“Even if there’s blood on the street there’s always somebody making money. You just have to make sure you’re on the right side of it.”

The son of poor Croatian immigrants, he sold his first company for $100 million in 2000. His second company, launched in 2003, is now the largest privately held IT solutions provider and integrator in Canada. When not residing in one of his posh homes, he holds court in CBC’s Dragon’s Den.

Robert Herjavec is a living example of what hard work and vision can achieve. He took the stage to close out this week’s 2009 Ottawa Business Summit and treated his audience to his insights on what it takes to achieve business and personal success.

I scribbled furiously the entire time he spoke and have distilled his pearls of wisdom to the following:

1. There is no stereotypical external factor for success. Fame and fortune is not reserved for the beautiful people in the world, nor can a successful person be judged by appearances. One of his neighbours has a company with 12,000 staff, an original Monet on his wall and a 15-year-old car in the driveway. And, bad people do succeed. “There are people who beat their dog and run a great business.”

2. However, he has never met a successful person who didn’t have a purpose, and that purpose must be more than the accumulation of wealth. If all one pursues is money, they will hit a wall. Herjavec’s goal was to build the best company in its industry. The money followed.

3. Achieving that success requires vision. When he started his second company, the problem was too much available money and not enough vision about what it should be. Money keeps you in the game. It doesn’t make a good company.

(Geez, have we learned that lesson in Ottawa after the VC excesses of the tech boom?)

4. And on that note, with particular relevance to Ottawa: If you build a better mousetrap, the world will not beat a path to your door.  There is no such thing as a good idea. It’s all about execution. Sales and marketing. And while he would hire the fellow who can sell ice to Eskimos, Herjavec would much rather have the fellow with the foresight to sell water in the desert beside a broken-down bus.

5. “Discipline is the art of doing what is necessary even when you don’t want to.” Inaction is easy. Citing his own recent experience running a marathon for the first time and the amputee with a prosthetic leg who passed him, Herjavec put it plain: “Winners find a way, losers find an excuse.” Which invariably means, ”For you to win, somebody has to lose.”

6. The importance of leadership, which he defined as the ability to get people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise be able to achieve–lift them from their comfort zone.

7. It’s all about sales. “Nothing matters until you sell something.” Which also speaks to the value of branding and marketing to drive those sales. But after sales comes service - sales may sell the first night in a hotel room, but service will keep the guest coming back.

8. Business is a sprint. “You’ve got to go now.” It’s better to take action than sit around planning the next five days. Once you secure an opportunity, then it becomes a marathon.

9. Feed the whales, not the minnows. Especially in a tough economy, devote your time and effort to those prospects, those core customers, who will support your business in tough times. He didn’t cite the 80-20 rule, but it obviously applies. For example, Herjavec’s business positions itself around high value, high touch service. When faced with a customer who likes to shop around and bargain hunt just to keep his suppliers on their toes, his preference is to dump them in favour of more loyal customers who appreciate the value of what they are getting for their money.

10. And when it comes to suppliers for your business, it’s a love/hate relationship. At the end of the day, your business is your business and they’re looking out for their business, not yours.

11. Learn to focus, which he defined as the ability to make the most of the 24 hours in a day and ”distinguish the truly important from the urgent that happens every day.”

12. Your business is not your family, it’s just business. Avoid emotional attachments.

13. Make it fun and be resilient. Nobody likes a negative person. What’s important is not what you say, but how you make people feel. There may be really bad days when you just want to walk away, but that just proves you care. What’s vital is having the resilience to believe that tomorrow will be a better day.

14. It’s not who you know, but how brutally honest you are with yourself. “The worst lies you tell in business are the ones you tell yourself.”

15. And lastly, business is like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Keep swinging until you hit something.

 

Technorati Tags: , , , ,