Rick Sontag learned to apply his three-day rule whenever he got fired giving himself only 72 hours to feel sorry for himself before he got up and got back into action.
And Sontag, who last week gave $1 million to endow a program to aid budding entrepreneurs at the University of Nevada, Reno, says the three times that he got fired early in his career toughened him up for his later successes.
Sontag, who earned a master's degree in physics at UNR in 1966, found success as the founder of Unison Industries, a manufacturer of aviation technology that he sold to General Electric in 2002.
But before he built that company to $200 million in annual sales and nearly 1,500 employees at six locations around the country, Sontag had a resume that looked like trouble despite a master's degree in business from Harvard.
"I think I probably set a record for a Harvard Business School graduate," he joked with students at UNR last week. "I think I was the only graduate who stood in the unemployment line in three different states. So, I started thinking that maybe I didn't do too well working for other people and needed to go into business for myself."
"At the time, it was devastating," Sontag recalled later during his visit to UNR. "But over time, it helped to develop my ability to be resilient, to recover. It taught me a lot about myself."
He learned a lot about resiliency when he went into business for himself.
In 1980, he bought a little manufacturer of aircraft magnetos taking on nearly $8 million in personally guaranteed debt just before the prime rate skyrocketed to 20 percent and the economy tumbled into a recession.
He trimmed the company's staff and refocused its product lines a strategy he would repeat as he acquired other aviation technology companies and built Unison Industries.
The epiphany that led to Sontag's success in business occurred while he was completing his first advanced degree at UNR and working as a student at Desert Research Institute.
He had been successful in his studies of physics, but discovered he was far more interested in how the financial mechanism worked at DRI. He listened to his growing interest and overcame the skepticism of his physics mentors to apply to graduate business programs.
"In the end, you have to follow your heart and your intuition," he said. "You have these inner voices telling you what you ought to be doing and you need to listen to them."
Ironically, he said, only Massachusetts Institute of Technology the one school that he expected to understand the desires of a physicist to learn about business rejected his bid to become an MBA candidate.
Sontag, who now devotes his days to investments and philanthropy, gave $1 million to the UNR College of Business to establish an annual award of about $50,000 to a student or group of students who show the ability and desire to start or expand a business. The gift is the largest ever to the UNR College of Business.
While entrepreneurs often are initially driven by the desire to make big money, Sontag said he encouraged employees of his companies and now, would-be entrepreneurs to look for a deeper sense of success in building strong organizations and helping to improve the lives of others.
And that, Sontag said, led to his donation to encourage UNR students to build new companies.
"I want other people to have that feeling of success," he said.
