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Five lessons every entrepreneur should learn

The 2012 W. P. Carey School of Business Spirit of Enterprise Award finalists represent a wide variety of small businesses, but regardless of their industry, their success stories sound similar chords. KnowMGMT has identified five of those strategies, measures any business owner can apply. The winners of the Spirit of Enterprise Awards will be announced at the annual luncheon on November 1 in Phoenix.

2012-10-09

Attend the 16th Annual Spirit of Enterprise Awards

The origin stories of the 2012 W. P. Carey School of Business Spirit of Enterprise Award finalists are as different as a woman opening up an auto repair business in her driveway and a man sitting in a Burger King in Nogales waiting for immigration papers.

But they share common themes, too. Five shared lessons learned emerged from this year’s finalist group: Many of these entrepreneurs have built their businesses on outstanding customer service; many are self-taught; a number have had to reinvent themselves to survive; many follow the “see a need, fill a need” motto; and almost all of them give back through charity work.

The Spirit of Enterprise Awards will be announced at the annual luncheon November 1, 2012 JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort & Spa. This is the 16th year that the Spirit of Enterprise Center at the W. P. Carey School has recognized Arizona businesses that exemplify the best in ethics, energy and excellence in entrepreneurship.

Lesson #1: Go above and beyond for your customers

Outstanding customer service was a theme echoed by many of the Spirit of Enterprise finalists. 180 Degrees Automotive, founded by Sarah “Bogi” Lateiner, focuses on women and minorities -- customers who have traditionally been neglected or exploited by the auto repair industry and feel particularly intimidated by it.

But, Lateiner says, the lasting success of her shop doesn’t come from that focus, nor from the fact that most of the mechanics and service advisors are women. “Being women in this industry may help to bring people in the door, but that’s not what keeps them here,” Lateiner explains. “We still have to provide excellent service and go above and beyond to earn, and keep, the trust of our customers.”

Likewise, CyberMark International has had to build a reputation for honest, customer-centric service in an industry plagued by mistrust. The company provides search engine optimization, pay-per-click, and social media marketing services.

It’s an industry that is rife with snake oil salesmen. CyberMark’s founder and CEO, Kimberly Judd-Pennie, says she is particularly proud of her Better Business Bureau Ethics Award, which the company received in 2011.

“All we can do is educate the client on what we do, why we do it, and what we do and don’t have control over,” Judd-Pennie explains. “We create realistic expectations by educating our clients, and we go the extra mile to provide great service. Clients trust us because we consistently under-promise and over-deliver.”

One of Clint Rowley’s goals as founder and president of Real Property Management East Valley is to change the perception that property managers are a necessary evil and few good ones exist. Rowley wants both property owners and their tenants to see Real Property Management as a partner.

“We see both the owner and the tenant as our clients, which is not typical -- normally the tenants are seen as cattle,” Rowley says. Just as with 180 Degrees Automotive and CyberMark International, Real Property Management has found a lot of business success in providing outstanding customer service. “We do everything we can to do right by our clients, and their loyalty is our reward.”

Lesson #2: Learning by doing works, too

A number of the Spirit of Enterprise finalists have earned their stripes in the school of hard knocks.

Jane Spicer began the venture that would become Daphne’s Headcovers when she was 10 years old and her mother told her she had to earn the money to buy the sailboat she wanted. The company makes animal and other novelty golf club covers, which Jane started doing at the suggestion of a customer when she was just 16.

“It was really hard to break into that market, but my mom, Daphne, told me: Be tenacious,” Spicer recounts. Spicer taught herself how to get past the attendants and assistants at gold resorts to get to the buyers. It worked: sales grew 400 percent in one quarter.

When Joey Bellus made the decision to expand his year-old health and fitness training center into a larger facility -- with a three-year lease -- it was “the scariest risk I had ever taken” he says. After two weeks of setting up the new location Joey had $90 left to his name.

“That was it. No new trainers, no new equipment, no new clients. The only way I overcame that biggest challenge was self-belief.” But with that self-confidence, and a commitment to learning by doing, Bellus has grown Optimal Performance Training, and is now looking for an even larger facility.

When Kimberly Judd-Pennie started selling websites in 1994, she wasn’t thinking it would become a long-term career, let alone a successful business. “I was a single mother, and I just needed a way to make money,” she says.

But she was in the right place at the right time, just enough ahead of the internet revolution to have a competitive edge.

“I taught myself HTML programming,” Judd-Pennie recounts. “I sold websites all day and coded all night, with my baby boy sleeping by my side. Failure was not an option; I had no other way to support myself.” With that powerful incentive, she grew CyberMark into a successful company with 26 employees.

Lesson #3: When circumstances change, reinvent

It’s said that you can’t control what happens to you, only how you react to it. Where many entrepreneurs facing external challenges called it quits, the Spirit of Enterprise finalists used a changing environment to reinvent their companies for the better.

In 2002, when Joel Barthelemy started the business that would become GlobalMed, he made imaging equipment for quality assurance in the semiconductor industry. “We did about $1 million a year in sales, just enough to keep the doors open,” Barthelemy recounts.

The company’s very fortuitous move into telemedicine came at the suggestion of a Tulane University pathologist. Barthelemy took his advice and in April, 2005, GlobalMed delivered its first system: cameras and software for the first remote pathology consult.

Today, GlobalMed continues to develop the software and manufacture the equipment that makes telemedicine possible.

Barthelemy says, “We have installed well over 2,000 telemedicine systems in 55 countries. We provide patients access to healthcare wherever there’s an internet connection. We’re changing the healthcare system in the U.S. and globally.”

The success of Hard Dollar, a developer of project cost management software, is a story of reinvention as well. Founded in 1989, the company had its first successes helping construction companies build as fast as possible.

But when the bottom fell out of the real estate market in 2007, “we were forced to rethink what solutions we offered, to whom, and how we delivered them,” explains Ron Babich, VP of sales and marketing.

Now Hard Dollar focuses on helping companies work not as fast as possible but as efficiently as possible. Its software is used by companies in the construction, mining, engineering, oil and gas, and energy sectors to manage productivity and cost.

Lesson #4: See a need, fill a need

There’s an adage that successful entrepreneurs make the products or services they want but can’t find on the market. That’s certainly true for a number of the Spirit of Enterprise finalists.

In 2000, LawLogix co-founder Brian Taylor was sitting at a Burger King near the consulate in Nogales, Mexico, waiting for a new U.S. visa to be approved. He got to thinking about how time-consuming and frustrating his immigration experience had been.

“Immigration law is almost entirely about information sharing,” explains John Fay, VP of products and services at LawLogix. “Sitting there at that Burger King, Brian thought, ‘There has to be a way to make information sharing easy.’”

So LawLogix, a software company focused on creating the easiest-to-use and most secure immigration case management and I-9 compliance software available, was born. Today, the company’s software and services are used by more than 155,000 organizations and 4.2 million foreign nationals worldwide.

Craig Weiss founded NJOY, which designs and manufactures electronic cigarettes, after he realized that nothing on the market at the time mimicked the addictive elements of smoking -- the nicotine and hand-to-mouth habit -- without the high cost, odor, and social stigma associated with tobacco cigarettes. NJOY’s electronic cigarettes look and feel like a real cigarette, emitting what looks like smoke but is actually a smoke-free vapor. The “smoker” inhales nicotine vapor but no tar or tobacco.

Yet Weiss see NJOY as, more than anything, a technology company. And therein lies its competitive advantage. “Cigarettes haven’t changed in 70 years,” Weiss explains. “We’ve developed a revolutionary technology that I hope will make tobacco cigarettes obsolete.”

Lesson #5: Give back

Across the board, the Spirit of Enterprise finalists are committed to paying their success forward.

For example, Total Transit provides both public and private transportation services, including Discount Cab, express route and paratransit service for Valley Metro, and service for many of the largest Medicaid and Medicare providers in the region. But the company’s mission extends far beyond transportation services; it is to “provide transportation services and solutions that create customers for life and enhance the communities we serve,” explains Craig Hughes, CEO.

To that end, the company supports a number of charitable organizations, including Habitat for Humanity. Total Transit’s Discount Cab division provides the Free Ride Back program, which gives people who have had too much to drink a ride home (which the rider pays for), then a free ride back to their car the next day. Also, each member of the Total Transit executive team serves as a member of a local organization, from Valley Forward to Homeward Bound.

Under the leadership of president Jane Spicer, Daphne’s Headcovers does a lot to give back to the community that, in Spicer’s words, “built the company.” They sell a special Weimaraner head cover and donate a portion of the proceeds to Gabriel’s Angels, which provides pet therapy to abused and at-risk kids. The company also partners with charities globally and now Spicer allows budding entrepreneurs to use her facility and equipment. Spicer said that she’s living out her mother’s directive, to do good while doing well.

Management great Peter Drucker once said that “Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.” From going above and beyond for their customers and learning by doing to reinventing themselves, filling a need in the market, and giving back to their communities, the ten companies that are Spirit of Enterprise award finalists this year have taught us valuable lessons that every entrepreneur can practice.

Bottom line

Among the ten very different Arizona businesses selected as finalists for the 2012 W. P. Carey School of Business Spirit of Enterprise Awards, there are five lessons that each company has had to learn. They are:

• An innovative product or service is not enough; you have to go above and beyond for your customers.
• Learning by doing -- in the “school of hard knocks” -- can be a powerfully effective path to success.
• When circumstances change, successful companies reinvent themselves.
• When successful entrepreneurs see a need, they build a product or service -- or company -- to fill it.
• Successful companies give back by engaging in charity work with their communities and communities around the world.

To attend the 16th Annual Spirit of Enterprise Awards:

• Thursday, November 1, 2012
• JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort & Spa
• 11:15a.m. – 1:30p.m.
• For table/seat sales please visit the registration site or call 480/965-3401

Entrepreneurship Management