Beyond fear
As a set-up to our conversation featured in this month’s Back Page, I congratulated Fred Wall. He’s the chairman of The Wall Cos. in Minneapolis, a commercial real estate developer whose latest projects include the Stone Arch Apartments and the Minneapolis Innovation Center. He’s also chairman of Highland Banks, with seven Minnesota branches and $320 million in assets.
Now that you’ve made it, I said, can you share what you’ve learned with Upsize readers? He wasn’t buying the compliment. “Having made it is not a word that should be in the lexicon of the entrepreneur,” Wall said. “Temporarily having made it is more like it.”
Even after a lifetime of accomplishments, this entrepreneur hedges his success by remembering his failures, and more importantly, the knowledge that they could come again.
Maybe the temporary feeling goes along with his business. Wall has had three spectacular crashes in the real estate business, most famously in the late 1980s when he had to give the landmark Foshay tower in Minneapolis back to the lender. Big hurrahs and big flops are normal in an industry as risky as real estate.
He recalls his misery at the time. “I spent 4 1/2 years talking to people who didn’t like me,” Wall said. He also recalls his fear, the third time through a business crash and the times that came before. “There’s fear every morning that you’ll lose everything you’ve got.”
But probably Wall’s sentiment that success is temporary is familiar to most entrepreneurs. Business owners are like that. They start a business and build it to a million or two in annual revenue. But right away they’re worrying about whether they’ll pay their bank loan back. They crash and burn, then recover and have another six or seven successes. Seared in their memory is that failure.
“I have a much more difficult time remembering the successes than the failures. I think those things through still today: Could I have done something different?” Wall said.
Like Wall, many entrepreneurs can’t articulate how they make it through the bad times. I asked him, because I was researching a question for this month’s Dear Informer column about how business owners overcome fear.
“We decided to hunker down,” Wall said about his first real estate crash. “I let everybody in my company go, except my secretary.” He paused, and thought. “Somewhere, somehow — it’s hard to remember exactly how, but we got through.”
That reminded me of Nick Smaby, who went through terrible times with his construction company in the 1980s, but now has built Choice Wood Co. into a $16 million success. “At this point in my career I’m beyond fear,” he said in the Upsize cover story in April. “I don’t worry about it.”
Keeping going. Starting again. Moving beyond fear. Hunkering down. Getting through. Entrepreneurs repeat these themes when they talk about their companies. Wall says it this way: “It isn’t so much that people fail in business, it’s that they quit.”
For inspiration to keep on going, read in this issue about Fred Wall, and Mike Sime of Creative Carton, and Sam Zordich of Stonegate Consulting, and John Francis of PostNet, and the many other business owners who are going beyond.
— Beth Ewen
Editor and co-founder
Upsize Minnesota
bewen@upsizemag.com
