Growing Your Passion into a Business with Oprah and Jürgen Ingels

0:00So I think one of the things that is important to point out is that your origin story and my origin story are similar. We had fathers who were very strict, and even though we were born on opposite sides of the ocean and under very different circumstances, what we were good at as young people, what we were interested in and focused on growing, yours was parties, mine was speaking, led to a career.

0:28Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Oprah podcast. And I thank you for giving us your time to be here. and I know that life gets busy and you want to be mindful about how you spend the minutes of your day. So it does mean a great deal to me that you join me here for conversations that for these times we're living in or any time that we'd be living in, give us ideas on how to live better, how to live more fully. So I just want to tell you, I met my guest today when he invited me to Belgium, a place I'd never been, to speak at his conference that he calls the Supernova Conference. And I was intrigued by that title.

1:11You know, a good title is everything. And I was also intrigued by the invitation because I really enjoy discovering new experiences and new places. And I would say I'm in one of the biggest periods of exploration in my life than I've ever been because all those years I was working for the show. I just work, work, work, work, work all the time. So when I got the invitation to go to Brussels, I said yes and met Jürgen Ingels, who is one of the great tech entrepreneurs. Born and raised in Belgium, Jürgen Ingels is a tech pioneer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He attained global business renown as the founder of Clear2Pay, which became the world leader in payment software.

1:54In 2014, with more than 1 ,200 employees in 14 countries, Clear2Pay was sold to tech giant FIS. Juergen has appeared as a judge on the Flemish version of Shark Tank. And he is the author of Start, Grow, Sell, a book that reveals 50 important lessons, not just for business, but also the business of life. That's why I invited him to the Oprah podcast to share them with you. he hosts an epic gathering of the most innovative minds in the heart of europe and we had such a great conversation jürgen was interviewing me on the stage but i really wanted to talk to jürgen about his book which i said shared this with you on the stage so i guess i don't know who sent me this, somebody who's running the conference said, oh, you know, he wrote a book.

2:48So my comms person said, oh, oh, send us the book. So I said, oh, I'll just skim through the book to see what the book is. The book is called Starts, Grow, Sell. So I started skimming it just so that when I met you, I'd be able to say, oh yeah, I know you wrote a book. And then because I was jet lag, I stayed up and I read the whole thing until 4.30 in the morning. And afterwards, I thought, this is so helpful, will be so useful to people who are starting out and don't know the ins and outs, or even if you are already in the ins and outs. And so that's why I invited you here. You're here. Yeah, I'm very, very glad to be here.

3:32You flew all the way from Brussels to be here. Just to come to this tea house and then you're flying back. Exactly. So I want to talk about Start, Grow, Sell, 50 Tips for Entrepreneurial Greatness. And the reason why I wanted to talk to him, because I know so many of you want to start your own business and people have great ideas, but you need more than a great idea. I think that this becomes a blueprint for life, not just business. but let's go back to how you got started because I think knowing how you got started will help a lot of people understand what I say here in this podcast a lot. Nothing you've ever done is lost.

4:11So I love the story that you tell in the beginning of the book when you had a strict father. Yes, a very nice father, but he was very strict. Nice father, but a strict father who didn't want you partying past a certain hour. 12 o 'clock. and to get around that, you created a way that you could party and then eventually started a business. Yeah. Well, I wanted to go out. I was 16 years old and my dad said, yeah, you can go out but you have to be home at 12. And I said, dad, it only starts at 11. He said, I don't care. You'll be home at 12. How many of us have said that to our fathers? The party doesn't get started until 12.

4:49Yes. Then I thought, well, this is not going to be fun. So I thought about it creatively and went back to my father and said, if I organize the party, can I stay longer? And they said, well, if you organize it, you'll learn something. You can stay as long as you want. So I started organizing parties in my hometown, which was fun. So I started - You're organizing parties for yourself or for other people? No, for other people. So I invited like first 100 people and 200 people. And then I started in once a month and then the other week, twice a month, three times a month, every week, and then other cities.

5:18So the lesson for this is, you're told you can't have a party. You can't stay out late at parties. You have to be home by midnight. You want to be able to get around that. You were an enterprising teenager who then decides, I'm going to just create parties, invent parties for other people. That way, I'd have to stay at the parties, also clean up after the parties. And so what happened to that midnight curfew? It went by the wayside. It went by the way. And also, I think my dad knew that I was going to learn a lot about, okay, if you organize a party, you have to organize, make a budget. You have to find sponsors.

5:51You have to sell tickets, all of that stuff. And I think, well, I couldn't ask anymore because my father died in 99. But I think in the back of his mind, he probably thought my son, maybe that's a good push for my son to be a bit more entrepreneurial, I guess. And so what was so striking to me about that story is you started out as a teenager organizing parties. And then I get invited to come to Brussels for one of the biggest entrepreneurial parties. It's like a summit of all the entrepreneurs all around the world. coming to Brussels. So you took this small idea and turned it into this big thing.

6:28At the time, of course, you didn't know you were growing it into that. No, no, no, for sure. I mean, if you would have told me that, I would have said, but it's because of the experience and also like inspiring people from the conference is something I really enjoy doing a lot. And that's also why I started Supernova to take what I've learned organizing parties because it's very similar, but then also showing how you can inspire people by inviting people to come and talk about the future, about technology, about life, and so on. So I think one of the things that's important to point out is that your origin story and my origin story are similar.

7:03Had fathers who were very strict, and even though we were born on opposite sides of the ocean and under very different circumstances, what we were good at as young people, what we were interested in and focused on growing, yours was parties, mine was speaking, led to a career. and one of the things, one of the many points you make in the 50 lessons for successful entrepreneurship is that you need to not be engaged in what you call sterile mediocrity. Can you talk about that? Yeah, it's in the chapter, Focus on Your Talents. And what I mean with that is basically, give an example, if you have children and they come home with their school results, sometimes let's say that they have three straight A's and they have a D, then as a parent, you typically say to the child, focus on the D.

7:53And so the child says, okay, I need to focus on the D. Gets maybe the D into a C because he didn't like it. He doesn't have the talent for it. But while he's doing that, because time is restricted, his A's also go to B. And so what you see actually, in my case, I've been like educated to be average. And average is not wrong. But in these days today, your average is not good enough anymore because you have to actually compete with the rest of the world. And so you have to focus on your talents. So you say you're educated to be average. Yes. Because the system... Exactly. Yes. And so my point is you really have to focus on your talents.

8:24You have to look at what you're good at. Everybody has a talent. Look at what you're good at and try to improve on the talents and work with people who also are very good at these talents and create like a kind of company with talented people. And so focus on your talent. Don't waste time on stuff that you're not good at. Well, not only that, but you always had the mind for, as you'll see, because you decided to switch majors in college from engineering to political and social sciences, correct? And your father said that you would have to pay for it on your own. and because of that, you took a job at a fast food restaurant.

8:53What did you learn from working there? You're one of those guys that no matter what you were doing, you took a lesson from whatever you were doing and you used that lesson to move you forward, which is why I wanted to have this conversation because everybody has a life where they've done things they didn't want to do. You're one of those people who did the things you didn't want to do and turned that into something that was more palatable for you. Well, when I started, my parents were not very rich. And so they were not rich people. And so when I moved and I wanted to study political and social sciences, my dad said, OK, I'm not going to pay for it.

9:29And so I said, fine, I'm going to work. So I worked in the Quik, which is like the Belgian equivalent of McDonald's. And I really learned, first of all, I learned the hard work because it's hard work. And I also learned to appreciate really people who don't have an educational degree because the people there are people who work there for 20, 30 years. And I've really learned there to work with those kind of people, to collaborate with them, but also to inspire them because those people are not necessarily inspired. They have to do the same job every day. And so I really learned also how to work in a team, how to inspire people, how to say, come on, guys, let's do this.

10:04And you had to balance work and classes. So you started to ask your friends for their lecture notes. I love the story in the book. And that gave you the idea for another business to sell notes and exam questions to other students. And where did this hustle, this work ethic come from? Well, I had to work 30 hours a week, so I couldn't always go to the lessons. And I saw that there were these girls who really have, and boys who really have very good notes of the professor. So I went to them and said, okay, can I use your notes for myself? But also then I saw these notes are really good quality. And I also had friends who didn't work, but were in the pub a lot.

10:41And then I started like commercializing the notes, but also the exam questions. And it started very small, but after like three, four years, I had like all the universities and all the different directions and selling copies. You say you've always been inquisitive by nature, but one of your favorite questions has always been, why is that so? Why is that so? Talk more about that. Yeah, I mean, I'm very curious. I'm very curious at why things are what they are. and I worked in a bank as well, where basically when I was working in New York, I had to send money back and forth between Belgium and the US.

11:18And money was always, took a long time to hit, to send money from Belgium to the US. And I thought, why is that? And so I went in the bank and talked with the people in the banking and said, what kind of system do you use to actually transfer money? Why does it take so long? And why is it so expensive? And they said to me, well, it's the financial system. Your money is somewhere in the financial system. And I thought, what's that? I mean, how can money, how can you not know as a bank where the money is? You're talking about Clear2Pay. Yes. And then I basically came up with an idea, but it was more curious.

11:46I wanted to figure out how it worked. And because I saw, well, this is crazy to do it like this. And so it started not really as, I saw a problem, but it was more out of curiosity that I saw the problem. And I came up with a solution and then created my company. So this is what he did. founded the company Clear2Pay, which revolutionized payment systems, built it to be a global powerhouse, then sold it about 10 years ago. And people told him how lucky he was. And here's what I think is so remarkable about you. Instead of just, you know, sitting back, you decided to find out if that luck was really real or to see if you could do it again.

12:27And what happened? Yeah, people said to me, you're lucky. And I was lucky. And then I really realized that I was lucky. But on the other hand, I thought, can you do this again? Can you again build a company out of Belgium, a technology company into a global player? And rather than doing that as an entrepreneur, I said, let's do it as a kind of private equity fund. So I created an investment fund. And through the investment fund, we invest in technology companies in Europe. And we help them very early stage by helping those companies to become successful. And basically with all the experience and the luck that I had in building my company, I try to help those companies to be as successful because I believe that if you do things right, that you can actually squeeze time and be more successful by using your experience and what you've learned.

13:12One of the reasons, you know, as I said, I was invited to speak at the Supernova Conference in Belgium earlier this year. And the host had written a book and I was just going to scan the book and started reading it and then stayed up all night reading it. And one of the things that intrigued me about this book is that you share everything from how to choose board members, because a lot of people mess that up. How to find investors. A lot of people don't know how to do that. Creating a pitch deck. The pitch deck is always too much. Wow. Right down to how to make sure employees are not stealing toilet paper.

13:52True story? Yeah, true story. Somebody was stealing his toilet paper. Yeah, exactly. Somebody was in the evening. Well, basically, if you went in the morning in the building, there was no toilet paper. And so apparently one of the guys was having a small business on his own. So in the evening, he stayed until late. And then he took all the toilet paper and started selling toilet paper. Oh, my goodness. That's pretty generous of you to share all of this intel. What was your motivation? My first motivation, I have two children, Timon and Finn. they're 22 and 19 and my first motivation was that they're not really entrepreneurs both of them but my first was like okay if you ever want to become an entrepreneur read the book of your dad that that was the intention of reading the book and I wanted to write a very practical book because there's a lot of management books and so on on entrepreneurship but I really wanted to write a book where if you start I've made a lot of mistakes that you can actually learn from my mistakes and do things quicker or better and that's the reason why I wrote it but it's a it's very practical because if you read it, you can immediately work with it and you get good information how to build a company.

15:00Thank you for joining us, dear listener, for this episode of the Oprah Podcast with one of the great tech entrepreneurs, Jürgen Ingels. He is the author of Start, Grow, Sell, 50 Tips for Entrepreneurial Greatness. Stay with us. Welcome back, listener. My guest today is Jürgen Ingels. He's one of the world's leading tech entrepreneurs, the author of Start, Grow, Sell, and the creator of the Supernova Tech Conference. It's a gathering of the best tech minds in the world. Let's get back to our conversation. Okay, let's talk about the biggest mistakes people often make. I think people start with a vision with no idea about how to execute.

15:34That's one of the things I think is one of the biggest problems. But I want to hear from you. First, biggest mistakes. I think the team, for me, the team is the most important. And you start with people that you say, okay, I think this is a good guy, but they're not the best guys. And I think if you start a business and you have business partners, you really have to choose the right people that you can work with. And you can't start with somebody that you don't think is not the best guy. No, I wouldn't do that. Because ultimately, and also with friends, because sometimes people start with friends.

16:05And I mean, it can work, but it's also difficult. And sometimes people also start with people that they're both engineers. They know each other from university. They're both engineers. It's always better, I think, in my opinion, to have somebody with a different background, with another background like history or philosophy, because it gives you other insights. So that's definitely a mistake. Second mistake, I think, is that they underestimate the costs that it will bring. People are always optimistic. You're an entrepreneur, you're optimistic. And so you make a calculation of how much money you need.

16:36But in my experience, it's always more. You always need more. It's always at least 30 % more. Yeah, well, that's more or less what I think. And it also takes longer because you're optimistic. You say, okay, I'm going to have a first customer within two quarters. And it turned out it's four quarters. So everything you do and you say, well, I'm going to have like my product is going to be ready in the second quarter. I always add two quarters because if you then look at reality, it's more or less like this. So I always add like two quarters in terms of when is it going to. I do that too, especially, well, certainly in building a house.

17:08If you're doing anything with a contractor, it's building a home. Same principle. If you don't do that, you just end up frustrating. So I automatically do that. So you don't go in with the expecting, whatever they tell you, add a third to a half. Whatever they tell you it's going to be in terms of time, add a third to a half more. And sometimes it's even longer, but at least you don't go in with, I thought it was going to be ready because it never is. Correct. And companies go bankrupt because of liquidity, because of cash. Yes. So when you add that and you make your calculation, then you see, okay, I'll need more cash.

17:41But then if you raise that cash or you get that cash from the bank, then you know that you're not going to get into trouble because the reality is going to be 30 % more and six months later. Yes. So you offer a mathematical formula. This struck me, too, for what you call the power of the extra mile. Yeah. And I told you when I was in Belgium doing your conference that I and my team embody this philosophy, even though I didn't know it was a philosophy. In chapter one, Jurgen writes, quote, there is no secret recipe or golden tip to becoming a successful entrepreneur. There is, however, a neat mathematical formula.

18:22In fact, it has never let me down. I've even given it a name, the power of the extra mile. I often work on Saturday mornings from nine to 12. It's just three hours a week. But if you add up all those three-hour periods over the course of a year, you end up with an additional 20 or so working days, almost a full extra month. Imagine what you could achieve if you had your own 13th month. You know, I really bonded with Jürgen on his extra mile philosophy. Yeah, it's a mathematical formula. My experience is that if you're successful in life, the people who are successful just work harder than the rest.

19:00And so consequently working harder than the rest is basically that formula. I just love that formula. It's fantastic because it allows other people to see that going the extra mile actually creates extra miles in the future. You actually have extra time to learn new habits, to learn new stuff. And that is like the real power because it gives you the extra mile. It gives you like an advantage because you work harder. And that's also what I've done in my life. I've always tried to work harder and learn new things by taking more time and not watching television too much or just spending time and stuff that I really like.

19:40Yes. When we were speaking in Belgium, you were asking me about, you know, work-life balance. And I was saying one of the things that's so remarkable about my team and particularly during the years of the Oprah show where we're literally putting out a show every day, there was no work-life balance. and I don't see how anybody who is going to be an entrepreneur starting something from scratch, putting it out into the world. I don't know how you have work-life balance. I fully agree. Certainly in the beginning. I fully agree. The first five years are really tough. The five, yes. And work-life balance for me is something you choose for, but if you really want to be successful in life, I think you really have to go for it and really like spend a lot of time in it.

20:23And there is a certain time period where you're building momentum and that momentum matters. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And actually most of the successful entrepreneurs, and they're not going to admit it to you, but most of the successful entrepreneurs that I don't know, they just have worked harder than the rest. And there's almost a direct correlation between hard work and success. And it's, I mean, you have people who are lucky and so luck is always a factor. Yeah. But I think luck is preparation meeting opportunity. So it's being prepared for when the moment comes along. It's not like, oh, luck, you know.

20:55Yeah. So, you know, you can have the opportunity, but if you weren't prepared, then it doesn't happen. I am so grateful you're here. Coming up, Juergen and I will be joined by a mother of four young children in Massachusetts who left a stable paycheck in finance to start her own business, a dream of hers for many years. We'll hear her story next. Thank you for being here. If you're an entrepreneur or have dreams of owning your own business, you'll want to get your hands on a copy of Juergen Engel's book, Start, Grow, Sell, 50 Lessons for Successful Entrepreneurship. It is a must read for business owners and honestly, for life in general.

21:29Let's get back to our conversation. Because we have you here, a couple of our podcast listeners who are entrepreneurs wanted your advice, okay? So Sana is joining us as a mom of four from Concord, Massachusetts. Mom of four, that is already a huge job. says she left a stable income in the finance industry to start a new business. Sana, what's your story? My hat's off. I take my sneakers, my hat, my shirt off to you. Four children, what are their ages? What are their ages? Yeah, so I have, they're all under the age of nines. I have an eight-year-old, a five-year-old, an almost three-year-old, and a one-year-old next week.

22:09And we are done. Oh, my gosh. Okay. It's wild, but wild, but great. But no, I'm so grateful to be here and to tell you a little bit about my story and to ask this question. But I left finance after 15 years and I loved leading teams and working on strategies specifically that was on products and solutions for women and wealth. But I always knew corporate life wasn't my passion. I had stayed for the stability to support these four children and the things that we hadn't wanted to do in our life. But I always dreamed of something of my own. And Juergen, like you, it started at the age of 16. But really, I didn't get the passion and the courage and the comfort to do it until a pivotal moment two years ago when my son reached age six.

22:56It was the same age that I was when I was sexually abused as a child. This is going to be a little heavy and then I'll get into the part, but I think it's important. And I knew that I could not move forward in my life and as a parent without bringing my abuser accountable. And that happened. It was a lot of work. 29 years later, the story became front page news in our town. It became public. And it was really uncomfortable. But what I will say is that discomfort, but that courage brought me to the point of saying, I can do very hard things. and I can be empowered to make this world a better place by helping ensure that my children are safe and other children are safe and it's never too late to do what's right.

23:44So what that brought me to was two years later in December, I left my corporate job and took on my passion of creating a small business that I hope to scale. And this is Happy on Main. So went from Wall Street to Main Street. And really what this is and what I've created is a retail experience that what I think is creating revolution. I want women to be able to be empowered. I want community to come together. And there's three revenue drivers that come with that, with shopping, connecting, and celebrating the little moments in life that really make up our lives. So why I kind of, with that long story and what that comes to is that for me, asking for money or charging is more uncomfortable than telling you that story of the abuse that I endured as a child that affected me for so long.

24:37And I have a mission-driven business within Happy on Main to ensure that women are seen and empowered and brought together to make the community better. But with that, I also want to ensure that I can drive growth in scale and find other main streets over time to bring this to. And so my question is, is how do you ensure when you have a mission-driven business, how do you ensure that you keep that mission but are also able to drive the revenue and the scale required to grow? Yeah, I mean, actually, you're in finance, so your background is finance, and I think it's probably something you should use, I mean, because you bring an added value in this world.

25:21And so maybe you should focus a bit on, like, trying to show what the added value is and working out KPIs and also achieving those KPIs. Because if you achieve those KPIs and you have a happy customer, that happy customer will actually be able potentially to pay a bit more, but also will be a kind of guide for you to go to other customers and tell your story. And so packaging your story by focusing on the KPIs, showing your added value, and then from that added value, try to convince other customers to come to your shop. I think that's what I would do. I would also say in terms of, well, you mentioned financial stability.