Exploring Entrepreneur

Aspen Magazine
Ridge Publications

Fall 2007

 

For his Aspen Magazine series “What I’ve Learned,” contributor and Washington, D.C. insider Kenneth L. Adelman chats with Sam Wyly, entrepreneur and owner of Explore Booksellers.

 

Sitting in Explore Booksellers, that beloved Aspen institution he purchased earlier this year, Sam Wyly looks far younger than his 72 years.  He is known as “the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur,” having succeeded in sundry businesses from computer software to Michaels arts and crafts stores.  He is working on his first book and is excited about the growth of Green Mountain Energy Company—which provides cleaner, eco-friendly electricity—and the new www.begreennow.com.  When not living in the East End of Aspen, he lives in Dallas.

 

Wyly spent his early years on a cotton plantation and then at a state penitentiary, where both his parents served as wardens.  “My family were cotton farmers and college teachers for generations,” Wyly explains.  “So although my folks first had a cotton plantation, Dad always wanted to be a writer.  Eventually he bought the Delhi Dispatch, a weekly newspaper.  He did all the writing.  Mom wrote the social columns and got the bills out.  My brother Charles and I did everything else.”

 

Wyly’s purchase of Explore Booksellers after founder and owner Katherine Thalberg passed away was highly controversial because of his large contributions to conservative political campaigns and candidates.  However, after taking over from Thalberg, famous for her liberal activism, Wyly assured the family and the town that he wouldn’t change a thing.  In fact, he describes his fondest hobby as walking to Explore Booksellers and browsing for hours.  There we met to discuss what he has learned.

 

Kenneth L. Adelman:  You’ve been successful in software, frames and art, energy, and other areas.  What does it take to be successful in business?

             

Sam Wyly:  Understand the purpose of the business, which is to create customers.  That’s done through innovation and marketing.  Innovation should satisfy the customer or create new demand for the customer.  This takes a bit of imagination.  When Western Union was busy sending telegrams, somebody brought the company the idea of a telephone.  The executives considered it silly.  Who would want to talk to each other?  They missed a nice opportunity.

 

KLA:  What fosters the creativity that leads to such innovation?

 

SW:  Well, you sop up information, especially by listening to smart people.  Look for something new in whatever someone says.  I consider myself an entrepreneur, someone who creates and builds enterprises.  The products of these enterprises must always pass the customer test.

 

My first company was simple.  We had an IBM electric accounting machine with punch cards—a big central system at huge cost, something like $3 million back then.  Our engineers had to input data on punch cards, drive them to that central system, and then input those cards, maybe getting computer time at midnight.

 

I thought of something really simple:  “Wouldn’t it be neat if they could just stay in their offices and send that data over a phone line?”  Then we would run the program for the customer and send the results back to them.  My idea was to sell convenience to our customers.

 

It turned out that we were online way before being online was cool.

 

KLA:  Why have you been in so many different businesses?

 

SW:  That’s due to my inherent curiosity.  I get bored doing the same thing for too long.

 

I’ve learned that I’m a “conceptor.”  We have regular family meetings that include 24 people with our kids, their spouses, and grandkids.  Anyway, together we took a personality test.  Other family members were “deliberators,” some “conciliators,” and several “knowers.”  I’m classified as a “conceptor.”

 

Well, America is the land of conceptors.  We have four times as many companies started here than in France, and probably 20 times more than Japan.  Being an entrepreneur is an American characteristic.  It was nurtured by the frontier mentality.

 

KLA:  What attracts you to Aspen?

 

SW:  Serenity, peace, and quiet.  I can sit on a mountaintop, under a nice evergreen, and do absolutely nothing.  We spend our summers here.  I don’t ski, so we come here primarily from May through September.

 

We first arrived some 30 years ago with my brother Charles, who came here to ski.  Cheryl and I got a duplex in the West End maybe 15 years ago.  We then bought a house in the East End, ironically on a street named West End Street.

 

KLA:  What do you tell folks to get the most out of Aspen?

 

SW:  That’s easy—go to the Explore Booksellers.  Eat at its bistro!

 

KLA:  Why did you buy the bookstore?

 

SW:  Because I wanted it to be here.  I didn’t want it converted into condos.

 

It’s my favorite place to walk to from our house.  And I spend hours there.

 

All the local bookstores around our home in Dallas have now disappeared—shoved out of the market by Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.  I didn’t want Explore to disappear.

 

KLA:  People were worried that, given your famously conservative philosophy, you would change Explore.

 

SW:  That’s label thinking, which I reject.  If they label me a conservative, they may be wrong.  If they label me a liberal, they may be wrong.

 

KLA:  Okay, so what do you call yourself?

 

SW:  I’m a Mary Baker Eddy spiritual man, an Ayn Rand libertarian, an Andrew Jackson democrat, a Thomas Jefferson republican, and an Adam Smith free-marketer.

 

KLA:  Is Aspen a liberal town?

 

SW:  I don’t think of it that way.  I don’t find it useful to bucket a town, or people.  I don’t like to be labeled.  So I don’t label others.

 

KLA:  Tell us about the book you are writing.

 

SW:  I think of myself as Mark Twain writing Huckleberry Finn, but I’m taking a different journey.  That’s why it’s called The Soul of an Entrepreneur.

 

KLA:  It’s a business book?

 

SW:  Not really, since it should be in several sections of a bookstore.  It deals with everything from spirituality to being in the White House.

 

It contains a lot of different characters that, if I do a good job, will be as believable as Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.  There are a few villains in the book, and a few heroes.

 

You’ll see it in Explore Booksellers by next year.  Anyway, I hope they carry it!

 

KLA:  Tell us what you have learned from life?

 

SW:  Above all, it is the quality of the journey that’s important.  That is much more important than reaching any particular port.

 

Each of us needs a game to play.  Each person needs a challenge, something to motivate us to do something big and creative.

 

KLA:  How can we enhance the quality of that journey?

 

SW:  By trusting people.  By treating people decently and expecting to be treated decently.  By seeing good in others.  Franklin Roosevelt said the way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.

 

KLA:  How important is spirituality in life?

 

SW:  It’s important to me.  It has always been a big thing in my life, and still is.

 

Seeing the spiritual reality makes bad episodes in life less onerous.  Material setbacks become less bothersome, or disappear altogether.

 

In life, there are lots of losses.  You play, do your best, and you can still lose!

 

KLA:  How do you bounce back from loss?

 

SW:  By looking for the next opportunity.  Remember, that next opportunity is ever-present.  If this happens to be a bad day—okay, tomorrow is another day.