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Follow Your Passion and Create A Vision

Written by: Razor Suleman

Article Overview: ollow your passion. The common theme with all of my businesses has been following my passion. I started I Love Rewards because I’m a pointaholic. I love overachieving, earning points, and getting great stuff for doing a great job.

Follow Your Passion and Create A Vision

How I Got Started - I first started my entrepreneurial journey out of my bedroom when I was 15 years old back in the early 1990’s when Upper Deck sports cards were all the rage. I started out of a passion for sports cards and that passion turned into a business. Everything I’ve ever done has been an extension of my passion so it never feels like work. I took advantage of price arbitrage in sports trading cards. In Canada we loved hockey and in the United States they loved football, baseball and basketball. I bought cases of hockey cards in the United States and sold them here in Canada and vice-versa with the other sports cards. I had a lot of fun and it helped pay my way through university.

The next business was started when I was 19. It was called Razor’s Edge and I ran it out of my dorm room at Wilfred Laurier University. I was really passionate about being at Laurier and one of the biggest opportunities I saw was branded products for universities. Your only option at the time was the book store which was expensive so we sold branded university gear at student friendly prices. I got my friends set up as franchisees and we built up that business. When I graduated, I wasn’t in the market anymore so I focused in on companies and promotional products using technology. We built web stores for companies like Heinz and General Electric. We found a better way to distribute promotional products using the Web and built up that business.

ING bank was one of our best clients. They were using promotional products to motivate their call centre staff to sell more ING high profit products like GICs. We learned from them that employees did not work harder to win a branded coffee mug. We stepped in and created a points system to let them choose their own rewards. Companies could pay for the points on success so it was a performance based system. Employees only earned points when they performed. We only earned revenue when we performed. We were successful because we listened to a problem of our customers and helped them solve it.

Revenues of ING increased fivefold as a result of our systems. It brought us to a critical junction in our company. At the time, 90% of our business was in promotional products and only 10% was the points based incentive programs. We made the decision to focus on building the world’s best rewards program and sold the promotional product business to exclusively focus on building that program out over the last few years. Now we do programs for Rogers, KPMG, and other big and small companies across the country.

Advice for Startups - Follow your passion. The common theme with all of my businesses has been following my passion. I started I Love Rewards because I’m a pointaholic. I love overachieving, earning points, and getting great stuff for doing a great job. My earliest recollection of this passion was when I was 11 years old and I ran a delivery route for the Toronto Star. I remembered that they had a program which rewarded you with points depending on the number of new subscribers you could sign up. You could redeem your points for gifts and I had my eye on a bike they were offering. I grew up in a family that couldn’t afford to buy me a new bike but I signed up 50 new people to the Toronto Star and got myself the bike! Everything I do now is around points and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Create a vision – start with the end in mind. We have a vision document for the year 2012 that describes the company that we will have. We’ve dominated North America and everyone is using our products. I think it’s important that every entrepreneur describe what your company looks like five years later. For me I have this little movie in my head of how it should look work and feel and I think it’s an entrepreneur’s job to communicate that to everyone else who gets on the bus. When you know where you’re going, everyone moves in the same common direction

Have integrity. We’re playing for the long run and while we may make mistakes, we don’t do things that are short term focused and, as a result, not a lot keeps me up at night. Our decisions may not always be the best short term strategy but it’s always best in the long run. As an example, we made the decision to go out and get capital. We had our eyes set on a venture capital company in Canada. They had a good Board and were interested in us. We ended up with a term sheet from them and they were investing in us largely to build out the technology and take on millions of new members. Just weeks before funding closed, our leader of IT left the company to take a job somewhere else. He was going to be here when the money came in and we could have hidden it from the venture capital firm if we wanted to. We made the tough decision to tell them as soon as we found out. It happened on a Thursday evening and we called the fund manager to tell him we lost our leader of IT. It was scary and where it paid off was while it was a big deal for venture capitalist firm, they simply made it a requirement of funding to find someone new for the position. He was very appreciative that we called and let him know. If I told him after the funding it would have jeopardized our future with them. We got the funding, found two new leaders and have a great relationship with our investors.

Promote continuous learning. I learned more after I graduated university than in my formal education. I read a book a week. I study other best practice companies. You’re going to succeed and grow faster if you understand that others have already figured it out and you should learn from them. Our favourite book is “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. If we were a religion it would be our Bible.

Surround yourself with great people. Hire people that are great at what they do, have strong cultural fits, and are passionate about what they are great at. For example, everyone in the office knows that Amy does a great job at getting PR and it’s a great thing for the company. How do you find that in salespeople and java developers? Find great people and let them be – don’t put too many rules around them.

My favourite interview question. We do group interviews with multiple candidates. We ask five typical questions. We ask them to tell us the most significant thing in their lives, if their lives were a book what would it be, etc. My favourite question is number five where we tell the candidates that the tables have turned. We tell them to image that we have now hired them. We then ask them who would you hire next in this room and why? It’s a great question because you see what they think about the others in the room and we feel that if you get it, you’ll know who those same strong players are. We also look to see if the candidates have the same experience that we had. Some people pick an average person but you’ll often see one person get three or four votes so you get some wisdom of the crowds. It’s a foolproof system to pick who the best one or two people are.

Finance for your stage of growth. It’s really important for entrepreneurs, based on the stage and growth plans of your company, to find the right type of financing. That might be bootstrapping and reinvesting the profits. It might be an angel investor if you want to scale it up and get to pre venture capital money or if you’re ready to commit to building a company that will be worth 10 times as much in five years then go to the venture capitalist and make sure that you have a product they will want to invest in. Don’t waste your time going to a source that you’re not the right fit for. Your growth rate has to match your financing. You can only grow as fast as you have money to grow.

Hire your opposites. A lot of entrepreneurs hire people like themselves – clones. What you actually need to do is the opposite. You need to hire people who compliment your weaknesses. I’m a sales and marketing guy so the first senior person I hired was more operations focused. Hire to the areas you’re weakest in.

Mistakes to Avoid - Create your culture. For a long time we didn’t have the culture that we have today. I had a really clear idea of the type of culture I wanted to build in the business and had to step it to make it actually take place. Culture is going to happen – it’s either by design or it’s by default. You either make the culture yourself or the rest of the people make it for you. For a while our company was culture by default, there was no clear architecture, and I learned that the hard way. It was a culture that I didn’t want to be a part of. It was probably the lowest point in our journey when I came to that realization. Our retention rates were dismal and employee engagement rates were dismal. It was my job to design the culture and hire people who were really great and passionate about what they do. It’s the most important role for an entrepreneur. Our culture can be defined through the following key words: passionate, focused, driven, A players. The people we have can get jobs anywhere – they choose to come here. They want to come help build our company. Along with having a strong culture is having culture recognition. We drink our own “Red Point” (The company’s version of Kool-Aid).

Be honest with yourself. Many entrepreneurs will not be able to benefit from some advice until it’s too late. I think that entrepreneurs need to be really honest with themselves about what type of entrepreneur they want to be. It’s an unknown thing that is happening when you start a business. There are the guys with the best Thai restaurant and they love it and there’s nothing wrong with that. There are some who are freelancers and that’s great – it’s a lifestyle business. When you mismatch your own desire and skills to the company that you want to lead as an entrepreneur that’s when disaster happens. Growth is always what gets talked about and gets attention but sometimes there is more happiness and more success by being a small giant. There’s nothing wrong with that - don’t believe in the hype of growth.

Opportunities to Watch - There is a whole new generation of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs that can build a really niche type of product around what they are really passionate about. These businesses are very capital efficient meaning they don’t need a lot of money to start up. The Internet is a really great distribution system in which to find other people who are passionate about the same things. You can build a business on anything using the web as a platform and staying targeted and focused. Do all this and insert your passion here. My passion is different from some one else. If I wasn’t doing business to business incentive programs I would be doing consumer points programs because I love collecting points!

Related Articles
  The Art of Passion
  What is Passion
  Start With Passion!
  It's All About Passion and Purpose
  What about passion

Article Tags: all the rage, arbitrage, call centre, centre staff, coffee mug, custo, dorm room, entrepreneurial journey, football baseball, franchisees, gics, hockey cards, ing bank, promotional products, sports cards, sports trading cards, upper deck, using technology, web stores, wilfred laurier university



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