Physician and entrepreneur Luke Murray, co-founder of the Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall of Fame (EHOF), shares his experience writing “Unbridled Spirit: Lessons In Life and Business From Kentucky’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs.” The new book profiles 19 successful Kentucky entrepreneurs and examines many of the core challenges of starting and running a successful business.
What inspired you to write ‘Unbridled Spirit’?
In the fall of 2016, the co-founders of the Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall of Fame and I were discussing initiatives that advance our mission of raising awareness of the impact entrepreneurship has had in the Bluegrass and encouraging others to pursue similarly ambitious endeavors.
One of our favorite parts about the Kentucky EHOF is that we get to hear the stories of its members and how they got to where they did. While we get snippets of this in our YouTube interview series, called ‘The Founders Series,’ and in year-long mentorship sessions with startup companies through our Awesome Fellowship program, there were huge gaps in their stories that we knew would not get filled in if we didn’t get them for at least an hour and really structure the conversation.
We pitched the idea of a book at a board meeting and nobody shot us down.
What was the process of writing, interviewing and editing by the book’s team?
Once we had a ‘business plan’ of sorts for the book, it helped shape the questions we wanted to ask. It was a mix of both our personal interests and the kinds of questions we most frequently get asked as people deeply involved in startups here in Kentucky.
We got a core number of inductees to agree to interviews and used their names when approaching the rest in the hopes that the participation of these other people would convince them that the project was legitimate, which is exactly what we did when we started the EHOF.
If you could meet with three entrepreneurs over a glass of bourbon or Ale-8-One, whom would you choose and why?
I’ll start with why and then go to whom. First, I’d like to be more generous as a person and as a businessman. I think that W.T. Young and R.J. Corman embodied that in several ways in their life and business, so either one of them would be first.
The second why would be finding a way to surround myself with a variety of things that I’m interested in. I think that both Jim Booth, whose businesses employ more than 40 percent of the people in Martin County, or Ron Geary, whose firm helped turn around numerous companies, which meant he got to be involved in a lot of projects, would be my top picks.
And my last why is the person I think I would like the most personally, and that would be Dr. Lee Todd. I’ve known him for years and he’s just someone whose company I enjoy, no matter the topic.
How do you balance your work as a physician and an entrepreneur?
I have a few relevant answers. The first is, “I don’t.” I was in medical school when Awesome Inc. and EHOF were getting started and took a year off to get them off the ground. But even as I went back and did better in school, I became less and less available and reliable as a business partner to my co-founders.
My second answer is, “I delegate.” It reminds me of something that Lexington Legends owner Alan Stein, who started his entrepreneurial career running a bar, said: “The three best days of my life are the days my kids were born, the day I got married and the day I hired my first employee at that bar.”
The third answer is “I get up early.” Jim Host, founder of Host Communications, the largest college sports marketing agency in the world (he invented the phrase “March Madness”) says this in the book: “I still get up every morning at four o’clock. I was in my office every morning at about five o’clock, routinely working until eight or nine o’clock at night.”
What’s next?
We hope to turn the book’s content into a class on Kentucky Business History and Entrepreneurship for the public school system and to turn the chapters of the audiobook into a podcast series that will be alternated with add-on questions and answers based on those chapters that have been collected from listeners around the state.