Mercedes, Maybe; Misery, Yes : Entrepreneurs’ Lot Not So Hot, Symposium Told
So you think the entrepreneur lives a charmed life, running a red-hot company whose shares are the rage of Wall Street, pulling down a salary in the mid-six-figure range and bombing around town in a $60,000 Mercedes 500 SEC?
Better think again.
“Every day of your life will be filled with pain and misery and on the last day you will die,” advised VLI president and two-time entrepreneur Robert Elliott, repeating a saying he discovered on a European church several years ago. “That’s much closer to the truth about what it’s like to be an entrepreneur.”
Elliott, whose current company manufacturers contraceptive sponges in Irvine, was one of three University of Southern California-educated business leaders asked to set the record straight on entrepreneurism at a symposium Tuesday sponsored by USC and the Orange County Chamber of Commerce.
Still, Elliott contended that the life of the entrepreneur can be psychologically and financially rewarding--despite the pain and misery--if the person has the right temperment and personality.
An entrepreneurial personality, Elliott said, accepts responsibility, displays initiative, establishes goals, thinks creatively, is willing to work up to 80 hours a week and, perhaps most importantly, is comfortable with high-risk and stressful situations.
Nevertheless, personality alone won’t guarantee success. “You’ve got to be lucky,” Elliott said. “Just look at (Apple founder) Steven Jobs. He got through everything and is still out of a job these days.”
William Lyon, founder of a Newport Beach home building company bearing his name and a majority owner and current chairman of AirCal, said the ultimately successful entrepreneur also is capable of accepting and learning from his mistakes and failures.
“Of course you will have failures along the way,” Lyon said. “The key thing is not to let them get in the way.”
And to underscore his point, Lyon revealed details of some pretty dark days at AirCal in late 1982, about 18 months after he and co-investor George Argyros paid $61.5 million for the Newport Beach-based regional airline. According to Lyon, the combination of the air traffic controllers strike, a nationwide recession and arch-rival PSA’s stepped-up price war nearly wiped AirCal out.
Although declining to take credit for the ensuing turnaround, Lyon said he took over the company’s reins and immediately tried to get company executives to re-evaluate their business strategy and operations.
Among the first steps Lyon had the company take, he said, was the elimination of 12 seats on each of its 162-passenger planes. While reducing seats ran against tradition, Lyon said the move allowed the airline to eliminate one of the four flight attendants required on the higher-capacity planes. In addition to saving money, the move gave AirCal the unplanned advantage of being able to advertise more leg space for passengers.
“Some people couldn’t have lived through a situation like that,” he said. “Some people aren’t comfortable with the risk. Others let their egos get in the way when there’s a failure.”
