Albert Behr, founder of a Toronto-based firm dedicated to moving companies into market leadership, has two words for Northern Ontario entrepreneurs with global aspirations: get real.
“Canadians are world-class engineers, and we’re really amazing at building stuff, but the problem is we’re completely terrible, generally, at scaling businesses on a world scale,” he says.
“We don’t have the money to do it, we don’t have the resources to do it, we don’t have the people to do it, we don’t have the connections to do it. Develop partners who have the dollars and the presence to do it and use them to bring you to market.”
Using what he refers to as his “Dr. Phil” approach, the high-octane Behr offered his boundless energy and advice to a group of seven entrepreneurs at the Northern Ontario Enterprise Gateway’s (NOEG) most recent conference on angel investment readiness.
Taking place at Cambrian College over March 26-27, the event sought to show attendees how to prepare to make pitches to potential investment partners, with Behr and National Angel Organization president W. Daniel Mothersill as the key speakers.
Behr argues that the single most common mistake he’s seen from entrepreneurs “over and over and over again,” he sighs, is the idea that they can bring their own product to the global market.
This is far too often a recipe for stunted growth or even failure. Talented engineers often lack the experience needed to survive alone in the cut-throat global market, he says. What’s more, bigger players with deeper pockets can almost always squeeze out the solo up-and-comer.
The solution, he suggests, is nothing less than strategic partnerships with the biggest players in the industry who can use their strengths and established networks to handle distribution.
While links with global firms may seem out of reach for people in Northern Ontario, the advent of the Internet and various online business networking services such as LinkedIn has shrunk the business community to manageable size, he says.
In other words, people with a proper business plan and a good product shouldn’t hesitate to track down the phone number of a potential partner’s business development officer and at least make the attempt.
Behr should know. Aside from having been the owner of a highly successful technology firm, he’s also served as the worldwide product manager for global technology giant Fujitsu.
“No big company builds by themselves,” he says. “They need a lot of these partnerships as much as the entrepreneurs do, so you need to be humble, but also be a pain in the butt.”
He points to a variety of success stories, which support this model, including Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the omnipresent BlackBerry. Rather than sell the product themselves, they partnered with telecommunications firms, who sell the item for them. The film industry is another appropriate analogy, he says, with countless movies being filmed in Toronto and Vancouver, but marketed and sold out of Hollywood.
Behr’s advice rang true for Daniel Faber, CEO of Ottawa-based Heliocentric Technologies, who attended the Sudbury event.
Faber, an engineer, is in the process of developing a portable analytic tool for determining the composition and grade of mineral samples in real time. Due to the unprecedented mining activity taking place at its heart, Sudbury represents a key target area for his upcoming product.
As a result, Faber anticipates setting up operations in the city within the next years for local testing and research.
He’s also hopeful about the potential to work with Northern Centre for Advanced Technology’s (NORCAT) upcoming Innovation and Commercialization Park, which is due to be completed this fall.
With these plans in mind, the NOEG session has proven particularly helpful as he works through the early stages of financing, he says.
“My background isn’t in business, so I’ve been learning how to put together the people and the money in a context where everybody’s happy,” Faber says.
“Also, [NOEG] is bringing investors in, and these are investors who are involved in the mining industry, which is of course where our instrument is applicable, so that’s giving us some good contacts as well.”
Jim Noble, regional coordinator for NOEG, says the event is just one of an ongoing series that the FedNor-funded organization is looking to offer throughout the North in the coming months and years.
In fact, Noble hopes to ramp up events to occur on a quarterly basis, with the focus alternating between preparing the groundwork on angel investment and allowing for more in-depth development of investment pitches.
“This is real-world stuff for real-world people,” Noble says.
