On a crisp autumn day in 2004, Dan Gilbert went in search of fall festivities with his family by visiting a pumpkin patch.
Upon arriving, he found irony in a sign reading “Pumpkin Patch,” with an arrow pointing in the opposite direction of the field. While some would let it go and laugh it off as stupidity, Gilbert pursued it. He interviewed a young man working at the patch about it, and when the Gilbert clan returned in 2005, the sign was corrected and accurately guided Great Pumpkin seekers to the patch.
In life and in business, Gilbert expects excellence and works toward a championship level as chairman and founder of Quicken Loans and majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, but errors, inaccuracies and apathy get in the way. He has trained himself and his employees to constantly raise their level of awareness to improve as an organization using a list of values he calls “Isms.”
He lives them himself to empower others to do the same, and these “Isms” create a strong cultural foundation for a successful organization. When he took over the Cavs in early 2005, he knew he could change the culture and help guide the organization’s turnaround process if he could build this foundation.
He has since grown the franchise to an estimated $102 million in revenue in 2005, according to Forbes.com, which also values the team at $356 million, ninth in the NBA.
“If you want to grow and you want people to understand who you are, the whole thing is getting your people everywhere to understand who you are and not what you do,” Gilbert says. “What you do is pretty simple. We play basketball in front of people. We give mortgages to people who want to buy homes.
“That’s pretty easy, but the harder part is to define as an organization who you are and make sure everybody knows who you are because when you know that, then the decisions that you need to make are a lot easier because it’s in conjunction with who we are or not.”