Risking It: An Intersection of Faith & Work
Tim Hoerr
Author Bio
Tim Hoerr is the CEO of Serra Ventures, a professional services firm offering assistance with business strategy, capital formation, and organization development. He serves as the Managing Partner of Serra Capital, the division of the company providing funding to seed and emerging stage high tech companies. He is also the Managing Member of a Jimmy John’s franchise operating in central Texas.
A partner and consultant for 15 years with RSM McGladrey, an international accounting and consulting firm (both in Illinois and San Diego), Tim subsequently served as president of SourceGear (a software firm), and then as Co-Founder and CEO of iCyt, a bioscience instrument firm which garnered numerous technology and business awards for their innovations. The company was acquired by Sony Corporation in 2009, the same year Tim won the Entrepreneurial Excellence in Management Award at the Innovation Celebration — an honor recognizing exceptional entrepreneurial talent bestowed by the University of Illinois.
Having previously authored “Thank God It’s Monday! A Toolkit for Aligning Your Lifevision and Your Work” (Everywhere Press, 1998), Tim is keenly dedicated to sharing his career-related insights with the goal of encouraging and equipping fellow Christians who are similarly seeking to integrate their faith into their own work life.
Over his three decades in the business arena, Tim has actively sought to boldly implement this key principle into every aspect of his business endeavors, and candidly shares his failures as well as his successes with businesspeople and entrepreneurs who are building today’s high performance organizations.
Description
One Christian business man’s warts n’ all tale…from lessons learned early on in his family’s business, to a laudable stint in the senior ranks of corporate America, to entrepreneurial adventures as well as misadventures — all humorously and engagingly shared amidst the backdrop of Tim Hoerr’s unshakable Christian faith, a key to his growth into the seasoned and now-successful serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist he’s become.
Tim’s primary goal in opening up his own life story from the business trenches is to inspire and provide practical encouragement to fellow Believers who are struggling with how to fully integrate their walk with Jesus into their secular work lives. Told with candor and often self-effacing, his hard-won wisdom and insights are both practical as well as profound. As a result, Risking It offers actionable guidance to those just getting underway in their career in addition to those who have decades of work life behind or in front of them.
With one foot in Illinois and one in southern California, Tim Hoerr’s orientation refreshingly embraces both Midwestern as well as more progressive west coast values. While decisively successful in worldly terms these days, his personal as well as career foundation is steadfastly based upon God’s Word from which he derives his perfect example and inspiration — Jesus Christ. Tim’s ultimate goal is that his life – professionally as well as personally – might always glorify Him.
His collaborator on the book is his daughter, Alyssa Kolb, who serves as Serra Ventures’ Marketing and Communications Director. She’s a graduate from the University of Illinois (undergrad) and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology (masters). Alyssa has performed a variety of functions since joining the firm in 2009, and has extensive training and background in the field of Industrial Organizational Psychology, essentially how human factors influence people’s behavior and interactions within organizations.
She is the oldest of Tim’s three daughters (and he could not be more proud!). A committed family man, Tim has enjoyed a long and happy marriage to his wife, Toni, and they’ve been blessed with three now-grown children.
Book excerpt
IT WAS ABOUT 5:45 P.M. ON A TUESDAY, AND I WAS
EXHAUSTED. It had been a long day, and I was ending it by having
a staring contest with my computer. I was hanging in there, though my
eyes were glazing over.
“Hey, Tim, you okay?” Bob Harrington said as he strolled into my
office. Bob was one of my brightest team members—a manager over the
human resources consulting group and an expert in compensation consulting.
“You look sort of…”
“Comatose?” I said, finally managing to avert my eyes from my computer.
“I think I am. Too many projects. Hard to keep them all straight
in my head.”
“Funny thing, being in the management consulting business. It’s
kind of like running a restaurant,” Bob said as he plopped down in a
chair.
“Oh, really?” I said. “Enlighten me.” I could think of a lot of things
that this business was like, but a restaurant wasn’t one of them.
“Think of it this way,” Bob said. “Our clients are like customers at
the restaurant. They’ve come to us with very specific expectations and
needs. Of course, everyone wants something slightly different. They’ve
placed their orders, and as far as they are concerned, they should be our
top priority. Never mind that we’re serving fifteen different parties at the
same time. Everybody likes to think they’re number one in the queue.”
I shrugged and nodded. “That’s probably why I’m comatose right
now. Lots of demands. Tough problems to solve. And everyone wants
their solution now.”
Bob headed off down the hall and I shut off my computer and
thought about the only problem I really wanted to solve: what’s for dinner.
But before I went home, I thought about the intensity of our consulting
work. It demanded that we find ways to renew “on the fly,”
catching little respites here and there. I stood and looked out my window
and across Fox Drive. I was struck by the soothing scene in front on
me—a winding walking trail surrounded by trees and shrubbery, covered
with a half inch of freshly fallen snow. The street and parking lot
glistened with whiteness.
It was late November, 1994, and winter seemed to have arrived
though the calendar indicated it was not official for another four weeks
or so. Yes, I thought. Our work is really challenging and exhausting—
but it’s also very rewarding. We get to make a real difference for our
clients, solving very challenging problems. Not only that, I get to do it
with people like Bob, Tony, Kevin, Scott, Sherry, Thane and Kim—just
a terrific team of talented pros. 1994 had been perhaps the most productive
and fruitful year for our consulting team. We seemed to really
be hitting stride.
My moment of quiet reflection was interrupted by the phone ringing.
The caller ID showed an unfamiliar number, a 619 area code.
