What was your individual career path in terms of education/training, entry-level job, or other significant opportunity?

I have a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto and a Master of Business Administration from Cornell University. I’d started college studying the sciences to be a doctor. But I was into sports, and I did a lot of socializing, and that was the end of my medical career. My degrees aren’t necessary to be an entrepreneur; they just give you the confidence and jargon to deal in the financial arena.

Through the 1990s I ran a private equity and venture capital firm within a large investment bank. As that fund got bigger and more global, I realized I was spending too much time managing egos. My brother Hollis studied law and ran a small merchant bank, but we both wanted to get closer to managing our own businesses. In 1999, we formed a company, Brent Enterprises, LLC, to own and operate businesses. There are important legal protections that come from having a holding company between an individual and the businesses owned. We started our first small business in 2000, but it took what seemed a frustratingly long wait to close our second deal in 2003. Working together is great for us because we have quite different personalities, with complementary expertise; and when we disagree on things, it’s never a question of whether one of us has an ulterior agenda—it’s just a fundamental disagreement.

We’ve owned seven businesses; some we started, and some we bought. Some we’ve sold. We had a frozen pizza company, invested in it, and sold it to one of the largest frozen pizza companies in the United States. We had a specialty packaging company called The IntraPac Group. It consisted of nine packaging plants in the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica, making laminated, aluminum and tin tubes, plastic bottles, jars, and deodorant sticks. End markets were the pharmaceutical, personal care, and food industries. We sold it to someone else who saw it as a platform for a bigger strategy. The time to sell a business is when it’s worth more to someone else than it is to you.

Our core businesses now are our organic snack food company, Made in Nature, LLC, and our grain fractionation and ethanol business, Permolex International. Made in Nature started in 1989 as a small, organic fresh produce and dried fruit company and eventually just sold dried fruit. We bought it in 2003 and transformed it into a healthy snack company.

Permolex mills flour and extracts the gluten to make a powder used in baked goods. We also produce food grade and pharmaceutical grade alcohols from our milling process to use in products such as hand sanitizers. The remaining grain is returned to the farmers for cattle feed. We have 250 employees between those two businesses.

Entrepreneurship is all about managing risk, and hopefully, those are calculated risks. There are two times in life where I think it is ideal to take that risk. Those times are when you are financially secure and can afford to lose, or when you are at a stage of life where you have nothing to lose. A great time is when you’re young, have vim and vigor and don’t know any better, and just want to get out there and give something a go. In my case, my kids were old enough and I had enough money set aside that if I failed, I could get up, dust myself off, and start again. We were fortunate enough that our failures were not enough to cripple the business, but as I say, an entrepreneur is always balancing risk, and hopefully those risks are well understood and thought through.

Sometimes you can make calculated decisions and be right in all of them and [then] something beyond your control can happen and upset the apple cart. Can you imagine starting a restaurant in 2019? I’m sure there are plenty of people who have strong business plans and a strong outlook, and then COVID comes along, and they lose everything.

What are the most important skills and/or qualities for someone in your profession?

The most important thing would be common sense. You’re probably not going to find an answer in a textbook for most of the questions you’re going to face in your career. You have to have a gut feeling—something just doesn’t make sense, or something can be done a better way. If you don’t have common sense to see opportunities or adapt, you don’t have much chance succeeding as an entrepreneur. When COVID hit, we were producing ethanol at a grade to be used as a fuel additive, but suddenly people weren’t driving anywhere. We moved fast and invested in upgrades to the plant to produce ethanol suitable for hand sanitizer. It was common sense to adapt to the new reality. Ninety-five percent is common sense, and five percent is confidence to sell your idea and resilience to keep going when facing initial hurdles.

What do you wish you had known going into this profession?

I have a unique perspective because I was fortunate enough to run an equity fund where I was sitting on the boards of companies run by entrepreneurs. I was always thinking: what’s the common thread? There are all kinds of people who are entrepreneurs. We had every kind of leader—some who believed everything would just turn out right, and others who were detailed thinkers. I went in with the knowledge knowing there’s not a formula, but the big awakening was when I was a private equity investor sitting on company boards, I would sit there and say, “why don’t you outsource that,” “why don’t you consolidate that,” “why don’t you combine those two products”? It all seemed so obvious to me. But when you start running these businesses, you quickly realize that it’s way harder than that. It’s never as easy as you think it is in terms of finding the right people, implementation, and execution.

Are there many job opportunities in your profession? In what specific areas?

There are a broad array of types of entrepreneurial enterprises and almost infinite opportunities to get involved with them in some capacity. No matter what the industry, you need a good idea, a good business plan, to be able to justify it to others, and then go out and find the money.

How do you see your profession changing in the next 5 years? How will technology impact that change, and what skills will be required?

Technology disrupts everything and out of disruption comes opportunity. As technology applies to virtually any industry, it changes the characteristics of a winner and a loser. Take e-commerce. There are certain appealing elements to physically going to a store—I can browse; I can make impulse buys. People were willing to buy certain things online; but then all of a sudden COVID hits, and there’s a huge growth in e-commerce. I don’t think it’s ever going to go back.

What do you enjoy most about your job? What do you enjoy least about your job?

No two days, no two hours are the same. You’re dealing with the unpredictable all the time, and it’s never boring. It’s not always fun—but it’s never boring.

What I like least is letting an employee go. We like to know our employees and create community within our businesses. You have to give people the tools they need to succeed, and believe they can succeed, and sometimes you’re going to be disappointed because they just can’t. Those personnel decisions are very difficult to make.

Can you suggest a valuable “try this” for students considering a career in your profession?

Right out of Nike: “Just do it.” You can get a window into being an entrepreneur by just going and working in your local butcher shop. Try working in ten things, don’t just try one thing. Nowadays, you can design and build something on a 3D printer and sell it exclusively on the Internet. Do whatever it takes to get up to bat. Because once you’re up to bat you’re going to hit the ball or you’re not.

What was your individual career path in terms of education/training, entry-level job, or other significant opportunity?

I grew up in a little mining town in Colorado and became a professional bull rider after high school. I had a career-ending injury and didn’t have a back-up plan, so I went to work: construction jobs, manual labor on a farm, in a meatpacking house, as an electrician. I realized I was pretty good at creating and designing things and that led me to engineering. At age 25, I entered Colorado State University where I earned a degree in mechanical engineering. I had a family and worked full-time to put myself through school, so I had to make sure my college paid off.

I worked for big Fortune 500 companies like Hewlett Packard, Schneider Electric, Lockheed Martin, and my career started to change toward the business side of product development. Then I moved into the startup space. I worked for four startups, one as co-founder. In all, I hold 31 US patents and many more foreign patents.

The first startup I worked for was Minute Key. At that time, if you wanted to get a key copied for your house you went to the hardware store, spent 30 minutes to find an associate, waited 20 minutes while they make the key and when you got home, there was a 25 percent chance the key was incorrectly cut and was not going to fit. I managed the development of a kiosk that, at the end of the day, could be adapted to large-scale use in grocery and big box stores. It can cut a key in 60 seconds with 99.9 percent accuracy. We created the market, then competition started.

I came to this job right as the pandemic started. This is the best job I could think of, to work in a place that funnels startups into the system. What they need is coaching, advice, and investment. I can help them not make the mistakes I made.

The number one mistake startups make is that they have a solution to a problem that doesn’t matter. They get enamored of their solution. Make sure you are addressing a compelling problem.

The biggest challenge with a startup, which is a high-risk thing, is that even though you may think you are on to something, you have to balance that risk if you have a family. Really successful entrepreneurs can kind of compartmentalize that risk and not waiver.

One thing that’s been really refreshing during COVID-19: these entrepreneurs see COVID as an opportunity, a new set of problems. The best entrepreneurs change their offerings. For example, we had a startup working on a software app, COVID happened, and they decided to shift and make an app where employees can say whether or not they tested positive or have symptoms. Employers could use that. Our entrepreneurs were right and got quite a bit of traction with it. Our drug development and bio sciences startups pivoted toward cheap ways to make masks, visors, or ventilators.

What are the most important skills and/or qualities for someone in your profession?

Entrepreneurs need determination and tenacity and to believe in their idea. As a mentor, I have to be empathetic. I have to be able to think about the perspective of the person I’m trying to help. I can give all the advice in the world; if that doesn’t align with what they are trying to do, that’s not much use.

What do you wish you had known going into this profession?

I went into engineering because I thought I was creative. But, had I known the direction my career would take, I would have focused more on business-related studies in parallel with engineering. I’ve also learned how to determine whether a problem is worth solving. That gets into problem-space vs. solution-space and how creativity works. In hindsight, I trained myself in some of those areas, but knowing up front how the creative process works would have been useful.

Are there many job opportunities in your profession? In what specific areas?

If you can hang with the risk and you’re creative and aggressive, there’s a lot of opportunity in the startup space. And I’ve been blown away by the number of opportunities for mentors and people who are willing to coach, although sometimes people are doing so to find their next opportunity. There are accelerators at universities all over the country.

How do you see your profession changing in the next 5 years? How will technology impact that change, and what skills will be required?

From an entrepreneur’s perspective, I think you are going to see more and more opportunities for social impact-type ideas. When you look at what motivates millennials and the generation after that coming up, it’s different from 20 or 30 years ago. They are interested in societal impact and positive change in the world, from diversity, inclusion, and racial equity to environmental impact. Technology comes and goes. Whether you are solving a compelling problem is the focus.

What do you enjoy most about your job? What do you enjoy least about your job?

Seeing young people energized and betting their life. They are onto something and helping them realize their dream—that’s terrific. I least enjoy knowing not all are going to be successful, and I have to deliver the bad news and help them move to a different idea.

Can you suggest a valuable “try this” for students considering a career in your profession?

Get out and get real jobs doing real stuff—pouring concrete, roofing houses, building things. That is invaluable because you cannot fake real experience in the real world doing real stuff. It gave me perspective, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world.