Entrepreneur Tips From the Top
Hardt exemplifies what these entrepreneurs have lots of: self-reliance and intuition. For Shane Lunny, confidence in creativity is key. After that, it’s all in the gut. Here's some tips from the top of B.C.'s entrepreneur community.
They’re stubborn as hell. They savour their mistakes. Most have enormous egos and don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks. They’re also quick to praise, crazy-passionate about their work and almost oblivious to risk. B.C.’s most successful entrepreneurs share some unmistakable traits – and it turns out they’re not very secret at all. When we pried, they spilled. No one balked at our probing questions because, among other shared attributes, these CEOs are big on solving matters in a definitive way by picking up the phone and learning from those who know – and then applying that knowledge in aggressive ways. Naysayers be damned.
The most common trait we uncovered? A very healthy ego. Case in point: Terry McBride, CEO and founder of Nettwerk Records: “Everything is intuitive,” says McBride, 46. “The only time there’s ever doubt is when everybody around me at the record company is questioning me. Then I might doubt it, but I still drive it ahead and 99 per cent of the time it works out.”
It’s a world view that could be categorized as egomaniacal, but McBride’s attitude is a common thread that runs through many of B.C.’s highest achievers – and is linked to their success. Take Dick Hardt, local tech genius and founder of software firms ActiveState and Sxip Networks. “Entrepreneurs are not all that sensitive to what other people think,” says Hardt. “I’ll think about how what I do may impact somebody else but in general, if they don’t like it, they don’t like it.”
Hardt exemplifies what these entrepreneurs have lots of: self-reliance and intuition. For Shane Lunny, confidence in creativity is key. After that, it’s all in the gut. A large part of his success in building a company that produces high-tech exhibits and theme parks around the world – including exhibits for the B.C. pavilion at the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin – is “winging it.” He knows his creative instincts are solid, even if the clients are caught wondering. The gregarious 52-year-old has been known to stand up during a presentation and exclaim, “You know what? We’ve never done a project like yours before.” He’s often the antithesis of what clients expect. “I kind of wave my arms and make something up and say what I think, what I’m imagining,” says Lunny. “You’ve got to challenge them. That’s part of staying fresh and staying alive and staying engaged.”
And when it doesn’t work out? Move on. These leaders take their mistakes in stride but never obsess over them. They’ve all made some doozies – they just don’t see them as failures.
QLT co-founder Julia Levy, who helped build B.C.’s first multi-million-dollar biotech company from a promising drug discovery, says she counts on mistakes to point her toward her goals. The scientific method depends on it. “I’ve always tried to get the information from something that doesn’t work, because it’s often telling you way more than something that does work. Because when something does work, it’s simply confirming what you already thought,” she explains. “Something that doesn’t work is telling you that your thinking is wrong and you have to change it.”
Levy, 72, retired in 2002 but still sits on the QLT board of directors and its scientific advisory board. She warns those eyeing a career in the sciences, “you’ve got to be stubborn and you’re got to love it because if you don’t, it’s going to break your heart. Your failures in the lab are probably tenfold higher than your successes, if you’re doing original work.”
Levy isn’t the only one who credits gaffes for her successes. You won’t hear Geordie Rose fret about failure either. He and his team at DWave Systems are focused on building the world’s first computer that operates on the principles of quantum physics. There’s nothing wrong with screwing up, says Rose, 34. “The thing that concerns me is not giving it the right try, not putting in the right amount of effort and that being the source of the failure. If we fail, it’s because we tried to do something very hard. I would be very proud to fail under that circumstance.”
Still, blunders deal a harsh blow to the ego. How do CEOs maintain confidence after falling flat? Levy has an answer: focus on the big picture. “I always dream about changing the world – somehow. You have these odd moments when you think, ‘Wow, this is so amazing.’”
Rose can relate to that level of passion. Last year he held in his hand what could be the first working chip of the quantum computer. “I got the feeling that very few people get and that scientists really crave,” he confesses. “It’s this feeling that you have touched upon something unique and you’ve had a part in bringing it into the world. It makes all the difficulties – the feeling that you’re running a marathon – it makes all that worthwhile to have just a few of those instances in your life.”
But passion, for all its advantages, can make you oblivious to risk. Many joke that this also makes them unemployable, forcing them to launch their own companies. Dick Hardt readily confesses that he doesn’t think he’s employable at all. Admits Allan MacDougall, founder of Raincoast Books: “I don’t like being told what do.” Ken Spencer, who co-founded Creo, the high-tech printing company picked up by Kodak for US$980 million last year, specifically founded his corporation because he felt couldn’t work for anybody else. “I’d always had these ideas about how to run a company,” Spencer explains. “They were quite different for the time, but not so different now. I believed in empowerment. I believed every employee should own shares.”
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