New Chapter, Same Story for Edmundson

As reported in The Memphis Daily News

The “significant stake” Texas-based Hunt Cos. Inc. is making in LEDIC Management Group clearly means it’s a new day for the storied real estate company.

Yet for the chairman who’s long been affiliated with and helped steer LEDIC – and who’ll now be known as its chairman emeritus – well, it’s just another day.

Ken Edmundson will still be down the hall from LEDIC in the same office building on Thousand Oaks Boulevard his companies and LEDIC share. The investment in LEDIC follows one of a plethora of storylines Edmundson will still be helping other companies – especially middle market companies – write for themselves.

Doing that is something he’s passionate about, written books about, travels frequently about and has developed several companies around.

With CEO Pierce Ledbetter, Edmundson has for several years helped put LEDIC on its current strong path for growth.

Not long before Ledbetter became CEO in 2007, Edmundson took on LEDIC as a client of Edmundson Northstar, the institute he founded that offers sales training, employee assessments, hiring services and leadership development.

Edmundson Northstar is one of several creations that emerged from Edmundson’s laboratory of tool-creation for business development. Others include The ShortTrack CEO system, which Edmundson launched with a few partners to focus on companies with under $100 million in revenue.

Through the ShortTrack system, CEOs and leadership teams are shown how to excel in areas like foundation, market, people and operations to help impact their business value. And Edmundson says the ShortTrack system provides the same business model used to grow LEDIC the past few years.

To sum up what he does and still intends to do: “I am very comfortable that if we come into an organization, we’ll impact that organization pretty quickly.”

Closing in on the fourth decade of his professional career, Edmundson isn’t slowing down. He’s traveling to Wisconsin in a few days and will be jetting elsewhere after that, continuing to plant the seeds of business strategy and development in the gardens of companies around the U.S.

Clues and symbols about Edmundson’s thinking and the way he operates are clear and hard to miss. The dominant image on the Edmundson Northstar website is that of a large compass. A copy of “Snowball,” the biography of famed investor Warren Buffett, sits outside Edmundson’s office.

In a video clip on the Edmundson Northstar website, Edmundson recounts a quote he once heard from Buffett’s longtime partner Charlie Munger: “If I knew where I was going to die, I wouldn’t go there.”

The simple philosophy behind that statement ought to be familiar to any of the companies and business leaders Edmundson helps partly by getting them to focus on the basics.

“The most important thing that a mid-market business can figure out for itself is why it is in business,” he said. “You’ve got to know why you’re in business. Many companies don’t know. They’re successful, but they still don’t know. Or if they do know, it may not be the driver it ought to be.

“Helping a company figure out why you’re in business and why the market responds the way it does is the key to getting a business headed in the right direction.”