Soapworks founder speaking about leadership

The strongest business manoeuvres Amilya Antonetti made in her career are not the ones she is most famous for.

She is renowned as one of North America's specialists in starting up new businesses and being called in by major corporations to (sometimes famously and sometimes without broader public knowledge) turn around problems in the enterprise.

She got her start, in the general public's eye at least, for founding a company called Soapworks in response to her newborn son's adverse reactions to cleaning products. Soapworks sold all-natural products that caught on at grocery stores all across the continent.

From there it was on to more than a dozen more multi-million-dollar startups, and her consultant work as well.

She also penned books like Why David Hated Tuesdays: One Mother's Courageous Guide to Keeping Your Family Toxin and Allergen Free, and the latest is The Recipe: A Fable For Leaders and Teams. She became an on-air TV and radio personality talking business on The BIG Idea with Donny Deutsch, FOX Business, MSNBC's Your Business, CBS This Morning and Extra. She also appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and has done countless magazine and newspaper spots.

But she will never forget how she started, even though there was no TV camera in the room at the time. When she comes to Prince George this week for a keynote speech, she wants everyone who comes to meet her to also know where it began for her.

"My first company was when I was in high school. It was a construction company. And it was a necessity. My mother committed suicide, so to keep my younger brother and I from being split up, I had to file for custody of him. I couldn't have him if I couldn't show that I was able to keep us both in the lifestyle to which we had become accustomed. I was 17, and the clock was ticking on this. I was working in a construction company trailer as a Girl Friday and I made a proposal to the boss. I told him to give me his worst crew, at the worst time of year, with the worst budget results, and whatever I could save him on that bottom line over the next quarter I got to keep. He agreed. I knew that 30 per cent of construction company losses were due to theft, so I really focused on that, I really rationed the materials and set up a tool library system so nothing could go missing. And I scored big returns."

But that wasn't the end of her innovation born of desperation. While some might have taken the cash equivalent as agreed upon, she instead asked the boss to keep the money and give her stock in the company instead. Plus she wanted the same deal on the next-worst crew in the next quarter. She turned that one around, too, and then a third one in the quarter following that.

Within a year, she built up enough stock to sell the shares for much more than the cash payouts she would have gotten. Saving the family was a slam-dunk after that.

She had other factors in her life that could have been roadblocks.

She is an experiential learner and how much real experience can a 17-year-old have accrued? But she zeroed in on battles she knew she could win.

She has a strong case of dyslexia, but she knew that had nothing to do with her intelligence level, it was just a brain language she had to learn how to speak.

Developing a business, or going in to turn one around, is not alchemy, she said. It's not about conjuring marketing miracles or voodoo accounting. It is being focused exclusively on the foundations of the bottom line.

"Entrepreneurs need to have laser focus on your company's highest priorities and your products' best uses," she said. "You also have to avoid the giant mistake of doing everything yourself. Yes, it takes investment in staff or consultants, but you simply must bring in people who are more talented than you at the areas of your business in which you suck. And you really have to be ruthless with yourself about what those points are. You cannot be the one doing all the jobs in your operation or you will spread yourself too thin and short-change your whole reason for doing what you do. When I work with a CEO on their company, I help them break those priorities down and those responsibilities down, one by one, to help them make a plan for navigating those waters. And I never once met a CEO who didn't know, underneath it all, what the solutions to the problems were. There's no reason why you can't do that with your own business, before the waters get rough."

The other advice she has is don't go into business just to go into business, if you wish for big financial returns. Find something that ignites you. Build your business around something you are passionate about, otherwise, the financial returns will likely parallel the emotional returns.

"If you are engaged, as an entrepreneur, it cuts across all other lines of thinking. We will fight to our last breath to keep the doors open. We will bend and morph and innovate if that's what it takes. You can be as patriotic as George Washington, but you will take 10,000 jobs offshore if that's what it takes to keep you operational."

Audiences have noticed that Antonetti is a woman. Although that is irrelevant in most aspects of business, it comes up in conversation and it plays a direct role in some aspects of her work. CEOs of beleaguered companies are usually men, yet (that is changing quickly), and many in her experience don't take kindly to anyone, especially not a woman, coming in on orders of the board of directors or the controlling partners to fix the problems that have developed under that CEO's watch. They tell her this directly, sometimes, and/or they exemplify it in their behaviour.

"I only know of three or four women in North America who specialize as I do in corporate turnarounds," she said. "When a company sets me up to coach a CEO through these things, people all around will think, oh, she's his wife, she's his girlfriend, she's his sister, she's his assistant, but what they almost never think is, oh, she's his mentor."

So she is used to bringing the most alpha-dog male minds around to her thinking. Which is why she is used to, and encourages, men to come to her Women In Business presentations. On average, she said, "there is a 60-40 split in the room and men are the 60."

She also wants to remind people that most of the population works for someone. Her presentation is not aimed at business owners, it is aimed at all those interested in business.

"That is just as valuable for the intrapreneur as it is for the entrepreneur. If you want to be better in your job, or if you are thinking about promotions to higher positions, if you are thinking about maybe one day down the road opening your own business, I am speaking with you," she said.

Antonetti will be live and on-topic in Prince George on Friday afternoon at the Ramada Hotel conference centre. Tickets are $45 each or a table of 10 for $400. This leadership luncheon (11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.) also includes MLA and cabinet minister Shirley Bond on the topic of women setting agendas for the economy.

For tickets and tables call Norm at 250-640-6670.