The best of lessons

For Tyler Gompf, recently completing an entrepreneurial rite of passage produced a sizable chunk of change, and something potentially more valuable: self-awareness.

Gompf co-founded customer-service feedback facilitator Tell Us About Us Inc. in 1997 with this modest ambition: to attract paying customers. But high growth came quickly to the Winnipeg-based company. Within 11 years, Tell Us About Us was serving 30,000 retail and foodservice outlets.

That success brought the firm to a crossroads. “It was time to seek investment, or join in with a group that could give us the tools to get to the next level,” Gompf says.

He and his partners, Scott Griffith, Brent Stevenson and brother Kirby Gompf, liked the latter option. In early 2010, they began their search for a buyer. Four legitimate suitors surfaced over the next year, but the winning offer came from Boulder, Colo.-based Market Force Information Inc. The sale (worth an undisclosed amount) closed this past March, and the four partners stayed on under management contracts.

But going from boss to employee worked well for everyone except Gompf. So, when his agreement expired in September, he left the firm. Which brings us to Gompf’s buoyant state. Building and selling a business has steeled his confidence in his business acumen. He now has the financial wherewithal to pursue a new venture that really excites him—ideally, one involving another cycle of building and selling.

And he has learned what truly gives him satisfaction: creating the frameworks that support fast-growing companies. “I think I was born with the entrepreneurship gene, but I didn’t really understand that before selling the business,” he says. “It has made me realize that this is who I am.”