One lesson of Randy Wilhelm's success is, perhaps, that entrepreneurs can come from anywhere.
Before launching Thinkronize in 1999, Wilhelm was an insurance salesman - a career path often characterized as unimaginative and beset by heavy-handed management.
And yet, since co-founding the company - which began doing business as netTrekker in summer 2009 - Wilhelm says he's had to remake himself three or four times, moving from entrepreneur to early-stage founder to small-company CEO to bigger-company CEO.
Today, netTrekker, which provides safe, relevant digital content to schools around the country through its educational search-engine also known as netTrekker, serves more than 10 million students in 20,000 schools in all 50 states and across Canada. The company has grown to 80 employees and is currently expanding into new international markets, and Wilhelm places revenue at "somewhere between $10 million and $20 million."
Wilhelm understands the trappings of founders' syndrome. A personal, emotional stake in starting a company can make it challenging to delegate, distance and determine its direction as it grows.
"I had to work hard to recognize when I was becoming more of the problem and not the solution," Wilhelm says. "But that's been a good thing for me and for the company."
A piece of duct tape is stuck to the bottom of his desk chair with the letters "CEO" scrawled on it - his reminder that being a CEO is a job, not a personal identity.
"I was lucky enough to have a sales coach in the insurance industry who helped me understand that I am not my job and that I needed to separate the two, so I wouldn't be slowed down by rejection and take it personally," says Wilhelm. Now he helps others see that there is a difference between a person's identity and their various roles.
Someone else will sit in that chair one day, he says, and Wilhelm will move on, and likely change again for whatever new role he takes on.
For now, he's settling into netTrekker's new office space off U.S. 42 in Sharonville - a sunny, expansive building with blue steel tracks snaking across the ceiling and the company's signature orange brightening the walls. Wilhelm envisions student art shows in the large, airy public areas and one day a learning center in the adjacent space.
One aspect of Wilhelm's story that may not be a lesson for other entrepreneurs is how he financed those early years - if only because it's a difficult situation to replicate. He connected with a local "broad-winged angel investor" with a deep passion for Wilhelm's vision of helping kids learn.
When the investor, whom Wilhelm declined to identify, handed over his first five-zero check, he told Wilhelm, "Go do something good for kids," a motto that has driven the company as it has grown into profitability.
"I got lucky," says Wilhelm. "I found someone who shared our passion for what this business can do - change education for students around the world. Maybe that's not lucky - maybe it's providence ... (But) it's a very unusual arrangement."
Ten years into his venture, he and the investor, who's become a mentor, are both still driven by the passion for helping kids learn. Wilhelm talked recently with CincyTech communications director Carolyn Pione about the life lessons of entrepreneurship and building a successful business.
QUESTION: What in your background set you up and prepared you for being an entrepreneur?
ANSWER: I'm not sure I was prepared. In fact, thank God for ignorance, otherwise I don't think I ever would have started a business.
But I quit my job because my entrepreneur meter was getting low. I was 35 years old, and I was worried I would become a slave to my income.
Along the way, I had to sell our house, sell my Beemer. We bought a tiny house that we're still in.
It was difficult launching a sales effort post-9/11. It was hard. But what's not hard? That's what makes it fun.
So did you expect early in your career that you would start a company?
I took economics classes in school, and I envisioned having my own place. But when I was younger, I'm not sure I had the confidence to think that far out.
You didn't have a technical background. How did you come up with the idea for netTrekker and Thinkronize?
When I quit, I had three ideas for businesses. One was a professional employer organization, which was a very popular concept at the time but faded. The second was a small insurance broker's benefits business. But my wife pointed out that my third idea was a natural because of my passion for helping kids.
At what point did you recognize that, as you said, you were becoming the problem and not the solution?
In 2003, sales had plateaued, and for six or seven months we were having a lot of organizational introspection, examining everything and trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the business. Finally, one day I had a revelation. I gathered my staff together and said, 'I know what the problem is. It's me.'
I told them: 'We have two options. 1. I can quit. Or, 2., You guys have to hold me accountable to change.'
I realized that all communications and decisions were going through me as they had since the early days. And when you're an entrepreneur, it has to be that way. You have to know everything that's going on. But as you grow, you have to let go. I had become the choke-hold of the organization.
So I hired a coach, and I changed.
People mix their identities and their roles together, and that's a near fatal flaw.
We talk at CincyTech about the myth of the serial entrepreneur. Very few people go out and start multiple companies and stay in that entrepreneur mode. And yet to sustain a business, you do have to change. And it's hard to change yourself.
I agree. Yet I know one serial entrepreneur who starts and flips businesses. I think what drives him is ego.
Clearly what drives you is passion for what you do. Your motto "Go do something good for kids" is painted prominently on the walls here at your office. How has that passion helped you succeed?
We have roughly 25 percent of the U.S. school market now. About one and a half million times a day, a teacher or student reaches out to netTrekker to help them with effective research or to support a student native of Brazil who is struggling with tessellation, or to garner an interactive map of the City of Petra to lead a class discussion.
Our passion to help kids learn is the thread that motivates our actions and provides hope that we can make the future better. It adds color and focus to vision and assures us that our daily work is far more valuable than just a job. It urges us to move quickly, and it binds us together.
Our passion is a gift, and we are grateful to have received it. We guard it as if it were precious, and for those of us at netTrekker, it is.
CincyTech is a public-private partnership whose mission is to invest in high-‐growth startup technology companies in Southwest Ohio. |