Obi-Wan Kenobi of Business Planning – Tim Berry: 2BB 053

Coming to you from the business district of the Haight-Ashbury.

We interview Tim Berry,  the Obi-Wan Kenobi of business planning. He’s a Baby Boomer, ex-hippie, Stanford MBA, entrepreneur.

Tim told us he failed as a hippie. He left home at 18 to live in Haight-Ashbury but it didn’t last long. He didn’t want to “take the damn LSD.” After a few weeks he called home telling his parents he wanted to come back. They said, “Okay, but you have to go to Notre Dame.”

That’s where he met his wife Evangelina who he’s been married to for 45 years. He majored in literature and enrolled in a PhD program. After talking to a shoe salesman who had gone through the program, he realized it was a bad idea and switched to journalism.

Soon after graduation, he became a journalist and worked for 10 years as night editor for Northern Latin America of United Press International in Mexico City. His wife helped him learn Spanish quickly by not speaking a word of English to him for 2 years.

Eventually, he figured out that journalism wasn’t going to help him “change the world.” It was filling the space between ads. At that point he had 3 small kids and realized that journalism wasn’t ever going to pay well. He took up business writing, which doubled his income from terrible to a little bit less than terrible. While he was there he took grad classes in business and found it to be more interesting than journalism. When he left Mexico and returned to the U.S. he had savings in hand and a letter of acceptance from Stanford business school, where he ended up getting his MBA.

His wife was supportive during all these transitions, which made it easy for him to become an entrepreneur. Two years after getting his MBA, he worked as a VP at a marketing research firm. He was doing almost exactly what he did as a business journalist but charged 5 times more.

Businesses in Silicon Valley were in start-up mode and he became excited about developing business plans. His background in journalism, plus his love for numbers gave him an edge. By this time he had 4 kids and left his job to start his own business with his wife’s continued support.

Entrepreneurial tip:

Make sure not to put yourself in the position of losing your relationship.

Success in Business

Tim built Palo Alto Software, a company with 65 employees and more than 10 million in sales.

Watch Tim’s Video – Startups and Entrepreneurship: Beyond the Clichés – click here.

Debunking business myths

People listen to experts, read all the blog posts and then parrot information to others.

Myth #1 Do what you love – Tim says he loves to play the guitar but no one is going to pay him to play it. You have to do what other people love. It will also be hard to build a company around it. What’s less hard is if you’re doing something that relates to what you love, but is also offering value to other people.

Myth #2 – All it takes is persistence to succeed – It’s not true. You have to give value. People are told “keep on going and you will succeed,” and they end up losing their homes and relationships.

Palo Alto Software had a product that got out into the market and it grew. The company brought in venture capital and 3 years later, during the .com crash he bought it back. Tim was able to create a living doing what he “liked” to do, surrounded by people he had chosen himself who believed in the same thing.

He’s still involved with the company and is making a good living even though his second daughter is now running it. Four of his five kids have worked in the company and all are successful in business. They learned by doing.

His son, Paul Berry is CEO of Rebel Mouse,