Lee Celske spoke Tuesday on about starting his own business and achieving his dreams. One dream he had was starting a building products company. Another was buying and maintaining rental property in Florida.
Some people think that entrepreneurship is something that is born in you. You either are one or you are destine to fail or quit when times get tough. A good case study for that argument is our recent Midwest Entrepreneurs speaker Lee Celske. Lee is a very dynamic individual; he is constantly on the move – physically, mentally and professionally.
When you are one of eleven children in a Milwaukee, you have to learn to survive. He has been a banker in Texas, an options trader in Chicago, a bond trader in London, a mayor in Aledo, an adjunct professor in Monmouth, an investor/entrepreneur in South Dakota and a real estate owner in Florida. In addition, he takes lots of pride in being a good husband and a great father. Business, family and community are all important to him.
Lee possesses the two essential characteristics of entrepreneurship – 1) the ability to see the opportunity and 2) the willingness to take the risk necessary to take advantage of the opportunity. Lee entertained the class with stories about his multiple lives and his will to survive. Each time his life changed, he re-invented himself and learned new skills and new industries. When he had to learn the ins and outs of the Chicago trading pits, he did. When he had to move his family to London for the welfare of his child, he did. When he has to re-learn trading in a new country with new customs and cultures, he did. When he had to get a graduate degree from the London Business School in the London School of Economics, he did. When he had to move back to Western Illinois for family reasons, he did. When he needed to lobby in Washington D.C., he did. When he had to raise capital to finance his new business ventures, he did. When had to be a one-man marketing, advertising and production company for his new business, he did. When he had to pick up the pieces of his failed business and move on, he did. As they say “it ain’t braggin’, if you done it.” And he has done it.
He is also a man of confidence. It takes an extremely self-confident individual to take all the risks that he has taken and Lee has that confidence. He believes in himself and he believes in his family and he believes in his future. “Just around the corner, there’s a rainbow in the sky.”
In addition to demonstrating for the students the personal character of almost all entrepreneurs, Lee showed the students something that is critical to learn but extremely hard to teach. He talked to them about dealing with failure. His latest greatest business venture failed. After a couple of years of hard work, he had all the pieces in places to start a company to build a new type of house based on an innovate green technology. Recycled waste glass was mixed with a resin to create a new building material that had many highly desirable characteristics – strong, non-flammable, well-insulated, quickly assembled, and affordable.
Lee got a license to make and sell houses using the patented technology developed by an inventor in England. A credit-crunch recession hit. The housing market turned down, bank financing become a challenge and the inventor was found guilty of misrepresentations and fraud. Then the project collapsed. Then the lawsuits began. Then the failure of the project became a reality.
The truth is that many, perhaps most, entrepreneurs fail at least once and often more than once. Only the winners are still around to tell their success stories. Those who failed are hard to find and they are almost never willing to talk about their failures. It is not easy to talk to strangers about your failures. But Lee Celske does lots of things that are not easy. There as many, and perhaps more, valuable things to be learned from failure as from success. Lee was not destroyed by the failure of the project – the project failed; not Lee. The failure of the last project is the opportunity to start the next project and Lee has already start a another new life.
The energetic, confident, risk-taking Lee Celske was off to his next project. It was a valuable learning experience for Lee and it was a valuable learning experience of the students in Midwest Entrepreneurs. Thanks Lee. We can hardly wait to hear about the next project.
