Engineer and entrepreneur Mike Wicks has had a remarkable career, successfully launching and selling two successful defense contracting businesses, creating his own charitable foundation, and embarking on a post-retirement second career in cancer research.

In a recent conversation with the Huntsville Business Journal, the Huntsville native and Auburn University alum shared his journey, and attributed his success to three things: Do something you’re good at, do something you’re passionate about, and do something the market rewards.

How did it come about that you started your first business?

I worked for AMRDEC for 15 years and they offered something called a VSIP – Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment. They offered to pay people to leave, so I thought I could go out and try the contractor world and see if I liked it. I worked for a defense contractor, but it got me away from what I really wanted to do. I remember having a conversation myself and I said, “I think I could start a company.” My dad (a former engineer) had retired, so we started Summit Research, and it was fantastic.

What did you enjoy most about owning your own business?

There are lots of things about what we do in the Department of Defense that you can’t change. But what you can change and control is your corporate culture. I tell people all the time: Be the boss that you wish you always had.

It’s that simple. Don’t try to be something you’re not. Be that supervisor, teammate, colleague that you always wish you had. Having the freedom to do that and be able to start something from scratch that didn’t have a lot of legacy policies and rules was so refreshing to me.

What was it like for you to sell your business and start another one?

Summit Systems had grown to about 100 people when Digital Fusion was looking for a company to get into the Department of Defense and specifically AMRDEC at Redstone Arsenal. They said that they wanted to buy our company and I said “It’s not for sale. I just started it.””

They said, “No, it is for sale.”

I said, “Oh, OK, I understand how this works now.”

So we merged with Digital Fusion, and it was a really good fit culturally. I stayed at Digital Fusion and eventually became the president. We sold that company to Kratos Defense, a much larger publicly-traded company, but I still really wanted to do engineering and innovative things. So I called the CEO of Kratos, Eric DeMarco, and I said, “Do you ever spin out somebody to do small business-set-aside work and to team with you?”

“I would do that if I had somebody I trusted,” he said.

I asked, “Do you trust me?” He said he did, so we had a very amicable separation and in 2009, and then I started Integration Innovation Inc. (i3).

What was unique about the culture you created at your companies?

With i3, the thing that really governed the way we built that company was the difference between rules and standards. When you’re doing work for the government, there is no shortage of rules. There are rules for everything, and we’re going to follow all those rules.

The last thing we needed as a company was more corporate rules. We went by this philosophy that we’re not going to have a lot of rules because rules are things that somebody else thinks are important and that get imposed on you. A standard is something that I think is important, and it comes from within. If you can get people to agree to what the standards of the company are going to be, then it doesn’t feel like a rule. That made all the difference in the world because everybody signed up for our standards. We had very few corporate rules.

We really had just one: if it’s moral, legal, ethical, and good for the Warfighter, do it. Don’t ask anybody’s permission. You have my permission. Now, those are some pretty high standards: moral, legal, ethical and good for the Warfighter. But if it satisfies these standards, then go do it.

What is the Wicks Family Foundation and what is its purpose?

At i3 we had a 501(c)3 charitable organization called i3 Cares. Early on at i3, I was trying to hire a key group of people on the arsenal. We had done everything we could do compensation-wise and I got word back that there’s something else they want. I met with them, and I asked, “Is it salary? Is it something with the benefits? What is it?” They said, “Oh no, we don’t want anything for ourselves. We want the company to have its own 501(c)3 because all of us are very passionate about working at a company that’s giving back to the community.” I thought, wow! We can build a foundation on this attitude.

After selling those companies, there was a void. Giving back had become part of our corporate culture, but for me personally, I needed a vehicle to be able to give back to this community that I’ve been so blessed by. So my wife, Christine, and I started the Wicks Family Foundation, and that is just our way to continue to give back. We look for things that make Huntsville unique and things that help employers attract great talent to this area.

How do you balance career and personal life?

It’s tricky. It’s especially tricky when you love what you’re doing. That’s why I wanted my own company and culture because when it’s time for a soccer game or you’re the soccer coach, I want you to go do that. You can make up your time. I want you to have the freedom to go, because you don’t get those moments back. Be there. Be present. Be wherever your feet are. I coached Little League so I tried to develop a system that, in a way, sounds selfish, but it’s flexibility in the company that worked for me and then you offer that same thing to everybody else. That comes from hiring trained professionals who don’t need a lot of supervision.

The other thing that I learned that helped me tremendously to balance is not thinking that I have to do everything. You don’t have to be good at everything. You do need to be good at something. Surround yourself with the people who are good at things that you’re not. That relieves the pressure. Learn to delegate. Nobody has to do everything as long as everybody is doing something.

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs?

Be open to change. Change is inevitable. Growth is optional. You don’t know everything. I certainly didn’t. Find a mentor. Learn from their mistakes and their successes. Some people can only learn from their own mistakes, and that’s really painful and expensive. If you can learn from somebody else’s mistakes, that’s better, but it really just teaches you what not to do.

What’s even better than learning from someone else’s mistakes is to learn from their successes. Although that’s helpful, it’s also limiting because I’m not you; I can’t do what you do. So what’s even better than learning from someone else’s success is learning from your own success. Keep doing what you’re good at. Find out what works, keep doing more and more of that, and stop trying to do things you’re not good at.

What would you say is the secret to your success?

For me, it’s to do something you’re good at. Why did I want to be an engineer? Well, it came pretty naturally to me. Do something you’re passionate about. I like the engineering stuff, but I really love defending our country. And then do something that you know that the market is rewarding. When I figured that out and how to do all three of those things at one time, that to me was the secret.

What are you up to now?

After the sale of I3, I was happily retired for three weeks. I had had cancer and beat it, but it was still a very unsettling thing. No one else in my family had had cancer. I had invested in a cancer research company, so during those three weeks that I was retired, I was checking on that and apparently asking too many questions.

So now I find myself as the CEO of Diakonos Oncology in Houston. We’ve got four U.S. clinical trials going on with MD Anderson and UTHealth Houston. We also opened a cancer center in Cancun where we can treat all kinds of solid tumors. So I failed completely at being retired. I work more now than I think I ever have in my life. But obviously curing cancer is potentially a very rewarding ambition.