Welcome to The Founder's Mindset, a monthly newsletter for entrepreneurs and business leaders featuring stories and advice from company founders, industry disrupters and innovators.

This first issue dives deep into entrepreneurship, drawing from Richard Schenkel's maverick approach and years of experience redefining service excellence in the food, dining, and support services industry.

“It’s a personality trait. It’s either there or not.

It is a combination of work ethic and self motivation.” Richard Schenkel

There are four key traits that make an entrepreneur - four essential pieces to entrepreneurial DNA and spirit.

The first is perseverance - they keep going when others give up. In every success story, there’s a moment when the founder could have quit. They could have said, this is too hard, or too complex, and walked away. Every business runs into snags, into situations you didn’t necessarily plan for.

Entrepreneurs are compelled to solve those tough problems. They’re 100% committed because it’s not just a job to them, it’s a mission. When you have that conviction, it drives you to persevere.

The second key trait is relying on gut instinct. It is imperative that entrepreneurs are not easily swayed by other people’s negativity. Because when you’re doing something no one has done before, disrupting a market or designing something new, you’re going to have naysayers. People who say “That can't be done, because no one has ever done it.”

Entrepreneurs have to be able to tolerate risk. If you’re a risk averse person, entrepreneurship is not the right fit for you. Nothing is going to be easy. You’re investing everything you have into your business, especially your first business.

If that makes you too nervous, you’re not going to be able to keep up with the ups and downs that make or break a company’s success.

Which brings me to the last point - you’re prepared to ride the roller coaster. Success in business is never a straight line. It just isn’t linear. In reality, you’re going to have gaps. You’re going to have challenges that come up that you didn’t anticipate, or never could have fully planned for.

Entrepreneurs thrive on the roller coaster - they are in the moment, responding to the needs of the company. It’s an exciting and rewarding process.

I sold business cards and printing door to door. It was a pretty humbling experience, and I learned a lot.

We had a printing press, typesetting, and all, in my home where I lived with my parents when I was younger.

At that time I might have been 12 to 14 years old. I learned how you're paying for the goods before you even have an order and that teaches you about financials - you have to have some dollars potentially to start a company, otherwise it's pretty rocky.

What is your advice for someone starting out on their first venture - what do they need to focus on to overcome those first hurdles?

I think as an entrepreneur, when you're starting organizations and funding them initially by yourself and potentially then looking to raise capital, you have to have tenacity, perseverance, and resilience. You never know who will say yes and who will say no.

You may meet with a hundred people, financing organizations, private equity, venture capital, etc - and all it takes is the right one. I think you just have to have that in your DNA. If you are an individual who can't deal with rejection, it is a real tough thing as an entrepreneur to raise capital when you're not used to anybody saying no.

You have to set certain expectations of where you'll be as an organization or anything you do as an entrepreneur. Then constantly look at those and see are we making and hitting those expectations or goals? Are we off? Why are we off?

An example - let's assume we were going to launch a business-to-business type of organization and we needed companies, clients, and we were going to put resources into business development, sales, marketing.

So we do all those things and we have people calling on prospects, but we don't have anybody ever really making any buying decisions. It’s not moving forward. In that case, you either have to figure out where you're off in the market, and why and retool. Or are you in a business model that in your opinion, is really a wonderful opportunity, but nobody wants it?

There's no guarantee that even a competitive business out there will hit the mark. If it was that easy, you'd have hundreds of competitors in every business scaling. It really takes a lot of grit to say, "Hey, this may have been the best concept in the world, but after three years of tying up cash, people, and capital, is it time to let it go?"

The other thing is I always say, you better go into opportunities that have what I call white space. White space is nothing more than a space that hasn't been 100% developed at this point. You look at those niches out there that can allow you to succeed.

What was the white space when you built Unidine into one of the fastest growing companies in the country?

Client intimacy. That was one of the success opportunities that Unidine provided, through a strong leadership team that was in touch with clients and very hands-on. When an organization gets very large, they can lose touch with the majority of their clients, that’s just the reality. As an insurgent force in the dining services industry, we were ambitious in our approach to client intimacy and service excellence.

When calls came in on the weekend, we answered them. Our first Thanksgiving with a new client, I got a call that the sewers had backed up into the kitchen. We had people out there with mop buckets making sure we could get out the meal. Sometimes you’re faced with an unpredictable situation, and you just better figure it out.

I think you can be an insurgent in a lot of different industries because frankly, there is a lot of mediocrity out there in larger organizations and they take success for granted. But when you have a founder-based culture, an agile team aligned to that vision, firing on all eight cylinders, you respond much more quickly and efficiently. Clients know they’re going to get that high-touch service experience. And employees know they’re a part of something game-changing, redefining the business model.

Next Time: Company Culture

In the next newsletter we’ll deep dive into company culture - the importance of hiring and mentoring the right people, and what successful company culture looks like when it comes to scalability.



WE LOOK FORWARD TO FUTURE NEWSLETTERS AND MORE ANNOUNCEMENTS TO COME.

Thanks to writer and marketer Val Urso for newsletter content curation and design.