Creating Big Entrepreneurial Wins

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Chuck Templeton, who is passionate about early stage and emerging companies and is focused on using business to find solutions to our biggest challenges today. He's currently Managing Director of Impact Engine, an amazing venture accelerator that focuses on helping for-profit companies address environmental and or societal challenges.

He took this first big step. As we all know, you are the entrepreneur, author and founder of OpenTable, which went public on the Nasdaq in May of 2009. Most importantly, which I loved about your bio. You have an amazing wife and two awesome daughters.

Chuck Templeton: Yeah, thanks for having me here.

Anita Brick: Absolutely. Thank you. So why did you decide to enter the entrepreneurial world rather than taking some people who would say a safer route going and going into banking or into consulting or something else that would be more traditional?

Chuck Templeton: You know, I personally like the early stage parts of business because I think there's challenges that you can go after. You know, you're not sort of encumbered by the status quo or what's been there before. You can be, in my mind, more creative and go after issues without having to deal with some of that, that status quo and that legacy that's there.

Certainly those people have been good at that, but I just really enjoy the problem solving that happens at an early stage, trying to figure out the right customer, fit the right market, fit the right price points, the right capital structure, and attract the right management team. All the problem solving of an early stage business is really where I, frankly, have the most fun.

Anita Brick: All right. A lot of people talk about entrepreneurs today more than ever. At least I, you know, talk to alumni and students who want to do that. Not as many actually follow through. What allowed you to take the plunge?

Chuck Templeton: You know, a little bit was naivete. I just didn't understand some of the challenges and how hard it would be when I was, you know, first starting out as an entrepreneur. Fortunately, my first business, I had some success. And there were, you know, a lot of really smart people who did a lot of really heavy lifting and carried that business.

And it was an idea that a lot of things work. You know, the business model worked, the timing worked. We found the right investors, we found the right other, you know, people that were there running it ultimately and whatnot, potentially. Another small piece is there was this thing called the internet that was starting at least, you know, from my perspective, back in 1997 or so, and I wanted to be part of it. I thought it would be fairly big.

So I interviewed for a bunch of companies that were all sort of icons and didn't have enough experience to work at any of them. So you know, I was watching my wife trying to make restaurant reservations one day and decided that there had to be a better way. And so I went out and, you know, I'd never written a line of code or, you know, had no idea what HTML was and, you know, somehow piece it all together.

Anita Brick: Since you mentioned OpenTable, there are a couple of questions about that. So when Alan asked, when you launched OpenTable, what potential competitive threats were you concerned about and what gave you the confidence that you could successfully overcome them?

Chuck Templeton: Certainly, I think that in early stage companies with big markets, competition is less of an issue. I think the number one focus should be how do you figure out what the customer needs and how do you deliver what that need is. And if I feel like you're doing that, there's a good chance you're going to win.

Obviously, if you know one of your competitors has, you know, has more capital than you or access to some, you know, important resource or asset that's important in that market that could be a big disadvantage. But for us, the restaurant space was very fragmented. There was no one on the diners side, you know, there wasn't the yelps and whatnot that there are today that sort of have the traffic on that side.

And so it was fragmented on both sides. And so from that perspective, the only thing that, you know, we really focused on, and I think it kind of upset me when I would be walking through the office and see one of our team members with one of our competitors up on their screen. I was just like, you know why?

Let's focus on what we can do and how we can impact, you know, the customer and how we can deliver value to them. And that's where I like to try and focus. So from our perspective, yes, we were certainly one of the first. We were pretty sure our very first real time online restaurant reservation would happen. But you know, at the same time there probably, you know, throughout at 10 or 12 competitors who came along, or one of the things that helped us is we sort of had an internal mantra of how do we get the restaurant to sign an agreement while falling over, if you will, you know, and we would get the system in. And so and that was our number one thing is that we really tried to simplify it and make it easy for the customer to adopt.

Anita Brick: They never asked a question pertaining to that, he said. It's a completely different business model, very disruptive. How did you get them to come on board to something that was unproven? How did you get those first restaurants to actually sign on?

Chuck Templeton: So a lot of restaurants, you know, especially the ones that are on the upper end, were more sort of in this mindset that, look, I don't need additional customers. What I need is to take better care of my current customers. I want to know, like my seats are always full. I want to make sure they're full with the people who are going to spend the most and feel the best and return the most, and they're the loyal customers, that type of stuff.

And so what they wanted was a better way to take care of their current customers. And so what we launched with was the Erb, the electronic reservation book, which did three main things making, changing, canceling, confirming reservations to table management. So once the evening begins, you know who was sitting where? How long have they been there? When are they likely to get up?

And then the third was guest management. So who are my VIPs? What are their preferences? How often do they come to that type of stuff? What this system did is a lot of restaurants who cared about taking care of their current customers either had old reservation books or three by five cards or things like that that they kept on their best guess.

So what this system did is it allowed them to have that all at their fingertips, you know, as a reservation was being made, they could see, oh, Mr.. Mrs. Smith, you know, you've been here, you know, six times. I know you like table 41. You know, we'll make sure that we save the prime rib or whatever type of meal that you're interested in, because we know that that's your favorite.

And so what this tool did is it gave them that capability. The number one focus wasn't bringing new diners in the door. It was taking better care of their current diners. And so those were the top influencers in a market. So those were the ones who were the most susceptible to the product because frankly, when we first launched, we had no reservation traffic. There were no people coming through the internet to book reservations.

Anita Brick: Okay. So how did they measure that? How did they know that if I were a VIP customer, that I had a better experience? I mean, what metrics did they use to measure it?

Chuck Templeton: You know, I think it's just, you know, they're feeling of, you know, what was important to their particular customers, restaurateurs, they're certainly getting more financially savvy than they then they were in the past. Would a lot of people believe is they could light a candle and serve a meal. But they didn't think restaurateurs were very good at much else.

And so what our tool gave them is some more sophistication around being able to say, okay, the Franklins used to come in once a month, now they're coming in every 2 or 3 weeks. So we know that we're getting better at service with them. So it was this ability to be able to look at the flow of the restaurant and customers and be able to see that, okay, now I'm sitting at 96% every night versus 91%, right? So it gave them a lot of tools like that that they hadn't had access to.

Anita Brick: It's kind of interesting because it also seemed like it converged on the trend of customization. So when you think about this, I, as a restaurateur, could customize your experience based on a history with you. And I had easier access to do that. So it seems like it also converged on that as well.

Chuck Templeton: This is where you talk about some serendipity worked out, right? So the internet was coming of age. The cost of computing power was dropping dramatically. People were starting to adopt the internet. So there were a lot of trends that made sense to us. And certainly customization was one of them. And now a restaurant, you continue to fine tune what they were doing.

They could spend less time with the administrative piece of it and more time actually acting on it and being able to do that. So, you know, there were some interesting things that eventually we started to see with OpenTable that almost 25% of reservations that came through the online were happening between something like 11pm at night and 10 a.m. in the morning.

So when a restaurant's normally not answering its phones anyway. Wow. We also saw things like we asked questions like, is this the first time you've been to this restaurant? You know, about 50% of the people said, yes, it's the first time I've been to that particular restaurant. So it was also expanding people's ability because people didn't want to wait on the phone, you know, or call six restaurants to find the right time, to then call their friends and figure out which one worked and that kind of stuff.

And there were two other really interesting things that we learned through time. One is that people wanted it to be a much more predictable experience, kind of like the ATM you walk up to it or the cash machine. You walk up to it, you put your card and you press six buttons and money comes out. So no matter how nice or rude the person is on the other side, it's a very predictable price.

And that's what reservations were. A lot of hosts were very nice, and the person who was doing it just wanted to do it and get it done with. They didn't want to be sweet talked, it was more about functionality. So that was certainly one thing that people wanted a much more predictable experience, a group, not all, but a group of people.

And then second, was this an embarrassment almost for some people to not want to call a busy restaurant on the day of or the day before? I asked if there was a table available. You know, they felt like the voice on the other end of the phone was going to laugh at them because, you know, oh yeah, what we found was a lot of people would search for the next day at the fine restaurants and take the 530 spot that might not have been ideal, but was available.

And, you know, that fine dining restaurant. So it allowed people to explore through that and be able to not be, you know, held back by the perception that a restaurant may not have availability. So there were some interesting things that we learned.

Anita Brick: You said that this started because of your wife making reservations. It could have ended up as a lifestyle business. What allowed you? And there was a question from the executive. Yeah, students kind of fit in here. How do you know if a business is scalable? So how did you know that the business was scalable and really capable of attracting investors.

Chuck Templeton: Even with all the money that we raise? I don't think we actually knew that the business was scalable and potentially profitable until probably a year 5 or 6. We put in a lot of processes and procedures to figure out how to make it as efficient as possible to get these systems in. But the biggest thing that we believed was that the market size was big.

There were 30,000, we thought between 30,000 and 100,000 restaurants that we could service in the United States. If we can get a couple grand a month from each of them, that was a pretty big market. So for us, we believed that it was big enough to go after. Not a lot of people believed in us. It was probably 20 to 1, 25 to 1, or for pitches versus actually raising the capital.

There were a number of things that were working against us at that time. And this is where, you know, it was a very capital intensive business when we built it. So a lot of restaurants didn't have power. Their host and a lot of restaurants didn't have connectivity to the internet. Again, back to this. They could sign a contract while falling over.

We'd get the system in. So as an example, there was one restaurant in San Francisco that had these beautiful polished concrete floors fairly new. It was an influencer. We knew we had to get it, but it just had the steel pole coming out of the ground with a little platform on top. And that was hot sand, right? So there was no power, no activity.

This is sort of pre 800, 2.11 or Wi-Fi technology. And so we spent $4,000 hiring someone to jackhammer the floor up, put conduit in it, place concrete back down. We polish it. And so we could actually put this, you know, this ERP at their host. And so for us, you know, we knew there were these big barriers and a lot of the venture folk didn't like the fact that we had to walk door to door to sell restaurants using sort of good old fashioned shoe leather sales techniques.

And a lot of people who didn't believe in the model, everything that they didn't like about the model is what they love about the model now. So the barriers to entry someone else to try and go out and sell 30,000 restaurants across the United States and have hardware installed, and staff knows how to use the system, and people have been using it for 2 or 3 years and has the next 45 days and, you know, 30 or 40 or 50% of their business comes through. That's hard to replace.

Anita Brick: Yeah. No, that's a very, very good point. Very good point. In fact, there were three questions that kind of follow on to that about specific situations. One person asked, I'm looking to start a marketing cooperative for small direct to consumer service businesses in my local area. Obviously you need participants to drive traffic to the site. How did you go about recruiting restaurants to participate?

Understanding their varying degrees of sophistication among owners? Part of it was that you were providing, as you said, a service to them that allows them to have a better handle on their customers, especially the most profitable ones. How did you get the early adopters?

Chuck Templeton: That two sided network, right? Chicken and egg problem. You know, you have diners on one side and restaurants on the other side. And I don't think we were geniuses, you know, and came up with all these ideas. I think we kind of stumbled into it, frankly, that we figured out that the restaurants like these systems would use it long before an internet reservation ever came through the door added value.

So what I kind of referred to as a seating on one side of the network. So if you can get one side of the network product that adds value before the other side of the network needs to show up, then you can actually get a critical mass on one side. And then as you start to open it up to the other side, now you can actually get liquidity in that marketplace, if you will.

So for probably the first nine months of the company or so, I spent two, three days a week, probably between 2 and 5 hours a day, sitting in restaurants watching them take reservations, work. Then, you know, the host and I mean, I worked in restaurants in high school and college. We listened to the order of questions that they asked, you know, did they ask for date and time or name and phone number or first name and last name or area code, or work or home or like, what was the order and questions in which they asked?

And so we tried to take the paper based world that they were used to using and move it into an electronic format, because we didn't want them to have to learn new things. And so we called that as polishing the friction in the process. So back to the seating. One side of the network. How do you see one side of the network, and how do you do it in a way that minimizes the adoption cost or minimizes the friction to adoption?

That was our main focus, and I think that's partially why we were able to do that. And I think a lot of really hard work from a lot of great people in the organization. One more thing on top of that is we had a great investor base too. So I think between those three things, that's how we, you know, we were able to sort of at least in the short term so far win the race.

Anita Brick: But it sounds like at the very beginning, what was most important is that you knew the customer, you knew the restaurant almost as well as they did, and maybe even better, because sometimes when we're doing things, we become so accustomed, we don't understand what the exact process is. We just know we do it. So it sounds like that front end detective work, so to speak, really helped a lot.

Chuck Templeton: I think so and so sorry I didn't add on to that last question, I think. So, I think one of the things that businesses and people will give you the benefit of the doubt, oftentimes, right. Not everyone, but there's a group of the innovators or the folks out there who want to try new things, who are willing to try new things.

My belief is if you can find those people and it's going to take some no's and slammed in the face and that kind of stuff to find those yeses. But once you find them, people will give you a pretty good benefit of the doubt as long as you're showing forward momentum. If you go in and you install a product and believe me, the first versions of the product we installed were terrible or terrible.

One of my early senior team members in the you know, his brother was a computer programmer, and he looked at the program. He said, this is the worst software I've ever seen. So it was bad. But what it did, we got it in front of the restaurants, and the restaurants were able to try it, give us feedback, and so we might do 3 or 4 builds in one day, you know, on something and get it back to the restaurants.

And they saw it changing. So, so, so they saw their fingerprints starting to show up on it everywhere. So they would continue to give us the benefit of the doubt and do that, you know, and there were some times where some of the changes were made for the wrong changes, you know, and they got mad at us and wanted us back. And so for us, as long as you're working in the early adopters see you innovating and moving the product forward. Most of the time they will give you the.

Anita Brick: Benefit of the doubt. The other question that was very specific to a particular context was an evening student who said, and this has a lot to do with ease of market entry. He said, how do you keep an online or app based innovation from being imitated and therefore losing its strategic advantage? I think that's the billion dollar question, right?

Chuck Templeton: You know, that's a great question. I wish I had the crystal ball answer on that. But you look at Instagram, right? I mean, there were 250 other photo sharing apps, probably at least photo sharing apps out there. And so, you know, many of them did a lot of the same filtering and stuff like that. So why did they explode?

What is the sort of magic thing for them? And I don't know if there's a consistent answer. Every time I've heard there was a couple early adopters that made those guys blow up and explode, it could be just the right place, the right time, you know, with the right product and the right quirkiness in the language that, you know, attracts the right demographic, that, you know, sort of this accumulation of small wins, you know, not too different than Malcolm Gladwell's, sort of philosophies of either the tipping point type of thing is to how do you get it into a small set of influencers, which I think that is a very important piece of, is how do you find the influencers and how do you get it in their hands? You know, it's part of the reason I think Instagram was somewhat successful. And then two is sort of this accumulation of small wins, which is outliers book, where you can keep getting small wins and sort of keep being able to two steps forward, at least less than one step back every time.

It's this moving the momentum forward, I think, is the most important thing. Fortunately, we're in a world today where there's not a lot of barriers to entry in a lot of verticals. It is a speed to market and people are fickle and that kind of stuff. And so I'm not sure there is a one size fits all answer there.

Anita Brick: The points that you made influencers and accumulated small wins, because most of us can get small wins. A lot of people that I talked to, they're looking for that one big thing that's going to make them explode. And it's usually not that.

Chuck Templeton: It's almost never that. Right?

Anita Brick: Yeah, yeah.

Chuck Templeton: Everyone wanted to be, you know, an article in daily Candy or, you know, on TechCrunch or something like that. Right. And you would see their traffic spike for about 24 hours and then write back and drive back. And so that's a good event to happen. You can't build the whole business around a single event. You know, you look at Apple right?

When they launched the iPod that wasn't successful because they launched a single product that was 20 years worth of experience, sort of building up to that and building a core following of people and people who, you know, believed in what they were doing. And so they've continued to build on that and grow on it. But it really is about, I think, small wins through time that sort of get you there. And maybe there are 1 or 2 big steps that help you explode. But for the majority of it, it's a lot of small wins. I get that.

Anita Brick: Got it. Unless you talk a little bit about Impact Engine, if we could, because I think it's really important what you're doing. weekend students. I want to be sure that whatever I start has a positive social impact in your role as managing director of Impact Engine, what do you look for in ideas and business plans? And I would add in people.

Chuck Templeton: Yeah, I think people certainly have an important piece of it. I mean there's got to be this right. Combined. And I'm not saying we've got the formula nailed by any stretch of the imagination, but there's got to be this right combination of someone who understands that it has to be for profit. They're not just kind of saying that sort of make you feel good about it, but also have a passion for what they're trying to resolve.

There's something moving them besides, you know, a dollar. We have our own sort of criteria that we look at. It's not super sophisticated, frankly. I've spent a while since the birth of my first daughter, really starting to dig into what a more sustainable future looks like. You know, after her birth, I started to think about what someone's going to be like when she got older and I was always sort of, maybe had a green tint to myself growing up to some degree.

I recycle, you know, didn't let the water run and, you know, things like that. But I never really understood the impact that humans were having on the planet at large. After her birth, I started to wonder, what's the world gonna be like? You know, when she's 20, 30, 40, and, you know, the more I read, the more I get concerned about some of these, you know, massive global challenges out there.

So what we look for in impact engines certainly is they have to be for profit. We have to believe that there's an economic model there. They have to address an environmental and or societal issue. And that's not super tightly defined at this point. A lot of that is, you know, based on just sort of, you know, my worldview over the last 7 or 8 years and how it's evolved that of the other directors that are involved, we have four of their directors involved.

The business and the mission have to be interrelated, meaning that it's not a buy one, give one or and percent of profits go to, you know, charity or something like that, when they sell their product that's actually making money and addressing the mission. So as an example directly, directly. Exactly. So as an example, you know, one of our companies is called Puerto Pier.

I'm an entrepreneur here in town. He used to run the filtration group or unit over at the Chicago Water Filtration Plant for about nine years or so, and it's the largest water plant in the world. And so he's filtered more water than probably anyone on the planet. So he understands filtration technology. And so what he was able to do is design a product that didn't use pumps, didn't need electricity, didn't need iodine or chlorine tablets or anything like that.

And it's purely gravity fed. It's a water filtration solution. You know, you can fill it with any lake, river, stream. And so we have this, this technology. And now I needed a form factor. And he showed up to impact the engine with a form factor that was either for a wellhead. and not all communities have, well heads or he had like this one liter squeeze bottle, but it took 21 p.s.i to squeeze it, and most people couldn't do it efficiently.

So they just take the top off and just drink out of it anyway. And so, you know, he was missing a lot of that. He did some research. Haiti's his first market because that was sort of the one that really caught him to think about after the big earthquake there and some of the issues that, had down there, that was the moment that moved him, took some product ideas, went down to Haiti.

In his first trip down to Haiti, he got or with these new product ideas, he got a $90,000 po from a nonprofit down there. The water problems are terrible down there. And so he's then able to now design a product. He was just back in Haiti this weekend with sort of the final designs, doing AB testing with some people.

And, you know, they overwhelmingly chose one of the designs over another. And it's a five gallon bucket that can be a backpack so people can travel with it. They can be micro entrepreneurs. They can sell water out of it. And at the same time, it's an appliance that sits on people's tables in their houses. Right? So there's no running water in these houses, but this product will allow most Haitians to save anywhere from 10 to 25% of their annual income they spend on water. Wow. And so now you can become an economic platform where they can sell water to their neighbors and stuff like that. So pretty powerful product.

Anita Brick: Clearly you look for profitability. Yeah. It is very much this whole conscious capitalism model right. So profitability is key. And social impact not as a byproduct where you make so much money that you can give it away, but that you actually have a social impact. And that's a brilliant example that you gave.

Chuck Templeton: Two other things that we do look for with that one is that the entrepreneur has to be coachable. We don't want them to sit there and listen to everything that we sort of say or other mentors say, or, you know, but they need to take feedback, digest it, and then factor that into their consideration or their decisions as they move forward.

So coach ability is one the last sort of things we have to feel we can help them. Right. If we, you know, if it's just an industry nanotechnology or something like that we just couldn't help we, you know, probably not get involved.

Anita Brick: And that's really good. There was another question from an existing MBA student that kind of fits in with that. So it's one thing to get it off the ground. So you look for certain things, you look for, you know, the things we just talked about, the person being coachable. How do you help them create an enduring, you know, company that isn't just a flash in the pan and makes a big splash. And then 18 months later or even five years later is gone. How do you create the long term aspect?

Chuck Templeton: Frankly, probably an area we don't spend as much time on, right, is sort of building the internal processes that enable it to be an HP or whatever type of thing. Right? So the built to last mindset, we do spend time really thinking about the process. How do you develop processes into your organization so that you're solving for scale in the early phase?

You certainly need to be paying attention to the individual needs of your customers so that you can design the product. But once you sort of get that, you then have to figure out how to solve for the masses, right? Google is one of the kings of this, right? They don't solve for the individual. They solve for the masses as they do stuff and solve for scale.

They certainly look at corner cases and, you know, factor in. But that's the least of their worries, you know, out of the gate. And so with this it's really how do you build an organization from a longevity perspective that first of all understands that. That to me is the number one reason why most entrepreneurs fail, because they don't understand the time horizon, right?

That it's going to take a long time and they're not prepared for as long as that they're going to need to do this. And for the two partners or co-founders once in six months. And we're, you know, off in grass courts in Tahiti and the others thinking, I'm going to be doing this for five years. And there's misalignment of that, those expectations or the expectations of their investors or whatever.

Right. So this time horizon question is really something that I try to work with the entrepreneurs on. And it's being this, this humble confidence that I think most successful. There are a lot of successful entrepreneurs, in my opinion, where they don't know everything. I cringe when I hear the term expert most times. There are certainly people who are experts out there, but I feel like that's a point in time rather than sort of what's going forward and what's beyond.

Because, you know, launching a company today is very different from launching a company two years ago. And so what worked two years ago may or may not work today in all instances. Right? I think there's some underlying themes that are oftentimes consistent, but I'm not sure, again, that there's any one sort of rule to follow or whatnot is one of the things I try and be with these entrepreneurs, being as honest and authentic and straightforward as you can possibly be, for I feel like you get the most benefit of the doubt with either customers or investors or whatever.

Hey, we think this works. We're feeling really good about it. Here's all the evidence, here's our assumptions. This is why we believe it works. We don't know for sure. We're not perfect. We don't have our crystal ball. We're going to do whatever we can to make sure we can be successful. There's some of that that really has to be in order to try to help these companies endure beyond sort of six months.

Anita Brick: And it sounds like, don't believe what the press says, either good or bad, because it can swell your head and then you forget that you're not an expert. Ultimately, if we go away, as you said, and believe that we are done, we're done. Yeah.

Chuck Templeton: Jordan, we should always be learning in my absolute I.

Anita Brick: Totally agree.

Chuck Templeton: You know, and so I think that I think we should always be open minded to stuff, you know, we should base past experience on that. I mean I think Nate Silver, you know, showed good examples of that. When you look at prediction and you know, you need that starting point to be able to predict what's going forward. So I think that's important and you need to use that. But going forward nothing's 100% got it.

Anita Brick: Yeah. What's interesting is that you and I both have MBAs. And this question came from an alum who also has an MBA, said there's a popular belief in the Lean Startup community that not only is an MBA of limited utility, it's actually a liability. What do you think about that? It really puts you on the spot. Yeah.

Chuck Templeton: No. So for some people that's the case in an MBA may slow them down or may not. So for me I started Opentable before I got my MBA. I went back after that experience to go get an MBA. And there were two reasons that I did. One is that I made a lot of mistakes at OpenTable.

I hope next time in my next startups that I'd make fewer, or at least not the same ones. and then two is that I wanted to continue to build my network. And that's why for me specifically, I chose the evening program, and I was in Chicago because my hunch was that more of those people would be staying around the community.

So I'd build my network here in the community a little bit more. So for me, I thought there were, you know, some classes that I felt like weren't as valuable as others, for sure. But I'm a big believer in education. I do feel like there's a lot of innovation happening right now in the business school model and that kind of stuff. And so I feel like maybe 5 or 6 years ago, it wasn't adapting as fast as it is as my perception is that they are today. You know, I think there's some interesting stuff happening.

Anita Brick: Do you have time for two more questions? Sure.

Chuck Templeton: Yeah. Yeah.

Anita Brick: Okay. Great. I know having grown up in an entrepreneurial family, there can be the best of times in the worst of times in a startup. So one of the evening students, do you have any techniques or strategies to manage the inevitable emotional ebbs and flows of starting and running a business?

Chuck Templeton: Part of it, I try not to take myself too seriously. Right. So, you know, I try to joke around a lot and bring light to situations, right? Because again, back to, you know, these, that there is some luck, right? Sometimes you're going to have some bad luck and sometimes you're going to have some good luck. Right? And so I'm a big fan of the quote. I'm going to butcher the exact quote, but I'm paraphrasing here.

So Shakespeare, in Hamlet, talks about whether nothing is either good or bad. It's how you think of it. If things are going wrong, if you can embrace those, you can actually use them as lessons and motivators and that kind of stuff, rather than sort of ducking your head in the sand and running away or whatever. And don't get me wrong, there have been times where I've felt like, you know, getting on the floor in the fetal position and whatnot, you know, because I'm frustrated about stuff or whatever. You're not productive in either of those. And so highs and lows, right? You know, you shouldn't pat yourself on the back too much for the successes or, you know, shooting yourself in the foot too much for the challenging times. And so for me, that's nothing good or bad. It's how you think of it.

Anita Brick: I guess it also dovetails with what you said earlier about always learning. and so having that as a backdrop all the time and having that, I think you called it humble confidence or humility and confidence together because then it moderates a little bit. Yeah. But you're absolutely right. Some people think, well, the only thing I really want to know how to overcome are the challenges.

But in a sense, some of the greatest wins or the things that people would say, wow, that was the best thing that ever happened in this company could also undermine you. Yeah. So you have to watch both sides.

Chuck Templeton: I certainly think so. You need to smooth the waves out of highs and lows so that, you know, I mean, you don't want to be totally excited when things are going wrong or, you know, super pissed off when things are going right. Certainly. But I think just being able to moderate that and, you know, stay deliberate and thoughtful and present, we're primal.

Right? We're animals. Right. Just to some degree. Yeah. There might be some people who disagree with that. but, you know, we're human. So we are going to feel some of those emotions. And it's a matter of how do we control those emotions? I think both the high side and the low side.

Anita Brick: Got it. One final question. I'm sure other people who are listening, who are aspiring entrepreneurs, would advise them to mobilize their resources and talents if they're determined to create a business.

Chuck Templeton: Understanding the time horizon is one of the most important things. It takes a long time to get a business up and running. I mean, there's very few guru bonds out there that do it in, you know, four years or whatever to get it to the level of success that they had. I mean, even Google, you know, was 10 or 11 years in before most of America had heard of the word Google, type of thing.

Right? So and that's probably even a short time given their success for sure. But so certainly Time Horizon two is, as I'm a big fan of networks and I try not to ever undervalue any or overvalue any one particular connection. I think sometimes the people who don't seem like they're gonna why should I be spending time with them?

I think oftentimes those are the people who even learn something really insightful from, or you're able to help in a way that helps you down the road and so I do a lot of paying it forward, or I try to anyway, I try and I like to meet with entrepreneurs and hear their ideas and sort of offer my thoughts or perspective, you know, if they're interested in them this time horizon, this the network.

And then if I had to do a third, I guess it would be this concept of, of always learning, you know, not believing that, you know, you're an expert at something. You know, there's just so many things that we think we're experts at. And then 5 or 10 years later, we discover that the whole science is wrong or the whole, you know, philosophy was wrong or whatever.

And so that we're constantly learning. We never sort of settle that. I've done it all in that my LinkedIn profile says student of leadership and entrepreneurship. That's sort of how I describe myself, if you will.

Anita Brick: One last question. What do you hope your legacy will be? Many, many, many, many years from now?

Chuck Templeton: Wow. hadn't been asked the legacy question. I guess my gray hairs are coming in a little bit. you know, I hope it's that my. And this isn't something that's perfectly controllable. Certainly, obviously. But I hope it's that my kids are good people, you know, that they've got a good heart. They're well-rounded. They accept other people, you know, whether they be of a different gender or race or culture or whatever, and that they are able to do what excites them. I think that that's probably, you know, if I had to think about a single legacy, I think it'd be based on what they become someday.

Anita Brick: Thank you so much. This is great.

Chuck Templeton: My pleasure.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.