Entrepreneurial Ventures Positively Profitable

Anita Brick: Hi. This is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking to Faisal Hoque, who is the author of The Power of Convergence, a really amazing book. The founder and CTO of BTM Corporation and the global think tank, the BTM Institute. He's a former executive at multinational organizations including General Electric; the editors of Ziff Davis Enterprises named him one of the top 100 most influential people in technology.

In addition to his book, he's written lots of papers and articles that have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Businessweek, The Economist, CIO Magazine, and lots of other places. So, Faisal, thank you so much for making the time. I know you're a super busy guy.

Faisal Hoque: It's a pleasure to be with you.

Anita Brick: Thanks. What led you to starting your own company?

Faisal Hoque: You know, there's many kinds of entrepreneurs, right? I think I'm one of those entrepreneurs who had an entrepreneurial part very early on in my life. Because you know, I originally come from Bangladesh, and then I came to the US to study electrical engineering and computer science. So that in itself was kind of an entrepreneurial journey because I didn't know anyone in the US. I think I had that bug from early on.

But I did decide that before I became an entrepreneur, I needed to learn a few things in terms of how business works. How do you really create new products? How do you really take it to the market? Out of school, I first joined multinationals like Pitney Bowes and Dun & Bradstreet, and then I started my first company and the company that I currently run as the CEO.

This is my third company if you consider the ones I started for the company, if you consider the one I was part of when GE spun off a new business unit.

Anita Brick: How did you know that the timing was right?

Faisal Hoque: I mean, if I look at my first job, I was very fortunate. When I started looking for a job, without even finishing my school, I was offered several different options. I had the opportunity to go and work in a Wall Street firm. I had the opportunity to work in other places, but I chose an R&D job in Pitney Bowes because first and foremost, I wanted to learn how to build a commercial, great product that I can take to the market, because I always wanted to start a company that had to be based on high intellectual capital and high product position, because that's the only way you can scale something.

That was my first training ground. Soon after working in R&D, I had the opportunity to work for a sales and marketing organization in Pitney Bowes. Consequently, right after that, I was recruited by Dun & Bradstreet to join their sales and marketing organization to do their sales and marketing automation. So I always had these training grounds from very early on between product position, R&D, sales, marketing, finance.

And post–Dun & Bradstreet, I figured that I had gained enough experience where I could create my own product and go to market and had somewhat of a success, you know, factor that I would be able to make it and make it living. Right. So that was kind of the deciding factor personally for me. So that was my first company.

Anita Brick: So it sounds like your having this cross-functional experience was really key to succeeding. Maybe having those first two companies under your belt also helped. An evening student asks the question, what do you believe are key factors in whether or not a venture will be successful”

Faisal Hoque: It’s very different for different people, because you have lots of first-time entrepreneurs who are tremendously successful, right? So if you look at Facebook's founder, which is a very unusual case, if you look at other players, their first-time entrepreneurs have been very successful. But then if you look at somebody like Steve Jobs, who had many trial and errors to reach to the point where Apple is today.

So I'm a firm believer that you need a solid cross-functional background if you want to be ultimately long lasting, sustainable success. So I wanted to get that. That's, I think, one, one of the key success factors. So because you need to understand every element of how your organization works before you can really make any product or service successful in the marketplace.

That's one second is the timing of your product and service needs to be right in the marketplace. If it's not, meaning the market is not ready and you are way ahead of the market, then you have to have the willingness, the drive, the wanting to sacrifice to make it work. That's the second factor. The third factor is, you know, you have to surround yourself with the right management team, right partners, right funding, right mentors. All those become a success factor.

So in my case, you know, I made plenty of mistakes. For example, my first company was actually very successful, which I ended up folding under GE, and I was able to go into GE as one of the youngest executives to run one of … part of their business unit, which was a spinoff. And then right after that, I started my second company, which was—from the get go, it was very successful, because by that time I had a lot of industry contact, and I was able to get it going right away and have GE as my first customer.

But I made a tremendous mistake of raising way too much money that I didn't need, and just that in itself created a major debacle. And ultimately, I lost control of the company. I thought I was fired from my own company, even if I had the right idea, right people, right customer. The funding partner made all the difference in killing the company. So all these factors play a big role: your skill set, the people you're surrounding yourself with, the funding partner, the ripeness of the market, how you're taking to the product and services of the market, all that plays a role in making a startup into a successful company.

Anita Brick: Well, you know, and your point about asking for too much money? I've heard this story before where people thought they needed more and they didn't understand how that could be diluted, or ultimately they could lose control because in that initial round of funding, they got a lot, which was good or it seemed to be good, but then they didn't realize that percentage that they had in round one would ultimately not be the percentage that they would end up with.

Faisal Hoque: That is absolutely correct. Most entrepreneurs are not expert financial guys or gals. Right? So, you make a lot of mistakes when you're doing your funding deal. That's one. But also, when you are in your early stage as an entrepreneur, you overestimate how long things really take. Right? So, for example, if it is a very unique offering that is based on R&D, then there are several stages.

I'll explain those stages, in the sense that you have to spend a lot of time in R&D and making sure that your product or service is going to hit the market. And it's going to solve a real problem and be commercial grade, meaning that is going to stand up because the test of your customer needs and customer problem that you're trying to solve.

Once you figure that out, then the next level of the journey begins, which is really creating a scalable platform for your brand so that your brand stands up against all the noise that may be in the marketplace. First, you have to create a unique product that truly tests that. Second, you have to create a unique brand that creates a differentiation.

And once you've done that, you have to have a repeatable selling process. It can be that you are very good at sales and you make one sale at a time. That's not a very beautiful sales process. So you have to have the ability to create a distribution model and sales model that's repeatable. Once you have figured that out, that's when the skill comes in and you can get money for scale.

But a lot of entrepreneurs make a mistake taking a lot of money off front. And in some cases you can't just get there faster just because you have a lot of money. You know, it requires a very disciplined way to go through the product commercialization, a branding establishment, a repeatable sales process, and then scale. I don't think there is a shortcut to any of these.

But sometimes you do get lucky. I mean, there are plenty of entrepreneurs who got very lucky, and the timing and the things were just right. it just hit without even trying too hard. But most entrepreneurs who are tremendously successful—and if you look at today's stock market, Apple is the largest company on the planet now. And if you look at the whole history of Steve Jobs as an entrepreneur, a lot of people don't realize how much trial and error he had to go on to the point where Apple has become the largest company on the planet.

And you can say the same thing about Microsoft. You can say the same thing about a lot of other, very successful companies, even somebody like GE. What makes it sustainable is the repeatable process.

Anita Brick: You're right. And Steve Jobs obviously was fired from his own company in the mid-80s. That's right. There was an Exec MBA student who asked, how do you know if his business is scalable versus something that would be a good lifestyle business that might be able to take his family where they want to go, but is not going to be attractive to investors? What are some clues that something might not be scalable?

Faisal Hoque: Great question. I mean, you know, first you have to look at the market need. And actually market need can be defined from two points of view. One is that you are solving a problem that already exists, and it is a well-recognized problem or something people need to have. So there is a well-defined need for that, and you have come up with a product or services that uniquely supports that market.

So that's one way of taking a new product or service to the market. The other product or service is that the market really doesn't know that they have the need, but you create the need for the market. For example, if you look at the usage of smartphones or iPad or that sort of thing, or even if you look at Starbucks as an example, right, you could say that those products or services created that demand versus there was a demand, and you came up with a product that supported that demand, right?

So, you know, whether you're supporting a demand or you're creating the demand, you have to look at the market size. That's the first indicator of whether a business can scale. So if you come up with the conclusion that whether you create the demand or whether there's a demand already existing in the market, just there aren't enough buyers, then that's the first indicator that a business is not scalable.

Second is that, you know, all the things that I mentioned before are able to create a repeatable process for your new product, constant new product creation and constant brand building and constant sales process. That's what makes the quote unquote scalable platform to scale. So, for example, you can have a very nice restaurant that's unique and you get a lot of visitors in the restaurant.

But unless you come up with a model like Chipotle that is a franchise model, or you're creating one after another in every city, you're just going to have one restaurant. Or if there was only one Starbucks, that doesn't become a global business, right? So it's a combination of market demand, a market size understanding, and having the scalable platform to support that market that makes a scalable business.

Anita Brick: It seems to me that another important asset, actually, I was thinking about my father. He clearly had a scalable business based on all of that. And he took it to a certain point, but he couldn't take it beyond that to be really big and a global brand because of his own limitations in terms of leadership. So it seems to me leadership, either your own leadership or your ability to relinquish that to other people.

Faisal Hoque: You just took the word out of my mouth. Because, I mean, we were talking a few minutes ago about Apple and any other very large company or GE, my former employer. If you look at that, a company may have a face or an entrepreneur that's driving the vision and whatnot. One of the things that includes in that scalable platform is your team, is your leadership team that can take your vision and scale it.

So, for example, if you look at Starbucks, or if you look at any other business, each of those business units or stores is run by a unit. Howard Schultz doesn't go and run every single Starbucks, right. You can break it down to that. You have to come up with a repeatable process, along with repeatable management practices and the leaders that can scale your business in every single market segment.

Otherwise, you're not going to be a very scalable business because everything will circle around you and you will never get there. Many entrepreneurs who can come up with great ideas often can't scale because of the fact that they cannot either attract or relinquish, or look at from a scalability point of view, and everything revolves around them, right? That's a key factor holding you back, and you have to be able to build the right team around you.

Anita Brick: Very, very good point. There were a couple questions about mitigating risk. One was from an alum. I want to start my own venture on the side while I continue to work full time in a noncompeting field. I've been told to, quote unquote, burn the boats and give up my job or my venture will not succeed. Is there a way to have a full-time job and launch a successful business simultaneously?

Faisal Hoque: You know, entrepreneurship is a very funny thing. And each entrepreneur's journey is very unique. It is impossible to replicate somebody else's success. It's really up to you to follow your journey, to reach the destination that you want to reach. It is a rare case where an entrepreneur has built a very successful business, or a successful venture where they didn't have to risk everything and anything they have to make it work.

Can you dabble to see whether your idea holds the water in the marketplace? Sure, you can do that, but ultimately, if you want to make it successful, then you have to put everything on the line and then go at it. You know, take 20 great American entrepreneurs and you'll see that they all risked everything and put everything on the line to make something successful.

It's a rare case where you can put your, you know, feet on the boat and be successful. But that doesn't mean that you can’t test your idea while you're doing something to make sure that your idea holds water and you want to spend your time, energy, and your resources to make it, to be successful.

Anita Brick: Good point. And also a good time to stash away some reserves, too.

Faisal Hoque: Absolutely. And then, you know, an asset you have to quantify. Asset is just not money. Asset is also skills. Right. So the more skill you are then, you have the ability to make it successful with less risk if you don't have any, any skills, meaning you're doing this for the first time, then you're going to make a lot of mistakes.

And in that case, you have to find a mentor that can walk you through the steps to make you successful. Otherwise, you're going to waste a lot of energy, resources, and time. So your asset is not just that you've stashed away a lot of savings. So you can live off on that, but it's also your skill set that matters.

Anita Brick: Very good point. And there is a question about mentors from an MBA student. And she said, I know that entrepreneurs are really busy. What advice would you have for me as I look for a mentor, and how do I keep him or her interested in helping me?

Faisal Hoque: Two things. I would say the most successful entrepreneurs—the more success you get—most entrepreneurs have this innate need—at least, most of the entrepreneurs that I know. They want to mentor or give something to the next generation of entrepreneurs. So from that point of view, most entrepreneurs are very giving, are very generous with their time and energy, even though they may have a lot of different things going on in their lives.

So it's easy to attract entrepreneurs to be your mentor. You have to listen to your mentor as well. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially in their early stage, are not very good listeners. They hear it, but they don't listen to them. So you have to be willing to listen to your mentor and learn from their mistakes so that you, as an entrepreneur, don't make the same mistakes as the entrepreneur made.

So those are the two from the entrepreneur’s point of view. Another point is that you want to look for an entrepreneur who cares about you enough, but who is very honest about what, you know, advice they're giving, from their own personal experiences and willing to give you unbiased advice versus biased advice. because what worked for that particular mentor may not work for the entrepreneur given that entrepreneur's business model or the situation they have taken.

Anita Brick: And you can't take the advice personally because sometimes, at least this has been my experience, entrepreneurs will just cut to the chase.

Faisal Hoque: Absolutely right. You cannot take it personally.

Anita Brick: If you recoil and get defensive, then they'll stop. They won't be your mentor anymore.

Faisal Hoque: That's exactly right. Because it's not worth it, right? Because, you know, to your point, successful entrepreneurs are busy. So if you're trying to mentor the next-generation entrepreneur and they're taking everything personally, they don't want to listen to you. It's not very motivating for the mentor to mentor an entrepreneur. This is a bidirectional process because in the process of mentoring, you're also learning something. So that's the biggest motivation for somebody who's mentoring an entrepreneur.

Anita Brick: Makes sense. So here's a very specific technical entrepreneurial question from an evening student. He said crowdsourcing and cloud computing have improved the chances of startups such as mine to succeed. However, there's still a dearth of technology such as disaster recovery and reputation management that can help startups do more with less. What strategies or tactics can I put in place for a fast-growing startup, when I don't necessarily have lots of money to invest in technologies?

Faisal Hoque: You know, fortunately, today, it takes one-tenth of the investment, or even less than that, to apply technology than it used to be even five or ten years ago. There's lots of technology available at our fingertips to apply in any kind of business. I mean, there isn't a business today that doesn't run on technology, right? And there's lots of technology available. The key thing is you have to figure out where and how you want to use the technology that's going to make your business differentiating, and will allow you to reach out to your customer with better service. That's the first factor. Technology is not the factor anymore because you don't have to invent technology if, say, there are a lot of enabling technologies.

So you have to just figure out the application of the technology. And that cost today is not as much as it used to be between the crowdsourcing open source and between the fact that there's a lot of technical resources available. It seems more and more entrepreneurs are very technical themselves. Given all that, this is a great time to take advantage of technology to build any kind of business, whether you're in education or whether you're in consumer goods or whether you're, you know, solving problems for enterprises.

You can flip a model completely utilizing technology. And that is a key differentiation. And you can reach a global audience very quickly with a very low cost.

Anita Brick: Very good point. And has—I mean, if you think about it, five years, things have changed so dramatically during that time. Yeah, it's quite amazing.

Faisal Hoque: Absolutely. I mean, the way you interact with your customer, the way you interact with your employees, the way you communicate with your partners, where you communicate with your partners, what your sources are in terms of your raw material. It is an absolute—the global society which creates, you know, many people will argue that's a very competitive advantage environment, but that also creates a huge opportunity that we wouldn't have five years ago or ten years ago.

Anita Brick: Good point. There was an Exec MBA student who obviously read something about you and knows that you are a big believer in creating both monetary and social value. His question is: my goal is to utilize my skills, experience, and knowledge to create a successful venture. What are key things to consider so that I create both monetary and social value?

Faisal Hoque: Great question. I mean actually if you look at the father of modern management, Peter Drucker, for a long time had a definition of what enterprise is. Enterprise is something that does social good while making money. So every enterprise has a social responsibility. You don't have to be, quote unquote, a social enterprise to do good for society. And you can contribute to society in many different ways.

So in our case, if you talk about my personal philosophy and what we are doing with my company, BTM, we are not only working with large enterprises, but a lot of these books and educational offerings that we have, which is really for next-generation leaders. And we set up an institute that does a lot of research on how to build better businesses, how to use technology.

That's our way of contributing to the next generation. And it's not driven by just a financial model. Whether that makes money or doesn't. Every entrepreneur has a responsibility to make the society better. And that's not about corporate social responsibility. That's the philosophy of an organization that drives that kind of behavior. So any business can make a social impact.

Even a restaurant can make a social impact in the sense that they can not only create a community environment, but a restaurant. Now takes an active role in providing food for the homeless, etc. Right? So every business has an opportunity to make a social impact that has to be ingrained in you as an entrepreneur. What is it that you want to ultimately do?

Me, myself as an entrepreneur has always been of the belief that whatever I do must have a greater social impact, and that's actually one of the reasons I write books, is not I'm very good at it, not the fact that they're best, you know, always it's New York Times bestseller, but whatever I have learned, I'm trying to pass on to the next-generation business leader, entrepreneur, and students so that they can do something with it.

Anita Brick: Makes sense. It really makes sense. I think that not everyone actually wants to start a company. But I think there are people who want to be part of a startup or an early-stage company. There was another Executive MBA student who said, I've been in a tech role in large companies for my entire career, and I want to break out into management.

While I don't want to start a company, I'd like to join an early-stage company in a nontechnical role. Although the companies can certainly be tech based, how can I make myself an attractive candidate?

Faisal Hoque: Great question. You can gain entrepreneurial experience both in startups, but I think you can also gain that in large enterprises. In my case, you know, when I ended up going to work for Dun & Bradstreet, or when I ended up folding my company or selling my company to GE, both of those experiences have been very entrepreneurial. By vocation, I was a technology person, but I gained those kind of cross-functional roles by working for nontechnical people.

So it's not just a question of, do I need to go and work for an early-stage or an established company? It boils down to what kind of experience you want to gain and look for those kinds of, you know, roles that give you those kinds of experiences, and to make yourself attractive in those kinds of roles, you have to diversify your skill set even where you are working currently.

So, for example, if you are a technologist, as an example, you develop a product, then perhaps the next stage is to become a product manager, not just a product developer. Or if you are a marketing person and you're marketing different kinds of products, if you want to become a technology marketer, then work for a technology enabled product and then go and start marketing a pure technology product. Right?

So yes, we will map out a road map for your own development perspective and manage your career from that point of view. We talked about a little bit early on what motivated me to switch. I mean, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I don't know how to do anything else. You know, I laid out this road map for myself where I said I wanted to gain early experience.

I wanted to gain marketing experience, sales experience, and financial experience. And I, you know, went after those kinds of jobs and then started companies. So it's very individualistic. But you have to kind of have a road map of where you are today and where you want to go, just like you would have for your business. Even from a personal point of view.

Anita Brick: I agree. I think people will come in here sometimes and do a gap analysis like, OK, here's where I want to be, and here the kinds of hard soft leadership skills, etc. that I need and where the gaps are and where can you do it. Because sometimes people do it on the job. They do it in their current job.

Like you said, sometimes they do it by even volunteering in a really super early stage startup to offer things and gain things and and sometimes they do it by making very strategic job moves, as you said, as well. So I think all those things are very good to do.

Faisal Hoque: Absolutely. And even today, you know, there's so much resources available. There's associations, there's business clubs. There are post-MBA or during-MBA programs that you can get involved with to hone your skill set, but also your interests, because people's interest changes. So you kind of have to kind of see what you really like to do and then hone your skill around it.

If you don't do what you like to do, it doesn't matter how much skill you have, you're not going to be very good at it, right? So you have to be passionate about what you do and then hone your skills around it, not the other way around.

Anita Brick: Sometimes people get really good at something they hate to do. They get more and more responsibility doing something they don’t like to do.

Faisal Hoque: That's right. And you know, life is too short for having that kind of compromise. At least that's what I believe. I mean, if you believe in something, you’ve got to go after it. No matter how much sacrifice it takes to get there.

Anita Brick: I agree, I agree, and I think everybody has a definition of what is too much sacrifice. And, you know, a lot of it depends on circumstances in your life and how strongly you believe in what you're doing. But if you don't have the passion to begin with, entrepreneurship is not the way to go. So people are like, well, it's my quick ticket to make tons of money. I'm like, well, it could be, but the passion has to be there at the front end.

Faisal Hoque: Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the biography of the most successful entrepreneurs anywhere from anywhere, they usually make a lot of sacrifices, and you have to be at it for a long time to make something that's worthwhile, that lives beyond you. Otherwise it becomes a lifestyle business or a family business. Right? So there's nothing wrong with that either. Personal choice.

Anita Brick: So I have two kind of tactical questions from a student and an alum. The student asked, I have a partner in a startup we're launching. What are a few questions that we should be asking ourselves before we then sit down with a lawyer to finalize an equity agreement?

Faisal Hoque: A great question. You actually first have to sit down with yourself and then with your partner. What is the skill set that you're contributing to the venture, and what's the impact of the skill set, plus the resources you're bringing to the table that's going to impact the venture? Because today's skill set that you're bringing to the table, that's more than likely is not going to take you.

So you're going to have to have other people and whatnot. And more than likely one is going to outgrow the other. So even though you're starting out together, you have to really think about what is it going to take today, what is it going to take two years from now? And what is it going to take five years from now?

And that should be the yardstick to say, okay, I'm going to do this. These are the kinds of resources I'm going to bring. My partner is going to bring this, and this is going to be the impact. And what is it worth? And based on that, you should come up with the equity agreement.

And you know, by the way, one skill set does not outweigh others. So for example, if one is a product manager or a product developer, another one is a sales and marketing person, only a combination of both has any chance of success. So you cannot say, well, I'm the one who's selling, so therefore I should have a bigger equity.

You're not selling anything if there's no product or service, right? So you have to think through that process and have a firm agreement between yourselves. Then go to the lawyer and then set up that equity agreement, because the lawyer is going to structure your legal structure. But the partners should have to figure out what that means from a business point of view today and tomorrow before you get into it.

Anita Brick: Got it. Something else along the same line, I mean, again, from someone in their very, very early stage, an alum said, I feel like I'm on my own starting this new venture. What are ways you found that work? To build a small community of like-minded entrepreneurs?

Faisal Hoque: That actually is not an easy thing to do. At least that has been my experience, because, you know, some communities have a greater orientation of like-minded entrepreneurs versus others. So, for example, I live in Stamford, Connecticut. They say in Silicon Valley, if you talk about Silicon Valley, there's a lot of tech entrepreneurs that Stamford, Connecticut, doesn't have.

So I had to put myself out there to get to know a community of entrepreneurs who are all over the world, not just in this country, to create the dialogue or interaction, and also not entrepreneurs, because you need, you know, depending on what you're doing and what customer you're servicing, you need that market perspective. It is a very individual situation driven where you want to get that support system that will allow you to grow a business or come up with an idea, given the fact that we are very can live in a very connected world and in a very digital world, it's easy to establish those kind of community virtually or on the phone, which wasn't the case like 15, 20 years ago when I started my entrepreneurial journey.

Anita Brick: To be tactical about those, it sounds like one of the things that someone could do is either look for entrepreneurs in their immediate environment, like in Chicago, there's the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, which is ChicagolandEC.org, and actually an alum is CEO of it. You could start there, but it sounds like it's also a great idea to do a little bit of segmentation in terms of your needs. Are you looking for people who've already been entrepreneurs in a particular industry that serve a particular industry? And that may be a way to start looking in places like LinkedIn or conferences or things like that, to begin to develop those kinds of relationships.

Faisal Hoque: Yeah, absolutely. Because a business has many different needs in the sense that you need customers, you need feedback in terms of your product. You need technical expertise. You need a distribution. You need a supplier base that comes from different places. So you need to create an ecosystem. You need funding. So you need to create an ecosystem around you that you can go to to get help for these kinds of different things.

That is not just hanging around with entrepreneurs because those are different things, right? So if you're serving a customer segment which is very highly specialized—for example, if you want to go after the healthcare market, you need people from healthcare, they may or may not be entrepreneurs. You need to surround yourself with a 360 set of access that allows you to create that complete ecosystem.

That only happens over time, unless you get very lucky. Just being in a purely entrepreneurial type of association, that may get you started, but that's not going to serve your organization in the long term. And that's also why people set up a customer advisory board, editorial board, or scientific advisory board along with your corporate board, because you do need a combination of all of those things.

Anita Brick: Agree. And I think that part of it also is it's bidirectional as well. Also thinking about how do you feed and care for your network, how do you provide value to your network?

Faisal Hoque: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: Because it will keep it going over time rather than making it very transactional, for sure.

Faisal Hoque: I mean, you know, in our case, I think I mentioned to you we created a research think tank in the institute, and we have a great, you know, participation from the academia because of the very nature of what we do. You know, now it's ten years old and we have, academics from around the globe, and they're really a support system because those academia doesn't necessarily work for us, but obviously, because of their intellectual nature and, and the kind of research we do and kind of things we're doing together, that's the by directional give and take that got them involved.

And, you know, I can say the same thing about the customer. We're creating complex, software products and we need customer interaction. So we recruited a customer advisory board that allows us to take advantage of their skill set to understand what it is that we should be developing today and tomorrow and whatnot. You do need to keep these different groups motivated. That will allow you to get what you want. It’s a long-term process. You don't get there from day one, but you have to have that mentality so that you can start building it up over time.

Anita Brick: Totally makes sense. Do you have time for one more question?

Faisal Hoque: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: Great, great. Maybe you can think backwards and forwards at the same time. If you were going to advise someone who is contemplating creating a venture, what are three things that you would tell that person to begin doing today?

Faisal Hoque: First, become an expert in something because it is a rare case where you become an entrepreneur, especially in today's, for lack of a better word, knowledge-driven economy where you're really—whatever your product is or whatever your service is, is based on a particular domain expertise. So become an expert in something. That's number one, because that's the only way you can add value to your customer.

Second thing is love what you do, do not do something that you do not love because that's not gonna—it's a rare case where it becomes a mega success where you're not doing something that you love. And the third is be sure to surround yourself with a cross-functional team and loyal team that stands by you, thick and thin when times go bad, because times will go bad and you will need to depend on somebody to carry you through.

So those three things. If you have that combination of those three things, the chance of success is high, even though you haven't figured out everything. And you'll figure it out along the way. But that's OK. But you need the combination of some core expertise, a passionate belief in what you're doing, and that's all you want to do. And a team that allows you to get there. But that team is cross-functional and brings different expertise, not just one-dimensional expertise. Because otherwise you wouldn't be able to challenge each other and make something better.

Anita Brick: And it sounds like you have all three of those things in your company today.

Faisal Hoque: Yes, we have all those three things. Otherwise we wouldn't have survived, last ten years. But that wasn't always the case. When I started my first company or the same company, or when I was part of other companies.

Anita Brick: You are a great example. And thank you for really sharing your insights and wisdom. I admire people who have that level of passion, who stick with it, because we know it's not a straight line up.

Faisal Hoque: Nope. This is not a straight line up, and the only way to be an entrepreneur is having the passion, having the discipline to execute your vision based on your passion and the ability to make sacrifices. And regardless of whatever adversity that's thrown on your face on a daily basis, unless you are willing to make that kind of commitment to yourself, to no one else but to yourself, you're not going to be able to succeed as an entrepreneur no matter what kind of business you build.

Anita Brick: Well, thank you so much. Thanks. I know that you've got tons of things on your plate, and we really appreciate your making the time.

Faisal Hoque: This has been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Anita Brick: Oh, thank you. And there's lots of really good information. Let me give you Faisal’s website, the corporate website. It is www.BTMCorporation.com. And you'll be able to link to stuff. They're linked to the institute and so on. Thanks again.

Faisal Hoque: Thank you so much.

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