As chairman and CEO of Allied Mineral Products Inc., Jon K.
Tabor has watched sales expand tenfold in two decades.
But that growth didn’t come overnight, and it didn’t come easily.
In that time, he’s had to learn the value of getting the right people around him, trusting those people and preparing them for
change.
His favorite example might be from when he bought Allied in
1980. Tabor had moved from sales manager all the way up to chairman throughout a decade with the company, and a slim window to
buy the producer of monolithic refractories came up.
“It was a trying time — it happened right before the Christmas
holidays, and we didn’t have a lot of time to do it,” Tabor says. “As
I recall, there was a tax law change at the time, and the owner
wanted to take advantage of tax savings. We had about a month to
call the banks and to buy them out.”
To manage the critical opportunity, Tabor leaned on one of his
rules — getting the right help.
“I got an adviser who had worked for a bank in a high position
and who owned his own business,” he recalls “He knew how
banks worked — when you need something from them, they’re
very tough to deal with, and when you don’t need something from
them, they’re very easy to deal with.”
The adviser, who now sits on the company’s board of directors,
knew exactly what the banks would end up demanding and giving
in on. The resulting 10-year agreement was paid off in five years,
proof positive that good advisers are key.
“I’d never dealt with a bank like that before — I probably would
have agreed to more of what the bank wanted in the end than what
I had to give them,” he says. “As I look back on it, I don’t know
what I would have done without (that adviser).”
Today, Tabor is constantly thinking about how to keep instilling
the principles that got him through the buyout to everyone at the
$109 million company. To fully explain how he got the company
there, he wouldn’t mind taking you through the last few decades at
Allied to show you how to try new things and how to get the right
people around you and involved in your evolution.
