Entrepreneurial Epiphanies: "How did you do that?.."
- Paul Hogendoorn
- Nov 4, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 29
I'm in a more reflective time of my career - and I think its good to reflect. Our careers are where we spend an immense amount of our time, and hopefully, at the end of them, we find ourselves satisfied by what we were able to achieve.
I now spend more time helping other people build their businesses than on my own, and conversations often leads to questions like, "how did you do that?"
My companies tended to "punch way above their weight class" (as the expression goes), and take on projects that more successful and capable companies would take a pass on.
Those are some of my favourite stories to tell, and those stories would lead to other questions.
Recently, I started writing a series titled "Stories from the Wall" where I recount how specific catalyst deals were made (you can get to the first one here: Stories from the Wall: the Grain Dryers - Harvest Times ). These were fun stories to write, and hopefully inspiring to read, and even though they spanned many different applications (from drying grain to selling flowers; from tooling and automotive manufacturing to making snow or keeping score in the pro leagues), the stories always led to the same questions.
Questions like:
How did you build not one but two high-tech, state-of-the-art, “world class” buildings for your companies? (All the accountants and analysts said it was a bad thing to do, and we'd never get the money to do it.)
How did you win that major deal with one of the world's premier Tier 1 manufacturing companies when you were up against the big brands with far more resources and far bigger budgets?
How did you go from selling a few small scoreboards to local schools to then becoming a preferred technology supplier to the NBA, NHL and NFL?
How did you know that a small sale on the other side of the world would become your company’s biggest customer?
How did you solve a common electrical noise sensitivity issue on a small, low-cost machine, and then use that little invention to a land a lucrative opportunity with the world leader in environmental technologies?
How did you hire so many great people? And, how did you know in the first interview that they’d be exceptional?
So many great questions that I never gave too much thought to, and to be frank, I wonder why so many of them were not asked earlier. My guess is that when you are "shoulder-to-the-wagon" every day, you don't take too much time to think about it after you've headed out in a specific path, you just keep working at it and save the "how did you do it?" questions for later.
This blog series titled Entrepreneurial Epiphanies answers some of these questions and others.
Follow along if you're interested. Each one represented some key thing I learned - usually the hard way - that became a critical step in my entrepreneurial journey. I'll post them on LinkedIn, but I'll also post the whole series here as I write them.
One great question that was asked of me recently was "what's your (unique) superpower?". It was asked by the chairman of one of the companies I founded, and it wasn't asked from any "pump-your-tires" perspective, it was asked from the perspective that every business founder or leader has one particular skill or trait that they consciously or subconsciously rely on more than any others. I recall that when he asked me, that I couldn't give him a really good answer, but now that I reflect on it, I can.
It is the subject of my next post in this series, "What's your superpower?", which will be followed by other key entrepreneurial epiphanies.
Postscript March 2026: be sure to check out the "Stories from the Wall" series. Every significant "conquest" was an adventure, and these adventures were fun to write about.
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