2026 Dynamic Dozen The Visionary Award: Ron Bogart

Ron Bogart isn’t an ordinary CEO. He holds a doctorate in strategic leadership. He charts his company’s course far into the future, not just quarterly targets. Rather than building an organization dependent on individual leaders, he has focused on building a continuous succession system meant to endure. It’s all part of a thoughtful approach based on tested methods.

SBJ: Let’s talk about vision. What comes to mind when you think about the importance of vision in leading a business like Gold Mechanical?
Ron Bogart: As leader, you’ve really got three responsibilities. One is to build the team, two is to protect the resources and three is to chart the course. And so when I think about vision, that’s the third one. … Any one of them is probably [no] more important than the other. But when you chart a course, you have to have an idea, I think, that can be communicated and repeated to others. And I’ve got a story about how we’ve how we’ve done that at Gold. Do you want to hear it?

SBJ: Yes, please.
Bogart: This is kind of our vision for Gold Mechanical, and I’ve borrowed some of it from the Erlen Group. … So they’ve got the Springfield Underground. They’re doing the Westside Stone project, which is going to be another Springfield Underground. … We’ve done a lot of work for them over the years. And so I remember I was telling my team, Erlen Group’s going to use us on this project for the new Springfield Underground. And they [asked], when does it start? And I said, well, based on their geological studies, it’s going to take about 300 years for them to tunnel all that out. And you could just feel the oxygen leave the room. So one of our pipefitters stood up and said, well, if we’ve got around 300 years, we’ve got to start doing things differently now. And that was the message I was trying to communicate. Because how long is a business supposed to stay in business? Nobody says, right? Now think back to the ancient times when they would build cathedrals, and it would take them a couple of hundred years to build these things. The architect never saw past probably the foundations. They had to get really good at passing ideas on to the next generation, and that’s what we’ve got to get really good at. I figure by the time we get done with that project, we’ll have somewhere between 15 to 20 executive leadership transitions. We better be good at attracting, training, developing really good leaders. And so we started the Gold Academy, which is kind of our leadership incubator over at Gold Mechanical, because we’re going to need to continue to refill as we go out over the 300 years. So, it sounds like a long ways out, but it’s really just simple things that have to happen. But in my mind, that’s casting a vision.

SBJ: I keep thinking about teambuilding … Ron, how do you get good decision-making to happen among all of the folks who are going to work on that team?
Bogart: It can actually be something that’s tested. I use Patrick Lencioni as an example. He wrote a book called “The Ideal Team Player.” [The book says] the people that you’re looking for need to have three elements. They need to be humble, hungry and smart. ... And in Patrick Lencioni’s book, on page 160, he defines what smart means. And to him, he said, it’s … people that make good judgments. Well, there’s actually a test called the Judgment Index … In 1973, it was submitted for a Nobel Peace Prize. It was called the Hartman Index at that time because it was created by somebody named Robert Hartman … it’s hard to repeat the results, but what I can tell is: When we put together a team, if you have people that are humble and hungry and test well on the Judgment Index, then you’ve got a team that’s going to work well together. Of course, there’s always going to be some varying personalities, and I’m not looking for a team that’s uniform in how they work. I’m looking for a team that can be unified at the end of the day. And so, you know, sometimes we miss the mark, but at Gold for the past few years, most of the time, we’ve got it pretty right.

Interview excerpts by Deputy Editor Gregory Holman, gholman@sbj.net.