasionally a couple of hours on a Sunday. And in those hours, I go in almost with, usually with no set agenda, just different things I can read and I just sometimes would sit there and think. You’ve got to have thinking time; you’ve got to retrain yourself. Don’t think that you’re going to learn how to be a marketing services provider through osmosis. It takes hard work, it takes study and my advice to anybody, the CEO in our industry is that if you’re not in there working on the weekends, you’re probably wondering why you’re not transforming as fast as you’d like and I would tell you that a reason is that you’re not putting forth the effort you need to.