This is America At Work. I’m Debra Stamp.

The internet is a great thing because it’s really part of a communications revolution. And as part of that revolution, it allows a massive aggregation of brain power through the internet. But the underlying principle is collaboration.

Jeff Dickey has an obvious flair for developing new business, no doubt with its roots in that lawn mowing service he ran as a kid.

I kind of got used to working for myself pretty early on. My father got a lawn mower and said, “If I buy the gas, you mow the lawn, but you can use it to do whatever else.” So I had two or three people working for me and we went around the neighborhood and we mowed lawns.

Among the many notches on his start up belt, you’ll find companies you’re very familiar with. DoubleClick and Advertising.com to name just a couple. In college, he took to economics like a duck to water. It just clicked. So did media and sales and they all came together with his first business venture, Alan Weston Communications.

We got into the entertainment industry. My first business partner’s uncle was a guy named Wolf Man Jack, and his real name was Bob Smith, so he was Uncle Bob. So off we went into the entertainment industry and that was kind of fun. The first movie we ever promoted was ‘Animal House.’ We ran around the country in togas, doing toga parties.

Oh, so now we know that Jeff and his buddies had a hand in that toga party craze! Well, it sounds like he always tries to have at least some level of fun in what he does. His business foundation does not include an MBA. It came from gut feelings, a strong work ethic and the help and advice of experienced people around him.

My father’s a Navy captain. He’s retired and he was working with a guy who was doing turnarounds. He agreed to sit down with us and show us how to do this. So he took us through cash flow analysis and the whole nine yards. That’s how we started. We really were being helped by people that were way better at it than we were, kind of explaining to us along the way.

That mentoring was so important. Is that something he still believes in?

We did that a lot with DoubleClick because all these businesses were so new, there really was no prior expertise in the marketplace. So, not only did we have to learn it, but we then had to teach it and so we spent so much of our time evangelizing and mentoring that it’s just become part and parcel of what we do in all these new media businesses. There’s all kinds of stuff going on where people have done well in the past and are willing to share that information.

According to Jeff, it’s the Wild West out there! Forget the old rules and processes, it’s all about exploration and networking.

I’m a big believer in networking, a huge believer in networking. I think that’s what’s going to be driving everything going forward. I think we’re on the verge of a second renaissance. It’s going to be a communications revolution that effectively allows anybody to collaborate and anybody to mentor and it’s all being driven by digital media. There’s a certain amount of learning you need to get under your belt. You can get that learning on the web, through people you know. It’s all about new ideas right now. Be creative and be willing to try anything. I actually sat on a plane with a woman who’s an HR person, it’s kind of interesting, and she’d just come back from a conference. And we were talking about how employers are having such a difficult time communicating with their younger employees, because they don’t talk the same, they don’t operate the same, they don’t look at the world the same. And my question to her was, “Well, why don’t they use the social networking that’s available through these employees and use it to set up open work groups where anybody can chime in?” It could be the person in the mailroom, it could be the person in a clerical position. You don’t know where the talent’s going to be. You don’t know where the creative people are going to be, you don’t know who the leaders are going to be.

He always seems to be a step ahead with his businesses, slightly off beat from the current practices. So how does he continually identify an area as an opportunity and anticipate people’s actions and possible new habits?

What it boils down to is, I’m curious. And I read a lot, I listen to people a lot, I talk a lot, I listen to people talk a lot. I’m in the midst of perpetual interaction. Well, what I’ve found is everybody has something interesting to contribute to every conversation. I’ve yet to find someone who does not have something interesting to say and some little insight or someway of looking at things. So, it’s just the way my mind works, I just assemble all this stuff and what I try to do is look forward and say, “Okay, well, given all this will be the case, what do I think the world’s going to look like five years from now?” Trying to anticipate what needs to be put in today to be functional in five years and that’s kind of the way my mind works.

Okay, but has he ever missed the mark?

I don’t think I’ve missed the mark so much in media, I’ve missed the mark more in holding on to a particular vision a little too long, where things may go a different path and I tend to hold on to it a little longer than I should.

And how do you know when to let it go?

You really don’t. You just have to keep doing what I do, which is talk and listen and read and look and get input and if things start to diverge, you just want to be able to anticipate that and change things a little quicker than you might normally do so. I probably, my greater failing is holding on to something a little too long. That is something that I’ve learned more and more not to do. But it’s something I had to teach myself not to do.

That makes planning an exit strategy all the more important.

There are two points of inflection where you have to decide whether to hold them or fold them. It’s the old Kenny Rogers song. The one point of inflection is where you have, you’ve built a business to a certain level, then you have a point of optimization where going forward there’s a lot of great, enormous, almost projectable growth and success. That’s one point of inflection. And the other point of inflection is when you actually get there. What’s interesting in a business is that the valuation in your company probably is going to be the same at both points of inflection. So in fact you probably can sell your company at the point of greatest potential for almost as much money, if not as much money, as reaching that potential.

So, as far as creating and finding business opportunities, is it really all about the friends we keep?

The reality is that you’ve got half of it on analytics and half of it on faith. If you have prior relationships where people (know) you’ve done this before, it’s been successful before, people at least know that you’re not coming to them with some fly-by-night crazy thing, that you’ve thought it out, and you can explain things to people, how it fits with the overall scheme of things. It’s making those connections, getting the vision across, but also understanding how their businesses work. Because, this is not just about us, this is about how do I make my customers successful? It’s all about making my customers successful. I simply would not be successful in this business if my customers are not successful. If the advertising agencies I work with and the clients I work with are not successful, we will fail.

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