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Bob Park Entrepreneur Lessons Learned

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“All businesses are people businesses.” Bob Park, President & CEO, Fincad

Bob Park is an entrepreneur who has overcome numerous challenges and changes in the twenty-five years since he co-founded Fincad. Bob and his original partner started the business in 1990 in the early stages of the modern over-the-counter financial derivatives business. Coming from the brokerage industry, they saw that there was a tremendous imbalance between what the derivatives experts in the big banks knew and what their clients, mainly non-financial companies, knew. As a result, the corporate treasurers and CFOs of those customer organizations were making costly mistakes or even being cheated. Bob and his partner set out to level the playing field by providing the customers of the banks with the knowledge and technology needed to deal in the derivatives markets in an informed way. Bob started with almost no money and has weathered stormy periods to reinvent himself and his company.

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Creating Success Through Culture

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If you want to dramatically improve the results of your company or organization, you need to focus on both your culture and people. Chris Edmonds’ has been showing people exactly how to do this for over twenty years. He has now taken this knowledge and beautifully presented it to us in his latest book The Culture Engine.

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Where’s the Skim Milk?

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Twenty years ago, Starbucks started expanding north into Canada and Vancouver was one of the first cities to see a proliferation of Starbucks stores. At the time, I was looking for a coffee store where there was skim milk (non fat milk for my non-Canadian friends) on the counter. I was tired of coffee shops where I had to constantly ask for cold skim milk for my coffee. Fortunately, Starbucks included skim milk on the counter in every single one of their stores. For me, this was the key differentiator that made me a Starbucks customer for the last 20 years.

The last two weeks, skim milk has been disappearing from Vancouver Starbucks stores. Every time I get a Starbucks coffee, which is usually more than once every day, I have to ask for skim milk so that I can add it to my coffee. When I do, a four litre jug is retrieved from the back and put on top of the counter for me to open and pour into my coffee. Not only has Starbucks taken away the key differentiator that made me become a customer in the first place, they make the experience of getting what I want unpleasant.

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What Drives Your Sales Success Today?

The last ten years has seen a seismic change in the way that prospects find and purchase products and services. Social media, Google, SEM, blogs, white papers, peer reviews, and more have forever changed the way sales people are viewed. For example, in my work with Webtech Wireless, prospects “Googled the snot out of telematics solutions”, believing that they know more than the sales people who are selling to them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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