Risk & reward: winners of IU's Indiana Entrepreneurial Leadership Awards.

• Author: Hromadka, Erik
• Position: ENTREPRENEURS - Company overview

BOB LAIKIN HAS LEARNED a few lessons in entrepreneurial leadership over the last 20 years as he's led Brightpoint into its initial public offering and highflying days on Wall Street and then through periods of rapid declines, restructuring and rebuilding once again into a global cell phone distributor.

Those lessons and his perseverance were honored at the 2008 Indiana Entrepreneurial Leadership Awards, where Laikin was given a special presentation of the William L. Haeberle Legacy Award. The annual program is organized by the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Indiana University Kelly School of Business, the state of Indiana and Premier Capital Corp. and its top award recognizes those who have made a career of contributions to the state's business community.

Laikin accepted the award, noting that being an entrepreneur means surviving both the ups and downs of the market and others perceptions of your company's success. "Building a company has its great times and some very difficult times," he says. And Laikin has experienced both of those in great measure.

Laikin recalls early success in 1989 when the company did $9 million in sales but couldn't get bank financing "because mobile phones are just a passing fad." Five years later, Brightpoint went public and Laikin says the same bankers were offering him $100 million lines of credit.

As it became obvious that cell phones were changing the telecommunications industry, Brightpoint stock soared and hit a market cap of $1.4 billion by 1998. Laikin was celebrated as Wall Street's youngest and most successful CEO at the time. "From 1994 to 1998, every comment was a positive one," he recalls, remembering how strangers in his hometown of Indianapolis would come up to him in restaurants and share stories of how the investments in Brightpoint stock allowed them to pay off their mortgages and send their children to college.

Not only were such comments rewarding, but they affirmed Laikin's priority of serving his shareholders. "That's who we work for," he says, placing them at the top of a list followed by customers, vendors and employees. But he learned firsthand how quickly markets change. By 2002, the company's value had collapsed to just $10 million.

"We had a wild ride. We learned a lot more from our mistakes than our successes," says Laikin, who jokes now that he got a $500 million education in the process. But at the time, it was no laughing matter.

Laikin admits that it was easy to stop listening to the good advisors he had in the early years, who urged him to focus on managing costs, being careful with credit and closely watch the bottom line. The "new" advice was to focus on rapidly growing revenues and worry about nothing else while large financial institutions pumped money into the company and drove up its stock price.

"You get caught up in that and start thinking this is how businesses should be run," he says, recalling road shows where he would fly into a city, make a quick presentation and have young fund managers agree to buy millions of dollars of Brightpoint stock. "And then one day you wake up and start reading how your company is overvalued."

That's when Laikin says he learned some tough lessons of entrepreneurship ... many of which are being learned by others in the current recession.

"On the way down, most people don't cut their losses early enough and they become too emotionally involved," he says. While that observation is often applied...