This interview with Rob Gough, president of Eckim, a marketing company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.  Q. Were you entrepreneurial as a child?  A. I did everything. I sold lemonade. In middle school, I actually got in trouble because I was selling these Airheads candies on the bus. I would buy them at Sam’s Club for next to nothing, and then I would sell them for a quarter each or five for a dollar. I had a little compartment at the bottom of my bag where I would hide my stash of money and my Airheads. Then a teacher nabbed me on the bus and confiscated my Airheads. I had to tell my mom. She made me give every dollar I made from selling them to the church. I learned a pretty valuable lesson.  Q. Any sense of where that entrepreneurial drive came from?  A. My mom has always been an entrepreneur. She’s always done so many different things and tried different things. My mom is the most positive person. Her saying was, “'Can’t never did anything. Make it happen.” I always think that the impossible is possible. For some weird reason, I’m on this mission to prove it. I had cancer. I beat cancer.  Q. Tell me about that.  A. I was in high school, and my big toe swelled up. They thought that it was a sports-related injury. I was in extreme pain. I couldn’t really walk. It finally went away. I went off to college. A year later, the same thing happened at the end of my freshman year. It turns out I had cancer — Ewing’s, which is very rare. It’s pretty aggressive, and typically you have about a 30 percent chance of living. I had just joined a fraternity, and I was getting to know some guys, and then your world changes. But even getting diagnosed, I never thought I was going to die. I went through months of chemo.  Q. How did that experience affect who you are today?  A. I think that everything is possible. A prime example happened about six months ago. My business partner and I are very different. I’m very positive, and he’s very realistic, as he calls it. We were at a conference, and two women from a large retailer were eating lunch at a table. I always like to sit with people I don’t know, and this was a big brand we had wanted to work with for a long time. They had never allowed anybody to have the biggest piece of their business, because they always wanted to do it themselves.  We made small talk, and I waited until two of our two competitors at the table finally left. My business partner said to me: “I know what you’re thinking. You’re never going to get that. This brand has never allowed it and will never allow it. I promise you that.” I was thinking, “Of course they can.” So I started talking to the ladies, and now we have that deal. Nothing is impossible. You just have to figure out a way.  Q. Give me another example.  A. My first business was called Bidaroo. It was a penny auction site. I bootstrapped it, and launched it while I was in school. In our second year in business, we were the main sponsor of a car at the Indy 500. I was this broke college kid, but we had a sponsorship that was worth several million dollars.  Q. How did that happen?  A. My mother introduced me to a gentleman who had a car every year in the race, and I started doing some P.R. work for him. He was going to make me one of the sponsors if he got in the race, but we didn’t make it. Then the next year I was thinking, “I’m going to do my own car.” I figured out that some cars have tons of sponsors, and some have no sponsors. I figured that for the guy who has no sponsors, it looks terrible. So I said to them: “You might as well put somebody up there. It might as well be me.” And it worked.  A. A big one I learned recently is that you get what you pay for. I’m a Midwestern frugal kind of guy, and I have hired people who aren’t the best just because of the cost. But I learned you should pay the extra money and hire the best, and let them be the best. You can’t really build a phenomenal company with mediocre people. There’s an expression — “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”  A. My grandfather always used to tell me: “Decisions are going to be tough. You don’t know which is the right one. But just make a decision. If you’re right 51 percent of the time, you’re right a majority of the time. That’s all you can ask for.”  Q. Let’s talk about hiring.  A. I think education shows that you can complete something, but in hiring I don’t really look so much at education. I look more at who you are as a person, what you’ve done in the past, what you’re interested in and what excites you.  I’m a casual guy. I just talk to them to get a sense of who they are, what they’re about and what’s important to them. Is it family? Is it friends? What makes them tick? If you just have a conversation with them, I think they’ll open up, and most people will just be themselves. Then you can really figure out who the heck they are.  Q. What advice would you give to college seniors who want to be entrepreneurs?  A. As weird as it sounds, I would say work for a company out of school. You’re not going to make a million dollars right away. Just pay your dues, learn as much as you can, especially those first couple years, and then do your own thing. But never lose that drive.  And don’t let money make you less of a risk-taker. I’ve always lived way under my means. I’ve never had to rely on that paycheck, so I can always take the risk of it going away. So if you say, “Hey, I’m not happy. I really want to try something else,” then you have the means to do that.  I’m a risk-taker, and I’ve always had a backup to support that approach. We are a completely self-funded company. I like to grow things quickly and take risks. That’s really what makes me tick. I really love the growth and pushing for it.
The head of a marketing company is out to prove the impossible is possible, whether beating a rare cancer or landing a client thought unattainable.