Articles & White Papers
Born Leader
Atlanta Facilitation Company Builds Name in Industry
By Ayanna Hunt
Landing lucrative facilitation contracts with the likes of Radio Shack, Shell and the City of Atlanta takes a lot more than brains and networking savvy. It also requires tenacity and the ability to distinguish your company in a burgeoning industry.
"Right now [the facilitation] industry is sort of like the video market was before Blockbuster," says Michael Wilkinson, founder and managing director of Leadership Strategies Inc.: The Facilitation Company. "There are no big players, just a bunch of one or two person facilitation firms around the country. Our vision is to be the Blockbuster of the facilitation industry!"
When Wilkinson left his cushy job as an IT consultant at Ernst & Young to start LSI in 1993, he experienced firsthand the challenges of finding success in an unproven industry.
"I can remember the very first public [facilitation] class we taught had four people, and we needed eight to break even," Wilkinson remembers. "It was like, 'Oh man, I need to hit the streets and start knocking on doors.'"
Part of the problem was convincing companies that facilitation was indeed a needed service.
"Facilitation is the ability to move a group of people with lots of different opinions together in a direction to get them to a solution where they can move on to better things," Wilkinson explains.
"If you're looking for the team's advice and for the team to say, 'this is the direction, how do we go about doing it?' then facilitation makes sense." His hard work paid off.
Since 1993, LSI has created a niche among corporate giants and non-profit agencies as a leader in both facilitation and facilitation training. The company has facilitated strategic planning, analysis and training assignments for corporate behemoths like BellSouth, Georgia-Pacific, KPMG Peat Marwick and Sears, Roebuck & Co. They've also worked with non-profit and government entities including the CDC, American Cancer Society, Families First and the Atlanta Public Schools.
In a typical week Wilkinson, who is also lead consultant, usually has five or six active assignments in various stages of execution all over the country. To focus more on building the company's infrastructure, he's limited his international travels to once per year.
The high honors Dartmouth College grad recently wrote a facilitator training manual, "Certified Master Facilitator." He is also completing his first book, "The Secrets of Facilitation," scheduled for release in late 2003.
In his bid for the coveted "Blockbuster" throne, LSI recently launched its National Facilitator Database, which will become a host for facilitators around the country to have their information filed for potential clients.
Wilkinson's foray into the industry proved fruitful: in 2002 his revenues were $1.2 million.
But he offers this hard-won advice to budding entrepreneurs.
"Do what you love," he says adamantly. "If you're going to work that hard, do something you love."
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