Happy New Year 2023 and welcome to a very special issue of Business and Industry Connection.
Reviewing 2022 from our company’s standpoint, it was challenging but successful. While still recovering from some COVID- 19-era setbacks, we have had a record year by almost every metric in our digital department, near record levels for our headhunting division, BIC Recruiting, and we have seen a huge upsurge of activity in our merger and acquisition consulting group, IVS Investment Banking.
I’m bullish on the future of our industry despite some headwinds and the proof is, in part, in the heavy investments we made in 2022 in our publication, online products, events, services and staff. One of the most consuming and attention-absorbing aspects of 2022 was implementing an enterprise-level software, which is a unique challenge requiring organizational discipline and teamwork to endure some short-term pain for the long-term good. Besides this major software transition, BIC has also invested in major hardware upgrades across the entire company, including personal computing and servers, and backup and improvement to our data security.
At the same time, we are making further improvements to our world-class content. We have added a new director of creative services, an industry veteran and returning BICster, Brent Gaspard. You can thank him for the beautiful design of our front cover and throughout the publication. We also have Jana Stafford in a newly-created position as director of content. She is coordinating BIC associate editors, freelancers and over a dozen different guest columns from various industry associations. These associations partner with BIC Magazine to communicate to you some of the most important issues facing them and to advise you of progress.
Building for the future, we listen to our readers and partners who have told us, amongst other things, that you are putting an emphasis on face-to-face events. In response, BIC produced its first-ever trade show, the Plant Reliability, Inspection, Maintenance and Engineering Expo (The PRIME Expo). Combining an on-site conference with an exhibition, the inaugural event this fall had over 1200 attendees, far exceeding expectations. The 2023 event will be held Thursday, October 5 in Pasadena, Texas at the Pasadena Convention Center. For information on attendance and available booth space to exhibit, visit ThePRIMEexpo.com.
Other extensive BIC improvements have been made to our website, where breaking industry news is updated several times a day. Page views are up 10% from this time last year. We have also introduced a variety of twice-weekly online newsletters that provide specific industry news, resources and networking opportunities to our audience. Additionally, BIC is working to provide more webinars and industry roundtables to share best practices within industry.
Like many of you, BIC has also juggled the issues of remote and hybrid work versus the collaboration and other advantages of working together in-office. This is going on in the backdrop of consolidating offices into our Houston area headquarters. Despite all the changes and challenges, we have a team at BIC that is as joyful, hardworking and cohesive as I’ve ever seen.
To what do we owe these accolades and successes? I believe it is due in large part to a culture created around the philosophy of service to others.
Before my 25-year-career at BIC, I worked at Exxon. BIC’s founder, Earl Heard, was already a father figure to me. Knowing Earl had risen through the ranks at Ethel and Hill Petroleum (now Valero), I solicited career advice from him before I started my first day on the job at Exxon; this was a decade before we became co-workers and later business partners. He gave me two wonderful pearls of wisdom that would serve any worker well.
The first was to find and develop a relationship with a mentor. Choose him or her carefully and then be proactive in encouraging them to delegate all the work they possibly can to you, teaching you to complete the tasks along the way. In exchange, you will learn your trade correctly, and, additionally, when your mentor climbs the ladder of success, based in part on your work, he or she will pull you up the ladder behind them.
The second piece of advice was to join the local professional associations, and don’t just join, but participate through contribution of effort. In exchange for the effort put into work on committees and/or the board of professional associations, you will learn more about the industry as a whole and broaden your network of meaningful contacts, he said.
Our current successes, I am certain, germinated from that advice decades ago. At the time he first gave them to me, it didn’t surprise me that both of “Earl’s pearls” were related to hard work and learning, but it didn’t occur to me until much later that the pearls had a deeper commonality: they both required serving others. In one case, it was serving your mentor. The other was serving industry.
The pearls were practical applications of the ancient and biblical principle, “it is better to give than to receive.” While ancient, this truth and many others are the foundation of the management philosophy of servant leadership.
On a broader level, as a Christian, I work with a different compass. Popular culture may encourage one to see work life and spiritual life as completely separate. If separate, it follows that if a practice is legal and everyone is doing it, the only fundamental question is: Can money be made? American economist and statistician Milton Friedman’s famous dictum is that business managers have one and only one goal — to maximize shareholder value. However, even Friedman had to incorporate the expectation that the market itself would reward integrity and hard work, and punish dishonesty and laziness. But ethics themselves sometimes boil value decisions into a cost-benefit analysis. We must do what is right because it is right, as our individual ethics have a cumulative effect on the broader common good.
Many of you reading this may not share a management title, but the practice of adroit service and honest dealings to your supervisor, coworkers, peers and customers will garner success in your career over time. It will, in essence, make you a leader amongst your peers, even before you are awarded a management position.
I’ve learned that if you earnestly put others’ needs before your own, on the whole, your needs will be met and even advanced. Further, it is a practice that one should exercise in every facet of life, not just at work, but at home with family and in the community with your neighbors. I’ve seen great success when I have practiced it, and have also crashed and burned when I have taken a stance of self-centeredness. We’ve all seen examples of self-focused leadership that alienates and aggravates, rather than promoting an environment for joy and success.
While we work to serve our marketing partners and our employees, we at BIC Magazine truly endeavor to serve you, our readers, by providing relevant content to help you in your job — and outside of work, to provide you a broader and easier path to your own success.
-Thomas
