The Vision Thing

Some people have vision. Some have visions. Joe Ellis has both.

That Joe Ellis beheld a vision one day in 2003 could probably be explained away in any number of ways. He was in a darkened theatre that had been in disuse for years, climbing a rickety staircase. Off somewhere else in the theatre, a salesman was playing an old James Bond movie; trying to convince Joe to use the projectors he was selling to turn Joe’s theatre into a second-run movie house. As Joe climbed, he could just make out faded Mayan figures staring back out at him from the dimly lit walls. The entire scene was a peculiar sort of vision already.
As Joe reached the balcony to see whether the screen would be visible to patrons in the upper seats, he called out for a friend downstairs to hit the lights. There were only two bare light bulbs strung in the theatre at the time, and when they came on, Joe did not see the movie screen. He saw something else entirely.
“I happened to be looking straight down at the stage and I saw a bluegrass band appear in front of some TV cameras,” he remembers today. “It was like a vision given to me, so I shouldn’t take the credit because it was given to me. But I thought right then, ‘We could do a bluegrass concert TV series from here and show it on PBS.’”
Today, the Song of the Mountains program that originates from the Lincoln Theatre in downtown Marion, Virginia reaches into 38 million homes with 69 million viewers. Suffice it to say, what President George H.W. Bush once referred to as “the vision thing,” has not been a problem for Joe Ellis.

For much of his life, Ellis has had both a unique ability to see things differently than most people see them, and a bold approach to addressing them. When he was attending college at Emory & Henry University, he says he had visions and dreams that drove him to action. When the US Forest Service announced plans to build a ski slope on Mount Rogers, he says, “I ended up reading all five impact studies and finding out that they really had negative impacts to the region. And if you study the region it’s really like a rainforest in the diversity of plants and animals. There’s nowhere on the east coast that has such a diversity except for one swamp in Florida.”
Vision led to action and Ellis made it his mission to thwart the Forest Service. “It was quite a laboratory for my learning,” he remembers. “There was no such thing as PowerPoint back then, no presentation tools. But I went to all the community meetings. I had to figure out how to take this data and put it into something that people could understand. So getting up in front of people in these little gymnasiums and showing how the wastewater output was seven times greater than the stream it was going to dump in was just, when I look back, a course in itself on making impact. I learned a tremendous amount. I probably took away more than I gave in some respects.” And he thwarted the Forest Service.

In 1989, Ellis was given an opportunity to look at things in a different way in his own business, and again, he used the opportunity to create success. His company was working with Dupont at the time, he remembers. “In 1989 Dupont was pursuing the Malcolm Baldrige Award and in my being a successful partner with them they asked me to answer the questions in applying for the award, “How do you know that your employees know what they need to know to do their jobs correctly?” and, “When something changes in your business how do you know that your employees have gotten the change to know how to do their jobs correctly?”
“The research that I did on these questions led me to create the resource I call People Resource Planning,” Ellis says. “The epiphany of that was that if two companies had the same idea on the same day for the same product or service, who’s going to win? The obvious answer is the one who makes the most accurate decisions and compresses the time the most.”
That led Ellis into the PRP theory of how to make decisions on human capital to get that accuracy and compression of time to get a product out as soon as possible. “We looked at the frequency of change that was hitting businesses and change was coming faster and it was also coming at higher altitudes, more of it,” he says. “To realign your human capital with that change gave you a competitive advantage, if you did it well.”
“Some of the factors that we named were compliance with regulatory change, changes in technology, changes embedded in your technology, or with your product itself, and market competition change,” Ellis says. “We predicted in the future that businesses would need a systematic approach to optimize this change in the employee’s development, performance and deployment.”
When Dupont decided to end its quest for the Baldrige, Ellis and his company had the opportunity to turn his Proustian moment into a profitable product. But being a small Southwest Virginia-based company, Ellis lacked the volume of data needed to prove the value he knew existed. So he built a consortium of large companies to build a global product. When they heard his ideas, the giants of industry began to line up. Eastman Chemical came on board early, followed soon by Verizon, Chrysler, Dominion Power, Norfolk Southern, Qwest and Mountain States Health Alliance.
Today there are seven modules in Ellis’ TEDS software package: Learning Management, Competency Management (or RTC), Performance, Staffing and Recruiting (Job Vision), Session Planning, Compensation Management, and Workforce Management. All are in a single database in a single application; which is both popular and effective. “We’ve had companies like SAP and PeopleSoft for a decade saying they’re going to be there next year, next year, next year,” Ellis says.
Ellis explains the benefits of his product in simple terms. “Say you were competing against Apple’s iPhone and your CEO is saying, ‘For us to stay at market share or not lose much we have four to six months to answer this.’ Twenty or 30 years ago you had two years to answer it, but in today’s market sometimes it’s weeks or months to stay within the market share. So with that, you have a gap, we call it a micro-gap, at your organization’s capability respond in order to close the gap at the micro-level. What’s it going to take? It may take monetary investment in equipment or factories, or whatever. But the change means that people have to do new things.
“The current way is guess work,” Ellis says. “With PRP full integration we’re able to keep an accurate skills inventory of what people know and how they perform. So you’re beginning with the accuracy of the known. In most companies it’s the accuracy of the unknown so you’re introducing risk right there. No company wants that kind of risk. With the PRP you can automatically say here is our current state and here is our future state and what we do with the PRP is to say, ‘We need to have these particular skills or competencies or jobs; however you define it. How are we going to get there?’ With the PRP theory you say we have three options: make them out of existing employees, buy them, or rent them. Say we’re going to answer the iPhone or whatever the gap is then I can define my future state and I can ask the question, ‘If I need 50 employees with certain skills, who’s my best fit, my least amount of time?’ The PRP theory helps you to decide whether to pull off 50 or pull off 25 and hire 25. Because of the integration the module can within a few clicks help you to get 25 people who are 80 percent trained and give them courses and develop them and give them the responsibility of training others. Then you can hire 25 people with the same skill with a single competency table, whether you’re making or buying, you’re making or buying the same standard. In most applications today, each application has different competencies and the overall picture is not accurate. That’s a high level view of how the PRP model allows you to compress the time and increase the accuracy. It gives a clear picture of your human capital.”
If it sounds like Ellis could write a book on this, well, he is. “We are writing a book on the PRP theory that we hope to have out this fall,” he says. “Twenty years ago we used this same theory for materials (MRP) and now we’re the only company that is using the same theory for human capital for accuracy.”

TEDS’ success has allowed Ellis the opportunity and wherewithal to build on his other dreams and visions. The experience fighting the Forest Service led Ellis to the conclusion that Marion, Virginia could develop a tourism-based economy, and he could lead the charge. “We just needed to find ways to transform our manufacturing towns and counties to tourism, which could value the assets that are already here,” he says. “I thought that if people could see that there’s economic value from preserving our buildings and our farms, it would be a good thing. I needed to transform people’s beliefs about what was valuable. People who have grown up with some of our assets take them for granted. So my original motivation was not so much to be an entrepreneur, but to bring about this transformation.” In other words, to bring his vision to reality.
Ellis and his wife began buying property in downtown Marion in the late 1990s. The first building Suzy Ellis bought was a dilapidated structure that now serves as one of the more architecturally interesting office spaces in Southwest Virginia. In 2000, the Francis Marion Hotel went bankrupt and a rumor spread that the primary potential buyer wanted to put a drug rehab dormitory into the building. “Out of near panic, we purchased it for $157,000,” Joe says. “It had cost $197,000 to build back in 1927.” They renovated the structure to its original Moroccan architecture and reopened for business in 2006. In 2008, the hotel made the “National Geographic 250 Hotels You Must Stay At in North America” list.
The Ellis’ and their business partners have bought and renovated several other properties. “The next is an old schoolhouse built in 1906,” Joe says. “I had a vision for it to become the Appalachian School for Music and Art. It would be complimentary to the TV series in that it would have the ability to offer classes in instrument making, how to use audio equipment, how to publish a song, as well as some heritage crafts including things like quilting and straw chair making. We received a grant last fall for the exterior and now we hope to be able to begin work on the interior. Tim White, the host of Song of the Mountains, has graciously agreed that we’ll make the actual hallways the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. We’ll paint images of the new members each year. Tim will paint them into the Hall of Fame. So we’re hoping that will become another point of tourism interest.
“Then there’s the home of Mountain Dew Museum,” Ellis says. “The actual Mountain Dew formula was invented here. We now have a building for the Home of Mountain Dew Museum downtown here too. We want to make Marion a really interesting little town to visit.”
And finally, there’s the Lincoln Theatre, the place where Song of the Mountains originates, and the place where, back in 2003, the most interesting thing happened to Joe Ellis… bj