Failure is no disgrace as long as you get back up and keep trying, according to David Girault, who earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration and accounting at Trinity University in 1991. He went on to receive a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin and also holds a certificate in Mexican Legal Studies from the University of Houston. A native of the Rio Grande Valley, Girault brings his experience as a finance executive, attorney, business leader, and faculty member at UT-Rio Grande Valley to Trinity as the university’s fourth Entrepreneur-in-Residence.
As Trinity's Entrepreneur-in-Residence, what is your desired outcome from this program?
One of the foundations of the Entrepreneurship program at Trinity is “doing entrepreneurship for real.” The EIR is key to that experience for our students. I am open about both my successes and my “less-than-successes” as a business owner and especially in my start-up experience. One of my daughters spent a number of years in the equestrian sports world. The two mantra of our household back then were: 1) you’re not a real rider until you’ve fallen off a few times, and 2) when you fall off get right back on. I hope that by sharing my experience and my ups and downs, I can demonstrate to, as well as teach, our students that entrepreneurship is no different. If the only thing entrepreneurship students learn from me, or really from the whole program, is that failure doesn’t happen when you stumble, but only when you don’t get up and try again, the I will consider my term as EIR a success.
How does your background in business, international business, law, and Mexican legal studies inform your work as an entrepreneur?
First off, having a background in law can be a huge advantage to the work of an entrepreneur! It’s been said that “an entrepreneur sees opportunity in every risk, while others see the risks in every opportunity.” One of the hardest things an entrepreneur must do is learn to properly assess risk, but, then, rather than having that risk become a deterrent to moving forward, learn how to mitigate that risk for the business. As a business lawyer, and as an entrepreneur, understanding legal structures and processes, and mitigation devices and methods, like contractual provisions or insurance, can be a real advantage. To a large degree, with globalization and more so with the internet, almost every business is international today. But in the traditional sense of cross-border transactions or setting up divisions or factories, international business, whether it’s in Mexico, or elsewhere, is largely the same as domestic business, but with more complexity and with more risks. So, the international aspect in my background really is just an enhancement of that risk identification and mitigation function.
What do you like most about working with Trinity entrepreneurs?
Without a doubt, it’s the collaboration and willingness to share. So many would-be entrepreneurs keep their ideas secret, and hide away in their basement or garage tinkering on their prototype product, out of fear that someone will steal it. But ideas really only turn into something more when they are, like a seed, planted, watered, fertilized, and exposed to sunlight. As much as our students learn from our faculty in the department, all of whom are accomplished entrepreneurs, they learn even more from their collaboration with one another.
How do you motivate your students?
Honestly, I don’t have to. In fact, they motivate and inspire me! I, and my fellow entrepreneur faculty are blessed in that way. Our courses are not (yet) part of the Pathways curriculum, and generally are not cross-listed with any other department or major. Beyond that, our offices are down a (somewhat) dark hallway, off the beaten path on the third floor of CSI. The result is that students have to be a little motivated and entrepreneurial to find us. Most of those that take the ENTR 2111-2112 sequence (that I teach), do so because they have an idea for a business or product that they want to pursue, or at least they recognize that they want to develop tools and talents that will allow them to create a product or business in the future. To paraphrase David Letterman, “There’s no ‘off’ position on the [entrepreneur] switch.”
What brought you to the world of entrepreneurship?
I grew up in an entrepreneurial family (more about that below), so all of this is “normal” to me. I often get asked a slightly different question, “Why did you leave the law practice?” The truth is that I never envisioned myself spending a career in a law firm. I always anticipated that I would gain valuable experience from a brief career in law, and that it would lead to an entrepreneurial or corporate opportunity. The path (as with all entrepreneurs) wasn’t as linear as I planned, but I always thought I’d end up doing “this.”
What are the biggest challenges facing student entrepreneurs?
School. It’s part of the learning process, but the last few weeks I’ve watched our Stumberg Competition business leaders stress out over midterms, papers, presentations, oh, and that competition with a $25,000 prize that could be the catalyst that assures their company actually launches into a successful venture. It’s not all that different than my experience as a startup founder in my mid-30s balancing a family with two small children, the death of a parent, and the consequent winding-down of our family businesses—one must learn to prioritize and balance, and burn some midnight oil, and do some of the less-important things not-so-well, so that the important ones get the attention they require. It’s a bit harder to see what’s important, and to find the balance, when you’re 19 or 20, and your whole life your identity has revolved around being a successful student.
Who inspires you? Why?
My biggest inspiration is my dad. He had every reason not to be successful. He was born the youngest son of a sharecrop farmer just a month after the 1929 stock market crash. His childhood was defined by the Great Depression, his teen years by World War II, and his adulthood initiated at the age of 17 with the untimely death of his father. He spent the rest of his junior year, and all of his senior year attending school by day and tending the family farm nights and weekends. He started junior college (his older siblings had all attended college and had received degrees), but dropped out after only a few weeks. I used to tease him that he hadn’t attended long enough to get hours, only minutes.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this adversity, he was quite entrepreneurial. After a stint in the Navy during the Korean War (there are even entrepreneurial stories from that timeframe), he began farming, and established a custom harvesting business with his brother-in-law. He turned his experience as a sharecropper into a positive, eventually expanding from a small 200-acre leased farm in 1958, a multi-location farming and ranching enterprise consisting of over 3,000 acres of cropland and 200 head of registered cattle by the 1990s, all of it leased, mostly on a percentage rent basis. At one point in the late 60s or early 70s he did purchase about 80 acres, but branched out into real estate development, converting that investment into a residential development in the early 80s. He also invested heavily in stock in a local community bank in the 80s and early 90s (a time of great uncertainty for the Texas banking industry), ultimately becoming one of its largest shareholders and a senior director of both the bank and holding company by the time an exit opportunity arose in the late 1990s.
In so many ways, the family farm is the ultimate entrepreneurial enterprise, and I had the great fortune to have a front row seat to observe and actively participate in that endeavor for the first 30 or so years of my life. My father passed away 15 years ago, just a little over a year into my switch from attorney to entrepreneur, but I can directly trace many, if not most, of my success to the lessons he taught me, and the advice he gave me, and conversely, the stumbles I’ve had in my entrepreneurial path have mostly come when I strayed from a path enlightened by his example.
What profession other than yours would you like to attempt? Why?
For the last 3 years, I’ve had the good fortune to be a partner in B2B CFO®, the largest firm of its type in the country. The really cool thing about the business advisory profession, much like being the EIR, is that I get to work with entrepreneurs who own all kinds of companies in every different field you might imagine. Other than a really great opportunity to jump into a leadership role at a quickly accelerating startup, there really isn’t a better profession (for me, anyway) than small and middle-market business consulting/advisory.
What is your favorite sound? Least favorite sound?
This is an easy one—favorite sound: laughter. I have never been someone that takes life, or work, or anything else “too” seriously. I have lived by the mantra that when I find myself in a place where I don’t laugh out loud at least once a day, I need to move on and find another place.
Least favorite: nails on a chalkboard (fortunately there aren’t chalkboards much anymore) or the sound when a person bites down on a spoon or fork when eating.
Where would you like to retire?
Jim Collings and Jerry Porras, in Built to Last (great business book BTW, everyone should read it!) laid out the concept of the BHAG—the big, hairy audacious goal, as “...an audacious 10-to-30-year goal to progress towards an envisioned future.” Now that I’m at the point where retirement is squarely in that BHAG timeline, my BHAG retirement goal is summers in Ireland and winters in the Caribbean or South Pacific. I still have some time to create the next Unicorn (in the entrepreneurial world, that’s a startup that rockets to $1 billion in value), so the BHAG could happen. If it doesn’t, I’ve spent my whole life in South Texas, so I’ll probably stay somewhere between the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio.
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