In his autobiography, Relentless (HarperCollins), written with Robert Brehl, Ted Rogers offered his five rules for entrepreneurial success:
Do I have any special insight into entrepreneurialism? Can what I learned over my life somehow help budding entrepreneurs? Have I found the “secret sauce” of entrepreneurialism? Those are heady questions, but over the years I have travelled through entrepreneurial valleys and climbed many peaks. Often I am asked, what is the secret to my success and how do I handle the enormous stress of being an entrepreneur when everything is on the line? The answers do not fit into a nice little box tied up with a ribbon because situations and people are different. What worked for me may not work for someone else. But I shall do my best to address them from my perspective.
First I should mention that I have always looked for industries just starting to grow. The momentum of growth has made up for a lot of my errors and has carried my companies. Second, being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It requires a healthy appetite for risk and a belly that can digest setbacks, even failure. I learned early that failure is a necessary component of success and an entrepreneur cannot let setbacks sideline him or her from objectives.
Over the course of my life I have followed five consistent concepts or strategies. I have boiled down each to one word: Perseverance; Build; Listen; Partnerships; Customers.
Perseverance is one of those words that is a lot easier said than done for many people.
I was fortunate, very fortunate. From the earliest age my mother drilled into me the need to work hard, never give up and get back what the family lost. At the age of eight or nine, I would fall asleep at boarding school thinking of ways to get back my father’s radio station, CFRB. We came close to losing everything more than once, but we didn’t. We had good people and I was lucky at times, but I also worked extremely hard.
Also at Macleans.ca Ted Rogers—in pictures
It may be worth adding that perseverance is important in life, too. For example, just before I launched into the cable TV business, I quit smoking. Until then, I was puffing on three packs of Export A cigarettes a day. It was a great decision to quit. One day, I said to myself, “See if you can go all day without a cigarette.” That worked. Then I tried it again the next day and the next day, until I never gave cigarettes more than a passing thought. A friend teases me that the only reason I quit was because they brought in lower life insurance premiums for non-smokers around then, in the 1960s. That may have played a role, but with my family history and my own health challenges, I just knew I had to quit.
I get so frustrated when people tell me they can’t quit smoking. If they really wanted to, they would. If somebody said to them, “The hearse is coming with a casket at eight o’clock tomorrow morning unless you quit smoking right now,” you know they would quit.
Turning back to business, over the years I have come to realize that I am often not the smartest person in the room. But I always want to be the best prepared person in the room. This comes from my legal training. In a courtroom, the best prepared side has the advantage. The same holds true for business. Solid and thorough preparation can trump just about anything.
Perseverance must be backed by faith and belief, not only in the underlying business, but in yourself. When times are dark, you must believe, roll up your sleeves and work, work, work. When times are good—as they are right now for my company—you must ring alarm bells because the sun does not shine every day. The rains can come more quickly than imagined.
You have to storm-proof your company. You have to take some of the money you make in the good times and spend it on getting really locked in and solid as a rock. It could be spending wisely on research and development or marketing; or it could be building new engineering technologies and computer systems. You simply can’t take your eye off the ball even if things are rolling along wonderfully.
The good times can be a killer for an entrepreneur who starts thinking, I’m pretty damn good. Sure, you’ve got to build people up and you want to thank them and all that. But you’ve got to guard against the leadership suffocating on its accolades or believing all its press clippings in the good times.
