VIENNA, Austria–One of the stars of TV’s Shark Tank shared a very personal connection with credit unions, and offered some ideas drawn from his life he urged credit unions to not forget.
For Robert Herjavec, speaking to the World Council of Credit Unions’ World CU Conference here, was something of a near-homecoming. He was born in the former Yugoslavia while it was still under communist rule, is Croatian, is now a Canadian citizen, lives in America, and is married to an Australian. He joked that he has much of the world covered.
It is because of the very modest circumstances of his birth that he says he feels such an affinity for credit unions, as his parents were life-long members once they arrived in North America and that there was nothing that could ever have gotten them to give up their membership.
“We came to Canada when I was eight years old. I had grown up in communist Yugoslavia, and my father had been to prison several times,” Herjavec related. “My dad’s dream was to go to America, to have slick hair like Cary Grant, and to buy a Cadillac. That was the dream. We went to Italy and to the United States (consulate), and my father says, ‘We’d like to go to America.’ And they asked, ‘Do you have anything special about you?’ My father didn’t and the U.S. said, ‘We can’t let you in.’ My dad was devastated. But (the U.S. representative) said, ‘If you go down the hall, I hear the Canadians are taking anybody.’ And he went down the hall and they said ‘Sure.’”
Herjavec said his family arrived in Halifax, Canada, on a boat named after Christopher Columbus with a suitcase and $20. They made their way to Toronto and lived in someone’s basement for two years.
No Stranger to Credit Unions
“I have a long history with credit unions, and my mom and dad were members of the Slovenian Credit Union, which is weird, because we are Croatian,” he joked. “But it’s remarkable when you think of what you can achieve in this life regardless of where you come from. My dad loved all that. Most of the world, I think, still looks at America and Canada as the bastion for hope and opportunity. My mom had gone to a technical school and my dad never finished high school. How does somebody who doesn’t understand how the world works get ahead? I don’t think the divide in the world is between the rich and the poor, it’s between those who know how to get things done and those who don’t.
Robert Herjavec on Shark Tank.
“My parents had no experience with credit and no idea of money and no idea of how to start a business,” said Herjavec, who prohibited any pictures being taken of him during his remarks. “And they are thrust into a country where the basis of everything is credit. I always think a big part of their success was joining a credit union, because it seemed very personal to them. A bank was very scary and foreign to them. But joining a credit union seemed warm. When my mom and dad passed away many years ago I went to the credit union and they knew everything about them. I think that in this world where things moving very quickly, when you have a financial institution that is personal, that is very meaningful.”
Herjavec rose from his modest roots to build a technology company that made him wealthy and eventually led him to Canada’s version of Shark Tank, known as The Golden Dragon as it is also known around the world, and then on to the U.S. version, Shark Tank.
The Big Mistake
“The big mistake we see on the show is people are so afraid of the word ‘no’ that they go to family and friends (for idea feedback),” said Herjavec. “We say the role of family and friends is to love you, not to be brutally honest with you. The worst thing you can do in business is get false support. Business doesn’t care about you. It’s a very competitive world that only looks at the value you add.”
Herjavec observed that while the show is broadcast in 40 countries around the world, the only country in which the businesses in which it invests really make money is the U.S. In Herjavec’s case, his investment in a start-up maker of inappropriate and ugly Christmas sweaters has since grown into a company with $17 million in sales.
“The industry that moves the fastest is technology,” said Herjavec, whose current company, Herjavec Group, provides cybersecurity services and does about $200 million in annual sales. “There are roughly five-billion IP addresses in the world. There are roughly three-billion people online. By 2020, there will be six-billion people connected and 300-trillion IP addresses. What that means is that the Internet will cease to exist. The idea of saying ‘I’m online’ will make you old. There is an entire generation of people coming up today who don’t understand the idea of connecting to the Internet, because anything that isn’t connected to the Internet has no value. In five years the Internet will be like electricity; you’ll only notice it when it doesn’t exist.”
Herjavec said that development affects everyone in two ways.
“If you’re only customers are people of my age, you’re good to go with physical locations,” he said. “But there’s an entire generation of people for whom the idea of walking into somewhere seems foreign. It seems painful to them. So, you have to ask how is your business changing to accommodate these people. They want to do it their way and not in the way you tell them.”
Lessons from Shark Tank
The second way that this change affects every credit union is that every one of those access points is a security risk, cautioned Herjavec. “If you have a security breach, your customers can easily leave you and go somewhere else. The world has become very mobile. Customer loyalty doesn’t exist anymore unless it’s value-added and convenient.”
There are some other lessons from Shark Tank that every credit union, and every CU leader, can take away, according to Herjavec, and that has to do with risk and change.
“A lot of the businesses we work with on Shark Tank need to change,” said Herjavec. “It’s difficult to change, because it involves risk and we as human beings want things to stay the same. Risk is very, very hard because it can be really scary. But the one thing we’ve learned is that without risk and innovation, you cease to become relevant. (Unfortunately), people don’t want to go out and take risks, they want to wait for opportunity to come to them, for the train to come to them.”
Chasing the Dream
In Herjavec’s case, he said the biggest risk he has taken was to go on Dancing with the Stars as a contestant, even though he couldn’t dance. But he did end up marrying his dance partner, Kym Johnson, who was with him in Vienna.
For Herjavec, it’s been the achievement of the American/Canadian dream. He reminded credit unions that there are many others among their membership—and those who could very much benefit from joining—who are chasing that same dream.
“People leave all over the world for a better life,” he said. “That’s what credit unions did for my parents and do for so many other immigrants and people at the other end of the scale sometimes. People who don’t have a voice—they want something better in their life.”