When Axia NetMedia’s stock price was being pounded recently, a poster on a message board had some calming words for shareholders.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got Art at the helm and Art knows what he’s doing.”

Price isn’t your typical e-business executive — he’s over 35 and he doesn’t do interviews while running a treadmill and ordering Mumm’s on his cellphone — but the CEO of Axia seems to command respect with a quiet confidence gleaned from 22 years in the oilpatch.

And forget the champagne.

During this 20 Questions interview at the Axia office, the quiet-spoken, farm-raised Price says he has nothing to celebrate because each success presents another challenge — and he says it while moving the goalposts.

1. You’ve been successful in business. You run one of the fastest-growing Internet companies in Canada. So why don’t you celebrate your triumphs?
“If we win a deal, my feeling is always that it just started the next challenge. In some way, you’d like to celebrate more. But I just see the next challenge.”

2. Let’s go back to the farm at Acme, Alberta, and your boyhood memories?
“The family experience. The family working together to build an Agri business (Sunterra Group). Between school and sports, that was the family goal . . . Soon as you could physically help on the farm, you helped. It was very normal to get up and do a couple hours of chores before school and two or three hours after school.”

3. Was there a childhood dream?
“I don’t think I had a set of dreams in the context of Tiger Woods wanting to be the best golfer. It was more intensity and impact. It was more like a winning proposition opposed to a specific thing.”

4. Is winning everything to you?
“Winning is important in a broader context — being a high performer, having high-performing organizations, having a balanced and value-based family life.”

5. How have you managed to balance professional and family life?
“It’s a little easier now because the children are older (ages 15-20). One of the reasons why I’d determined that I needed a change from the Husky Oil dynamics was because there was a period of time there when I was averaging 60 to 70 hours in the air a month and it happened to coincide with the time my children were young.”

6. Rumour has it you lost a golf game recently to your son Robert?
“It’s OK to lose to your son because it’s a great competition. What’s tough is as you get older your golf ball doesn’t go as far as it used to. Their golf ball goes farther and straighter.”

7. Your first job off the farm was . . . ?
“I managed a swimming pool in Acme. The pay was better than the farm, although the indirect pay on the farm was bigger because we were working almost as a partner in it.”

8. The people that had the most impact on your life . . . ?
“It would have to be my parents and family, colleagues or siblings.”

9. What values did your parents instill in you?
“Honesty. Hard work. Respect for others. Team play. And determination.”

10. What kind of rapport do you strive for with your 600 employees?
“I don’t feel like people work for me. If anything, I work for the rest of the team. In an organization like this, it’s not one person, it’s the group. In that sense, I try to be open and collegial.”

11. By age 32, you rose to the top of Husky Oil. How’d you manage that?
“Early on, the main thing I was doing was trying to make a meaningful impact. So, whenever an opportunity came along which gave me a chance to have more impact than the one that I had, I typically took it. Also, I had an executive team that wasn’t all that caught up in years of experience. They were more opportunity oriented, sink-or-swim style. So that’s how I became the lead executive for Husky at a very young age.”

12. How does an oilpatch CEO end up cyberspace?
“I never wanted to be the CEO of an oil company for the rest of my working life. That was never the plan. I became the CEO of Husky because the opportunity was there and it was a big challenge and it was a lot of fun. I’d always had a personal objective to be involved in a different style of business. I wanted to be in a fast-moving, strategically-challenging business and one that I could have a meaningful ownership in.”

13. How important is integrity in business?
“There are two leagues in business — the big league and the little league. To me, the big league has the character and integrity of a business organization. The little league has a lack of character and integrity. Some of the biggest companies in the world are not in the big league, but I won’t mention names.”

14. What is U.S. networking giant Cisco Systems, a company you’re in partnership with, like to deal with?
“They’re quality people. We don’t have relationships on a standing basis with anybody that doesn’t meet my big-league test.”

15. Bill Gates sits next to you at the shoe-shine stand. What do you say?
“I actually probably wouldn’t say anything to him. I respect what people have accomplished and, unless he said something to me, I probably wouldn’t say anything.”

16. Your house is on fire. You’ve got time to take three possessions with you. Which three?
“As long as the family was safe, I wouldn’t have to go back in for anything.”

17. What’s the best thing about being the CEO of Axia?
“It’s the challenge of building an enterprise that depends totally on people and is in a whole new sector. We’ve got a huge challenge because we are trying to build a global company from an Alberta base in a sector that five years ago people said: ‘What are you talking about?’ ”

18. How often do you check your stock price?
“My son looks at it more than than I do. We’re building an enterprise that the stock market will value over time. If I got preoccupied with the value of the stock in the last five years, we probably would’ve made a mistake.”

19. Is it frustrating when people can’t grasp the company’s concept?
“It hasn’t bothered me because, three to four years ago, we were totally pioneers. It would really bother me if that were the case three years from now. The theme of our annual meeting is clarity. Simply put, we do intelligence online.”

20. Your vision for Axia by 2005?
“We want to be a household name in the net media sector as it relates to knowledge and online services. We want people to say: ‘Oh, Axia, they do knowledge for pilots, or neurological specialists, or high school mathematics, they’re the world’s best online knowledge people.’ ”

IN PROFILE: Art Price

* Born/Raised/Age: Acme, Alberta; 48.
* Family: Wife Debra, son Robert, 15, daughters Kristin, 20, and Lindsay, 18.
* Titles: CEO, Axia NetMedia; director, Sunterra Group, World Wildlife Fund, IPSCO Inc., Rawlco Communications; former CEO, Husky Oil, former vice-president Nova Corp.
* Education: BSc (mechanical engineering), University of Alberta.
* Claim To Fame: Appointed president and CEO of Husky Oil at 32, masterminded sale of Husky's American company at the top of the market in 1984 and negotiated the $1-billion, 86-per-cent sale to Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-shing that turned Husky from a publicly traded to privately owned subsidiary.
* Kicks back by: Playing tennis and golf with his children and burning rubber on a tractor on the family farm at Acme.

THE COMPANY: Axia NetMedia

* Brass: Art Price, CEO; Peter McKeown, CFO.
* Industry: A NetMedia company providing intelligence online with user-controlled, media-rich applications for information exchange and learning. It is developing subscription-based global information centres. For instance, it has a Global Centre For Knowledge In Neurology through a partnership with the Mayo Clinic.
* Products: CD-Roms marketed online include titles such as Urinary Tract Infection In Women ($39.95) and Know Your Common Bird Songs ($59.95).
* Recent Stock Price: $6.00 (year range, $5.00-$18.75).
* Web site: axia.com.
* Phone: 265-0812.
* Address: #600 1040 7th AVE SW.