Another year of EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards has come and gone, but the stories told and the lessons learned are far from over. Each year EY’s entrepreneurial programs get bigger and better and the entrepreneurs involved are getting more creative and leading more impressive companies than in prior years.
For instance, Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and CEO of Chobani Inc., was named Entrepreneur Of The Year 2012 U.S. He went on to win 2013 World Entrepreneur Of The Year, making him only the second entrepreneur from the U.S. to win the world award.
This summer Smart Business caught up with a few of EY’s leaders, Herb Engert, Americas Strategic Growth Markets Leader, and Bryan Pearce, Americas Director of the Entrepreneur Of The Year Program, to discuss how these programs have evolved and talk about some new ones that are being developed.
It should be noted that EY itself is going through a leadership transition with the retirement of Jim Turley, global chairman and CEO. Smart Business spoke with him as well to understand the future direction of the company.
Here’s what we learned.
How are you effectively developing a seamless global leadership transition?
Turley: We announced Mark Weinberger was going to be my successor well over a year ago, probably 14 or 15 months ago. It was interesting because unlike many of our competitors who do this very quickly, we realize this is a really important transition.
The reason we gave ourselves 15 months of transition is because we’ve got 170,000-plus people around the world. So we take our time; we do this well.
How do you see your legacy?
Turley: If there is a legacy it’s our people culture. We’re a special place. More experienced folks join EY from our competitors than ever leave us to join the competitors. They come and they say it’s because of the culture we have.
What is one of the greatest marketing challenges moving forward?
Turley: Everybody has realized now, much later than we realized some 34 years ago, that the growth driver in the world is coming from entrepreneurs. They are the ones driving economic growth. They are the ones driving job growth.
I think we have to keep investing in and keep recognizing their strengths. But we don’t do this for our own marketing. We do this because of the impact entrepreneurs are having in the communities where they live, and they weren’t getting the attention in the press when we started the program some 27 years ago. Increasingly they are getting the visibility they need.
How did the issues discussed at the WEOY program relate to what’s going on in the U.S.?
Engert: They’re directly correlated. Everybody is talking around the issues and challenges in the world economy, which is growth, jobs, investment and innovation.
When I think about innovators and some of the companies that have come through the EY programs, they are companies that are disrupting, or said in another way, addressing a need, demand or service. In some cases in emerging markets they are replicating what might have already been met in another developed market.
That whole concept of replication and foreign direct investment, at the root of it, is what entrepreneurs are all about and it’s going to bring parody to the global world. A stage like WEOY puts it in perspective and how it’s all tied together.
Pearce: The companies that are here have been successful in growing their companies perhaps in their domestic or regional markets and this gives them a great opportunity to meet counterparts that are operating in other parts of the world. At a minimum, they may learn a little bit more about those markets. Ideally, they may meet people who are potential partners, strategic relationship candidates or people who could help them in some way to expand their own business into expanding foreign markets.
How do you plan to apply the information gained in the WEOY program into the Strategic Growth Forum this fall?
Pearce: The WEOY and the series of strategic growth forums that we do around the world are definitely part of getting knowledge to entrepreneurs as well as networks to entrepreneurs. When you bring those two things together, they learn more about how they can grow their business, run a better business, access capital and develop their people.
It’s a focus on the five important pillars around customers and growth: people, operating effectively, capital and managing risk. You get insights into that here and you’ll get insights into them at strategic growth forums.
How has the program content developed with WEOY?
Pearce: We have added a lot of content to what has historically been a program only focused on awards. That knowledge and greater focus on networking with each other obviously has been well received by the entrepreneurs. They came to WEOY to meet their colleagues, but also to learn and so we had people coming in as keynote speakers and panelists.
We have also created a series we are calling E exchanges, which are groups of 10 to 15 people sitting around the table with common issues. These E exchanges will be very helpful for people to get to know each other and to really get into some of the down and dirty, nitty-gritty of what they are doing to tackle problems in their own business.
Are there any particular countries where you see big opportunity?
Engert: I have been tracking where I see money going. Where is the most foreign direct investment happening? Africa is clearly one. In South America, Colombia has been coming much more into its own, as have Indonesia and parts of Southeast Asia. Those are some of the markets you’ll start to see. Mexico is another one you have to watch because it’s close to the U.S. and its leaders have had change in their political landscape to be more pro-business. It’s the No. 7 GDP nation in the world.
What does the Entrepreneurial Winning Women Program mean to EY and how is it developing?
Engert: The Winning Women Program is a recognition program, but it is so much more. It really is a development program. We really focus on recognizing the women and giving them an award, but we’re putting them into an EY incubator where we give them the opportunity to participate in a lot of different aspects of thinking about the strategy of their business, their financial plans, how they approach media, branding, PR and investors.
We’ve learned a lot in the last five years of this program, and I’m proud to say we are expanding that around the globe.
Pearce: One of the recognitions that we had was that women are 48 percent of business owners in the world. They’re starting up businesses at a rate more rapid than men right now. But part of the challenge is scaling. You don’t tend to see the women-led businesses scaling as rapidly as others do.
What I think has really been the strength of the program is that there is more than just an award. There is ongoing education. They are recognized through the awards program, but also get mentoring and other skills to help them build better businesses. And then we bring them to events like WEOY.
We will have virtually all of them at the Palm Springs event in November. So they have that opportunity to get integrated in with our EOY award winners and other great entrepreneurs and find partnerships and boards of advisors and directors and various other things that can help them to scale their business.
So we began that in the U.S. We are now rolling that out to Canada and Brazil this year and looking at more rapid rollout into other countries because it is certainly a great opportunity to help support these women as they grow these businesses around the world.
What about the addition of a family business component?
Engert: The Family Business Award was put in place because family businesses are the bedrock of communities. They’re the unsung heroes.
Most private companies are family-owned businesses and a lot of public companies are actually family-owned businesses as well. A significant amount of them are multi-generation family businesses and it creates a focus on that market segment.
It’s a totally different class of business with different needs and attentions. So we are trying to celebrate family business, which will provide a lot of great learning and perspective for us.
Pearce: Our definition is that families are those at least in the second generation or beyond. Not only do you have all the same challenges that another company, private or public, would have in growing the business, but now you have this added dimension wrapped around it of family dynamics.
We try to bring them together with each other so they can learn from other families how they are handling those same kinds of challenges around family integration, succession, fundraising, liquidity, and all of those kinds of things, and then we are able to provide services to them as we look at managing through those same issues.
Across the 25 programs regionally in the U.S. we had more than 200 nominees this year that want to be considered for the family business award, which was a great start.
Can you explain a little bit about Endeavor?
Engert: We have a partnership with Endeavor. They are focused on building a better working world themselves and investing in and promoting entrepreneurs in emerging markets around the globe. The Endeavor model is wonderful because it’s entrepreneurs who are opening a local chapter, but have strong ties to the global connections of Endeavor that help bring entrepreneurs and perspectives to bear.
Endeavor is a great program and we’re proud to be partners with them. I look forward to Endeavor expanding further around the globe because they are a key difference in some of those emerging markets.
Pearce: In many of the countries that they operate in, particularly in the Americas and in Latin America, we’ve got strong relationships with our EOY program.
For example, this year is the first year that we’ve had EOY in Uruguay, and that really began as a partnership between Endeavor Uruguay and one of our former partners who is on the board. We were able to team together and the initial EOY gala was combined with the Endeavor gala. We had more than 800 people attend in year one. So it shows you the power of entrepreneurship and certainly the power of the partnership between Endeavor and EY.
