Entrepreneurship Journal - Week 9: "Interview with Redge Allen"

This week I had the extraordinary opportunity to interview Redge Allen, a professor at BYU-Idaho University. He has owned and ran multiple businesses that have been successful, but he has also encountered a few failures in his career as well. The interview went amazing, and my perspective on 'what it takes to be a businessman/woman' was changed dramatically.

Despite the fact that Allen is a very smart and powerful man, as we were talking I could tell that he had a very humble spirit about him. As soon as I realized that I became curious as to how he was able to act so humbly in an environment where the egocentric always seem to get the best and quickest results.

One of the best moments of our interview was when I asked him the question, "What was one of your most significant gains and failures you experienced since you have been in the industry?"

He replied in a way that I was not expecting at all: "The greatest gain I ever had was losing every penny I had in a failed business. The greatest challenge of all was making too much money."

Wait a second... those seem backwards. My thinking was that making enough/too much money would be an advantage to you and your business, and that having a business fail would be a great challenge, not a blessing. I asked him if he could further explain this statement to me.

He simply said that when he had lost every penny he became very humbled and used that opportunity to learn from the mistakes he made with that business. It also helped him recognize those issues which he can stop from occurring during future businesses. He then explained that when he was receiving too much money he became too focused on the world, and ended up making decisions which could have had better outcomes if he had not been as haughty or proud as he was in the moments where he was most prosperous. Too much money only made him more proud, not successful.

After hearing this I was baffled that he, a successful businessman, could think that too much money was a bad thing. But, he ended up proving me wrong. I only hope as I walk with him more on the subject in the future that I will be bale to gain his mindset on business so that I can focus on more important aspects of business than the amount of profit I will earn or lose.