Smart Business Magazine, October 2013

Monte Carlo 2013 Overcoming Challenges BY LEE KOURY LKOURY@ SBNONLINE COM M onte Carlo has seen a lot of risk takers in its day but not many have been like those who attended the recent EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year conference These risk takers may use the term gamble every now and then but they more often use their willingness to take a risk as a way to overcome the challenges of running a business The collection of the worlds most accomplished entrepreneurs at the conference were innovators futurists turnaround specialists and problem solvers From this highly qualified group of leaders comes some quality insights into rising above the challenges that could have blocked the success they envisioned for themselves and their companies FEATURE EY WORLD ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR Cost pressures are always high What we need to make sure we do is continue to innovate our audit services and all our services to make sure we make maximum use of technology We also need to make sure we take advantage of both time zone arbitrage and cost arbitrage where talent zones are present JIM TURLEY RETIRED GLOBAL CHAIRMAN AND CEO EY In our country our main challenges are new regulations and new financial reforms that we have to comply with We are getting together for meetings inside the bank in different areas to study each one of the reforms Also at the Association of Banking Industry in Mexico we have an association of the 44 authorized banks where we get together in different commissions to make sure that we can modify some of the new policies that are going to come out later this year LORENZO BARRERA SEGOVIA FOUNDER AND CEO BANCO BASE ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR 2012 MEXICO As a startup you go to the specialty stores first Thats how you start and you grow and once you reach a certain level then you go to the big retailers I didnt want to do that I wanted to go to the big retailers and be in the regular dairy isle That was a crazy idea and nobody thought that would go but at least we tried When we tried we convinced one retailer in New York The result from that was we were able to expand to a couple of other retailers After the second or third customer that we had success with for our yogurt I knew it wasnt going to be about selling it was about making enough HAMDI ULUKAYA FOUNDER PRESIDENT AND CEO CHOBANI INC ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR 2012 UNITED STATES 2013 WORLD ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR The drive to always want to get better and do more is what keeps me going Its hard for me to turn it off and say Thats great Im always thinking about tomorrow You cant take things for granted in our business COREY SHAPOFF PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER SME ENTERTAINMENT GROUP One of the main challenges is how to train the talent we have in Latin America Latin America has 600 million people and 1 million IT workers The next step is to train more people and convince people to adopt technology as a career If you provide the proper entrepreneurial environment to that maybe the next Google or Facebook can come from Latin America MARTIN MIGOYA CEO GLOBANT ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR 2012 ARGENTINA One of the biggest challenges the industry faces is trying to figure out what the impact of the natural gas shale gas revolution is going to have on us Suddenly there is cheap natural gas which is going to be more challenging for renewable projects to compete with Rather than looking at it as an eitheror world you have to look at how the two technologies can work together JIM DAVIS PRESIDENT CHEVRON ENERGY SOLUTIONS