Focus On The Positive Even When Things Are Tough
by Jeremy Nulik
On a random Sunday, a rooftop cooling tower leaks water through your ceiling. Thousands of gallons of water pours into your data center. Servers that contain all your work and client information are waterlogged. Your dedicated IT staff scrambles to dry out equipment and finds a way for you to keep working in the short term.
Meanwhile, you are forced to spend your time negotiating with insurance agents, lawyers and property managers.
This scenario—just a bad dream for most entrepreneurs—was reality on March 4, 2007, for Jason Fiehler, founder and CEO of infūz, a St. Louis-based interactive marketing agency. Although the challenge took up Fiehler’s time and patience, he says infūz is a stronger company because of it. The situation forced him to make decisions he had postponed for a long time.
“We did not fail or go under,” says Fiehler, who has grown his company from one to 32 employees in nine years. “What I realized as a result of this experience was that I was not the appropriate person to be managing operations. This is something that I have known for a while, but up until that time I thought that it would cost too much money and I thought I could not trust anybody.”
Luckily, Fiehler was able to find someone he could trust, Jill Schanzle, who is now chief operating officer at infūz. He has now rediscovered what he enjoyed most about his business: helping small-business clients. So instead of worrying over details, which drained his energy and left him with a negative attitude, Fiehler now focuses on having fun at work and contributing to the positive growth of the company.
“Try not to dwell on the negative aspects of your business,” says Fiehler. “After going through disasters or the loss of a client or a lawsuit, try not to get drawn in from an emotional standpoint. It can damage your soul. I have learned that firsthand. You need to be focused on keeping your clients happy and products of high quality.”
A focus on helping startups is nothing new for Fiehler. During the late 90s dot-com boom, he found himself working with a number of startups doing any number of things from strategic planning to finding sources of funding. Fiehler says the lack of sleep and lack of pay prepared him for owning his company.
“Let’s just say I have a desk full of useless equity stock certificates,” he says. “When I started up during the dot-com boom, it seemed like everybody owned a company. I actually felt strange not owning a company. So I thought that since I had a business degree and I had worked for other startups that I knew what I was getting myself into. It was naive really.”
And although Fiehler says the decision to start a business should not be taken as lightly as he took it in 2000, he remains passionate about startup businesses. In fact, his dream is to spin off several more from infūz. However, he also says some people in the St. Louis financial community could take a more active role in taking risks to help innovative companies get off the ground.
“To spur entrepreneurship here, we need to increase the access to angel and venture funding,” says Fiehler. “Right now the investment pool is extremely conservative. The ideas in St. Louis are plentiful and wonderful. They just need a little bit of help to get things going.”