John Nemanic has an enviable track record as an entrepreneur.
In 1998, Mr. Nemanic was President, CEO and Director of I.D. Internet Direct Ltd., At the time the company was rated the seventh fastest growing company in Canada by Profit Magazine.
Those were the days when technology companies could do little wrong. One year later, he amalgamated the company with a privately held firm to form Look Communications, a national wireless broadband and digital cable provider.
He was named a finalist in the Entrepreneur of the Year in 1998 thanks to his success with another venture, an internet software site called Tucows.com. In May of 1999, a majority of TUCOWS Interactive Inc. was sold and Mr. Nemanic moved on to a new entrepreneurial venture, Hostopia.com.
Hostopia.com, a North American leader in web hosting specializing in small business web sites, grew from a company with revenues to $100,000 (U.S.) in 1999 to $14-million by 2005. That's a 15,000 per cent increase for those keeping track. The tech bubble crash of 2001? Yeah, he felt it, sort of.
Along the way however, Mr. Nemanic learned a valuable lesson.
"Ultimately your true measure of success comes down to your human relationships and how well you get along with each other," said Mr. Nemanic. "What I learned was a revision of the old saying, 'money doesn't buy happiness.' "
According to the entrepreneur, who splits his time between his Canadian Hostopia headquarters in Mississauga and the international office Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the failure of his first marriage in 1998, at the height of his professional success taught him a valuable lesson that still guides him today. He vowed to work hard at finding a better balance between work and personal relationships. He vowed never to get so obsessed with his companies that he would neglect those closest to him.
"During my days as CEO of Tucows and Internet Direct, I worked 12-14 hour days, six days a week, and on my day off, I would spend it catching up on my business and economic readings," recalled Mr. Nemanic. "My view was that working very hard and ensuring that my family would be prosperous and secure justified ignoring my wife and not paying attention to my children.
"The end result was great business success, but personal failure expressed in the form of divorce and estrangement from my children."
Mr. Nemanic took it to heart last year after he decided to get remarried.
"I did say to myself, that if I was going to do this [get married] again, I did not want my past to become my future," said Mr. Nemanic. "I was determined to be much better balanced in my relationships. I would say to date it has worked."
The success of Hostopia is remarkable in that it experienced much of its growth during the tech crash of 2001, affectionately referred to by Mr. Nemanic, as the "tech nuclear winter."
"The dot-com crash in 2000-2001 made it difficult when we sought capital from venture capital firms in 2002," he said. "Our track record got us in the door. There were a lot of companies who didn't have a hope in heck of ever getting in there. Having said that, there were a lot of VCs who were shell shocked, they needed their capital just to maintain their existing investments, and they didn't see any quick paths to liquidity so they weren't interested."
Mr. Nemanic adheres to what he calls the "classic 80-20 rule."
