To be an entrepreneur is both incredibly rewarding and extremely challenging. This was the message of Roger Berman ’76 when he came to speak at Hamilton this past Wednesday, having been invited by the Entrepreneur Club and the Communications and Development Office.
After graduating from Hamilton, Berman joined his family’s apparel business, where he worked intermittently for 20 years. During this time, he pursued his business degree at New York University. After having worked in his family’s business for nearly two decades, Berman was given an opportunity to implement his business training in the technology industry. He and his partners founded the software company Digital LAVA, fortuitously or perhaps clairvoyantly, choosing to do so at the beginning of the dot com boom. As Berman joked, “I didn’t own a computer. Didn’t know how to use a computer,” yet he was confident in his abilities as an entrepreneur. While neither the dot com bubble nor Digital LAVA lasted long, the experience was an important one for Berman.
After pursuing other technological endeavors, Berman proceeded to return to his roots in the textile business, developing Istanbul Textile in Turkey. Berman traveled extensively, and while he admits it was not always as exotic as envisioned, it was a learning opportunity. The company’s influence spread to Bulgaria as well, where it became the third largest exporter to the United States and remained as such for several years.
In the midst of his entrepreneurial projects, Berman and his wife also found the time to form Miracle Feet, a foundation, which treats children with clubbed feet in developing countries. Berman likened the experience to starting a business and credited his ability to get the foundation running with his work in start-ups.
More recently, Berman formed his own consulting firm, RH Berman Consulting. Despite being an American company, RH Berman’s work has actually gone primarily overseas, particularly to Asian countries. It was largely due to his travel in Asia that Berman was inspired to take on what he claimed will be his last project: building American-style outlet malls in China.
Hand-in-hand with his many successes have been several disappointments, leading Berman to be wary of overinflating the hopes of current students and young people. Throughout his presentation, Berman continued to refer back to an address by Anna Qunidlen he had seen when he attended his son’s Hamilton commencement in 2006 in which she advised students to “throw out the box.” Berman was slightly more cautious in his discussion, explaining “everyone has their box” and we must learn to operate and achieve within the limits of that box. In spite of the challenges, however, Berman expressed his enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, and the way in which it allows you to “feel successful in your own way.”
Berman closed by reminding the students in attendance of the value of their Hamilton education. He has remained friends with many of his Hamilton classmates and noted that all of them seem to be successful-if not financially, then because they had found resolution in their lives. Berman credits the lessons learned at Hamilton in writing and speaking with having helped not only him, but his classmates, achieve success in the real world. Most of all, however, he noted that Hamilton had taught him to listen and it was that skill that helped him become a skilled entrepreneur.
