Citadel experience set tone for his life

Al Katz was a high school student in Greenville when he took a date to a football game between Furman University and The Citadel.

"The Summerall Guards were marching at halftime, and she thought that was the best thing she had ever seen," says Katz, 69. "The next day, I applied to The Citadel."

If that wasn't his entire reason for going, he says now, at least it was the catalyst that led him there.

"Once I got down there, I realized this is something I really needed in my life," he says. "My dad died when I was 15 and I really needed the structure and discipline."

At The Citadel, Katz set his sights on the Summerall Guards. A silent precision drill platoon, the Summerall Guards are senior cadets who are chosen for their physical stamina and drill proficiency. Membership is considered a high honor.

"I wanted to be in the Summerall Guards and knew if I were going to do that, I had to do well, so that was my motivation," he says. "It set the tone for my whole life."

By the time Katz graduated from The Citadel, he was not only a member of the Summerall Guards, but he was also an honor court representative, distinguished military representative and member of the economic honor society.

He went to graduate school at the George Institute of Technology, earning a master's in business administration, then fulfilled his military obligation with two years at Patterson Army Hospital at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

Afterward, he returned to

Atlanta, where he started a career with Ellman's Inc., a catalog showroom store.

"I spent my whole first career there, learning business, literally working in the warehouse and learning all the different aspects of the business," he says.

He worked his way up to senior-level executive positions, serving as president and chief operating officer during an expansion that led to nine locations and 1,800 employees. Katz was particularly interested in the jewelry end of the business, which increased to 48 percent of sales, compared with the industry standard of around 17 percent.

"My charge was to get the business in the position to sell it," Katz says. That goal was realized when Ellman's was sold to Service Merchandise in 1985.

Shortly after, he started his second career "quite by accident," he says, when a store owner in Grand Rapids, Mich., asked for help.

"I got there on a Sunday night in October and they had a newspaper and one of the inserts was for his company," he says. "On the cover was Prestone antifreeze, like a doorbuster. I went in the next morning and it was a beautiful store, very similar to ours, and we went to his jewelry counter, and next to the diamonds was an 8-foot stack of Prestone antifreeze. I'm thinking to myself, 'That's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.'

"Although I did not realize it at the time, that was the day I became a business coach, helping people self-discover their own issues and also the solutions to them. And that's what I've been doing in my career since."

He founded The Next Level, a business consulting company, and has since worked with more than 600 companies. In 1994, he relocated the business to Charleston because he wanted to live near the water.

While he built his business career, Katz "always had one foot in academia," he says. He went to Georgia Tech as a teaching assistant and later taught there as an adjunct professor. After he settled in Charleston, "the first thing I did was go to The Citadel and ask if they needed someone to fill in, never thinking it would be anything other than a guest speaker. I'm now in my 15th year there."

He teaches an undergraduate class called relationship marketing and co-teaches strategic consulting in the graduate school.

"I wanted to share some of the things that I learned with the cadets," he says. His undergraduate class is taught as a workshop, with no textbook and no final exam.

"Instead, we do a project where they go out and take the concepts they learned and apply them to a real company," he says. "It's as close to a real-life situation as I can get them into."

The students, and Katz's business clients, also read "A Journey With Mac," a book Katz wrote as a novel. The story follows business owner Gregg on a journey with a carpenter named Mac, whose mission is to fix lives. Along the way, Gregg learns the fundamentals of business.

"Gregg represents all my clients," he says. "It really is a story that I see happening all too often. People don't have enough time for family, don't have enough time for their business."

The book, in its second edition, was published in January.

"I had tried to write this twice before and they were not bad, they were just awful, really awful," he says.

But after reading a couple of novels during a May 2004 trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, he decided to give it another try.

"I had my laptop with me and I thought, "I am going to make an outline,' " he says. "I type pretty fast and I started to make this outline and all of a sudden I was watching my fingers move over the keyboard and seeing the story in front of me. I knew that was a divine moment."

He finished six months later, and has spent the years since editing it.

"It was definitely a labor of love," he says.

Brenda Rindge can be reached at 937-5713 or at brindge@postandcourier.com.