MAGNET in the News
A little louder now:
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If you’ve never heard of the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network, don’t blame David Fouts.
He got there as fast as he could.
Mr. Fouts, 57, a longtime local executive and former consultant for Ernst & Young, on July 1 became president of the Cleveland-based manufacturing support organization, which is known as Magnet. In an interview six weeks into his new gig, he said one of his first priorities is to turn up the volume of the organization. It should be louder in terms of its member-to-member communications and louder still when it comes to its political advocacy, Mr. Fouts said.
“I think the community is thirsty for a more active Magnet,” he said.
The group already has taken a higher-profile approach on the political front, coming out strongly over the last month against the Ohio Healthy Families Act, a planned initiative for the November ballot that would require manufacturers and other employers to provide workers with paid sick leave.
Magnet sent out news releases July 21 stating it was staunchly opposed to the measure because it would kill jobs, and a week later sent an open letter to Gov. Ted Strickland asking him to fight the initiative — which the governor last week said he would do.
“We hadn’t taken a position (before his arrival) and our customers (Magnet’s members) wanted us to take a position,” Mr. Fouts said. “Without advocacy, there is no leadership.”
Mr. Fouts said Magnet’s political work “will remain issues-oriented, but to the extent that one candidate, or camp, endorses an issue that we abhor, then we will point that out to our members.” He said the same goes for candidates who support issues that benefit manufacturers.
A former college wrestler at Ohio Wesleyan and the son of a high school football coach who played for Bear Bryant, Mr. Fouts is not one to shrink in the face of a challenge.
“We’re going to go belly to belly — but we’re not going to create fights,” he said.
Favorable impressions
Not that Mr. Fouts wants to spend all his time or Magnet’s resources fighting political battles. He also sees a larger role for the organization in supporting economic development by promoting infrastructure improvements and other efforts to help manufacturers.
“I’m trying to get companies to stay in Northeast Ohio,” Mr. Fouts said.
Toward that end, he has begun meeting with regional economic development executives. One, Brad Whitehead, president of the Fund for Our Economic Future, an organization that seeks to promote regional economic development, was won over quickly.
“He certainly impressed me out of the blocks,” Mr. Whitehead said. “He’s a guy who’s got an appreciation for what this region needs and a lot of interesting ideas about what can be done.”
Mr. Fouts also is proving popular with at least some of Magnet’s members and directors, including Peter Broer, CEO of Cleveland-based Lumitex, a maker of lighting systems for electronic devices. Mr. Broer served on the Magnet board committee that hired Mr. Fouts.
“We all think there’s an important role for advocacy, education, innovation, collaboration and commercialization, and Dave, I think, has the background to step forward on these fronts and also the personal ability to network among constituent companies and member organizations,” Mr. Broer said.
Eye of the tiger
Another goal laid out by Mr. Fouts is for Magnet to be more aggressive in working with members and helping them help each other more than it has in its previous 24 years, including when it was known as the Cleveland Advanced Manufacturing Program prior to 2006.
“Sometimes, it could be some pretty forceful help,” he predicted.
Mr. Fouts said he wants to assemble “tiger teams” of successful manufacturing executives who can work with Magnet members on specific business issues, ranging from controlling expenses and targeting their marketing efforts to taking a business green.
It might be advice the recipient doesn’t want to hear, he said. But he believes channeling such advice through groups of proven executives, in a setting similar to an intervention, will have a greater effect that sending the same message through an individual Magnet consultant.
“When it’s one-on-one, people tend to say ‘I won’t listen to that guy.’ But when it’s five on one, they tend to listen,” Mr. Fouts said. “It’s intervention, it’s absolutely intervention.”
Mr. Fouts sees his membership as a vast field of expertise from which he and individual members can find answers to many common problems.
“We’ve not ever taken our 2,500 members and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a company in the (Magnet business) incubator and they’ve got a hiccup. Can you help?’” Mr. Fouts said.
Man on a mission
For that matter, Mr. Fouts said, Magnet should become more selective about whom it puts in its incubator. In the future, he said, candidates will be considered not only on the merits of their ideas and management talent, but also on whether their management is coachable and whether their business is one that Magnet members can help when significant challenges arise.
“It’s going to tighten up,” Mr. Fouts said of the selection process, which he said will include a “whole different interview process” going forward.
But Mr. Fouts insists he isn’t out to give Magnet a wholesale overhaul — nor was he hired to do so.
“No one in the hiring process said, ‘Make changes,’” Mr. Fouts said. “However, what I do see is a huge opportunity to help the community more.”
Magnet’s board may not have given Mr. Fouts a mandate to affect broad changes, but it’s happy with what it has seen from him thus far, said Lumitex’s Mr. Broer.
“I think what we’ll get out of this is a more active Magnet, a more open Magnet, a more ambitious Magnet and a more collaborative Magnet,” Mr. Broer said. “A number of (board members) had known him before, and they’ve all sort of looked at each other and said, ‘Why didn’t we think of him sooner?’”