This specialization makes the complex production process a simple series of easily duplicated steps. Think the factory floor of any major car manufacturer.

I mention the production process because LearnKey hires no one for upper management – every one of LearnKey’s decision makers came in at the ground floor and worked their way up.

Because of their policy for internal promotion rather than hiring to fill top positions, LearnKey’s hiring criteria are strenuous. Everyone they hire for part time quality control is a potential department head or future production-team leader.

This practice creates company leaders who are intimately familiar with the company expectations for quality, as well as specialization requirements. These leaders know the company’s core value: creating the highest quality training aid in the world, and they know how to impart that value on to the people they manage.

There’s nothing radical about LearnKey’s approach to training their core leaders, and there’s certainly nothing radical about John Clemons’ approach to growing his company, unless you consider that being conservative is a radical idea in these days of rapid growth and even faster decline.
Resource Conservation
From inception LearnKey has lived from the checkbook. You can take from this fact a LearnKey maxim: no loans. In an age of high finance and large investments, this maxim has helped define their steady, conservative growth. It was no surprise when David Clemons told me “we have always saved for a rainy day.”

Another appropriately conservative aphorism, which sounded much-used, is “you might think you have to have there today, but in reality you don’t.” Clemons cited the high cost of next-day shipping, and the fact that boxes often sit on desks for a few days before recipients open them anyhow. Rushing needlessly hurts the bottom line.

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that they don’t believe in taking unnecessary risks. OK, so “unnecessary risk” is fuzzy, and often when you take an unnecessary risk you don’t realize it’s unnecessary. For clarification look back at their pivotal decisions for a list of one company’s necessary risks. Moving to St. George from Salt Lake City was an enormous risk, but it gave the company room, and people, to grow. The move also provided them the space to embrace another necessary risk: CDs.

Hedgehogs and Great Companies
Towards the end of our interview, Dave Clemons began talking about their “hedgehog theory,” which I assumed had to do with some sort of small mammal infestations they were having out in Utah. Then he told me about two animals from fable – the fox and the hedgehog. The fox is clever and knows a little bit about everything. The hedgehog has one big idea and holds tight to that idea no matter what. Which animal do you think LearnKey is like?

Their decision to be the best production company in the world is their hedgehog theory, their one big idea that helps them define their reason for being. “Good to Great,” a book by Jim Collins, helped them to crystallize their thinking (and that’s where they got the hedgehog concept). Every member of the management team is undergoing training on this book, which Clemons maintains is the reason why they stay so ardently in line with the LearnKey core values.

As our hour-long conversation came to a close I asked about morale at the company. Dave said “Garrett, morale here today is the best it’s ever been.” With their hedgehog dedication to core values and homegrown corporate culture, I can understand why.

Garrett French is the editor of webproworld’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.