Young Entrepreneur
Billy Hennessey Qwatro RoyalPak Etobicoke
In 1997, RoyalPak was started as an 8,000-square-foot, empty building. Today, Billy Hennessey leads the Qwatro RoyalPak team, manufacturing innovative, environmentally friendly cleaning products for the hospitality, food plant, health-care, retail, janitorial and automotive markets in a 20,000-square-foot plant that includes a stateof-the-art lab. Hennessey has acquired two separate chemical manufacturers in two years RoyalPak and Qwatro and consolidated operations. The consolidated company has 600-plus chemical formulas and supplies customers all over North America including Toronto icons CN Tower, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Centre Island and Trump Tower. Are entrepreneurs born or made? Entrepreneurs are made. It’s a mindset. It’s a whole lot easier to be in that mindset if you start on your own right out of high school or university. Learning to put food on the table for yourself is a big step. What would you say are the top skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur? All successful entrepreneurs are bright and hard working. Only some have the risk tolerance to make it big. How important have good employees been to your success? Good employees are key. Motivating them and giving them autonomy is a gamechanger. How can Canada support a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem? Entrepreneurs must hang together or surely we will hang separately. We need to support each other. I’d like to see Canada as a whole more accepting of failure. I’d like to see more government funding for a broader range of success stories, not just startups. Looking back, what is one thing that you would do differently, professionally speaking? My only regrets are wishing I had taken bigger risks. What motivates you? Power and ambition. How do you define success? The bigger the better! My industry is very mature. In the next 10 years, we intend to grow through acquisition. Five years from now, I would like to diversify and get into another industry, once we’ve reached $100 million in sales in the chemical space. I want to begin to build an empire that is one of Canada’s largest private employers, focusing on three or four different industries and raising boatloads of money for charity.
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EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2014