The DEC Network’s Fridays Are for Founders is a weekly virtual forum that gives entrepreneurs opportunities to learn from each other while struggling with the impacts of COVID-19. In this video, Trey Bowles and Delanie Majors talk to serial entrepreneur Carl Dorvil, who started tutoring and mentoring company Group Excellence (GEX) in 2004, while he was a junior at SMU. It was, at one time, the fastest growing public company in North Texas.
After selling GEX, Dorvil went on to start other companies. Now he is partner and CEO of Dog for Dog, which he calls Toms shoes meets dog rescue, with investors that include Snoop Dog and Michael Bublé.
Video table of contents
- The birth of a serial entrepreneur: 5:28
- Three characteristics of an entrepreneur: 15:30
- Challenges all entrepreneurs face: 17:20
- COVID as a new challenge: 25:25
- COVID as a new opportunity: 32:05
- How to be a good leader in the face of adversity: 40:08
- Tips and advice for entrepreneurs: 44:15
- Additional resources: 53:25
Dorvil got his penchant for hard work from his parents, who were born in Haiti and moved to the United States speaking no English. He attended SMU on scholarships and graduated with degrees in public policy, economics and psychology, and then got his MBA.
His family wanted him to be an attorney, but he had other ideas. Reading Rich Dad Poor Dad changed his life, he says, and entrepreneurship is in his DNA.
Ways to prepare for adversity
Dorvil outlines seven things entrepreneurs should do to brace themselves for hard times:
1. Know why your company exists. “A great mission statement answers the question, Why am I here?” A guiding light can remain a guiding light even if the world changes, Dorvil says.
2. Understand you will make mistakes. “If you’re not failing, you’re not actually trying hard enough,” Dorvil says. Forget about being perfect.
3. Assemble your advisers. Being an entrepreneur is lonely, particularly when hard decisions that impact the lives of others need to be made. Having people you can trust to advise you can be key to your sanity. Dorvil calls that group a “personal board of directors” and says it shouldn’t be an accident. “When you’re in those low moments, you really can lean on these people as advice centers,” he says.
4. Recognize the truth. COVID-19 has changed the way we all do business. “This is a completely different world. The world that you lived in no longer exists,” Dorvil says. Take a realistic assessment of your business’ ability to survive in the new world. Adapt if you can; do something else if you can’t.
5. Don’t be afraid of what other people will say about you. People are going to talk about you, and they are going to criticize your decisions, he says. But you can’t let other people’s ideas about you determine who you are.
6. Know where people stand in your organization — and let them know their status. Keeping a running list that assigns a value to each of your employees is a concept Dorvil adopted from Jack Welch’s book Winning. It helps you make hard decisions about employment if you have to, he says. “Very painful. Very difficult to do. Very easy to say. But if you do it, it prepares you for times of difficulty.”
7. Have a willingness to look at things in a different way. “When we go out 10 years, there’s going to be people who became tremendous winners, and there’s going to be people who became tremendous losers,” Dorvil says. He finds it helpful to project himself into the future, figure out where he wants to be and then reverse-engineer his strategies for getting there.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges, the rules for meeting those challenges are not unprecedented. The way to address all other adversity is the same way to address adversity in current times. “My hope is that people recognize that,” Bowles says.
