Note: This is part of an ongoing series of articles that mine the Be Epic Podcast for lessons and insights that students and practitioners can apply to their lives as business leaders. This is part one of two based on the podcast with Gary Norcross.
Jeff Bezos flipped burgers at McDonald’s. Warren Buffett had a paper route. Beyoncé swept the floors at her mother’s hair salon. And Doug McMillon unloaded trucks at a Walmart distribution center.
A typical moral from such examples is that it’s OK, even beneficial, to start at the bottom and work your way up. But let’s face it: plenty of people start at the bottom and don’t reach the C-suite.
If you’re a college student or young professional, however, you are likely thinking about how you can build a career with an upward progression. You figure you need a plan for getting from Point A (the minimum wage or entry-level job) to Point Z (the job you envision when you look 20 or 30 years down the road). You know going from flipping burger or sweeping floors to CEO or superstar isn’t easy. And the fear that one wrong choice can send you into a black hole of career mediocrity can fill you with anxiety and indecision.
If that’s the case, consider the secret-sauce advice from Gary Norcross: Chill out.
Well, that’s not exactly what he said. That’s just the two-word summary. Here’s the longer, and much more helpful version, of what the farm-boy-turned-CEO-of-a-global-company recently told Walton College Dean Matt Waller on the BeEPIC podcast: “You really can’t make a bad decision early in your career, as long as you’re growing and getting new experiences.”
In other words, it’s not what you do so much as what you do while you’re doing it. Are you learning new things? Are you working hard? Are you building good relationships? Are you developing your technical skills and your skills as a leader? If you do those things while you are unloading trucks at a distribution center, it will help you not only in that role but in whatever comes next.
Norcross knows this approach works, and not just because it worked for the likes of Bezos, Buffett, Beyoncé, and McMillon. It's also worked for Norcross during his rise to the position of CEO of Fidelity Information Systems (FIS), a Fortune 500 financial services company.
Norcross graduated from the Walton College and fully intended to go home and work in the family farming operation. After interviewing with several companies during a recruiting event on campus, however, he recognized the value of an opportunity to get some experience “outside the farm.”
He accepted a job offer from Systematics, the Little Rock-based banking software company that would eventually morph into FIS. That job, however, fell through just before he graduated, so he scrambled to take a sales job. A year later, in 1988, Systematics came back to him and offered him a job as an entry-level programmer. He took it and has been with the company ever since.
“I didn’t have a programming background coming out of Walton,” he said. “But Systematics taught me how to program and I found it really interesting. It really was all about the experience for me.”
Norcross, whose degree is in business administration, still thought he would return to the farm, but he kept accepting new assignments with Systematics. “I went very broad in my career and moved from programming to client support to implementations to client management to sales,” he said. Then in 1996 he got what he calls his “big break,” although few others saw it that way because the assignment was to take over the company’s worst-performing business unit.
“I take this job and we send out the announcement across the company,” Norcross said, “and my phone just lit up. ‘What did you do wrong? Who did you upset? Why would you take that kind of demotion? That’s a black hole. Everybody goes to that business and it always ends their career and ends in failure.’”
Norcross, who was 31 at the time, saw it as another opportunity to learn, but he wasn’t blind to the challenge. The business unit did around $3 million in annual revenues, but was losing $2.5 million a year, he said. Under his leadership, however, they adjusted their strategy, quickly became profitable, and grew to revenues of more than $3.5 billion over the next decade. By that time, the company was known as FIS. Norcross was named president and chief operating officer in 2012, president and CEO in 2015, and now is CEO and chairman of the board.
“When I took that opportunity in 1996, I literally went from reporting to the president of the company to someone four levels deep in the company,” he said. “So it was viewed as a huge demotion. But for me, it was all about the opportunity, and that’s really played well for my career.”
Each role prepared him for what was to come, he said. For instance, his different stops taught him about sales, product development, and how to assemble a team that leans into each other’s unique strengths. And working on the family farm taught him not only about work ethic but about working with and leading people who were older than him – how to show them respect and learn from their experiences and expertise. When he took over the failing business, many of his direct reports were older than him. And he realized that, while he always needed to have a viewpoint, he also needed to have an openness, to be inclusive and listen.
“I didn’t know anybody on the team,” he said. “I did not know the product. This was an entirely different division within the company that I’d had zero exposure to, and it was well-known that it had been failing for years. And so I immediately pulled everybody together on the very first day and I transparently said, ‘Here are all the results of this company.’ And you could see people’s eyes just lighting up. I realized in that short period of time that they’d never been told transparently what’s going on in the business.”
Norcross told them he was there not to close the business, but “to turn every metric from a negative to a positive.” They did that by working together to make strategic changes regarding their offerings and their approach to sales. They began to grow organically, then, as things improved, by using well-timed mergers and acquisitions.
Norcross never expected to lead a multi-billion-dollar business, but that’s where his path took him because, he said, he never chased titles. Instead, he pursued interesting opportunities. And that’s why he believes students and young professionals can’t go wrong as long as they focus on learning and growing from their experiences.
“Find an opportunity that interests you and always stretch yourself to be uncomfortable,” he said. “It’s kind of like in school. Take the honors class. Take the advanced class. Really lean in and get the most you can and stretch yourself. I think your career is very similar. … Find something that you’re interested in, stretch yourself, always push yourself to take new opportunities and new risk.”
If you work hard, always try to make a positive difference, and find mentors who can help you along the way, he said, you will continue to grow. And if you discover you don’t like the work? No problem, he said. Move on to the next opportunity.
“Don’t be scared to pivot,” he said. “At some point in time, you might have a lot of passion around a topic and you’re two years in and find out, ‘This isn't exactly what I thought it was gonna be. Even though my degree might have been in this particular area, I want to move, I want to try something different.’ And if you do that, I think you'll have a phenomenal career.”
