Entrepreneurial Instinct: When Preparation Meets Opportunity

When I was a kid, my father told me that the worst day of being your own boss was better than the best day of working for someone else. It was the best piece of advice I ever got.?

When my dad married my mom, he borrowed some money from his new father-in-law to buy a small farm near Lashburn, Saskatchewan. He got into the registered seed business, produced a bumper crop and paid off the loan in no time. From that point on, my dad was his own man.

My dad later added pigs to our farm and my siblings and I were expected to help raise them once we reached a certain age. Not the sweetest smelling job, but it needed doing and we kids understood that in an isolated situation like our farm, we all needed to pull together.

To instill the entrepreneurial vibe, every year my dad gave each of us kids a piglet that we were responsible for raising. We personally reaped the benefits when it was sold at market, so if we slacked off, the pig didn’t grow as large and we had a smaller payday.

My dad had entrepreneur DNA, always involved in side projects, some successful, some less so, but he always had his eye out. We took a trip to Hawaii one year and after three days sitting by the pool he got bored and began scoping out local business opportunities.

My mom was the same, dabbling in real estate (which I later got into in Vancouver after I got my MBA). With our parents as role models, it’s no surprise that we kids all grew up to become serial entrepreneurs.

Like all entrepreneurs, I had plenty of stumbles. My successes came from identifying opportunities when they presented themselves and seizing the moment before anyone else could. That cliché about luck = preparation + opportunity exists for a reason.

Following the recession of the early 90’s, I got involved in commercial real estate in Vancouver. There was a lot of vacant office space, and I caught wind of these two floors in an office tower that nobody could rent. And here my world changed.

The building shared space with the Simon Fraser University campus, which at the time had the city’s only high-speed internet hub. I took over the office space myself, then sold the SFU admins on letting me string a fibre optic line to tap into their internet.

Money was tight, so I wore a lot of hats. I read manuals on how to repair servers, rewire phone connections, change motherboards, you name it. But word spread, and in no time at all, I was hosting Vancouver’s hottest technology incubator space.

This was super early in what became the dot-com bubble, and all the early internet entrepreneurs set up shop under my roof. I got to know all of them, and I saw most of them fail. But in doing so, I got to see what worked online and what didn’t.

Within a decade, this Lashburn farm kid was smiling on the cover of the Forbes ‘Billionaires’ issue. Again, preparation met opportunity which, combined with a hell of a lot of work, helped get me where I am today.

I’m no metalhead but like most people in the 1980’s I saw The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. It was the funniest music movie since Spinal Tap but there was one part that really hit home.

Some famous bands were asked what they’d tell someone looking to become a rock star. While some tried to warn people off even trying, Paul Stanley from Kiss shrugged and said: “I’m not here to tell you you can’t do something because I did it. You can do it.” https://youtu.be/5DZu6T8aDCA?si=vmsz_mL-GtX9qYHH&t=4696

I did it. And so can you. So get off your ass and LFG. Oh, and call your dad and tell him he rocks.