Fail

In The Box Podcast

Episode 17: Team Building Failure, Brand vs. Customer Voice, Self-Reliance And More – Podcast

Garth Beyer

On this episode of In The Box Podcast, we wrapped up our thoughts on luck, talked about why most startups fail, the difference between responding and reacting, and how much self-reliance is too much.

We also explored the idea of changing a brand voice to suit the voice of a publication one is pitching to and why many groups fall apart.

Give it a listen on itunes and subscribe.

Episode 17: Team Building Failure, Brand vs. Customer Voice, Self-Reliance And More

Luck – Trust that things will always work out.

Startups – Why do you think most startups fail?

Team building failure – Do many groups fall apart because of poor character dynamics or because the purpose of the group isn’t strong enough?

Brand vs Customer Voice – To get a publication or blogger to cover your business, should you choose your brand voice to fit their style or should you forget them and only seek out those who either speak or value your brand voice even if it doesn’t resonate with their own?

Respond vs react – How do you differentiate between responding and reacting?

Self-reliance – Is there such a thing as too much self-reliance?

 

Stay Positive & Is Your Purpose Clear?

What A Real Impresario Needs

Garth Beyer

Balancing Impresario

It’s an odd feeling when someone tells me that they have my back because half of what I do I do to show one person can do it, that you don’t need a safety net, that one doing risky work doesn’t need someone to have their back.

What every impresario needs is not the hearing that someone will pick up the ball if they drop it, nor is it the knowing someone has their back; it’s the feeling of it all. The feeling someone is there to back you up, catch you if you fall.

Don’t tell your impresario friends you’re there if they fail. Make them feel you’re there by supporting their forward direction, appreciating their work, asking them questions that help them challenge their lizard brain thoughts.

Support is a funny thing. You don’t need an impresario to fail and fall to show your support. Giving them motivation to keep building their momentum – that’s the support impresarios need, that’s the trust that makes them continue doing work that matters.

The way an impresario sees it is this: they feel you’ve got their back when they see, hear, and feel you’ve got their front.

In the world of art, moving forward is so much more important and so much more difficult than dusting shoulders off and getting up after falling down.

Show you’re there to help forward movement and any impresario will feel you’re there to have their back, because, really, that’s the easier of the two, the safer of the two.

If your there in the front helping them do the work that matters, there’s no reason you wouldn’t be there if things were to go south.

 

Stay Positive & The Quickest Way To Become An Impresario Is To Support One

p.s. if you’re an impresario yourself, share this post with friends. they may need to read it more than you

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Unlocking Potential #13: Q&A With Ryan Paugh

Garth Beyer

Ryan Paugh

When researching for a story centered on entrepreneurs under 30, a friend connected me with Ryan Paugh. At the time, Ryan was at Brazen Careerist writing, speaking and preaching about career-management. He was big into entrepreneurship… still is.

Like all the others on the unlocking potential series, Ryan is a linchpin. He is the source, the center of many entrepreneurial circles, providing resources and connecting people just as my friend connected me with him.

Without further ado… welcome, Ryan.

Q: You’re known for building epic communities. What does an epic community look like to you?

Ryan: An epic community is one that can help you unlock any door in your industry or trade. For communities like YEC and FounderSociety, we aspire to help our members gain access to everything they need to grow successful businesses.

Q: How did you get to where you’re at now? What’s your story?

Ryan: This is very geeky, but blogging changed my life. After I graduated college I started a blog with one of my best friends about Gen Y entering the workforce. Through the blog came my first business, Brazen Careerist, which was a free community for Gen Y professionals seeking career happiness.

Q: What’s the best and worst parts of being an entrepreneur?

Ryan: The best part about being an entrepreneur is having control over your own destiny. The worst part about being an entrepreneur is the toll it takes on your personal life and the lack of stability.

Q: What gets you filled up with passion and ready to take on the world, to go the distance, to be in it for the long haul?

Ryan: My family. Now that I’m a father especially, I find that I’m more motivated to be successful than I have ever been. I want my family to live the best life possible. I want them to see me as their hero.

Q: What do you see people regularly failing to do while starting a business? What would you suggest they do differently?

Ryan: Spending too much time on one idea is a common startup killer. Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that they didn’t get it right on the first try. They had to iterate on their existing idea to make it work.

Q: What are four hacks you can share? They can be about life, relationships, getting a job, starting a business, whatever you would like.

Hack #1. Invest in a virtual assistant and outsource work that takes away from building your business. Challenge yourself to delegate at least one new thing per week to your assistant.

Hack #2. Perfect is stupid. Come up with an idea for a business. Build the minimum viable product (MVP) as quickly as you can and get it to market. Iterate based on feedback from your early customers to get better.

Hack #3. Become an early riser or a night owl and you will get more accomplished than 99 percent of the population.

Hack #4. Take care of yourself. You physical and mental health are strongly linked to your success.

Q: Here’s an open-ended question for you: What are your thoughts on waiting?

Ryan: Don’t.

Q: What about failure?

Ryan: Embrace it.

Q: Would you tell us about a truly challenging time and how you got through it (or didn’t!)?

Ryan: Without going into too much detail, I had a health scare a couple months ago that left me feeling mentally paralyzed. It took weeks for me to feel better and get back to my business. The reason I was able to take the time off that I needed to recover was my amazing team. At some point in the future, you’re going to need to take some time off too and it will go a lot smoother if your company can operate with you missing. Being a great leader means learning how to delegate to your team and trust that they can get the job done. You should spend time early on in your career getting comfortable with this. You’ll thank yourself later.

Q: What are three lessons people should know about building a community?

  • Community businesses are are some of the most difficult businesses to run. I love what I do, but it’s not an easy road to riches. There are plenty of other avenues you could take to get rich quick
  • Great customer service can keep a paying customer loyal even when the product still needs work.
  • People will pay a premium for a concierge-level community experience.

Q: What makes an idea or a business or a person remarkable?

Ryan: Vulnerability. I’m drawn to people, ideas, and businesses that are not afraid to be what they are even if that might lead to them being criticized.

Q: Any last advice you want to give someone in marketing or someone who is thinking of starting a business?

Ryan: Share your ideas with as many people as possible.

Q: Lastly, where can people find you and the remarkable work you do? (Shamelessly self-promote here.)

Ryan: The communities I’m currently building are YEC and FounderSociety. We also run a great startup advice website for early-stage entrepreneurs. Follow me on Twitter. I try to blog semi frequently at ryanpaugh.com.

 

Stay Positive & Go Share Your Ideas, Be A Hero, Start Something

Two Of The Biggest Reasons You Stay Stuck

Garth Beyer

Get Unstuck

Two of the biggest reasons you stay stuck and don’t do anything is fear of inadequacy and fear of failure.

You may be good at many things, but a master of none. No matter what you do, it won’t be good enough. Have you felt this before?

Failure can suck too, but that is a mindset one has about failure.

Ask someone who has never failed before and they will say failure is terrible, just absolutely terrible. Ask someone who has failed plenty of times, me for instance, and I will say failure is necessary, it’s a stepping stone, and… I’m alive.

Staying stuck is a choice. Being afraid is a dance. You can’t stay stuck if you’re moving, can’t stay stuck if you’re dancing with the fear that pursues you.

 

Stay Positive & People Die Standing Still

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Slow Fail, Quick Fix, Overnight Success

Garth Beyer

All organizations are prone to fail slowly, although it may not seem like it at times.

Just like the overnight success of Amanda Palmer, which is anything but an overnight success (it was a consistency of getting the little things right over a long period of time), failures appear to happen fast. One day the restaurant is there, the next day it’s not. One day the business manager is in charge of 20 employees, the next day it’s just him. But, truly, you and I know failure and success don’t happen that fast.

All agencies, organizations, businesses are bound to be cut and bruised just as we are. Are you treating the wounds of your business as you would a wound on your body? Or are you waiting (like so many now-failed businesses) until it’s time to patch the wound with a giant band-aid, a redesigned website, a new PR campaign, a new motto or “about us” page? It may seem logical to care for all wounds at once, but it’s not.

A drop in office productivity, a minor employee-client clash, one regretful tweet are cuts that need mending immediately. Even more importantly, we must view the boring things of business just as wounds that need our immediate attention.

When we begin ignoring the little things, we set ourselves up for a fail: a slow fail until the day it hits you.

You can certainly jump ahead success-wise with a broad stroke, a bold move, but to stop a slow and painful death that every organization, every person in business is susceptible to, we must make the little things a little more remarkable, we must apply, not just quick-fixes, but improvements to the banal, to the cumbersome, to the “not my problem” problems of our business.

Don’t just think “how can we fix this?” think “how can we fix this in a way that leaves a positive impression?” If we ask and answer this enough, we may just find ourselves getting referred to as an overnight success.

 

Stay Positive & Turn The Little Things Into Big Things

Unlocking Potential #11: Q&A With John Saddington

Garth Beyer

John Saddington

I regularly write about the importance of being human, of momentum and of the need to continuously try new things. Top experimenter John Saddington is a living example of doing all the above.

John is linchpin who I recall wore a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle t-shirt to Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event in Tribeca, and asked Seth a question about blogging platforms. It should have come as no surprise to me that John was asking for input because he was in the process of developing his new (and awesome!) blogging platform app, Desk.

John has been blogging for more than 14 years, so it goes without saying how much of a privilege it is to have him be part of this series. Without further ado, welcome John.

Q: You’re a hacker and a human. Tell us how you got into hacking. What’s your story?

John: Yes, that’s my tagline. I think it’s important to let others know that I am a human being. This is one of those “duh” statements but it carries a lot of personal importance to me. It means that I suffer and struggle with just as many things as the next person. But, I have “hacked” my way to a solution that works for me.

I will always be looking for more solutions to life, just as the next person, to ensure that I can survive and thrive in the limited amount of time that I have on planet earth.​

Q: What qualities are needed in a person for them to become successful hackers, humans, entrepreneurs? 

John: A willingness to experiment, be wrong, and fail. A desire to get help, all the time, and to stay humble. To be curious about learning new things and tenacious about not giving up. To be a person of integrity, honest, and true.​

Q: For this next question, I’m sure there are hundreds of answers, but just write about the first two or three that come to mind. What are some hacks you can share about entrepreneurship?

​John: Time box everything. What I mean by this is create a “start” and “end” point to all your experiments and projects. This helps create momentum and helps you establish objective markers for whether or not it’s actually working.

Secondly, get help. Do more things with others and less alone.​

Q: Tell us a bit about Desk PM: How did you go about strategizing a publishing app so it would be as successful as it is? What sort of questions did you ask and answer before you built and shipped the app?

​John: There wasn’t a strategy. It was luck and a long marinating process (over 12 years) as I thought about this application as it tied so closely to my writing and blogging over the last 14 years. Then, I executed. That’s about it. I didn’t deliberate or try to do massive planning or anything like that. The only question that I asked was this (and one that I continue to ask): Do I still love this app? Am I using it every single day?

If the answer ever becomes “No” then I’ve lost the original vision and I should throw it all away.​

Q: What’s the most recent big decision you’ve had to make and how did you rationalize your decision?

John: The biggest decision recently was to join with some friends to work @ The Iron Yard.​ This was the culmination of long-standing relationships and a deep love for education (I got a Masters in Education). I joined them full-time in late 2013.

Q: Would you mind sharing one of your biggest failures and how you worked past it or what you learned from it?

John: I raised ~ $300,000 and spent much more than that on a failed iOS app that netted, over a two year period, just north of $1,300 dollars. I am still learning from this fiscal failure of an app and project. I am still recovering. I wrote a few things here.​

Q: Who and where do you go to for motivation? Any particular mentors or bloggers?

John: I go to my friends and most importantly my wife and kids. I find a ton of motivation in my quiet times as I reflect on spiritual topics, God, and through meditation.​

Q: Perhaps there’s a couple quotes or life mottos you live by?

​”Never give up.” – Dad

“Always have options.” – Dad

“It never hurts to ask.” – Dad

Q: What is the biggest challenge todays entrepreneurs are faced with? 

​John: I’m not sure. Does that matter?​

Q: This one might be a toughie, answer however you would like. What does it take to create something remarkable?

John: It starts with a decision to pursue it and then it requires the courage to not quit.​

Q: Where can people find you and you art? What’s the best way to reach you?

​John: My personal blog: http://john.do

 

Stay Positive & Publish On

A Subtle Reminder That Experts Will Still Fail

Garth Beyer

So I get in the elevator with the mail carrier today. We’re both excited it’s Friday, but I mention that it’s raining (which doesn’t suck, but I’d prefer sunny weather. Who wouldn’t, right?) And he says to me, “It’s better than snow.”

“That’s true,” I respond.

Then he said, “Gotta think positive.”

He said that to a man (me) whose motto is Stay Positive. It was a subtle reminder that while we can be experts on anything, even experts fail. And that’s a good thing.