Most entrepreneurs will slow the pace once they crank out their first home run.

Not Evan Chrapko.

Four years after selling DocSpace Co. for $568 million US to Critical Path in a stunning blockbuster dot-com deal, the supercharged Edmonton entrepreneur continues to set a breakneck pace as he swings for the fences with his second big venture, Time Industrial, a company that helps industrial clients track and manage costs.

But tracking the 38-year-old, who hails from an Alberta hog farm, for an interview is like chasing greased pigs in slop.

Jack Dagley photo, Business Edge
Farm upbringing was 150 per cent of his success, says Evan Chrapko.

Jack Dagley photo, Business Edge
Farm upbringing was 150 per cent of his success, says Evan Chrapko.

Finally, at a time when most CEOs are heading home for dinner, the CEO of Time Industrial answers his cellphone. He is on a business trip en route from the Edmonton home office to Fort McMurray.

Is he driving his Diablo Lambourghini sports car?

Not a chance.

It’s a Neon rental.

And, true to form, Chrapko’s got the pedal to the metal. 1. When you reflect on your success in business, how do you think your farm upbringing may have been beneficial?

“One hundred and fifty per cent. On the farm, you learn lessons like, ‘You reap what you sow.’ Ideas like ‘No risk, no reward’ are kind of ingrained in the brainstem. You learn that it’s not enough to work smart. Working smart’s a given. But you also have to work long and hard.”

2. What are some of the values that your parents taught you?

“Like lots of farm families, ethics was a given in our family although it’s not too fashionable nowadays. Now ethics are being legislated. Growing up where and how we did without terribly much, you’re relying on your wits and your fellow man and the people who came before you. Basically, the message was to leave the world a better place than you found it. We (children) were assigned our own animals, like sows and lambs, and our own pieces of land and we were expected to shepherd those things or be good stewards of our own little subset of what was on the farm. That taught you at an early age to learn the value of time and money. My boyhood dream was to end up being half the parent that my parents were.”

3. To what do you attribute the success with the rapid growth of your previous company DocSpace and subsequent sale of that company?

“Pure, raw, unadulterated sacrifice. It was sacrifice in terms of the pursuit of pleasures and recreations. Besides that sacrifice, we had to be really, really disciplined so we would do a sensible business. There were some suggestions from investors about how to spend their money that were nothing short of ludicrous and dangerous. The fortitude to hold to sensible stuff that we learned on the farm was tested. It’s funny that important lessons that made us successful were learned a decade earlier in a place that had no relationship to the Internet whatsoever.”

4. How did the blockbuster deal with Critical Path come to fruition?

“We were actually pursuing an IPO (initial public offering) but Shane (Evan’s brother) had dealings with the other party (Critical Path) and eventually introduced the idea to them. They made us an offer that we couldn’t refuse. What isn’t really well known about DocSpace is that we had declined three other offers prior to that. The first offer came two months after our startup for $12 million, the next one was in our sixth month for $24 million, and in the 12th month there was a $75-million offer. What people didn’t know is that we were living in near-abject poverty while declining those offers. We were living in low-income housing in the city of Toronto and growing a vegetable garden out back to augment our diet of Kraft dinner.”

5. How difficult was it to spurn those offers?

“We did it because we knew we were worth more than that. What I was saying to the company and the key members is that if we were worth a dollar we were worth $200 million, and that DocSpace deserves to cover the planet.”

6. At the time of the DocSpace sale, did you sense that tech stocks were riding a dangerous bubble?

“We did. I talked about it. I was laughed out of a conference when I suggested the Nasdaq would sink as low as 1,500 at a time when it was over 5,000. People would say, ‘You’re being kind of silly.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’”

7. How did your personal windfall ($75 million US) from the sale affect your lifestyle?

“What we’re focusing on is sensible gratuities. Yeah, there were toys (Evan and brother Shane bought twin Diablo Lambourghinis). We had a 20-year plan in place and DocSpace was only the first three years of the plan, so we just continued to execute on the plan. I know that’s a boring answer.”

8. Do you think that Time Industrial can become as big as DocSpace when it was sold?

“I think it’s at least 10 times bigger than DocSpace. Not right now, but whenever some sensible amount has passed, be it three years or 10 years.”

9. What’s the key to marketing Time Industrial’s technologies for tracking costs of capital expansions or maintenance projects on a real-time basis?

“It’s looking for people who are serious about controlling the money they spend on contractors. They’re either visionaries open to a new way of tracking the spending or, if they’re not visionaries, they’re people who have had a really bad experience in terms of cost overruns and have tried the standard solutions like SAP or PeopleSoft. If they’ve spent a lot of money – tens or hundreds of millions of dollars – on SAP, the big German software company, they’re ripe candidates for us. We keep hearing about CFOs (chief financial officers) and others slapping their heads and saying, ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’ And we hear project managers slapping their CFOs, saying, ‘Why didn’t you get me this sooner?’ We’re the only ones doing this now. I predict that in a few years we’ll have a few competitors, but it’s going to take a long time for anyone to figure out what we’re doing and how, I think.”

10. Where’s the hot market for your technologies?

“We’re focused on oil refineries, petrochemical companies and power companies. About 95 per cent of our revenue is in the U.S. The hot market is in a small collection of people who understand that you can not use SAP to do what we do and you can’t cobble together enough Excel spreadsheets to even come close to what it is that we do. Those two points are absolutely fundamental to understanding what we do. I see Time Industrial existing in any setting where owners hire contractors to do the work and I see it becoming the Visa of transactions. Time Industrial will be looked at as the single source that provides the truth about what happens on the jobsite.”

11. What was your revenue last year?

“As a private company, we keep that information private. What I can tell you is that we tripled our prior year’s revenue and we look set to triple or quadruple our revenue again this year. But I’m never satisfied. (Laughing) And I never will be.”

12. Are you profitable?

“We are always in the middle of raising financing. How’s that for an answer? The thing we have to do is so massive that we’ll never be big enough in my books as I look at the mission before us.”

13. Do you plan to take the company public?

“I think what is likely is that we’ll do an IPO or be sold. What we’re really emphasizing is that we’re building toward our own independence as we’ve done before. If someone makes you an offer that you can’t refuse, then you may really need to accept it for the benefit of the customer and the employees. Through all the dot-com carnage and of all the tens of thousands of companies out there that have failed or disappeared, DocSpace is one of the few that has remained viable and healthy.

“So, a sale of Time Industrial would be based on the issue of whether or not the customers are going to have their services interrupted and how the employees are treated.”

14. What do you think is unique about your entrepreneurial style?

“I think it’s my intensity. Because of that, you end up not being well liked by 75 per cent of the people at any given time, but that changes depending on what issue you’re taking a stand on. I get 25 ideas a day and I can’t execute on all of them.”

15. Do you lose sleep over what people think of you?

“No, because I tend to make them (employees) all very, very happy in the end. If they remain unhappy, I see that as their issue. If they’re with the team, looking at the big picture and contributing to the cause, then, believe me, they end up very happy. I now have people coming back to me and wondering if there’s a spot for them at Time Industrial where they can rejoin the fervour and the vision and the mission of the next thing. If at all possible, don’t burn the bridge because it’ll end up being good for everyone in the long run. Life’s too short for that.”

16. What’s it like being the boss of your brother and sister (Time Industrial managers Shane and Gina Xina)?

“Sometimes, I’m the employee of my sister and my brother, and other times, depending on the issue, I am the boss. It (the relationship) is fluid and I think that’s what makes it strong. The good thing about it is that they’re people who are going to tell you the way it is and not play games. You need that perspective.”

17. What’s your definition of good corporate governance?

“Don’t do something that would make your grandmother ashamed of you or that you would be ashamed to see on the front page of the New York Times. I’m horrified by the scandals that we’ve seen and it’s sad because everyone gets painted with the black brush. Nothing, nothing, not any kind of punishment you could imagine, would I find harsh or degrading enough for these people. It’s almost anti-society or anti-civilization.”

18. What would you like to see done about improving corporate governance in Canada?

“I’d like to see a national securities regime as opposed to this shattered provincial hodgepodge of regulators. I’d like to see meaningful and real jail terms and enforcement rather than the joke we have now, where the punishment for white-collar crime is much less severe than other crime. I’m not saying other criminals should be treated more lightly, but white-collar criminals need to be treated more severely. It shouldn’t matter that their crime is clean, non-bloody and not physical.”

19. What’s your best advice for a young entrepreneur?

“You’ve got to be world-class, focused and intense. Everybody else with an opinion needs to be listened to, but their advice can’t all be followed. The most rewarding part of my job is development of people and watching individuals rise up to challenges they sometimes didn’t think they had in them. Empowering other people is something that constantly re-energizes me.”

20. Name one thing you need to do to be a better CEO?

“Slow down. But I don’t think I will.”