Saturday night I won the Technology category of the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ 2017 Pacific Awards ceremony held in Vancouver BC. I’m sharing my acceptance speech video with our blog readers who are entrepreneurs or about to embark on the journey.  To me, the award is a team award for what we’ve achieved together because StarFish and ViVitro are really about team effort.

I’m grateful to EY for such a great honour. This award is recognized around the world– I’ve already received congratulations from 9 countries. I hope my win and the following words will inspire and encourage other entrepreneurs in the medtech community and beyond. For those who prefer the written word, here’s a summary of my speech:

Wow! I have to say I feel very blessed. I really had no idea who was going to be the winner of that category. First of all I’d like to recognize my mother who has never been to any business function of mine – sitting right over there, and my wife, Fiona, and my EO forum, who all came over here and organized a retreat for us in Whistler.  We’re going to get in a limousine after this and go to Whistler. We all went down to the float plane in our tuxedoes today and got on the plane in the sun and got over here in the rain.  I want to thank you all for doing that for me.

I would like to observe that the entrepreneurial narrative is, you start with difficulties and then you overcome them and you have this big triumph.  And that’s the story we all like to hear.  But somewhere in the middle of all of that, that story is forged in some dark nights. And every entrepreneur who is in this room has had some of those dark nights where things were not working, you were confused, you were scared, you didn’t know how you were going to make payroll or how you were going to keep that critical person.  I believe that those crucible moments are really what entrepreneurship is forged in.

In some respect entrepreneurship is about emotional resilience as much as it is about brilliance. One of the sponsors here is a peer group, TEC Canada, and I mentioned EO.  I believe that a peer group is essential in developing that emotional resilience, just having people to help bounce ideas off.  In my case they challenged me at a time we were losing money and confused and scared to align our pricing with the best companies in our space, which is actually pretty scary when you’re in the services business and potentially going to lose some clients. In the last four years we’ve tripled the size of our company and become one of the premier companies in North America in our space and I’m just delighted by what we’ve been able to do together.