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FAILING FORWARD NUGGET #4: PURPOSE I n business, there is no such thing as "set in stone." Change is constant, but surviving and thriving through change requires leaders with both a vision to seize future opportunities and a flexibility to shift focus. For Mary Kohler, President of H&H Group, life has provided plenty of opportunities to develop these two attributes. In fact, she'll be the first to tell you that in business and in life, her path hasn't always been smooth. "If you would have told me when I was younger that I'd be running a business, let alone a print business, I would have said you were nuts," says Kohler, whose parents, Phil and Camilla Huepenbecker, began a Lancaster branch of a Sir Speedy quick-service copying franchise in 1973. "I hated the business when I was a kid." After graduating from high school, instead of joining her parents, Kohler opted for a path of her own by enrolling in college and assuming the day-to-day management of a horse farm. However, it wasn't long before she realized that she couldn't sustain a living with horses and found herself back in Lancaster reluctantly asking her mom for a job. "I was doing bookkeeping and customer service, which was definitely not a part of my life plan," says Kohler. "But the more I got into it and realized I had a knack for working with customers, the more I developed a passion for the business. And it wasn't long before we grew into the number one Sir Speedy franchise in the world." But challenges existed almost from the beginning. "Coming into a family-owned business isn't easy," she says. "At the same time, I was a woman in a very male-dominated industry. I have plenty of examples where my mother and I would sit in meetings to buy equipment for $100,000 or more and the salespeople would focus all of their attention on our general manager, who was male and about the same age as me." She says with a smile: "We'd politely inform them that he wasn't the decision maker, we were." As attitudes about women-owned businesses evolved, so did printing. By the 1990s the industry was facing a new threat with the rise in popularity and affordability of desktop computers. "We were a staple for all businesses, because they needed us to print forms," explained Kohler. "With the proliferation of computers, that part of our business LancasterChamber.com 7
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