Dave Porter
Title: President, CEO Baystate Financial Services
Age: 52
Experience: 30 years
Dave Porter’s story almost reads like a Horatio Alger tale.
When he packed his bags for a no-frills state college in Pennsylvania, Porter had little more than an unenviable SAT score and a dream of becoming a police officer. But his life took a considerably different turn, and now, more than 30 years later, he’s the owner of Baystate Financial Services.
Since he bought the company in 1996, he’s grown it from a $1 million institution with 48 employees and one office in Boston’s North End to a $60 million company with 500 employees and 10 offices in five New England states. But no plaques hang on his walls, and he takes pride instead in the drawers full of “Thank You” notes he’s received over the years.
Now that he’s added published author to his list of accomplishments, Porter sat down to chat about his newly-released book and his keys to success.
Q: Where did you get this idea to write a book?
A: As I’ve grown over the years, I’ve started asking a lot of questions about how I got where I am today, and I’ve boiled it down to four core beliefs: Say please and thank you, be on time, finish what you started and do what you say you’re going to do.
If you can do those four things, you’re better than 99 percent of the world. That’s accountability, and that means you own the outcome. And we – my co-author Linda Galindo and I – turned that into a book, titled “Where Winners Live.”
Q: How did you wind up working with Linda? And how did the writing process go?
A: Linda wrote a great article about accountability three or four years ago in a magazine. I read it and I called her up. We started talking; she was coming to Boston, and we became friends.
We worked with a journalism professor at the University of Maryland – Sharon O’Malley – and every week, for 60 to 90 minutes, we would have a conference call with her, and we would just talk. What was your experience that week? What were you seeing? What were you hearing? Were you accountable, were you not accountable? And Sharon took literally thousands of pages and turned the best of that into a 100-plus page book.
Q: So, how do you apply those lessons in your business?
A: I always ask people here: What’s your definition of success? Because I’ll know that fast how to motivate you or keep you motivated. Everybody has something a little bit different, and I have everybody’s definition of success written down. It could be that you want time to coach Little League. It could be that you want to spend time with your best friend. What I don’t want it to be is money. I never want it to be money. I know lots of people who have a lot of money, and they are not happy. So I don’t tie it to that.
Know what you do well, but also be comfortable with what you don’t do well. If you’re not good at certain things, there’s no shame in that; you can’t be good at everything. But recognize what you’re good and not good at.
Q: You told me earlier that you weren’t always accountable. Can you point to a particular moment when that changed for you?
A: I don’t know if I can point to a moment so much as I can point to a person, but I dedicated my book to him [Tom Quirk]. He’s almost 20 years older than me to the day. I joined his firm when I was about 25. He was very good at this business, but he was a million times better as a person. And what I quickly recognized was … he was always accountable. I probably didn’t use that word at the time, but I thought, “This guy always follows through.” He taught me how to act; he taught me how to be respectful of people in a way that I wasn’t before, and he taught me how to think bigger.
Dave Porter’s Top Five Charities
- Baystate Charitable Foundation
- DCF Kids Fund
- Genesis Fund
- Police Athletic League
- Jimmy Fund
