A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

CS: What has been your greatest career challenge?
PG: I’ve frequently been in advisory roles; I was a consultant with MacKenzie and Co., and I’ve been a venture capitalist. But while you may be starting a business, you have to find an entrepreneur to run it. So my biggest challenge was not being able to have the kind of impact on a business that I wanted to have, because I didn’t have as much direct contact. The way I solved the problem was to jump into the fray and start a business. I just had to see how it went when I had the ability to make decisions rather than just give people advice.