Yves Doucet Has Been Through Some Things
Yves Doucet is a battle-tested entrepreneur on a constant journey of self-improvement. He faced challenges that might have stopped many people in their tracks, yet came through it stronger than ever.
Doucet founded Dovico, the company he now leads as CEO. He also helped found the Moncton gaming company Spielo around the same time. Spielo started to grow fast so he joined the team there full-time, hiring his sister Diane to take care of Dovico, a company that focuses on solutions for tracking employee time.
Things were looking good for Doucet. But that trajectory of business success hit a brick wall when he was told to leave Spielo by his business partner at the time. Doucet and another shareholder who was fired sued their former employer when the company was sold shortly after they were let go.
After a lengthy court battle, the judge ruled in favour of the employer and Doucet says he was left with a $3 million debt. He didn’t happen to have $3 million at that moment.
Doucet says he made the decision not to give up.
“A lot of things went through my head, even the darkest things went through my head at the time,” he says. “I started to do more exercise on a daily basis. I started to invest in my reading, my education more, which I had forgotten for the last ten years.”
“I had to decide what to do. Am I going to go bankrupt? Do I have to relaunch? What am I doing? I made my decisions to invest my time in what I thought I could do best,” he says. “I focused on Dovico and investments. Those are the two things I think I have a talent for … It’s paid off well for me. I’m not quite out of the woods yet but I can at least see the light coming at the end of the tunnel.”
Doucet describes the daily routine he got into, which includes getting up first thing every day and spending time exercising, reading, journaling and doing the best work he could.
“Every morning I would wake up and I would invest time in myself,” he says. “Then I would do at least an hour of what I believe was my best work and then I’d give the rest of my day to the rest of the noise. To be able to do that, you have to wake up at 5 a.m. because nobody’s up.”
Doucet says every entrepreneur will face adversity at one point or another and that the trick to dealing with that is to have a solid base and healthy habits to count on.
“If you don’t like falling, don’t start a business,” he says. “It’s through falling that you’re going to learn and you have to appreciate that the falling is important. Your habits, what you do every single day, what you eat, how you exercise, how you take care of yourself and your family and your friends matters more than your business because that’s going to survive your business.”
“The one thing I would say to entrepreneurs is make sure that you invest in yourself first. The one thing that’s going to make your business succeed is going to be the decisions you make; that’s what entrepreneurship is about and you cannot do that if you have the wrong mindset.”
Doucet sees himself not as only an entrepreneur, but a manager and an investor. He explains that entrepreneurial spirit can be encouraged but must ultimately come from a drive that is innate in certain people.
“It’s like anything else you can teach,” he says. “I learned hockey. I can shoot the puck, I can skate. I’ve learned all those skills and I practiced a lot when I was young but I will never have the talent that Wayne Gretzky had. It’s the same thing for anything. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing guitar or if you’re an entrepreneur…certain things can be taught and certain things you have to have talent for.”