"First Corbin Financial Corporation recently changed its corporate name to Forcht Group of Kentucky, honoring founder Terry Forcht of Corbin. In an interview with Business Lexington's Tom Martin, Forcht discussed his oversight of a 94-company corporate family and the lessons learned along the way. The interview is edited to accommodate space. Hear the full conversation as a Bizcast, online at www.bizlex.com
TM: Terry Forcht, thank you very much for joining us today.
TF: We appreciate you having us.
TM: The Forcht Group consists of 94 individual companies in fields as diverse as banking, nursing homes, broadcasting, construction and even horse racing. Can you tell us about the path that brought you to where you are today?
TF: Basically, I had a lot of education, from a bachelor's degree, master's degree in finance and a law degree. I went to Cumberland University down in Williamsburg, Kentucky, in 1964 and taught college for awhile there at the university and then began to practice law in that area. And as a result of a law practice, I was fortunate enough to meet several partners, (and) that eventually spilled over into real estate and health care. I did a lot of tax work, so people were generally looking for someone that would handle that part of the business while they did the other aspect of what they had in mind
TM: In looking over the information I have about those early days, it looks to me as though when you found yourself on the board of a bank, you became interested in community banking.
TF: Yes, that is true. I guess the banking aspect, and I did it while going to the University of Louisville at night. I had the banking background. I guess our first venture was in the health care, where we built a nursing home in Corbin about 1972. So after that, the banking came along.
TM: Thinking back to that early experience in community banking, what appealed to you?
TF: At that time in our small communities, we had more or less unit banking, where you couldn't cross county lines. And so you were intense in a way, trying to please your customer in a small town and I think that appealed. And I think bankers had a higher reputation generally in the community ...The competition outside the banking field was not as great as we see today with other aspects of lenders that are more aggressive.
TM: Again, 94 companies in a very broad range of areas; at what point did you decide to go into such broad diversification?
TF: I think one just sort of followed the other. Again, we started in health care, moved to banking and as a result of these activities, you see other opportunities. We were always interested in real estate in Eastern and Central Kentucky with the coal properties and gas and oil and timber, and so as we made one business go, it seemed that that business needed other services. So we found in health care that a pharmacy was needed or a laboratory, or we found in banking that we needed insurance. So we just sort of followed what we were spending money on, in a way. If it looked like it was a good adventure, we'd begin to enter another field.
TM: So you own many of the companies that supply many of the companies that you own?
TF: Yes, that is one way of saying it. It's not a quantum leap. I think sometimes people can leap outside of where they are, but we try to stay within the things we understood. Like in the banking business, we started a small loan company and that began to take us to other places in Kentucky. If we were in a town, we looked around and maybe had a bank that we were starting, and then maybe had a finance company that maybe would go with it. A radio station or newspaper might be of interest because we had to advertise, so that's sort of how we gauged what we were doing.
TM: When you hear of somebody presiding over 94 different companies such as yours on a day-to-day basis, it's a marvel, and I just wonder how you do that?
TF: Well you start early and stay late and try to do it seven days a week. But we have it broken down with groups. We have group leaders.
TM: Is there any particular management structure that makes it all work?
TF: I think delegation of authority helps a lot, and then openness is what I like. If a person wants to discuss something or to see information, it's readily available. So approachability and then holding people accountable at the end of the day is a good way of doing things.
TM: When you're building your leadership team, what do you look for in people?
TF: I think you are looking for expertise in their position. You look for loyalty and you are looking for people that want to work. Most of the things we're in, if we are going to grow, we have to take market share from somebody — do the business better than somebody else or work harder at it. So I would say the three characteristics are: know your job, loyalty to the company, and then hard work.
TM: People seem to be becoming very extremely challenged for time. I imagine that technology has an awful lot to do with that, in particular the PDA and the cell phone. I wonder if an individual such as you who is overseeing so much activity, if you aren't challenged by that yourself?
TF: I think so. Everybody is challenged for time because you are reachable today, and there are a lot of things that command your time. You have your business activity and then there is always the community activity, and family and charities that you want to support. So it is a demanding year, I guess, that we are living in.
TM: Your company recently adopted a new motto, which is intriguing: "Many Companies, One Vision". Explain that a little bit for us and how you arrived at it.
TF: I think our vision is, again, that we're in the smaller towns, the smaller communities, even within like Louisville or Northern Kentucky or Lexington, so our vision is to try to accommodate the areas where we are. And then, if we can have one part of our companies succeed, the other parts will also.
TM: Along the way, we tend to collect lessons and things that tend to inform what we're going to do next. What would be on your short list?
TF: That's a good question. I think one good lesson you learn is you have your short falls, but you try not to get too involved or revengeful and you just keep going forward. You know you are going to lose occasionally, but when you do, you don't really dwell on it. You're going to have some personalities, maybe, that don't click, but you don't dwell on those and you just keep moving without really rethinking the past. I don't have a memory of the past really and sit and dwell on it, so I look towards the future.
TM: Do you expect sometime in the near future we'll be doing a headline at Business Lexington that talks about the Forcht Group's 100th company?
TF: Well, you know, you reach a point maybe where you have to compete on size, so there might be several of our groups that we would want to consolidate some of the companies down into a bigger unit. But certainly, there's room out there for more activity. We see a lot of opportunity.
TM: Anything that I haven't touched on here that you had in mind that you would like to communicate to the area business community?
TF: I think the thing is you take your time in life, and you can't get in a hurry. I think you lay out your plans. You try to what I call balance within the company. You want to make your payments. I pay on every loan that I have every month, so that way you build up your equities and you build up your people. But if I would suggest anything for success: it's a long pull, it's not going to happen overnight.
TM: Terry Forcht, thank you very much.
TF: We thank you.
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