Tatum, Doug

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Tatum, Doug

PERSONAL:

Education: Florida State University, B.S. (magna cum laude), M.Acc.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Tatum, LLC, Sun Trust Plaza, 303 Peachtree St., N.E., Ste. 4400, Atlanta, GA 30308; fax: 404-880-1301.

CAREER:

Financial consultant. Tatum, LLC, Atlanta, GA, cofounder and founding chairman, 1993—. Florida State University Business School, adjunct faculty member.

WRITINGS:

No Man's Land: What to Do When Your Company Is Too Big to Be Small but Too Small to Be Big, Portfolio (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Doug Tatum is a financial consultant. Tatum graduated magna cum laude from Florida State University with a bachelor of science degree before going on to earn a master of accounting degree. He then worked as an officer and senior-level executive with several national companies before cofounding his own company, Tatum, LLC, with his brother. The company grew to become the largest executive and consulting services firm in the United States. Occasionally he serves as an adjunct faculty member at Florida State University's Business School.

Bo Burlingham interviewed Tatum in Inc. magazine about the concept of his business and how his previous hardship in business led him to start his company. Tatum explained that "it was a year or two after we started our firm. Our business plan was to provide rapidly growing companies with financial expertise. We were all finance guys—me, my brother John, and the cadre of partners we'd put together. Every week, we'd have a meeting and talk about what our clients were doing. Pretty soon a pattern emerged. We saw that below one level of sales, you were sort of in a safety zone. Above another level, you were more or less out of the woods. But the transition from one level to the other was just incredibly painful." He continued, "I remember saying, ‘My gosh, it's like a no man's land. You can't survive there. You've got to push through to the other side or go back to start.’ I began to see that it was a universal phenomenon, regardless of the business. Later, I wrote a little pamphlet about it." Tatum continued, saying that the pamphlet "was for explaining, not marketing. We'd found it awfully hard to tell entrepreneurial CEOs what they would face in no man's land—especially how they'd have to replace folks who, in many cases, had been with them from the beginning. The pamphlet gave people a chance to read about it and think it through."

Tatum published his first book, No Man's Land: What to Do When Your Company Is Too Big to Be Small but Too Small to Be Big, in 2007. The account deals with the specific services his business provides to help a small- or medium-sized company grow to the next level without having to pay premium price for the talent it would require.

Stacy Perman, in an interview on BusinessWeek Online, asked Tatum about the specific missteps entrepreneurs often make when they enter what Tatum defines as "No Man's Land." To this extent, Tatum replied that "they miss the fact that all of the rules are going to change on them. The people that got them up and running are not going to get them through it and grow. They miss that they have to take on capital from markets and the responsibility that goes with that. They literally don't know how to get through the wilderness. Nobody has given them a road map. When they face these issues, they don't realize that they're going to have to bring in new management with people with different skill sets." A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented that the book "will help leaders." The same contributor observed that "Tatum's potent guide communicates the key ideas vividly with engaging stories and evocative writing."