Mentor Yourself With Jacoline Loewen, Partner, Loewen & Partners
November 4th, 2010 | 
Author: Your Invisible Mentor: Jacoline Loewen, Partner
Company: Loewen & Partners
Website: http://www.loewenpartners.com
Do you walk away from opportunities because you feel you aren’t good enough? “If you’re not afraid, you’re not in the deep end, and if you’re not in the deep end, you’re not growing,” says Jacoline Loewen. Read that quote again. That’s a tough lesson Jacoline learned. Read about her biggest disappointment in life and you’ll understand why that quote is now so important to her.
Two weeks ago you heard from Laurel Touby who founded mediabistro. Laurel talked about getting private equity funding. Today, you get another perspective. Jacoline, who works for Loewen & Partners a family business, gets the funding for business owners of mid-sized companies. She also has something in common with Diane Danielson who needs both family and work to make her complete.
What other similarities do you find with other interviewees? While reading Jacoline Loewen’s interview, think about what you can learn from her, and in what ways are you similar to her. I have known Jacoline for a few years now, we both sat on the board of the Strategic Leadership Forum. I have always admired her because she got things done, and all the events she organized were sold out.
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Jacoline Loewen: I work with Loewen & Partners which is a family business. I love to work but I also love to be a mother, I’m married as well, and I think I have done a pretty good job of combining all those things. I’ve tried to have it all and I would say because I am a high energy get-it-done person, you would think that I’m a corporate person, but my husband and children say that’s not the case.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Jacoline Loewen: I take my children to school and I’m at work by 8:00 am. I like to divide up my day into packets. I know I am very creative so my first 90 minutes in the office I spend the time writing reports for clients or designing an event. I do a lot of cold calling and selling, which I have scheduled into my day. In the afternoon I meet with people. I have a lot of people who want to meet with me and I have learned that it’s good to meet with a lot of people. My mentor and father-in-law, Chuck Loewen taught me to meet with a lot of people and be quick and professional to help them to understand your business, and not assume that they do. Listen to what they have to say about their businesses and figure out if you can make at least one connection for them. I see people in the afternoon because that’s when my energy is not as high and I like to get home by at least 6:00 pm so I can make dinner for my sons and spend the evening with them. From 10:00 to 11:00 pm, I will work and often I get up early in the morning and will work. If I’m writing a book, I will write from 5:30 to 7:00 am.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Jacoline Loewen: I love to read! I read blogs, self-help books, autobiographies of a wide range, from generals in war to Donald Trump. I like LinkedIn because it shows the blogs of your contacts, so for people who I respect, like you, I pop on to their blogs and it makes me feel like I belong to a community, and I’m enjoying their thinking as well. I do this on a daily basis and I think it’s important to do that. The other thing that I have discovered that has changed my life is the iPhone, which has an iPod listening device. I drop my kids off and I have about a 30-minute drive to work so I tune in to podcasts like advanced selling the have a 30-minute special on every week on how to sell and I’ve learned so much because you get to listen to all these experts. Normally you would have to go to an event, drive there first thing in the morning, pay, then drive back to work. This is incredible, you have access to all these leading experts.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Jacoline Loewen: I’m from a tiny village in Central Africa, that’s very different from South Africa. The village is on the border of Zaire and Zambia. I was born and raised there and a lot of my education is from there. I learned a lot because I had to make my own clothes, and if I wanted chocolate cake I had to make it. There were no stores, there was basically nothing, so if you wanted to be entertained you had to invite friends over and play card games, or swimming races. A lot of Scottish people were there and they would have Highland games. Coming to Canada, I think every immigrant has it, you feel insecure and try to fit in, and feel that you will get packed up and sent home. I still have that insecurity of having to try to fit in and revealing that I’m an immigrant. If I were to start over I would get over that and move on.
Also, I would have pursued a higher level of education a lot quicker and pursued my goals a lot quicker. I would have these big thoughts. My father took me to Deloitte because they were the auditor of the mine that I was working in. So he got me to wear my mom’s navy blue suit and to meet the auditor who asked me what I wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to do in five years, and he got me thinking about my career. I was afraid of my big goals, and I saw him and I thought, “I want to be like you,” and I ended up working at Deloitte. That’s where I really started to leverage my career. But I think you have to go for those scary dreams a lot quicker, and believe in yourself even if you do not go to the right school or have the right accent. I didn’t know how to dress for the Canadian society.
Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?
Jacoline Loewen: I have been absolutely shocked to find out that most business owners in Canada are not really concerned about growing their business. They are more concerned about preserving capital rather that accumulation of capital. That’s a big shock for me because I did a lot of strategy work with companies in the developing world, like South Africa, which is at the bottom of the world. If they want to make their product and company really successful they have to strategize and design it, so it’s a big shock working with Canadian business owners who are sitting next to this really big market in the US and not really working as strategically as they could and not also having the ambition to grow. In Canada, you have some really large companies then you rapidly fall of a cliff and you get down to really small companies. It’s a dangerous place for the Canadian economy to be because the global market is being forced on us, and a lot of these companies need to double up and triple up in size. I’m not sure they are able to do that because they don’t have the mindset. They don’t see the purpose of it, they have a nice lifestyle and that’s quite understandable.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?
Jacoline Loewen: I am in the mid market private equity field which is $10 million up $200 million in revenues for companies. Private equity has not been around at all for this size company until five years ago. So private equity in the past five years is brand new to these mid market companies, and what I find is that most of these owners do not know about it. They still think that the bank is the place to go. The reason that Canadian banks didn’t fail is because they are banks, and they are quite sensibly risk adverse. They take risk but with senior companies, and they have rules about how much they can lend as a percentage of the balance sheet and they have stuck to those rules more than we have seen with the American banks which have vanished off that list of top 20 banks of the world. The five Canadian banks are now at the top of the world’s banks. But the reason for it is because they were banks, they don’t take the risks that entrepreneurs and business owners have the guts to take, and quite right actually. Private equity is for the high risk finance guys, they are the supermodels of the business world.
Traditionally they have focused on the big companies. For example, they would take a company like Hertz or of one of those large car companies, provide the money, stay with the company for five years, get it stabilized then take it, IPO (Initial Public Offering) it or sell it to a strategic buyer. So they are sort of like that bridge of getting the company financially stabilized, growing it to make it very attractive and selling it off within five years. That opportunity and that past have now become available to mid market companies.
The problem is that people just don’t know about private equity funding. And also they have listened to the few bad apples and feel uncertain about what private equity is. The technology is now available to manage smaller companies. We didn’t have the spreadsheet capacity to do it before, and now we do. And also there are a lot of entrepreneurs who sold dotcoms for $100 millions and they are often the best private equity partners because they have been entrepreneurs themselves and they want to apply that success model now to another company.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Jacoline Loewen: The biggest threat is trust. You see how bankers are hated now, they are really despised. I’m in the finance community, so how do you build up trust and respect when you’ve got movies like Wall Street, and you are looking at greed and that sort of thing. So I would say that the biggest threat to my business is having competitors that are perhaps unethical, who are taking money from grandmothers and not being completely transparent, and are working with business owners for their own gain rather than putting the entrepreneurs’ interests first.
One of the ways that I am dealing with that is we have been working with the Ontario Stock Commission on a designation for our type of company, which is a corporate finance company that deals with raising capital for mid market companies, and sell mid market companies. We have been working with EMD, which is an Exempt Market Dealer, and it’s a designation that you have to register with the Ontario Stock Commission and follow the rules. They come in and do an audit to see how you treat your customers and clients, what you are revealing to them, and when you are raising money what are the processes, and if the clients are unhappy what recourse do they have.
I run an association now, the EMDA. I’m on the board with top lawyers of Canada and we are working to bring regulation, to bring process and a rigorous behavior code to what we are doing because we are dealing in very large sums of money. We are dealing in entrepreneurs’ lives and there have been situations where people do not respect that so they are there more for their own greed. We are trying to create a structure and place for clients to come to if they have issues, get them resolved and also create a community. When people know you in a large community, and you see them regularly, I think that that kind of herd behavior keeps all the herd behaving honestly and on a straighter course than when you don’t have that.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Jacoline Loewen: One of the things that Loewen Partners does is we go and find money, for example $10 million for a $35 million company and we will get the business owner to sell a third (33 percent) of their company then they get the first bite of the apple. They get money right away for themselves, for their retirement, which tends to make their spouses really happy and then we work with them very hard for the next five years with the equity partners to drive the growth of the company. So we will plan that five-year growth on a monthly basis, and all the activities they are going to do to increase their revenues because we are usually tracking from say $30 to $100 million in revenues within a five year period. We will assist the owners so that they can get on with what they love to do and take away all that financial analysis that they tend not to like. We also watch the relationship with the private equity people and make sure that the owner is getting looked after.
Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?
Jacoline Loewen: There are a lot of lone wolves in our business. We will go into a company and say, “Would you like raise money for your company, would you like to get $10 million?” and owners will say, “Yes.” Our competitors then tend to charge $50,000 or huge amounts of money and then they don’t raise that capital. We have a process where we get to know the owners and their financial situation, and unless we are 90 percent sure that we can raise capital we won’t take them on as a client. So we have a 100 percent success rate. We are very good at raising the money and I think what people are doing badly is they do the front-end marketing well and do not reveal that they haven’t been successful and do not reveal their success rate. There is no point in an owner paying $50,000 and not raising your capital. We hate that our competitors are out there muddying the field.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.
Jacoline Loewen: My biggest challenge is marketing, explaining to mid-sized business owners the opportunity they are sitting on with their company. My biggest challenge is explaining the five-year road that they are about to go on, and many owners will start off with us a little bit stressed, and the only reason they have decided to look at private equity is because they are getting a bit closer to bank covenants and they are under pressure.
I’ve now shared the journey with many of them and they end up on Profit 100 Fastest Growing Company, or Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The best thing is the relationship with their spouses, because they get some money off the table and their wives are now relaxed because they have some retirement money. They have a big nest egg and they can now grow the business. After a couple of years the change in them is enormous because the wealth of the business grows so much, and they discover that they can actually run a $100 million company as much as they could run a $30 million company. They start to understand how to grow a business and that you can also do acquisitions and not just organic growth, and they get very surprised that they are able to go out there and judge other companies and managements teams, acquire them and bring them on board and grow their brand, get much bigger projects than they had access to before.
The hard part of my job is to make that transparent. How do I show them that path? I try to share stories of past clients but it’s difficult because we do not get permission from most of our clients because it’s private and they don’t want other people knowing their stories.
Finding clients is also a challenge. All my clients I’ve found through cold calling, which is a terrible way to go about finding clients. Warm introductions are the best. This is my biggest challenge and that’s why I am listening to these sale podcasts. I have learned a huge amount from them and have applied what I’ve learned as well. I find my sales process is becoming a lot more professional and one of the things I changed is that I opened up the sales process to the whole team.
I have a group of very smart people working for me and they were mostly on the execution side, so they are all financial geeks, they all work on executing the financial deals and I do the marketing so I started sharing with them my problems and frustrations. I didn’t have a solution at that point. One of the things they suggested is, “Why don’t we all come up with companies for you?” and the amazing thing is that their picks are better than my picks and so we have a competition and the winner gets $1,000, and it’s very motivating for everyone to get in the top companies because they have the ability to win $1,000 if we get them as a client.
In a way I suppose I am resolving my challenge. I’m pretty hard on myself.
Avil Beckford: What lessons did you learn in the process?
Jacoline Loewen: I’m learning a lot about myself and how I come across to other people. I like to get things done and I’m the person who works with a whip, I’m a driver. When I said to them “What am I supposed to do with this sales problem I’m having?” They came up with the solution and I’ve always thought that I was a very inclusive person and I’m realizing that I’m driven and high achieving and I’ve learned to soften that and become a coach and mentor as much as a director.
I feel I’m a soft person inside and apparently I’m not. When I’m at work I command and control and one of the great things for me is I work in a family business so I get very honest feedback from the family and that’s one of the beauties of working in a family business. If you work with family members who will give you honest feedback, you take it, and I often have to bite my tongue, write it down. I often go back and read those comments years later and reflect on them and I think that has been huge for me.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Jacoline Loewen: I had been a corporate strategist for a number one bank, and my boss was the Top Businessman in South Africa for three years in a row. I’d had a baby and was pregnant with the second, and for personal reasons I had to leave my career and go home, and it was really to go home and look after my children.
I had a personal tragedy at my home so I was under duress to return home. I decided that I would write a book. I had written an MBA thesis, so I had learned how to basically write a book. I loved Tom Peters so I thought I would write like him and I modeled myself after him. I wrote this book, put it aside and thought, “It’s not very good, who is going to read this anyway, and what a load of rubbish.” But I had shared with some of my women friends that I had been writing this book and I really wanted to have my book published.
By this time I had given birth, and I had a group of women who had all given birth at the same time and they were having a baby group. I was such a snob and was very anti-motherhood and looked down my nose at women with babies, and yet here I was with babies. I wasn’t very comfortable in that mother role. My friend invited me to this baby group, and they were all superb women: Doctors, lawyers and all sorts of things. And I’m sitting there, one of the women breastfeeding, and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, this is horrible.”
My friend said, “What’s happening to that book you were writing?” and I said, “I’ve had it in File 13.” The woman sitting beside me who was breastfeeding said she was Head of Sales at what happened to be the biggest publishing firm in Africa. She said, “Give me your manuscript.” I ran home got my manuscript and gave it to this mom, again with my judgment of mothers. She took it away and by the next day I had a signed book deal. She gave me a big break. That was a big break for me.
Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?
Jacoline Loewen: I think I’m my worst enemy. I had a mentor in South Africa who was the Head of Anglo-American. He wrote the foreword for the first book that I wrote. He was a writer as well and wrote columns for the main newspaper. He wanted me to write columns because I had written a couple profiles about CEOs, their strategies and how they were designing their companies and I would pull in Harvard Business Review comments and tie it in. They were very dynamic businesses, what they were trying to do, so this mentor wanted me to write articles and wanted to introduce me to the head of the paper. I had my two babies at the time, my consulting business and I just didn’t do it. I didn’t pursue it because I didn’t think I was good enough. I thought it would be revealed. How silly that was to have done that?
Now I try to realize that you have to be afraid, you have to be in the deep end. If you’re not afraid, you’re not in the deep end, and if you’re not in the deep end, you’re not growing. Now I try to really push myself and maximize my contacts instead of shying away from them.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Jacoline Loewen: I had a client in a bid plastics company who was one of the first clients I pursued, trying to get him to do private equity. In the end his father had sold the company to a German company, which this man was unaware of, or didn’t realize how far down the track his father had gone. I lost him as a client. Loewen & Partners advised him to go with the sale rather than pursue private equity. He would have done what we suggested but the sale was the best financial option for him.
We walked away from a massive opportunity, and I remember feeling really depressed by it because we were struggling at that point to get going and it would have been a big help for us at that point. He invited my family over for a barbecue so say thanks because he knew what we had lost and he appreciated our honesty. At the barbecue he started talking to me about his family business and he was making me laugh because I have issues with my mother-in-law, sister-in-law and brother-in-law. I have a great relationship with my father-in-law, but in a family business there is so much dynamics, undercurrents and jealousies, and all sorts of things that happen. So he was telling me his stuff with his sister, brother and father, and his wife would chime in.
I loved the way he was saying it, and I said, “This is all stuff that I’d like to read, why don’t you write a book?” He had a lot of issues and had to work through a lot of pain so I thought writing a book could be very cathartic. He said, “I can’t write a book,” and I said, “Sure you can.” I wrote out 10 comments for him and said, “There’s you chapter headings, what are five points that you want to make under each chapter? Go write the thing. Call me in six weeks. Go to your basement and don’t come out.”
He did and I also told him to send the manuscript to me and I would see if it was a book, so he did and it was. I gave him the name of an editor and I was going to introduce him to Wiley, but he decided to publish it himself. He is a marketing machine and have taken that book and sold hundreds of thousands of copies now. He is an amazing public speaker and he goes and speaks in the United States and South America, and he speaks to all the major family businesses in the world.
In his book he acknowledged me and acknowledged my book Money Magnet which I wrote about private equity, so he has become a great partner for me and refers companies to me. That was probably my most depressing moment when he was no longer going to be a customer or client and to have it turn around. I just had a barbecue with him and he is a very good friend now and I have so much respect for him.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Jacoline Loewen: My toughest decision is always whether to work and not spend time with my two children. You don’t really get to be a full-time mom. My sons tell me that they love that because my eyes are off the ball. I’m a terrible cook, I’m not great at doing the laundry, and my house is untidy, or used to be. The interesting thing is that my sons are now 17 and 15 and they both cook and do their laundry and tidy up and my house looks great now. They look after the animals, take out the garbage, I’m amazed. Actually I talked to them about it and said, “Isn’t it terrible that your mother is not there for you to do all these things?” and they laugh at me about that and I find it amazing.
There is this really hard choice, I love working and I love being a mother, and it’s a huge pull that you have to have making decisions about when to spend time with them and when you don’t and it’s very, very hard.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Jacoline Loewen:
- My father made me work when I was very young. From age 16 onwards I was working, and he and my mother would say at the end of summer, “Here is the money you made, you should save some. What do you want to do with the rest?” I put myself through university by working. I had to go and work in these all male environments. At 18 you are allowed to work in the mines, so I was working in a primary industry and being female in an all male environment was a great experience for me, and probably made me be a guy in business. It’s a horrible thing to say because I’m a woman, but men drive the bus at the opportunity quicker and I learned that from working around them.
- The second thing was meeting my mentor and father-in-law. He was from such a different world. He had a Harvard MBA and yet he had started from very humble beginnings. He was also born in Pakistan, a third world country, and traveled to England. Both of us had similar schooling experience and then came to Canada as an immigrant, with a funny accent and all that entails. So to hear his stories of being ridiculed for his accent and how he adapted himself, he changed himself a lot to fit in with the culture to reflect back because people do business with those who reflect themselves. You can say that with women as well because back in the eighties women wore floral, with flashy earrings and a lot of make-up, now you won’t see flowered suits, but grey. Chuck showed me a lot of things.
- Doing my MBA was also huge for me and it changed me.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Jacoline Loewen: I don’t think that I have accomplished enough. Besides my children, my biggest accomplishment would be getting my books published. I realize now how hard that is to do. I have written three books now: Money Magnet, The Power of Strategy, which was a huge bestseller, and E-Business Evolution.
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