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

Right now I have a mentor, his name is Frank Zenie, he had built a couple of businesses up to $100 million plus. Whenever I ask him a question, he has a great ability to help me find the answer for myself by asking good questions, in a kind of Socratic fashion. For example, when I asked him about a business initiative recently, he didn’t tell me whether he thought it was a good or bad idea, he said, “Well, let me ask you this: What do you think are the core competencies of your business?” And he drew it out of me that this particular idea, while it might be attractive from a return on investment standpoint, and it could be a pretty neat business, it wasn’t the best fit with the assets of our organization. I really feel that I get a tremendous amount of support and encouragement, and also he’ll tell me when he thinks I’m full of it, which is really important in a mentor. He was so effective at coaching me as a new CEO of a business that I asked him to join our board of directors, which he did. So now it’s a more formalized mentor relationship, but it started out much more informally. We hit it off, he invested as an angel investor in the business, and he did that because he liked us and thought we had a neat idea to solve a true problem out there. I kept using him informally, and then I made him a board member.