People should know what’s coming. Especially a storm.
That’s what AccuWeather founder and chairman Joel Myers thought as his aunt waited out a blizzard at his parents' Philadelphia home in 1947.
Myers, then age 7, stayed up all night fascinated by the whiteout. “I started writing the weather conditions down every day,” he told IBD.
The obsession snowballed into a career in the fledgling field of forecasting.
Today his media company, AccuWeather, provides forecasts to more than 1.5 billion people a day, in 100-plus languages and dialects, and serves nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies.
Analytics firm ComScore ranks AccuWeather.com as the No. 1 mobile weather website in the world and the fourth-ranked site in the U.S. based on unique users.
On Alert
The company’s forecasts reach the public through smartphones, tablets, radio, TV, newspapers and the AccuWeather network cable channel.
Sometimes it’s a matter of life and death.
In 2015, a California railway rerouted trains based on AccuWeather’s flash-flood and mudslide warnings, saving crew lives and millions of dollars in cargo.
In 2008, a Caterpillar construction machinery plant in Mississippi received 22 minutes' warning from AccuWeather before a tornado decimated the facility. All 80 employees reached emergency shelters and survived.
In 2005, AccuWeather targeted Hurricane Katrina’s landfall 12 hours before the National Hurricane Center issued its first warning. Myers' outfit was even way ahead of that. Calling it a “catastrophe in the making in New Orleans,” AccuWeather predicted disaster three days before the storm arrived.
“That was a dramatic example of superior accuracy. That’s been my life’s dedication,” said Myers, 76, who was recognized by Entrepreneur magazine’s “Encyclopedia of Entrepreneurs” as one of the greatest in American history.
Sky Fall
It started with “snow, snow, snow.”
That’s what 3-year-old Myers chanted as he paced in front of the family’s living room window.
His mother, Doris, called him “one-track-mind Joel.”
Myers’ ability to focus bordered on fixation. “If I was interested, I couldn’t be dissuaded,” he said.
By age 11, Myers was gathering instruments for an amateur weather station in the attic. Younger brothers Barry and Evan were drawn into the home-spun science project.
“I started calling my weather reports in to the National Weather Service and the local radio station,” Myers said. “At age 14, they started saying my name on the radio.”
Even then, Myers prized accuracy.
He regularly rose at 6 a.m. to listen to meteorologists on radio stations. “They helped educate me,” he said.
Future Course
As Myers neared high school graduation, he plotted a future. “I decided to combine my love of weather forecasting with business,” he said.
Myers’ parents tried to talk him out of it -- meteorologists typically ended up in low-paying government jobs -- but the boy was steadfast.
“I was determined, and that’s what I loved,” he said.
His enrollment at Penn State in 1957 was the right move. “It happened to have the best undergraduate meteorology program in the world,” Myers said.
Forecasting was then a young field, requiring hand-drawn maps, keen observation and intuition.
“Complete surprises were routine. But there were a handful of people who could do it, and Joel was one of them,” said John Cahir, a fellow student and now retired Penn State vice provost, dean and professor of meteorology.
Myers was never satisfied, even when he was right.
“He didn’t want to hear praise. He always wanted to know: Where did I go wrong? What were the weak spots? That was his habit of mind,” Cahir said.
Pennsylvania’s Prognosticator
During a forecasting class, Myers predicted 4 to 5 inches of snow would fall the next day. The professor bet the brash student that precipitation would be nil.
Myers won that wager -- and several more.
“He lost 11 straight bets to me,” Myers said. “He chose me for an assistantship.”
The assistant’s job was to prepare maps for the class. When the professor kept failing to show up, the student became the teacher.
“Now I’m working like heck. I’ve got to keep this thing going,” Myers said.
It became Myers’ class and one he would teach for 21 years. “I was able to do a lot of experimenting in class,” he said. “You learn the most by teaching.”
Myers had students pick a city and forecast the weather in a head-to-head competition. “If they beat me, they got an automatic A at the end of the semester,” he said. “It was a lot of fun.”
Business Winds
Observing students’ results helped Myers detect this essential clue to accuracy: If he took forecasts from promising students and averaged their results, he’d get closest to the actual conditions.
That became the seed of AccuWeather’s approach: “Take the best forecasters and put them together as a team,” Myers said.
A mentor at Penn State, Charles Hosler, gave the promising student a nudge. “He knew of my dream to take forecasting and turn it into a business,” Myers said.
Professor Hosler had been providing forecasts to local firms and passed a natural gas company client to Myers, letting the young teacher set up an office in a rooftop closet on campus in 1962.
“So the business started on the roof of the Deike building,” Hosler said. “Joel plowed right into that. He didn’t need much encouragement.”
Myers' gas company client was paying $50 a month -- $400 in today’s money -- for daily forecasts. “We were off and running,” he said.
Storm Clouds
In 1963, tragedy struck: Myers’ father, Martin, committed suicide.
The calamity steeled Myers’ resolve to expand his business while teaching and pursuing his Ph.D. at PSU. Failure wasn’t an option.
Rejection was.
“I talked to 2,500 prospects before I had 100 customers,” Myers said. “I dealt with all the skepticism.”
He won over ski businesses -- which needed conditions plus relative humidity for snow-making operations.
“(My forecasts) were tailored to each mountain,” Myers said. “I had 60 to 65 ski areas in the Northeast that depended on me.”
Bright Horizons
In 1971, Myers, now a Ph.D., started delivering forecasts to radio and TV stations and newspapers. His brothers, who also attended Penn State, joined AccuWeather and rose -- Evan to chief operating officer and Barry to CEO, while Joel remained president and chairman.
While continuing to teach at PSU until 1981, Joel developed a reputation at AccuWeather as a demanding but fair boss who hired top talent -- often Penn State grads.
His philosophy after launching AccuWeather.com as a free website in 1996: “Be the best at it, and it will work out.”
The best is the most correct.
“You hear about people overplaying the weather,” he said. “It’s important you don’t do that because you don’t want to lose credibility.”
Myers put AccuWeather’s false alarm rate for tornado warnings at 11% compared with 88% for the National Weather Service.
For business clients, “that difference translates into dollars,” he said. “To shut down a (factory) line -- that’s very costly. It’s a safety factor, and it’s a business factor.”
AccuWeather’s 52,000-square-foot headquarters in State College, Pa., puts top technology into the hands of the most meteorologists in one location.
“This is the center of it. There’s no other place like this in the world,” Myers said. “We’ve been in business for 54 years, and we’ve only had two years when revenues did not exceed the year previous.”
Those years -- 2001 and 2008 -- were marked by economic storms. The company continued growing its media footprint and services for businesses -- from tailored weather forecasts and warnings to business analytics and forensics for weather-related accidents.
Myers raised seven children while expanding the company, and he continues to write and speak about the meteorology business.
On his radar now: how to tap into transformative innovations driven by accelerating technology.
“The weather game is never over,” he said. “It’s a continuing story.”
Myers’ Keys
Built world’s largest weather-forecasting media company.
Overcame: Skepticism, tragedy, competition.
Lesson: Relentlessly pursue accuracy and communicate it clearly.
“I’ve been blessed that a lot of people have bought into my dream of this being the crucible of the most accurate, meaningful, valuable forecast source in the world.”
