When we achieved our 50,000 membership goal in 1978, two years ahead of schedule, Wilson Johnson called to congratulate me but sadly informed me that he had been diagnosed with bowel cancer and that it was well advanced. He died three years later.
The Chairman of the NFIB was of the “religious right” and informed me when asked, that they did not believe in succession planning. He explained that those things are best left in the “hands of the Lord”. They hired a new President from outside the organization, a man called John Sloan, who had run for political office and was the President of a small community bank.
The Board was concerned at the time with its ability to continue growing and had a membership of about 425,000. They also were concerned about their cost of the field, which was five percent higher than ours. After serious consideration, they decided to invoice the renewals of their members who had been with them six years or more.
This led to a revolt by their Division Managers and the Board fired half of them. They obviously didn't appreciate the view of Wilson Johnson that the Division Managers were the most important people in the organization, and were paid as much as their senior lobbyists in Washington.
The invoicing plan was a disaster, and soon huge numbers of those invoiced that did not renew, had to be called on by the field. Then they began replacing invoicing with telemarketing. Over the next 20 years, the membership of 425,000 shrunk to 300,000 and the principles upon which NFIB was built were discarded.
The key principle laid down by their founder was that their revenue sources would only come from their members. Faced with a financial crisis, the Board created a couple of foundations to provide member services, funded by major corporations. And most of the salaries of NFIB’s senior executives were then shifted across to the foundations, freeing up funds for NFIB operations. Wilson Johnson would be turning over in his grave.
It was obvious that the NFIB Board had no knowledge of the membership invoicing experience of the advocacy organizations in northern Europe, like the Finns, the Swedes and the Dutch, who invoiced their renewals, but with massive free membership benefits to make it costly for a member to quit.
CFIB Board members do excellent work as long as they are not put into a position where they have to change the fundamental revenue-raising apparatus of the organization. That is why the Chairman of the Board of CFIB is also the President and CEO. It is a matter of building in special checks and balances. Good governance is part of CFIB’s success story. But history of other mature advocacy organizations shows Boards becoming their Achilles heel.