There is a certain yin-yang quality to the business association of Kurt Welton and Joanna Burish, but their divergent personality traits are shaping the future of a local build-to-suit commercial real estate developer.
Welton, president and treasurer of the Madison-based Welton Enterprises, is grooming Burish to be his eventual successor. In terms of personality types, the 50-year-old Welton considers himself to be an “INTJ” [Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging). People of this type are called masterminds because they like to devise plans and allow other people carry them out; unless they are close to someone, they are not very good at personal (or business) relationships.
He considers Burish, now director of finance and development, to be an “ENFP” (Extrovert, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perceiving), which is the personality type that often is called a “champion.” An ENFP definitely is more in tune with ideas, creativity, and personal relationships than an INTJ.
“It’s funny because ENFPs need a mastermind to mentor them,” Welton said.
In this business succession process, Welton is the first to admit there is plenty of two-way mentoring going on. That’s part of the reason why Welton is so confident that his family-owned company has chosen the right person to run the business for the next generation. By Welton’s own admission, Burish, a 40-year-old single mother, is already better at managing people than he is – in part because she is more interested in getting to know people and their families.
Case in point: Welton recounted the time when Burish, who has been with the company for one full year, told him that the wife of a business associate was sick and suggested that he ask the associate how his wife was doing. This thoughtful touch, which is enough to get any encounter off on the right foot, otherwise would have never occurred to him.
“I just don’t think that way,” he said.
Burish’s comparatively high Emotional Intelligence Quotient is hardly the only reason she was tabbed to succeed Welton, but it played a role in one of the company’s first key succession judgments. Welton Enterprises has established a five-year succession plan in which Burish will learn the ropes of this complex business, which manages more than 20 different companies, each with its own assets and employees. In an oft-repeated mistake, most organizations don’t give themselves that much time to put a succession plan in motion, and even Welton admits it took considerable prodding – several quarterly meeting’s worth – from his board of advisors to get the plan rolling.
The Succession Bus
Welton took over the company in 1999, the year after his father, Ken, suffered a massive stroke. However, he never contemplated his own succession until board members asked, “What happens if you get hit by a bus?” Although Welton put them off, the company’s board meetings would inevitably come back to the same types of questions: What will happen to the company if something happens to you? What’s your plan?
Eventually, Welton realized that putting off a succession plan was selfish, and that’s because his train of thought turned to the potential impact on employees. Said Welton: “If the bus hits me and I die, what would happen to the business? It would sort of be like a dead zebra in the plains. The vultures would come down and they would pick it clean. There would be nothing but a few bones left, and all these people would lose their jobs. Is that fair to them?”
When the board met in November of 2007, Welton promised to craft a succession plan. Since it’s a family business, he considered his children, nieces, and nephews, but realized he would have to go outside the family when nobody expressed an interest in running the business. He toyed with the idea of asking a local television station to get involved in a competition modeled after The Apprentice, but he caught an unexpected break after Ann Kinkade, director of the UW-Madison Family Business Center, asked if he’d be willing to be interviewed by a local newspaper about the center’s forthcoming seminar on family business advisory boards.
Welton, who joked that he is a poster boy for doing what the Family Business Center tells him, was interviewed for an article that caught the eye of Burish, who has a real estate background. Nowhere in the article did Welton mention a successor, but Burish was interested enough to send her resume.
Welton knew his successor had to be younger than he was because it would take some time to learn the different facets of the business: its chart of accounts, development projects, and leasing techniques; negotiating the purchase of assets; and how the different companies are intermingled. “Her resume was very impressive,” Welton said. “It looked like it had everything I was looking for, and I thought to myself, ‘Okay, I can spend a year or so and end up with someone this good, maybe better, maybe not. Why don’t I have my board interview her and see what they think?’”
That interview took place in May 2008 at the Madison Club. There she was, in a large room, alone on one side of a big, four-sided table, facing Welton, his attorney, his CFO, and an experienced board that includes the likes of Bishop William H. Bullock, bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Madison.
It wasn’t too intimidating, however, because Burish had done her homework. To Burish, it was an exciting opportunity to walk into, especially after researching the board members and the company, and having impressed Welton in a preliminary interview. (He had planned to ask 54 questions, but asked only 21 of them because every response, he said, was a “10.” Her answers were provided to board members in advance of their meeting with Burish.)
Burish, who graduated from UW-Madison in 1996 with a degree in accounting, not only entered the Madison Club prepared, but with the perfect frame of mind. My thought was, ‘You go through something like this, and if you’re the right person for it, it will work out. If it’s the right job for me, it will work out.’”
Welton’s decision to seek independent advice payed off handsomely when the board also came away impressed. According to Welton, “When she left, they said, ‘If you don’t hire her, you’re an idiot.’”
Quite a Production
One thing that impressed the board was Burish’s combination of business and artistic skills. Burish has run her own music production company (with studios in New York and Los Angeles) and her own Madison-based film-television production company, More Than Infinity Productions. Her most recent film, titled Madison, was one of the most watched films at the 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival.
Her film production experience already is paying dividends with a testimonial video about Welton’s Silicon Prairie Business Park development. From now on, she only intends to dabble in film and use the not-so-obvious parallels between film and real estate to her advantage. “It was a pretty big producer who really pointed out to me the correlation between film production and real estate,” Burish noted. “It’s really the same process. You have a land property, you have a film property. You’re finding your director or producer on the film side; on this side, you’re finding your architects, you’re finding different bankers and different [building] contractors. It’s such a direct correlation, but with different labels on the jobs.”
Beyond Burish
In addition to moving toward an employee-owned company – “If they own it, they will take better care of it” – Welton has even sown the seeds for Burish’s potential successor. He did so by coyly suggesting a management future to Grace Welton, his 12-year-old daughter.
Grace, who was 10 at the time, needed the kind of masculine reassurance that only a father can provide. The Welton family was sitting at the dinner table and Kurt, who had raised the subject of the family business, asked Grace, “Would you like to run the business someday?”
Her initial answer surprised him.
“She said to me, ‘Dad, I’m a girl.’”
“I said, ‘What?’’
“She repeated, ‘I’m a girl.’”
“I said,‘So what?’’’
“She said, ‘Well, girls don’t run businesses.’”
“I said, ‘Are you kidding? Women run countries. They run big businesses, and you can run it if you want, but you’ve got to be smart enough. You’ve got to work hard enough, and you’ve got to want to.’”
“Then she goes, ‘Oh, then maybe I will.’”
If she does, Welton has chosen a more immediate successor who can serve as a role model.
