Career Options Magazine

CBC’s hit television show “Dragons’ Den” has brought entrepreneurship into the primetime spotlight. Aspiring venturists present their ideas to the Dragons—some of Canada’s brightest, most successful entrepreneurs—in the hope of striking a deal that will bring their product to the marketplace.

One of those Dragons is Bruce Croxon, a digital pioneer who co-founded the online dating service Lavalife. He now invests in digital start-ups and owns a chain of holistic spas, while also partnering with promising ventures he encounters on the show. He talked with Career Options about what young entrepreneurs need to know to succeed.

Career Options: What is a typical day like for an entrepreneur?

Bruce Croxon: I would say the answer is there really is no typical day, because I think by its nature, you have to be ready to adapt to changing situations depending on the size of the business you’re involved with. But if you’re just starting up, there really is no typical day. You’re usually underfunded, doing everything yourself. It can be a scramble. The challenge is to take that chaos and the temptation to lose your focus, and try to bring some focus to what you’re trying to do. So the short answer is there is no typical day.

CO: What are the risks and hazards of being an entrepreneur?

Croxon: The challenge of being an entrepreneur is that it can be a very lonely existence. You’re taking responsibility for the success or failure of whatever it is that you’re being entrepreneurial about. The risk is that you can work and work and work—and there’s no doubt that it’s more work than a more conventional career path—and the risk is you can work really hard and not get the results that can be considered a success. You have to let go of the notion that you put in eight hours of work and therefore should get this much money. The reality is you’ll have to work really hard, and the amount of money you get for the amount of effort you put in may not be equal. You have to keep grinding until things start to happen.

CO: What are the benefits?

Croxon: It’s a very personal journey. You acutely feel every victory and you acutely feel every defeat. If you’re the kind of person who can live with the ups and downs of it, and not let it keep you awake at night, and if you’re still a nice person to be around and the rollercoaster doesn’t eat you up, there’s no better feeling than working hard at something and having the fruits of your own labour come out the other side. It’s a very rewarding experience.

CO: What are the qualities needed for a successful entrepreneur?

Croxon: Stamina and stick-to-it-ness. You need to work harder than the next person. You need to be comfortable [with the fact] that you need to be thinking about your business seven days a week, 24 hours a day. In this competitive environment, if you’re not doing that, someone else will be. I think the other quality of a good entrepreneur is the ability to look in the mirror once in a while and realize that you don’t have all the answers. It’s a fine line, because you need enough ego to have enough confidence to do it on your own, but your ego can’t be so big that you ignore the mistakes you make or the learning you get from other people and situations. So introspection would be a quality you need. The ability to work with others, too, unless you’re an exceptionally bright person—of which I’ve met very few in my life.

CO: When is a “good” idea really a bad idea?

Croxon: It depends on what area you’re working in. I work in the digital world. The good and bad thing is you get feedback very quickly. You know how people use the service and respond to what you’re doing. You just really need to listen to your customers and pay close attention to how they’re adapting to the service. In most industries today, because things move a lot quicker than they used to, if you’ve got your eyes and ears open, that feedback comes pretty quickly.

CO: How do you know when to quit?

Croxon: If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an entrepreneur. Quit doesn’t really enter into the vocabulary of the best ones. They just need to change. It’s not about quitting, it’s about adapting. When you get a certain amount of information and you’re getting evidence that your idea doesn’t work, you need to go back to the people that you’re trying to get as customers, and ask what it is about what you’re doing that they didn’t like, and just change what you’re doing. One of the qualities of a good entrepreneur is the willingness to change direction, to not get too locked into your own point of view. When the evidence comes in that your point of view is not shared by a market, you need to shift gears and change your idea. That’s really different than just throwing in the towel.

CO: What advice would you give to high school students as they enter post-secondary with the intention of being an entrepreneur?

Croxon: If you’re going with the intention of being an entrepreneur, I’d think seriously about whether post-secondary is going to help you do that. It’s getting more and more expensive to go for a liberal arts education, so unless you’re going specifically to study business, I’d think long and hard about it. If you know it’s what you want to do, there is an argument for getting on with it. A lot of parents won’t like to hear me say that, but while I had a lot of fun at university, as far as preparing me to be an entrepreneur, I’m not sure it did that. A lot more people go into university than ever before, and to what end? Are there jobs for these guys to walk into? I’m not sure you’ll get that sitting in philosophy class learning about Voltaire—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But do you want to be an entrepreneur or a professor?

CO: What do you wish you knew when you were a young entrepreneur?

Croxon: Looking back, I wish I had known a little more about financing and the right time to bring capital into a business. So the balance sheet and financial part of things, I could’ve used a bit more knowledge about. The other thing is it’s probably as easy to go with a big idea as it is a small idea. It’s the same amount of work, so you might as well go for the big one.

Jordan Adams is a Carleton University journalism graduate.

For more information, please visit: cbc.ca/dragonsden, brucecroxon.com, careeroptionsmagazine.com