About a decade ago Josh James and John Pestana were BYU students with a business idea. They started JP Interactive, a small Web design company that featured a statistics counter for small businesses.

Their company began to take root in Utah County's fertile high-tech soil. Before long they changed the company name to MyComputer Inc., and Josh and John were feeling pretty lucky.

Then came the infamous dot-com crash during the early part of this century, during which many technology-oriented businesses failed. Josh and John weren't feeling so smart during those days — especially when they nearly went bankrupt. For several years they reported annual losses and a negative net worth. Employees had to be laid off, and the two principals became full-time fund-raisers in addition to their duties meeting payrolls and managing the company.

But Josh and John never gave up. Instead, they did a smart thing. They hired the best people they could find and courted some of the best investment banking companies. They followed time-honored entrepreneurial concepts:

• Treating their remaining employees well.

• Being willing to commit their own resources to make the company viable.
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• Analyzing competitors.

• Concentrating on improving products and making big sales.

And somehow through the course of all of these smart entrepreneurial processes, Josh and John found that their luck was starting to change. They reinvented themselves into Omniture Corp., a publicly traded (OMTR-Nasdaq) Web strategy/analytics company that today is a dominant force in the marketplace. They currently have more than 1,500 customers in some 70 countries, including the likes of IBM, General Motors, Microsoft and eBay.

They say they've been lucky. I say they've been smart.

The fact is, this entire enterprise could have easily ended up on the trash heap along with so many other failed high-tech companies in Utah's recent entrepreneurial past. But the owners' determination and confidence kept them going when it looked like all was lost.

Sure, there was some luck involved. There always is in matters entrepreneurial — at least a little. But they were also smart in the way they worked through their challenges and re-invented themselves to take control of a significant — and, it turns out, lucrative — market niche.

In my view, the luckiest people in this scenario are the Utah Angel investors who bought shares in Omniture at 12 cents per share and who could now sell those same shares for about $17.50 per share — about 145 times their original investment.

Of course, even their investment is more than just blind luck. They were also smart enough to know a good business opportunity when they saw it. And to know that in the sometimes-fickle world of entrepreneurship, it can really pay to be both lucky AND smart.

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Joseph Ollivier is affiliated with the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. He can be reached via e-mail at cfe@byu.edu.