An Entrepreneurial Vision Turns into a Family Business

Listen to Randy tell the story of his father deciding to turn his entrepreneurial vision into a family business. When establishing a new business, it is important to follow a personal vision which will translate into passion in the business. A comparable passion in the rising generations can contribute to long-term success of the family business.

He first spoke to us about it, I don’t have the exact date, but it would be sometime in 1983. I’m not necessarily an entrepreneur the way that he is, I certainly have some entrepreneurial type of characteristics, but not like him, he’s a true entrepreneur. And he sat us down, in terms of our entire family, in the dining room table in our house in Beaconsfield and he told us of his decision. At the time he was the president of Micron hockey skates which was a global and very successful hockey state company, and my reaction to him as a 16, 17 year old kid was ‘are you crazy?’ You know, I didn’t understand why he wanted to do this. I thought he had reached the pinnacle in terms of what he wanted to do. And he agreed, he never thought that he, from a business standpoint, would get to where he was, the president of a hockey skate company. He’s an individual with a high school education and his background is professional hockey player, yet he was the president in the early 80’s, not that long from when he retired from the national hockey league, president of a hockey stake company. And he agreed that it was the pinnacle, but he felt, for a couple different reasons, that he wanted to do something on his own, and he felt very strongly that he wanted to have complete say from start to finish. There were a few incidents that happened at Micron where he felt like he didn’t have that say. And it went full circle, cause certainly when we sold the company in its entirety in 2008 it was happening it a little as well, the Burns family did not have the same say in the company, and I could appreciate then what he was talking about all those years before, when you don’t have that say, you lose a bit of the passion, even though it was a hockey skate company and he was a very passionate man about that, he was starting to lose a little bit of the passion, and wanted to start something on his own. Key Takeaway For entrepreneurs, following a personal vision brings passion into the business.