Alltech staff photo
Mark Lyons with father and Alltech founder Pearse Lyons during the 2016 Alltech ONE Ideas Conference in Lexington.
Mark Lyons has had a whirlwind few months when we meet for an interview in a small conference room in his father’s old office at Alltech’s world headquarters in Nicholasville, Kentucky.
Lyons has his own office in the building, but a spokesperson tells me he likes to come in here from time to time, she believes, to feel closer to his father. Pearse Lyons—who founded Alltech from his Lexington home in 1980 with just $10,000 and grew it into a multinational company—passed away in March due to an acute lung condition that developed during his recovery from heart surgery. Signs of his looming presence are everywhere in the office—from accolades, framed pictures and mementoes lining the dark wood bookshelves to his signature fedora sitting on a desk, as if waiting to be picked up and put on.
As Alltech’s new president, Mark Lyons now steps into a role that, as he says, his father has helped him prepare for over all of his 41 years. The company is in the midst of an explosive period of acquisitions and growth that have more than doubled its size over the past three years, with an annual revenue in excess of $2 billion and approximately 5,000 employees doing business in more than 120 countries. Alltech employs 650 people in Kentucky, where it operates eight facilities that range from the production of agricultural feeds, aquaculture and life sciences research to brewing and distillation, including at its new Dueling Barrels Brewery & Distillery in Pikeville, set to open later this summer.
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Alltech Staff
Mark Lyons, now global president of Alltech, speaks during ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference in 2017.
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Mark Lyons welcomes a delegation from China to Alltech’s European Headquarters in Dunboyne, Ireland, in June 2017.
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Pearse and Deirdre Lyons with their son, Mark Lyons. Their daughter, Aoife Lyons, and other family members are also involved in the company.
It’s a critical juncture for Alltech, a fact of which Lyons is keenly aware. He’s spent the past week traveling with his mother, Deirdre Lyons, to visit a project in Spain, and then to a meeting in Vietnam before flying home to prepare for ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference in Lexington, where he’ll serve as master of ceremonies for the first time.
Lyons took a few moments to talk about the future of Alltech.
First of all, condolences on your father’s passing. This must be a difficult time for you and your family.
I was just thinking this morning that it’s been six and a half months exactly since he had his surgery. He went running the morning of his surgery and then ended up having a triple bypass. You just realize the absolute drive he had. It was extraordinary.
I've been trying to get out to as many of our markets as possible over the last couple of months. Talking with so many people who’ve shared all of these happy memories they have of him has been really impactful. We had a company meeting in Ireland last month where, both mornings, several people got up and just told a story. It was tough and it was emotional, but it's also important to go through this together.
Dad loved the “Don't lose the opportunity of a good crisis” quote. He would endorse, I think, what we're doing right now in terms of bringing people together and focusing on the values and the things he did that were different and that made this company special, and to ensure that we keep those going forward.
The bigger thing is, throughout the world, we talk about it being one Alltech family. Traveling around recently, I’ve realized how much of an impact my father had on individuals and their families.
Born in Ireland, he essentially adopted Lexington as his home and had a huge local presence. Can we expect you and the company to continue in that role?
Dad was the face of a lot of things, but my mother is quite involved in organizing events or promoting ideas internally by saying, ‘This is something we should do.’ Everything that you see around here—with the new building, the facility in Pikeville, the new office in Stamford, England—is all her. My father and mother had a very strong partnership.
The Opera Scholarship with UK, for example, has been a very successful partnership that has grown into a sizeable program that’s been impactful for the university and for the community.
We're also on the second year of our internal accelerator, the Pearse Lyons Accelerator. We're looking at taking that and expanding it into more of an open platform where we can invite other companies to get involved, so we could take outside companies or even some of our own concepts and help them move from an idea to a real business, and see what we can do to help launch it. Dad felt that we didn't do well with joint ventures, but collaborations are something I'm more interested in.
We also have the Dueling Barrels project in Pikeville coming online, and Eastern Kentucky is an area that Dad was very passionate about. As with all of the markets we go into, we want to have a positive impact on the community, and that's one that I'd really like to get my arms around.
Pearse Lyons toasts the groundbreaking of Dueling Barrels Brewing & Distilling Co. in Pikeville, Kentucky.
What is the business of Alltech? It's difficult to pin down sometimes.
That's true, and I think part of that comes from the entrepreneurial energy within the company. At its core, Alltech is focused around the science of fermentation. The largest part of our business is around animal nutrition—that makes up 90 percent of our sales—and around creating innovative products that improve the nutrition of animals in a natural way, and in ways that consumers are happy with and that are better for the environment.
As that business has developed, we've acquired several companies over the past five years that help us get closer to the farm level, and that's grown our footprint significantly.
Are you also working on human nutrition?
We have some nutraceutical products that we're looking at through out Life Sciences division. Some of our research [in conjunction with the University of Kentucky’s Sanders-Brown Center] is showing that, with diseases that relate to mitochondrial function like Type 2 diabetes, some of these nutraceuticals may have an impact.
One of these potential businesses will be mentioned at the ONE conference, and it’s also one of the businesses within our accelerator. I'm very excited about it. Essentially this would be a nutrition business where you would go online, complete a detailed survey and you would receive a box containing personalized supplements organized for each day.
We looked at drug applications and will continue to do so, but I don't think that's the ending point for this type of technology. We're finding that younger people need to start taking these products earlier, particularly in relation to Alzheimer's and anti-aging, but not many people are thinking about Alzheimer's when they're in their early 30s. But there are other benefits to these products that may be more relatable.
Speaking of relatable, would you say that Alltech’s Lexington Brewing and Distilling helped bring a broader awareness of the brand?
Absolutely. For a long time people thought we were the phone company—everyone thought we were Alltel—and then they thought we just made beer.
I'm actually the seventh generation of our family to be involved in some aspect of the brewing or distilling industry. It was something that my father was very passionate about and I'm very passionate about as well. Both of us studied brewing and distilling [Lyons has a master’s degree in brewing and distilling and a Ph.D. in solid state fermentation from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland]. Now we have three breweries and distilleries with Pikeville coming online, which will eventually be on the Bourbon Trail. We also have a brewery in Ireland, and the Pearse Lyons Distillery just a couple blocks away from Guinness in Dublin. It gives us a sizeable footprint, but we’re still very much focused on craft.
What are you passionate about?
I think any aspect where you can connect with people through these entrepreneurial activities and create businesses that generate excitement and motivate people. I gained a global perspective having grown up traveling with my father, and I think part of my responsibility is to connect the dots and maybe help people feel that there isn't such a big difference between people around the world.
Alltech has grown to be very successful; how do you guard against complacency?
We've been using a book that’s really relevant right now called "The Founder's Mentality." It’s about fostering a sense of front-line obsession and ownership, and thinking like an insurgent rather than an incumbent. Incumbent companies don't want change. They want to keep the business the same and just keep churning out profits, whereas insurgent companies are constantly thinking about how to disrupt things. That's who Alltech is and has always been.
We've lost one Pearse Lyons and we can't replace him, but how do we get hundreds, maybe thousands of people, who can think like Pearse Lyons? This is an amazing business he created, and there’s a very clear path of what we need to do. I’m coming into it with a lot of motivation and energy to continue. We don't want to lose that.
Alltech Staff