When he sold his business, Tien Wong, today the Chairman and CEO of Opus8 Inc., was relatively young — about 40 years old. After the sale, he didn't really know what he wanted to do.
He hired an executive coach to help him figure out what the next chapter could look like. That ultimately helped him realize that he’s born for business.
“I'm cut out to be an entrepreneur,” Wong said at the D.C. Capital Region Smart Business Dealmakers Conference. “My whole family — grandparents, parents — they're all entrepreneurs. So, it just runs in the DNA.”
His identity, he says, was wrapped up in his company. So, when the company was sold, he had to find himself.
“For 12 years, I was buried — just 24/7, no boards, just non-stop work,” he says. “It was pretty demanding, mentally and physically. And after we sold, I had an earn out for one year, and I had a contract for one year, but they didn't really need me except to play a lot of golf with the clients, to do the transition. I sold to a Fortune 500 company. And it was a good deal for our employees and for our team and everything. I was only 40 years old, and my partner was, like, 37. When you're that young, you really don't know what you don't know, and you don't know what you want to do. So, I experimented a lot, and found my way that way. But it took a while.”
That time between the sale and when he started his new venture would not have been any shorter, he says, even if he had hired the executive coach earlier.
“I was pretty un-self aware,” Wong says. “I knew everything. I was a know it all. I was just this cocky, arrogant guy. I knew everything. So, I would have never listened to a coach. But after we sold, I was kind of lost. So, I had to hire this guy.”
Even though working with a coach was expensive, he says he needed him.
“I needed to know, Do I know myself? Who am I? What do I stand for?” he says. “Because when you're busy running a business, all you care about are your clients and your employees. That's it. It was good to take the blinders off.”
But what he would do with his time wasn’t his only concern. He says his biggest fear after his liquidity event was seeing his kids become entitled, unproductive members of society (they're all older now, he says, and made it through OK). That had him thinking about estate planning. For that, he had a couple key advisers who talked with him about trusts and estate planning. He completed that about seven years before exit. He says he’s thankful for those advisers continuing to remind him of the importance of getting that done.
“They beat us up. ‘Have you done this?’ And we got it done,” Wong says. “It's hard when you're running a business. It's easy to say, ‘get it done,’ but it takes a long time to think it through. Where's the money going to go? How do I split it among the kids? What causes do I care about?”
Eventually, after the sale, he began to find his next venture. He made some angel investments, invested in some funds and bought some small companies. Along the way, recognizing that D.C. didn’t have a deep technology investment community, he started CONNECTpreneur13 years ago, as a way to find deal flow and promote some of the companies that he'd invested in and acquired.
“We set it up as a pay-it-forward type situation where we could have communities like this — investors, entrepreneurs, service professionals — gather, do deals, hire people, sell to each other,” he says. “And we're still going strong. It's been really rewarding; very, very rewarding, actually.”
