e2e Interview

 

Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur Interview

Amy Lewis, CEO of MediConnect and Will West, CEO of Control4

 

The following is a condensed transcript of a peer-to-peer conversation between two of Utah's entrepreneurs. Visit www.luminpublishing.com/GUV_podcasts/index.html for instructions to download an audio podcast and listen to the entire interview including expanded discussions on the above topics and other topics not discussed in the condensed transcript below.

 

Will West: I'm the CEO of Control4. We are a manufacturer of home automation systems. We provide all of the software and hardware necessary to make your home smart with light, temperature, security, audio and video working together. This is the fourth company that I have started with my partner Eric Smith.

 

Amy Lewis: I'm the CEO of MediConnect Global. We are a company that does the retrieval of medical records for litigation and insurance cases worldwide. We have 1,200 employees in Utah and India. We retrieve medical records, digitize them and make them available to both the patient and clients as needed.

 

Will West: Your background is a business background?

 

Amy Lewis: Yes. I'm an entrepreneur — not by plan, but by necessity. At the time I was married and had two brand new babies and a husband who wasn't able to support us. I am now divorced, but at the time I had to support my family and so I started a company from home with what I thought would be a home-based business to resell medical software. I soon ended up with 30 employees working out of my house. I was an accidental entrepreneur who just happened to get lucky and be good.

Will, did you plan to go into business and start your own companies or was
it accidental?

 

Will West: I did. I think that being an entrepreneur on purpose requires some amount of brain damage. You enter a space with enormous amounts of risk that envelopes your entire life and you do it on purpose as opposed to a nice 9-to-5 job that pays you a good wage and leaves you lots of family time.

You don't really have that opportunity as an entrepreneur. It seems to me that people who are considering the life of an entrepreneur are either ignorant of what it actually means to be an entrepreneur, or they are somewhat brain damaged. I perhaps fall into both camps. Initially naïve, and then repetitively brain damaged in doing it over and over again.

 

Amy Lewis: I sometimes have to laugh at the employees who think being the CEO is such a great thing. It is a great job and there are a lot of great benefits but it is actually much harder than many entrepreneurs realize getting into it. There is a lot of work. You never get to go home. Even if you go home you still take it with you. It is a different life that has huge rewards but it also comes at a cost.

 

Will West: My favorite business professor was an adjunct professor and he taught a class on entrepreneurship. He warned all of us that we will pay a domestic price for being an entrepreneur. It is difficult. If I didn't marry someone with great patience I can't imagine being married today.  

 

Amy Lewis: What has been the hardest thing growing your business?

 

Will West: The hard choice we are going through right now is simply trying to match the growth to what the opportunity is. We want to be the system that connects everything electronic in your house. That opportunity is fairly large. There is a window of time when we believe that we have a significant advantage over others that want to be in the space. At the same time we have a great desire to get to profitability.

We will get there within the next year, but we have to make very hard trade offs with the plan for growth beyond the next year. There are things that we know we could do with the business that would put us in an even better position.

 

Amy Lewis: One of the big entrepreneurial challenges is knowing how much money to raise when to pull back a little bit and hunker down and try to get to profitability because you don't want to miss an opportunity but you also don't want to dilute your company so bad that you make that mistake. I don't know that there is ever a right/wrong in those situations either. I think that there are just different payoffs.

 

Will West: What stage of business do you like?

 

Amy Lewis: I think that most entrepreneurs only like the fun stage. We all like the thrill of the chase and the hunt and doing the impossible. But as soon as we conquer,
we are bored and we are ready to move on. That is the nature of an entrepreneur.
Once things get easy or stable we are no longer interested. Would you agree with
that statement?

 

Will West: Absolutely! Brain damage!

Amy, hypothetically let's say you make enough money and you don't have to work again, what would you do?

 

Amy Lewis: My passion is helping young entrepreneurs. I love it. I love speaking at colleges and teaching courses. They are not tainted by the world yet. They don't know what they are up against and so they are still excited about it. There are so many people who are going to get up and tell them that you can't do it and that it can't be done. I tell them that they can. If a girl who didn't have any training to become an entrepreneur could go and do what I have done, then anyone could do just about anything. I really believe that. I don't look at myself as someone who had any special skill or talent.

 

Will West: The statistics don't suggest that anyone can run out and start a business and be successful. The statistics suggest that most businesses fail within a short period of time.

 

Amy Lewis: It is not because it can't be done. When I look at people who have accomplished tremendous things, most of them are regular people who just really wanted it really bad. Do I think there are special talents that make you more able than others? Yes.

 

Will West: So how should someone determine whether or not they are cut out for it in real life?

 

Amy Lewis: I think that if you are a person who has to have certainty in your life, then you should not be an entrepreneur. The best entrepreneurs are the ones who become comfortable with the constancy of uncertainty. I think you have to be honest with yourself about who you are and what your talents are. If you have a family and need a certain amount in a regular paycheck, then you may not do well as an entrepreneur because you are going to be too worried all the time.

 

Will West: You are describing a circumstance and not a personality and you became an entrepreneur when you were the provider for two kids. And my guess was that it was fairly important that you bring home a paycheck and look at you now.

 

Amy Lewis: The difference was that I was willing and more comfortable betting on my capacity and my ability than I was on some other company's capabilities. I had enough confidence that I could make enough to survive taking a risk. Some people can't handle that uncertainty.

 

Will West: Would you consider yourself a high-stress individual?

 

Amy Lewis: I'm never stressed about things. I'm always a doer. I always have to be busy and have projects that I'm working on.

 

Will West: If you get freaked out about things like that, then you need to think long and hard about becoming an entrepreneur. I think that entrepreneurship is often looked at as a road to riches. It may or may not be, but it is absolutely a road to stress. If you
are not by nature low-stress then I think you will implode.

I am enormously low stress by nature. I've had sleepless nights, but that takes a lot for me to get to that point.

I think that being an entrepreneur is the right path for a lot of people and the only path for a lot of people because they can't work well in very structured
large organizations.

I remember working for the government when I was the only one in the division who knew anything about technology. To try and get anything done, I had to go through all of the paperwork and the red tape. If something was broken that needed to be fixed, it would take weeks. Often, I would just use my own money, go get the parts and find a
way to fix it — just to get it done. I couldn't last in that environment. It was way too
slow and inefficient.

As a result of this entrepreneurial path though, I've had a hard time balancing work and family. My daughter came to me when she was 13 and reminded me that I had missed six of her last seven birthdays. That hurt a lot. I have not missed any since, but that is what happens. I am enormously incapable of being disciplined about time away from work. My favorite place in the world to vacation is Lake Powell because there is no phone service.

 

Amy Lewis: One thing I've found to help free up time is that you need to hire people who are smarter than you. I have to teach my managers that. I have to explain to them by hiring someone underneath you who is better than you, it doesn't mean you are going to lose your job. As soon as you get enough of those people underneath you then that is when you are going to have a life again. I think that is critical. When you are excited about what you do and it is your baby it is hard to have a life. Even on a holiday I feel guilty the first day I'm gone. That is the area that I am the weakest in is having balance.

I think that entrepreneurs by nature think that everything is an emergency. There rarely is an emergency. If people cannot contact you, they will find a way. Your employees will step up.

 

Will West: It is harder to do that in the earlier stages of a business where more is dependant on you. One of the best things and the worst things my mom did for me was that she would put quotes above the sink and one of them that really stuck with me was, "The difference between success and failure is a little bit."

I decided that I was not going to be the person who did not do that little bit and fall just short of success. You know at times there are small conversations that end up making the difference of whether or not you succeed or don't succeed.

 

Amy Lewis: My definition of success changed too. I think that what you are talking about is that drive to succeed. I realized that success in business wasn't worth it to me if everything else fell apart. There was a time when I didn't think that. Then I realized that if I had to succeed in business at the cost of my kids, it wasn't worth it to me. It took a while for me to realize that there was a trade off happening. But now I've realized that the more I have pushed myself into balance, the more financially successful I have become.