Last Thursday I spoke at the monthly luncheon for the Utah Valley Entrepreneur Forum (UVEF) down at the Novell campus in Provo.

I gave my Adventures in Entrepreneurship presentation. I’m hoping they put my slides and the audio from it up so that I can link to it. I really enjoyed the event, and I met some great people afterwards.

One of those people was John Pilmer. John is the President of PilmerPR. One of the 7 Laws for Entrepreneurial Adventurers I present is to “Leap before you look.” John told me afterward that reminded him of a quote he was familiar with:

But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money–booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!’

That quote is from The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, 1951 that was written by W. H. Murray, a Scottish mountaineer.

It’s great. Here’s an adventurer talking about how they leaped before they looked. Entrepreneurs definitely fall into the group of those that dream and of those that begin their dreams with boldness. And if that means as an entrepreneur I can also lay claim to genius, power, and magic, I’ll take it.

P.S. - For those interested, the “Goethe couplet” referred to by W.H. Murray is from an extremely loose translation of Goethe’s Faust lines 214-30 made by John Anster in 1835. For more info, see what the Goethe Society of North America found in their research.

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I guess last week Yahoo had a big broo-ha-ha about their future.

Kara Swisher has a great write-up of the event called The Yahoo Revival Meeting (Starring His Digital Holiness Steve Jobs)!.

Some super-quick takeaways:

• there were 300 plus top-executive attendees, all VP and above. (Good night, if Yahoo has 300 VP’s, maybe that’s your problem right there)
• the event sounds very well planned and coordinated. Good move there, something like this will either bomb or go great, and the planning is the main key to success
• Steve Jobs came and rallied the troops
• Yahoo’s problems are execution. Put that in the category of obviousness. Can they take a meeting like this and actually do something with it?
• Steve Jobs came and rallied the troops

Anyway, I like Yahoo. Here’s hoping to they actually get some good things going.

Last week I received an e-mail message from Paul Hutchinson, a managing member of Bridge Loan Capital Fund, inviting me to a networking dinner with other CEOs and company founders from around my area. Paul found me because of an award Doba recently received from the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum (UVEF), and he wrote to encourage me to attend the dinner because of the possibility of being invited to participate in what he called an ‘exclusive executive retreat’ in the spring of 2007 with other world-class CEOs.

My idea of an executive retreat is a little different than most CEOs. As I wrote back on the 5th of June, when Doba takes its Management Team out for retreats, nary a word about work is spoken and not one spreadsheet is unveiled, nor is anyone asked to present their ideas for saving or making the company money. Our retreats are way more relaxed than that and serve an entirely different purpose, and so too it seems are the retreats Hutchinson and his colleagues put together. Last year they climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and next year they’re thinking about renting a 233-foot ship for a sailing excursion to some pretty remote areas.

The networking dinner is tonight, so I’m definitely going to check it out for myself.

I’m always impressed when I run across the owner or general manager of a large retail store working the check-out line. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s usually a sight to behold (think over-aged person fumbling with cash register and credit card terminal, and you won’t be too far from the truth). Aside from the joy one receives as a result of watching the big dog work just as hard as everyone else, I’m usually hopeful that the owner or manager in question is gaining a specific and measurable level of respect, appreciation, and understanding for his or her customer’s and their needs and wants.

Most business owners–especially those who run large retail operations–remove themselves from the showroom floor, favoring instead to troll the hallways and offices that the customers cannot see. They always have meetings to attend, people to hire and fire, reports to review, orders to place, and major decisions to make. Somewhere along the way though, they eventually become so disconnected to what’s happening in the front of the house that they themselves could not even begin tell you in which isle you’ll be able to find the JELL-O.

In my line of business, nearly 100 percent of Doba’s customers–all of whom are small to medium-size business owners and entrepreneurs themselves–interact on a daily basis with their customers. Our customers, for the most part, sell goods and products on Internet sites like eBay, Overstock, and Amazon, or on their own web sites or retail operations. Unlike their larger brethren, on a daily basis, our customers field questions and inquires from their current and potential customers themselves. For the most part, they have no back hallways to patrol or front-line employees to handle such trivial matters (as many large retail owners would call them) such as, “Where can I find the JELL-O?” or “Why does your store do it like that?”

Recently, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, Doba exhibited at eBay Live! in Las Vegas, and in addition to bringing some of our own front line employees to the show to work our booth, our entire executive-level management team attended the show as well, and just like everyone else, they too worked the exhibit booth, explaining to anyone and everyone who came by the booth exactly what Doba does and why they should consider us as a part of their product sourcing solution. At other trade shows I’ve attended, executives and management team-level personnel come to the show, but rarely will you see them working in their booth or making themselves available to anyone who approaches–regardless of age, appearance, or company affiliation.

The reason we choose to bring our management team to shows like eBay Live isn’t as a reward or so they can schmooze it up with other muckity-mucks on the sidelines of the exhibit hall. We bring our executives because at Doba we believe that everyone in the company should connect with customers on a one-on-one basis. Regardless of what their title is or what floor they work on in our building, listening to our current and prospective customer is job one, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

Last week, after everything finally settled down back at our offices, many of those same management team members who attended eBay Live! got on the phones and called some of our customers. At many companies I know, those types of calls would have been assigned exclusively to customer service reps or assistants, but at Doba we recognize that a great company is one that listens to its customers and members and, as a result, can develop the propensity to anticipate their needs.

A few weeks ago, right around Father’s Day, I got to thinking about my own Dad and what I’ve learned from him about being a successful entrepreneur. As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up on a farm in Idaho where my Dad farmed with his father (my Grandpa Hanks), and his brothers (my Uncles). My Mom’s father also ran a ranch–his was in the middle of the desert in western Utah–so farming and ranching was what I was raised on, big-time! From the time I could talk back to my parents until I left home to attend college here in Utah, I worked on our farm, and when I went to visit my other Grandpa on his ranch for a ‘vacation,’ I worked then too.

With that in mind, here’s what I learned from my Dad and both of my Grandfathers about entrepreneurship:

Work is Hard

Hard work will always win out over creative or smart work or whatever else you might want to call it. When I wrote about Planing your Work and Working your Plan, a large part of that post was to suggest that working hard is the secret ingredient in the recipe for entrepreneurial success. For every entrepreneur whose success you choose to credit because they ‘out-smarted’ their competition, I’ll show you 100 other entrepreneurs who flat-out ‘out-worked’ theirs.

Growing up, I watched as my dad worked extremely hard on our farm. He worked harder than any of us kids ever did. He also worked harder than my Uncles did, and he certainly worked harder than any of our neighbors did. And when farming became more difficult, I saw him continue on with the hard work while simultaneously going back to school–at Idaho State University–to earn his teaching credentials so he could eventually teach school. For two years, he rode a bus one hour each way from our house to Pocatello, Idaho. Each day, he’d waking up at crazy hours just to keep the farm going, all the while pulling down a 4.0 GPA in school. To say my Dad worked hard would be an understatement; he worked extremely hard, and that might be an understatement in and of itself. To this day, my Dad still works hard, and it always pays off. If nothing else, I know I learned my work ethic from watching and modeling after my Dad.

Work Can and Should Be Fun

I saw in my Dad as well, that with hard work you can and should also make work fun. Some of my best memories from growing up come from working alongside my siblings and my Mom and Dad, and my Uncles and Grandparents too. We would thin and hoe beets together, move cows together, and change the animals’ water together. But as hard as the work was, my Dad always encouraged us to find ways to have fun doing it. If you cannot seem to have fun while doing your work, then you need to reevaluate your work or your status as an entrepreneur. He knew that to spend 12-plus hours a day working the land was hard enough, and that to be successful at it, you needed to have fun while doing it. The same holds true for anything in life worth attaining, especially as a result of entrepreneurial pursuits.

You Cannot Change What You Cannot Change

One of the most valuable lessons my Dad ever taught me was that I couldn’t control everything. I remember once when a really wicked hailstorm came through our part of Idaho and totally wiped out our sugar beet crop, that I told my Dad that you could stop that from happening, and he said, “No son, you can’t. You do what you can to grow good crops, and you focus on what is in your control. You can’t control the weather or the price of commodities.” So, for the things in your control, do the very best you can, and for those things you cannot control, try not to worry about them. Protect against them if you can (that year, we had hail insurance on our beets), and choose instead to focus your energies on the areas where you truly do have the ability to influence outcomes.

You Reap What You Sew

This typical law of the harvest certainly applies to me. (Surprise, huh…that I learned about the law of the harvest from my Dad.) If you plant crappy seeds, you’ll have a crappy crop. If you don’t water on time, you’ll have a crappy crop. An entrepreneur needs to realize this. The efforts and intentions you put into your business, whether they be ideas or resources like employees or technology, need to be good, or the output of your efforts won’t be. I know that’s one reason why at Doba I spend so much time focusing on our employees, because they are the core input for a business.

Creativity

I have to admit that while I’m generally a workaholic, there’s another part of me that’s a little bit lazy. The work part typically wins out, but as a teenager growing up on a farm, the lazy side won more than its share of battles. Working on a farm is hard blasted work, and I was always trying to think of better and easier ways to do the work. That mindset was developed over the years, and I think is at the core of my success as an entrepreneur. Being the type of person who is just not satisfied with some things, I always think there has to be an easier and better way of doing it, which in my professional life has always resulted in building a better mousetrap.

At the end of the day, I credit my Dad with helping me learn those five entrepreneurial attributes (there are more of course, but I’ll save those for the book). To my Dad:

Belated Happy Father’s Day! Thanks for teaching me so well (I love you for that, and more). I hope you had a great Father’s Day. I think about my two kids now, and I wonder how I can teach them what you taught me and what I now take for granted.

I really believe that some lessons in life can’t be taught in any other ways. Working on a farm or ranch is the ideal environment to train leaders and entrepreneurs. It’s tangible. You can touch and feel the work. My kids will probably never understand what I do on a daily basis as the CEO of Doba, or any other business for that matter. I’m going to either have to really work hard at teaching them these same lessons, or maybe I’ll just have to see if the Hanks farm in Idaho can continue on for a few more generations so we can all do summer family ‘vacations’ to the farm.