What Business Would You Start?

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"I do think you've got to believe in what you're doing. There has to be somebody who's passionate about the product or the service, and it certainly helps if it's the people who are in charge of the enterprise, whether it's a new company, an old company, an entrepreneurial company, whatever."

THINK DEMOGRAPHICS

Name: Gary Hoover
Age: 50
Location: Austin
Background: Founder of Bookstop Inc. (now part of Barnes & Noble), the nation's first book superstore chain; TravelFest Superstores (now defunct), a travel-and-leisure superstore chain; and Hoover's Inc., the company behind Hoover's Online, an electronic distributor of information on companies and industries; and author of Hoover's Vision: Original Thinking for Business Success

"I think it's real important to separate two questions here: One is, What business should you start? And the other is, What business should I start? Because they're very different questions. I think a critical part of deciding what kind of business to start is to look at your own skills and passions and to look at where you stand in time and space in history and geography, and from those, create your own enterprise. If you don't love what you're doing, your odds of success are very, very slim. These people that go through a formulaic or mechanical approach -- I meet M.B.A.'s who say, well, they're trying to figure out which industry is going to go fastest and all that. If it's only that, it's not going to work.

"Four of the industries that I think look most exciting over the next 20 to 30 years are financial services, health services and health-related things, travel, and education. And all four are really based on the continuing aging of the baby boomers. I keep a list of business ideas. Right now there are about 70 ideas on it. It's a very broad range. Hopefully, not a day goes by that I'm not investigating opportunities and passions.

"Now, it might surprise you that I'm deliberately not mentioning technology as an opportunity area. The thing about technology is that, by definition, advancements will die off. Yesterday's high-tech center is today's industrial graveyard. It's a challenge to build businesses that last for a long time in technology. Xerox, Digital Equipment -- you can go on and on. So it's easier to build a lasting business if you make soap or run a retail chain.

"Instead, the first thing I point to is banking. I think banking is a wonderful opportunity for people who want to go in and revolutionize it because a big chunk of it is just dead in the water. The big banks have gotten so removed from their customers and focused on big mergers, which don't do anybody any good. The only change for customers is that they go from being a 6-digit number to being a 14-digit number. And it's just awful.

"But when I see somebody doing something dramatic in the human-gene project and all that, I can say, Hey, you're in the right place. But it ain't going to be me. I don't have a passion for it. I pass out at the sight of a needle! The health-services industry is ripe with opportunity. It's a mess, just like the auto industry was in 1921. It's going to be 10 times as big as it is today. And where there are problems and where there are challenges, there are opportunities. There's just a gold mine there.

"I'd also look at travel and education. As the baby boom ages, these people are going to have all this time and all this money. And a lot of them are workaholics, and they're going to find out they have no hobbies or interests. After a life of accounting and marketing and lawyering and all that, a lot of them are going to say, 'Well, I saw that Ken Burns special on the Civil War, and it might be kind of neat to go down and look at Gettysburg.' They'll realize that there's more to life.

"What I personally am interested in is bringing liberal-arts education on a for-profit basis to adults who aren't pursuing a degree. What I'm thinking about is in-person, face-to-face learning. It might be in a classroom; it might be at a resort; it might be on a cruise ship; it might be in Florence or Cairo; it might be in a big New York City hotel; it might be out here in the hills west of Austin or in Palm Springs or La Jolla. The idea is, get great teachers together with groups of people who have taken their vacation time or their retirement time and said, 'I'm going to spend 3 to 14 days learning one, two, or three subjects.'

"To me the opportunity is really focused on the baby-boomer demographics. A Goldman Sachs partner said to me, 'Well, all investing essentially is demographics.' And I think he's right. I spend a lot of time analyzing an opportunity. So I'm a big numbers guy.

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