When San Diego-based Mark Price was a teenager he wanted to travel the globe and compete on surfing’s world pro circuit. Now at age 55 he travels frequently, surfs (almost) every day and is CEO of the planet’s most forward-thinking surfboard company. And he has Kelly Slater as a business partner. It’s been quite a ride for the Durban boy who’s always been determined to live his dream – and who’s never shied away from taking risks.

 

Growing up, Price assumed he’d be an electrical engineer – but when he arrived at Durban varsity in 1979 he was horrified to discover that the heavy class schedule would leave no time for surfing. The easy-going 18-year-old, who’d first ridden a board five years earlier, was ranked number two on the domestic pro circuit and had dreams of making it big on the international scene – so immediately he did a 180 and switched to a BComm degree, because that timetable would allow him more time in the water.

 

It was a reflex decision that set the course of his career. By the time lectures began in early 1980 Price was invited to compete on the international pro surfing circuit. Within days he’d packed his boards, ditched his studies and was en route to Australia for the start of the pro-surfing circuit. “I decided that life experience was more valuable than graduating,” he says. By the end of that year Price was ranked 17th in the world.

 

That desire – that intrinsic need – to surf has continued to influence the path of Price’s successful 34-year career in business. The sport has always been his priority, and Price has thought nothing of turning down job offers that would have taken him away from the coast, or with companies that don’t have surfing in their DNA.

 

“I always knew that my entire life would be centred around surfing,” he says. “Surfing is my north star, and I have always aimed towards it when making pivotal decisions.”

 

When he set himself up in the States it was Price’s surf roots that landed him a job with Gotcha, at the time a fledgling surfwear company that fellow Durbanite Michael Tomson had started in his Laguna Beach garage. Price’s career – and the company – flourished. Within five years he’d risen from working in customer service to being VP of Marketing and International, and by the end of the 80s Gotcha became the first surf-lifestyle brand to reach $100-million in annual sales.

 

Price was charging – he’d surfed the pro circuit for two years, had cameo appearances in a few surf movies and was, as Beach Culture magazine labelled him, “the consummate surf executive”. Mark Price was living the dream.

 

After leaving Gotcha in 1992, he started Tavarua Surf Company, a clothing business he nurtured for eight years before joining RipCurl USA; then he took the position VP of Marketing at surf lifestyle brand Reef.

 

Life was good: Price had a successful career, a solid marriage and a stable job – until one day, in 2006, when he rode a surfboard shaped in a small factory in Australia. It was made from EPS foam and epoxy resin and included parabolic balsa wood rails, all more environmentally friendly than your standard surfboard materials, and it rocked his world. Within a week Price had resigned from Reef and become one of the original partners in the company that would become Firewire Surfboards. At the time it had no supply chain, no infrastructure, and was making 10 boards a week. To Price, that didn’t matter. He’d calculated the risk of joining the start-up and, he says, he had faith in the product. “Plus as a lifelong surfer, the emotional excitement of being around surfboards and by definition, even closer to surfing, meant that I was hooked.”

 

It wasn’t all endless summer and in the early years there were times when the company could barely break even: there have been many business challenges in essentially reinventing surfboard manufacture and getting an alternative product into the market. “We’re a surf technology company that happens to make surfboards,” explains Price. “Sometimes being too early is almost as bad as being too late.”

 

Over the past 10 years, however, Firewire has thrived. From a team of 12 the company now employs 225 people; surfboard sales rival those of the company’s more established global competitors and, on Christmas Eve 2014, surf legend Kelly Slater signed on as a major investor in the company.

 

With surfing his north star, Price has carved a life that is true to himself, that keeps him happy and healthy, and that allows him to thrive – and along his 34-year journey from customer service rookie to CEO of Firewire, he has learnt some valuable lessons along the way. How can you live the life you dream of, and build a successful career around your passion? This, says Price, is his advice:

 

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1/ If you combine work with play…

 

Follow your passion and honour it, and things will work out in the long run. But you’ve got to keep the faith as that timeline for each person is different.

 

If your job and what you’re passionate about are closely linked, they will feed off each other. When your work and play are so closely aligned, true passion is automatic and so nurturing it does not have to be a “management objective”. It’s innate and authentic.

 

Prioritise achieving a work and personal life balance. If you blindly follow career opportunities without regard for that balance, you will never achieve it. You need to define, or perhaps redefine, “getting ahead” around that objective – which is difficult to do in our overly material world.

 

When you really go for it while surfing a wave, you maximize the experience. However, given the power of the ocean, you also have to match that aggression with a degree of humility in some circumstances. Success in business requires a balance between assertiveness and humility – otherwise you’ll soon find yourself a leader without any followers.

 

 

2/ Be the master of your time

 

Use your 20s to decide what you want to do. If the traditional school-study-work route isn’t your vibe, that’s okay. Know what you want and forge a path that works for you. I didn’t finish my university degree because I chose life experience (and the opportunity to surf) over formal education – and that’s not held me back in any way.

 

If you’re 25 and still unsure of what you want to do, give yourself a break and keep exploring. If you’re on the right track, however, be careful about taking time out as you could derail your progress.

 

Use your 30s to become an expert at it and position yourself for future success.

 

Spend your 40s, 50s and beyond reaping the financial rewards.

 

Work always fills the time allotted to it – don’t let meetings meander.

 

Keep your body strong. Always work out in the morning – you never know what is going to happen later in the day. Always travel with some bare essential good nutrition. And know that as you get older, flexibility is more important than strength.

 

Remember to stop and smell the roses. I don’t do that often enough, but I do try to make sure I never forget what they smell like.

 

 

3/ Do your homework

 

When you are starting out in your career, it is far more important to join the right company in any capacity that you can, than it is to take the job description you want at the wrong company. A company that’s going places will create opportunities, and companies generally prefer to hire from within – so look for one you admire and find a way to get in that door.

 

Read voraciously – because the right books will further your education. I have always been an avid reader and that, combined with global travels at a young age, was instrumental in shaping my world view.

 

Never try and remember anything – make a note immediately.

 

Follow up. This is the single most important thing to get right. If you say you are going to do something make sure you do it, and if you ask someone else to do something, make sure they did it.

 

Find yourself a mentor. A mentor allows you to break out of the relatively narrow learning curve that your specific job description offers, and that exposes you to a broader cross-section of business experience. There is so much to learn.

 

Surround yourself with people who challenge you, and then let them.

 

The most important thing in the world is someone else’s time – don’t waste it.

 

Keep your eyes and ears open. It is less important to set specific career goals than it is to pay very close attention to everything going on around you along the way. Learn to recognize opportunities that present themselves – and take them.

 

Make sure you at least have a working knowledge of Finance. Product, Sales and Marketing are probably more interesting areas, but there is always a financial component to strategic and tactical decisions – and even many creative ones. Try and balance your left and right brain strengths and you won’t regret it.

 

Always get the big picture right. The right strategy poorly executed still has a chance of success, while the wrong strategy flawless executed will surely fail. That said, obviously try and get both strategy and tactics right.

 

 

4/ Take those risks

 

Your gut feel is seldom wrong – learn to not only trust it, but to actually hear it. When there are tough decisions to make I draw on gut feel combined with experience, and game out various scenarios and consequences to determine the best outcome.

 

Take big decisions on in a studied but timely manner. They seldom get easier with procrastination and your range of options usually shrinks over time.

 

It’s smart management to actually look for battles to lose in order to win the war.

 

Be decisive. I prefer to make 10 in a day and risk one being wrong, than to only make five and be sure all of them are right. You can correct mistakes, and the pace of business today requires prompt action.

 

 

5/ If you get involved with a start-up…

 

Don’t take a knife to a gunfight. You need a unique product or service, passion and funding. I learnt this through my start-up, Tavarua, which I liquidated after eight years. It was under-funded from day one and that was our ultimate undoing, despite all the sweat equity that went into it.

 

Before you join a start-up get a sense of the financial resources at their disposal. Inevitably they take much longer to break even, and it costs far more than planned to get there. A very high percentage of start-ups fail, often due to lack of cash.

 

Make sure there is upside for you if the company makes it: there should be a reward for the risk you take and, particularly if you’re taking a pay cut, the opportunity cost of lost wages in the short term.

 

Negotiate a reasonable severance in advance in case they have to lay you off, especially if you are leaving a stable position to join. Start-ups are volatile by nature so you could lose your job even if the company does not fail.

 

If you want to get a product out there, make sure you bring a tangible value-add to the market. You’ll need funding to hang in there for far longer than you think it will take to succeed – and if possible have reserve funding in place at the start. And you’d better bring outsized tenacity to the table. Discipline is also vital – in the long run the business you turn down is often more important than the business that you take on.

 

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