Jack Goeken: serial entrepreneur

June 18, 2001

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

You never know who’s in the seat next to you, but you might learn something from them.

I was about to watch a presentation at Spring COMDEX, the technology industry trade show held each April in Chicago, when I caught the eye of the fellow in the seat in front of me. The man happened to turn around, so I struck up a conversation.

“So, what do you do?” I asked politely.

“I started MCI,” he said.

Ummm ... say that again?

“I started MCI,” he said, and handed me a COMDEX brochure showing he was being honored for his achievements.

As it turned out, my conversation companion was Jack Goeken, the minister’s son who never went to college but started MCI, FTD Mercury Network, Airfone and In-Flight Phone. He still actively pursues entrepreneurship at Goeken Group, a Naperville, Ill. holding company. He’s even earned two honorary doctorate degrees.

With the dot-com crash and start-ups falling out of vogue, it seemed poetic to bump into Goeken. Here was a guywho, in 1963 at age 33, had the idea of stringing together microwave towers every 25 miles from Chicago to St. Louis to form a communications network competitive to the Bell monopoly—a real-life, modern-day Don Quixote who tilted at windmills, only this guy won. He was a manufacturer’s rep successfully selling two-way radios for General Electric when he saw an opportunity: a market helping barge operators and truckers traveling between Chicago and St. Louis keep in touch with home base. He was the only one of the five original founders of MCI to stick it out in the fight with AT&T, and last year, the company he created reported annual revenues of $22.8 billion and a market capitalization recently of $51 billion. (MCI merged with Worldcom in 1998.)

Here was Jack Goeken, who’d sprung from Joliet, Ill., far from Silicon Valley. Somehow, I thought Goeken might have the silver bullet, a restorative tonic for any depressed or demoralized technology marketersor entrepreneurs suffering from dot-com day-after syndrome. But as it turned out, Goeken had much more to offer than a pep talk.

Shame on the leaders of the failed start-ups of the past 24 months who didn’t come to Jack for advice before they began their ventures.

“It wasn’t the technology,” Goeken told me in an interview that followed our meeting. “Where you make your money is selling something that people want to buy.”

It’s about identifying and filling that need, and it’sabout good business sense. It’s about sticking with it.

“Nobody could tell us how much money it was going to take to fight AT&T and win,” Goeken said.

The five entrepreneurs initially put up $600 each to pick a fight for a telecommunications license. The fight would ultimately cost $21 million, Goeken reported— “I’d spend 90% of my time out raising money and 10% coming up with the stuff to fight AT&T,” he said—but it clearly was worth it.

Then there’s passion and a deep belief in what you’re doing.

“This is America. Nobody gave AT&T a monopoly; they created it themselves,” said Goeken, still indignant nearly 38 years after the fight began.

They say entrepreneurs are born, not made, but listening to Goeken, I think it must be a little of both. He clearly learned his entrepreneurial values at his father’s knee.

“My father was a minister at the First Lutheran Church of Joliet. He was at the same church for 46 years. He was ordained there, and he retired there,” Goeken said. “He never went on vacation, and people teased him: ‘You’re a workaholic.’ He told me, ‘Jack, what if I’m gone, and somebody dies? The family doesn’t want a strange minister coming in offering comfort.’ ”

I got the sense that Goeken’s values about fair play, which fueled his fight against AT&T, must have been forged listening to the sermons his father gave each Sunday.

Though the younger Goeken’s pursuits have been worldlier than his father’s, he applied the same 24/7 approach, the same degree of commitment, energy and passion to his entrepreneurship. Listening to Goeken, you get a feeling that entrepreneurship is almost a spiritual pursuit—a trait many successful entrepreneurs share.

And he’s still at it.

“It’s hard to break a bad habit,” he joked. “But ... I wish I had a thousand lifetimes to do all the things I’d like to do. The opportunities are unlimited. Most people don’t look at the opportunities and see how they can make something happen.”

As our conversation wound up, Goeken added, “You never want to kid yourself that everything’s going to be easy, because then you’re going to get discouraged.”

Good words of advice for today’s entrepreneurs who wonder if they should stick with it. Judging by Jack Goeken’s track record, it’s worth it

Michael Krauss is a partner with DiamondCluster International in Chicago.
He can be reached at news@ama.org.