A Huntsville native and longtime business owner, John Allen has spent much of his career helping shape the community he calls home. As CEO of the Huntsville Committee of 100, Allen brings his private-sector experience to civic leadership, working alongside business and community leaders to address challenges and plan for the region’s future.

In this edition of Sit Down with Success, Allen shares his perspective on leadership, collaboration, and what it takes to build a stronger Huntsville for generations to come.

What did the business world teach you that has proven especially useful in civic leadership?

I was a custom builder for high-end residential projects. One lesson I learned is that it takes a lot of people to get things done, over 230 to build a home for instance, and it’s not just one person that is more important than the other. In civic leadership, it’s about listening, learning, and gaining the perspective of many people to move big ideas forward in the community, all similar to building a house.

The takeaway is, everybody’s important and has a place. Certainly, from a building perspective, if the foundation’s not right, the framing’s not going to be right, and the roof’s not going to be right. If you start right then you will end right. The lesson for me is that no one is more important than anybody else. This approach helps our organization, through the work of our members and our mission, to make our community a better place.

What was the biggest adjustment when you moved from business into full-time civic leadership?

In a small business, you control your direction, strategic planning, and what you want to accomplish. You make all the decisions. Civic leadership isn’t about one entity making all the decisions. It’s about collaboration and understanding the perspectives of many people, not just one group to assist in making the right decisions.

Having a broad understanding of the overall community allows you to work on civic challenges that take a long time to address. In a small business, you can move pretty quickly. In the civic world that we’re in, things sometimes don’t move as quickly as you may want.

How do you create a consensus among successful people who may have different ideas about what Huntsville needs?

Our tagline for the Committee of 100 is vision, collaboration, and results. Without a vision, you can’t really work towards results.

Visioning takes a lot of people’s opinions around the table. To be clear, we are business-focused in the work we do and what we deliver. We know it’s never been about just our opinion over the last 31 years. It has always been in our culture to set big visions for what our community can be and provide a pathway to get there.

For instance, twenty five years ago, we talked about how incredible it would be if our downtown could look like Chattanooga’s. We started talking about downtown development, putting the right people around the table, and hearing different perspectives, then moved steadily forward to create the kind of downtown we have today.

It’s not just about us. It’s about big ideas we’re persistent about moving forward and implementing. For example, eight years ago, we started talking about investing in National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) through the Raise Your Hand initiative, which we ultimately created in 2021 in collaboration with The Schools Foundation.

This initiative will fund 500 new NBCTs to achieve certification and is driving our community to have the highest concentration in the country of NBCT’s. This $1 million dollar investment by the community was completed last year and will have generational, game-changing, long-term impacts for our students in our three public education systems.

Building consensus means collaborating and setting a vision. You still need to be willing to shift and change but ultimately have the perseverance to continue to move forward towards results.

What issue facing Huntsville today do you think will look much more important in hindsight 10 years from now?

Regional collaboration. Huntsville is in four counties. Huntsville reaches out to Decatur and Athens, all the way on the other side of I-65. Our growth was programmed many decades ago, and now, with the expansion and annexations we’ve seen, Huntsville is the largest city in Alabama.

We are now spilling out into Limestone County, Morgan County, and Marshall County. As we continue to grow and provide opportunities for the residents of the city of Huntsville, continuing to work with our neighbors in the region is key to our success. This applies to the workforce of tomorrow, infrastructure, transportation, and, of course, quality of life.

Because of growth, we are becoming a much more connected region in North Alabama. We need to keep finding ways to strengthen that regional collaboration and cooperation.

What is your definition of success?

I’m a Huntsville native. I grew up here. From this executive position, it’s been fascinating to see the growth, how we got here, not only the opportunities that have been created but also the challenges we face. Personally, my definition of success since I began in this role in 2017 has always been: Do the best I can, with my skillset, professional background, and community knowledge, to make our community better today than it was yesterday through the work of our members and our mission.

The work of the Committee of 100 is long term. It’s not tomorrow’s challenges but tomorrow’s challenges plus 10 years. It takes persistence to be successful and as an organization, this trait is in our DNA. Community building takes time and it is in the nature of our work.

Every organization, no matter if you’re in a nonprofit, city, municipality, or county, change is inevitable, especially in the world we live in today. You have to be nimble and be willing to open up the aperture of your perspective to be successful.

Has Huntsville’s rapid growth changed the kinds of conversations you’re having with business and community leaders?

It’s changed the conversation to managing growth. How do we grow, still be who we are, and still have that Huntsville-centric culture that’s always been who we are? We’re a growing, desirable community with opportunities for our friends and neighbors in the workforce.

I will say that’s also been a conversation with the administration, and they’ve done a good job planning and staying ahead of the curve as much as possible.

What is a conversation you wish Huntsville’s business community were having more often?

I think we all get lulled into complacency because of success and forget what it took to get there. Our community has been successful literally because of ideas that were planted decades ago, enhanced, and executed by the leaders of today.

Our organization, and many others in the community, saw a vision for what Huntsville could be, and what it is now. We are always thinking about what’s next and how we are going to get there. We ask that question of where do we want to be in five, 10, 15 years?

As our community continues to grow, we will continue to work towards what will make us successful for decades to come.