In the first Brigham Young University Hawaii Entrepreneurship Lecture Series of 2009, Digitalbridge President & CEO Terry Pitts told how, along with two others, each put $500 into a new healthcare data business that they sold four years later for $15 million. Then he shared the lessons and principles he learned in the process, and since with four other companies, with the students in the McKay Auditorium on January 29.
"There are certain ingredients in being an entrepreneur," said Pitts, who recently completed a proselyting mission in Washington, D.C. with his wife and now lives in Heber, Utah.
"The first thing is the Spirit," he said, recalling he had other opportunities to start a business before his first venture, "but until I got a confirmation of the Spirit, I always told them no." He added the three literally started that first business with "two sawhorses in an empty bedroom, and spread a plywood desk over them."
"The second ingredient is the support of your spouse. No matter what you do, and no matter what kind of entrepreneur you end up being, you've got to have someone who will follow your dreams... Without that, I could not be successful," Pitts said of his wife of 38 years. He added that not all of his ventures have been successful.
He next listed personal traits and values, some of which he learned as a directly-admitted senior healthcare management partner at Coopers & Lybrand [now called PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world's largest professional services company], suggesting the students complete the following sentence: "I'll be successful when ______."
"If you write, I'll be successful when I make $10 million, I'll tell you right now you're wrong, because it's not all about the money."
"The personal traits that are so important are...integrity and honesty, work ethic, love to learn, self motivated, like people, competitive, to be inspiration and to motivate, to have passion in what you do, to be creative and always thinking of new things...and leadership."
For example, Pitts showed a video clip of an important naval commander on a stormy sea who received a radio request to change course, and refused to do so — until the caller told him he was the assistant at the lighthouse directly in his path. "The problem that he [the captain] had was he was being decisive without adequate data points to make a decision."
Pitts also stressed that you don't have to be corrupt to enter business. "Certainly we see in this economy all that stuff that's going on today. There are people you can be honest with, who have a great work ethic, and you do not need to compromise your values to be successful," he said.
For example, he told of starting a new health information services consulting operation in a Pennsylvania company that grew into a $100 million division, which then started to be dishonest. "I had a lot of stock options," Pitts said. "They knew I was honest to a tee, and when they started playing games with the books, I went to the chairman of the board, my boss, and I quit. I left $3.5 million on the table. I will never regret that decision, because what they were doing was flat wrong. There isn't a person today who can smear my name. That's far more important than making $3.5 million."
"You always have to stay with your values, to stay with your integrity."
"You should be the first one to work. You should have a passion and drive for what you do," he continued, telling how the first thing his daughter did when she became a general manager for a large home-style restaurant chain in Mesa, Arizona, was to clean the bathrooms. She told her father she did it "'to show the rest of my employees that I would do anything that I would ask them to do.' She cooks often, and she knows every single job in that restaurant with 225 employees."
"You can't be an entrepreneur and follow. You have to lead," Pitts continued. "That doesn't mean you have to come up with every idea... Go to people: Ask and learn. You have to love the people: Go and embrace them. You have to be able to motivate them."
He also described a four-step process that "you can apply to any facet of your life": Assess, plan, implement and monitor.
Pitts encouraged the students to be realistic about the growth of their future companies, citing a dot-com business worth about $40 million on $8 million in annual sales in 2001 that put a $2 billion price tag on itself two months before that industry burst. "Greed will kill you. How much money is enough? It's not about the money," he reiterated, pointing out all his employees in all of his companies have stock options. "Share the wealth," he said.
Returning to the sentence Pitts asked the students to complete earlier in the presentation, he shared his own version:
"I work at what I love. I can live my values comfortably without fear of compromise in what I'm doing. I can be in an environment where I can constantly learn (and I chose my profession of computer science on purpose), and that I'm contributing value to society, my company and myself."