The Power of a Failure Resume

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the Small Business Show. I'm here with Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Dave Hamilton here with Shannon Jean. Thanks for joining us today, folks. Yeah, it's. What is it? Show? 248, I think.

248. Yeah.

I don't know. I fail at remembering that every single time I have to look at the website to make sure I have the episode number. Right. Yeah.

Well, you know, it just so happens we're going to have. This show is all about failure.

Oh, God. Good news.

I'm in good company. Good kid. That's right. That's right. And you know all about creating what is called a failure resume. And while that may seem to go against, you know, just about everything we preach on this show, we talk about our success list and all this kind of stuff we're going to talk today about and some have some powerful lessons about why it's a good thing for you to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's building a failure resume, which is something I only did very, very quickly to prepare for show. And, and you'll hear during the episode I actually add something to mine and tell the story of that because, you know, it as you focus on these things. Well, you'll see Shannon and I are incapable of leaving something looking negative.

That's right.

But, but that's like, that's the point of this, I think, is, you know, like, yeah, I, I looking at my list and being like, oh, holy crap. Like, whoa. And I know I'm missing things. Right. But I'm looking at my list and thinking, well, you know, I survived every one of those things and I would not have had other successes if I didn't try those things first. It's not that they're necessarily related. It's just that you learn things or you get momentum coming out of failure. When you're in panic mode, man, that is when you can work the best. Sometimes you don't want to be, like, overly panicked. And I certainly don't mean to minimize if someone, you know, it suffers from clinical anxiety or something like that. That's different.

That is different.

Yeah, but, but if, you know, if, if you get yourself into a pickle and have to get yourself out of it, you can capitalize on that momentum when the pickle's over.

Indeed.

And I certainly have. And I think, well, you'll hear us talk about some of that.

Yeah. And the one. Real quick, I want to leave you with this. The, the professor from Princeton who started this concept of a failure resume. The one thing I loved about his story is out. Out of everything. The failure resume has gotten more attention than my entire body of academic work throughout his entire life. And it was. I thought it was great, you know? Of course. Yeah. So it's a powerful concept.

Humanizes you.

Yes.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's good.

All right.

I'm excited. I'm excited to talk about it.

Same. Here we go.

I. I just come back to. It's kind of the opposite. We talk about this success list, right?

Yeah.

A lot. Well, this is just the opposite. But I'm starting to think that this might be more powerful because it just reminds me, oh, I. I can get through this stuff because I face it all the time. I'm. I'm in a kind of a reinvention phase in my life right now, and I've got some businesses doing well and other ones that are just. They just suck, you know, And. And I was like, gosh, you know, do I have to cut these loose or what do I do? And. And I'm not getting any younger. And I'm thinking, God, you know, can I reinvent myself again? Over and over again? And. And I got you.

So it's failure time. Is that what this really means? Shannon, we're not good at talking about failure.

I know, I know. I. I've been saying this the whole time. I was just talking to my wife, Renee. I said, gosh, you know, it's really tough to talk about it and focus. For me, focusing on it now. I joke around about it, you know, with people and that kind of thing about. Oh, yeah, you know, And I always try to maybe play down some of the successes that I've had because I don't want to. I don't know. I just feel like a jerk sometimes.

I want to be that guy. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't want to be that guy. And somebody will bring something up. And I'm like, oh, you know, but that was one success out of ten failures or whatever. And. And so.

But the reason you. You. Those successes work for you and for a lot of folks, you know, me included, is that we don't obsess about failure, but we don't ignore it either. And I think. I think as we. As, you know, you built your failure list and we started putting together this agenda for the show, and I started building mine, I realized we both do the same thing. It's like, okay, yeah, here's this terrible thing that happened, and sometimes it's varying degrees of terrible, right? But, you know, terrible thing. But here's What I learned. And here's the positive. And there's. It's like, it's almost impossible not to. For me anyway. And it seems like for you too, it is almost impossible to not, like, spin it. And so we are. We. I just wanted to say that up front, we're definitely going to be spinning these things, but we should just get into some of these failures.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the whole concept here that I, that I want to share today is, is the concept of a failure resume. And I was listening to a podcast and the other day, and I'll put it in the show notes, it's called Without Fail. And this woman, who. Nerd name escapes me, of course, at the moment, she was talking about how. And she's a Hollywood producer, and she's saying, well, I keep this, my failure resume because I always rebound from failures to some of my biggest successes. And that really hit me. And I said, oh, that's really good. You know, and so, you know, we just, we always talk about the power of optimism, creating your own story, embracing the power of. Yes. All this really positive stuff, which I am a firm believer, creates a system that helps you to be successful.

Yeah, but you know, that point you just brought up that some of your. This woman said some of her biggest successes come right after failures, man. Like, I've never thought about that until this moment. And my mind's a little bit blown because that is 100% true for me. I've had, you know, and the bigger the failure, or at least the greater I perceive that failure to have been, which is really the only important thing in the, in the process. But other people might think, dude, like, it's not that big of a deal. Just, you know, you'll figure it out, you know, but if I perceive it to be a big failure and then I navigate my way out of it, my biggest success has come from. Come right after that.

Yeah, it's interesting, that phrase that she said really got me thinking. And I. And so I researched. I started reading about this, this concept of a failure resume. And it was originally, at least it's. It's credited to this professor at Princeton, this guy Johan Hascherfer. Right. I'm sure I'm just butchering that, but we'll put a link in there. And his concept was that we're really short changing ourselves if we don't focus a bit, at least on our failures, because it's a way to celebrate our perseverance. Right, right. And our ability to recover. And it also introduces a bit of humbleness when we're thinking about our success, which we just kind of mentioned, we're talking about that.

Although we've avoided mentioning any failures yet. Well, we're going to get deep. I'm just pointing that. That we're really doing a good job avoiding this.

I'm not going to fail at the show. I'm going to make it work. But one of the things I, as a, as a co host on this show where, you know, we connect with thousands of small business owners, I think we've, we, we've talked about mistakes. Right. That you and I make and we talk, we ask every guest about their best mistake. But on the outside, for successful people, you can often. It can often look like it's a kind of a constant, streamlined series of triumphs.

Right? Yeah.

And that's not true. That's not the way it works.

And it's messy.

Yes. It's. It's very ugly on the inside.

Yeah. What was it Steve Jobs always said? You know, you can only connect the dots when looking backwards, looking forward, it's just a mess, you know, or when you're in it especially, it's a mess. Yeah.

Yeah. So I, I went ahead and I wrote. I wrote a. I created my failure resume and I posted it up on my, my personal website@shannonjean.com and I'll link it in the show notes just so I can have it up there. And, and it's. You know, the funny thing is, after even just a few minutes before we started recording today, I'm like, oh, I left this out. Oh, I left that. I left out. One of the things I left out is how we. Which was a failure, how we almost sold.

So that's on mine.

Deal brothers. Yes.

Yeah, it's on yours. I'll tell that story. In fact, I have a, I have a perspective on that that I don't think I've ever shared with you. I don't know that I've ever shared with anyone. So.

Yeah, I have one, too. So I would love to hear yours and then I can share mine.

Okay.

Thinking about it, how I think I could have made that a better experience. You want to start with that one?

I do want to start with that one. Yeah. But you know what I want to do is I. Because we've been failing to discuss our failures very successfully here, I will, I might add, like we are doing a fantastic job of avoiding this while still making the content at least compelling, if not valuable, hopefully. Yeah.

Yes.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, explain what, explain what Deal Brothers does.

Right, so. Well, Deal Brothers started life as deals on the web. This was, I can say, almost exactly 18 years ago, you came to me and had this idea. You were advertising on some of our websites. That's how we knew each other. You came to me and said, hey, I want to create a deals website. And you needed essentially a technical partner.

Yeah.

You had this idea. You knew what you wanted to do. It was all going to be based on affiliate revenue. So we would post links every day and direct people to different sites for deals and then they would.

Great business.

It was great business. It really, it paid for a lot of things for us for a while.

Yeah.

And you needed a tech partner, so. So we started it great. And it went really well. Loved it. Like, I have no regrets except Maybe, maybe one. But I, like, I can't really say that, but one day the CEO of a public company showed up and said they wanted to buy us. Literally. What happened? Like, we were not thinking about selling it. We were just crunching along. Things were going pretty well. And yeah, we'd had some struggles. We made some mistakes where we linked with the wrong people and we had some, some of our affiliate accounts were shut off for a little while and we turned it back on. But they like, you know, that's normal, right? You run a business, things happen. So the CEO shows up and it was for. And it was weird because it was like, you know, a two line email or something with no signature or whatever. But it turned out to be very, very legit. And so we started down the path of negotiating for the site. Do you mind if I share the numbers with people? I don't think it was just. Yeah, yeah, because it didn't. Listen, all the numbers we share, it doesn't matter. It didn't sell.

Okay, that's right.

Great. So it's worth a lot less than these numbers now. But he came in, he offered us 150 grand for it. And we looked at the numbers, we're like, well, why would we sell it if all we're going to get is 150 grand? Like, we're, we're making more than that in a year profit, you know, like, okay, great. It doesn't make that anymore, folks. So, you know, sorry.

Yeah, affiliate marketing days are very different now.

They're different. Yeah. I think some people are still making money, but it's not quite as easy as it was in the, in the heyday. But so we went back and we looked, you know, we took a long hard look like, okay, what would it take for us to be okay selling this? And we decided it was 500 grand. And you know, we thought, well, okay, is like, what's this guy gonna do? Is he gonna walk away? You know, and, and we went, you and I went back and forth like, are we okay if he walks away? You know, at five, would we have taken four? Would we have taken three? And the answer was no. Like, we think fives it. Okay. So we go back and he comes back within like, I don't know, two hours or something. And he's like. And we had talked to him on the phone and stuff. You know, this conversation sort of happened via email and also on the phone. And actually I wound up meeting, wound up meeting with him and his attorney. That's right. At one point. Yep. But I, because he was relatively local to me, I could drive and meet with him down in New York. I took the lead on, on just interfacing with him, although via email, we were both right there. And, and so he came back and said, okay, we'll do 500 grand. And it was great. And then we got greedy. And you, you call me and you're like, I think we should ask him for six. And my, my head, I thought we.

I thought we'd offered and I may certainly glaze over it, but I had thought we wanted more. And then he came back at five and I thought we were, we told.

Him five and he said we. Well, what we said was at least five, I think.

Yeah. Because I don't think I would have gone back if we had put a number out and he agreed to it. I wouldn't have wanted to go back and raise that number.

Yeah, but that is what. You're right, but that is what happened is we said to him we would need at least 500 grand. And of course, you know, he's not going to say, oh, I'll give you 750. He came back and said, I will go to 500,000. And that's all his email said was like, you know, it was those four words or something. And then you and I talked and you're like, I think we should ask him for six. And this is one of those things in my life when my gut tells me things, I need to listen to it. But intellectually I agreed with you. You were like, well, we didn't say that we would take five, we said we needed at least five.

And I'm like, first time I'd ever negotiated trying to sell a company.

Yeah, same. Right. And, and so my, but my gut was screaming at me that day, like to the point where I viscerally remember this. And it's like, okay. And I sent him like we were in agreement, except my gut, like it was, our heads were fine, we were totally in lockstep. It was just my gut that was screaming in the corner. And, and so we sent the email, you know, I actually, we need 600. And he like, he got pissed and it was another short terse email, you know, but that was again, I set it up this way because that was normal, but it was, I don't do business this way, you know, and that was it.

Either take it or that's it.

And yeah, I think it was a take it or leave. I think he did say take it or leave it. I think you're totally right.

About that.

Yep. And so I called him on the phone and, and you know, worked it out. I'm like, I'm really sorry, you know, confusion and, and yada yada.

We were young. Yeah.

Tail between our legs. It was our first time doing this, yada yada. And, and he was like, that's okay. You know, we'll do five. I'm like, okay, great. And I don't, I, to this day I haven't asked him. I should ask him. He might not remember because he does a zillion deals. But I do keep in touch with him from time to time. But I wonder if it was at that point that he decided, those guys pissed me off. I'm not going to do this deal with them. I don't know.

Hard to say. I think, yeah. If my take on it was or is that his team wasn't really behind it. He was, he was.

That's true.

Yeah. And the, his team around him wanted to buy a different property.

Well, that, that is what happened.

They did.

Yeah. They, they wound up buying a, a different property. Not in the same business. Although I have a, I have an aside to share after this.

That's good.

Yeah. Not in the same business. But, but they needed 20 million to do that.

Yeah, that's right.

And so they, so we didn't, like, he was like, we don't have enough money. Like, but there was a 21 day diligence period.

Here's my failure.

Okay, go ahead.

Yeah. Is that I pretty much, okay, the deal is going to happen and I could take my eye off the ball and do something else because this thing is going through and the message here is, oh, no news is good news. That's false. And finally when we asked on the 21st or 20th day of the 21 day due diligence, that's when he said, oh, we decided to go in another direction. And I believe had we speaking for myself because like I said, like you said, you kind of took the lead on it. Had we been more upfront and regularly communicating. What else can we get you? What other kind of documents? How's everything going? It may have had a different outcome. I don't know.

Well, you know, that other deal showed up for them at like day 15 of our 21. Like, I don't even think it was, it was in. I mean, you don't, it's. Again, it's impossible to know. Yes, correct. But I think if we had pushed that through on day five or seven of the 21 day, like we had put a whole I went and met with them. We, you know, we negotiated some points that they wanted, some non compete stuff. And I'm like, dude, no, we had lunch together. A great lesson I learned there. I bought that guy lunch. It was just him and his attorney and we all had salads. I mean, I don't think it cost us 50 bucks. When the check came, I grabbed the check and he was like, oh, no, no, no, let me get this. And I'm like, no, you're our customer. I said quite literally, you're our customer. We are selling a business to you. And he's like, oh, okay, thanks. He says, nobody ever buys me lunch. He says, I honestly can't remember the last time.

Megan. Multimillionaire guy. Yeah, right.

Yeah. So always buy somebody lunch. I mean, it doesn't cost anything. Although it didn't help. Yeah. But I think if we, if we had pushed it through, it might have happened. Time kills all deals. I have that written on a sticky that sits on my desk and it is 100% because of exactly what you just described.

Yeah, yep.

Yeah, yeah.

I, I think it's a really good one. And, and I think that looking back on it, it allows you to have a different perspective or things you might have missed. And so again, it's another great message of looking at these failures that we often can overlook is a helpful thing to do. I will say, go ahead.

Well, I was going to say we both learned the lesson from that. Once you emotionally check out from a business, we found it impossible to reengage. You can go visit the website right now and see when the last time we posted something was. This was something that to at least three people was worth 500 grand and now is, you know, arguably worth, you know, somewhere close to zero.

Yes.

You know, and it was because we could not re. Engage with it with the same passion.

Sucked all the life out of us.

And you learned a val. You've employed a valuable lesson that we learned there and that was when you sold another business. You put a plan B in to make a self financed plan B or something. I don't remember what the details are. Yeah, yeah.

In that case it was. Yeah, yeah.

But something to ensure that the deal happened. Even if, you know, the plan A fell through.

Well, it's, it's always looking for, what if this happens? What do we do? And back when I was a much less experienced business person, when that happened, you know, 18 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever it is.

Yeah. I don't, I'm trying to think, oh, it was I know when it was.

Because it was about 18 years because my kids were just starting to go into, I think, first grade. My daughter.

Well, when we started the business started. We started it 18 years ago because my. Our sons were about to be born, I think. Yeah, mine was, but we. The. The deal was 12 years ago that. That it died. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's.

Seems longer, different lifetime.

It is. I know. Yeah.

Yeah. But like one of my favorite quotes, you know, from Nelson Mandela is that lose, I either win or learn.

Right.

And like you said, this is the part I had a hard time with when I wrote my failure resume was that I wanted to talk about the lesson and the power of everything I had learned during, you know, when those things happened. And yeah, and I held myself back from doing that, but I always put, you know, and I put it down at the bottom and if you go and read it, you can see where I made some comments. But I often consider these lessons as tuition. Right.

Yeah.

And I learned. I have a ton of things that I refuse to call failures because I was like, wow, I really learned a lot and I picked up and I would not have been able to know if I had not taken that leap and not tried this product or this project. So a lot of what other people may consider failures, I didn't add on my list, but I do know I have. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 company failures on my failure resume. Yeah. And I'm not going to go over all of them. I'll tell.

You know, I was going to say we should. We. We did say that we would talk about our failures. So we should talk about maybe one each, you know, and, and pick your favorite. I'm. I. You want to go first? You want me to go first? Doesn't matter.

Yeah, I'll go first. Go ahead. I. I was. When I was still in college and I was running a. A construction business and I was buying. I was renting all kinds of equipment and, you know, it was very expensive to rent big, you know, tractors and cranes to move stuff around. And of course, thinking the way I do, it's like, gosh, you know, it's got to be a way I can just buy this stuff for. For almost what it's costing to rent and figured out a way to do that. Go to some auctions, buy some used equipment, use them for these projects, and then resell them.

Right.

And trying to at least get my money out of it.

Right.

And so I would get to the use of it for, quote, you know, for free. And after a while, what I realized is that, oh, you know, there's just money in buying this product and moving it around the country to different, you know, areas like if. If Atlanta was booming, if the construction industry was hot there, but it was bad in Southern California. Well, I could go to Southern California and buy cranes and, you know, you name it, you name it, we bought it. And then I would ship it to another part of the country and, and sell it. And the great. I've always operated in inefficiencies, right. And it was horribly inefficient because there was no Internet like there is now. You couldn't find all the stuff you can find now. Or it was much more difficult. But the mistake I made. So I took an investment from my parents. They were my angel investors.

Right?

Sure. So they invested about $10,000. And the mistake I made was I kind of forgot that I, I would have to live while I was doing this. And I forgot about, like, expenses and, you know, I had to eat right, I had to pay rent, I had to ship all this stuff. And it was not nearly enough money. And I wound up burning through all this, this cash, even after selling, you know, equipment. And I was just out of cash. I had no more money left. And I, I thought I was like, I have just, you know, made. This is. My business career is over before it started.

Right? Yeah.

And. And it was actually, you know, my mom that sat me back down and go, well, let me show you what happened. Because I had to go back and say, you know, I lost the money.

I lost some. Right? You got. Yeah, yeah, that's a tail between your legs conversation.

Yeah, I lost money. She's like, well, don't worry because I'm going to have you take on this project and you're going to make that money back for me. But let me show you why you lost it. Because you did this and you did that and you didn't keep track of this and that probably wasn't enough money to get started anyway and all that kind of stuff. So it, it was a big failure. You know, the one upside, I got to drive a 40 ton crane from, you know, San Francisco Bay area all the way down almost to Mexico. And that, that was a lot of fun. And that was my, you know, the upside that I remember from that, that project. But yeah, but it was, it was good. And I just come back to. It's kind of the opposite. We talk about this success list, right? Yeah, A lot. Well, this is just the opposite. But I'M starting to think that this might be more powerful because it just reminds me, oh, I can get through this stuff because I face it all the time. I'm in kind of a reinvention phase in my life right now, and I've got some businesses doing well and other ones that are just.

Just.

They just suck, you know, And. And I was like, gosh, you know, do I have to cut these loose or what do I do? And. And I'm not getting any younger. And I'm thinking, God, you know, can I reinvent myself again? Over and over again? And. And I got, you know, one more kid to get through college. And, you know, unfortunately, I live in the most expensive place on earth out here in the Bay Area, in California.

Yeah.

Apple's not gonna.

Probably not gonna buy you a house either.

No, they're not gonna do that. And. And so I'm constantly questioning myself, and I think that focusing on failure more and reminding ourselves about it, you know, whether it's product launch failures, you know, whatever, but being more. Maybe more authentic and transparent about it would help myself more as well as other people that are listening in that are maybe going through the same struggle.

Yeah.

Or similar. So, so, so I'm happy to. I'm happy to do it. And, you know, Harvard Business Review has a great article up there about it, and I'll link it in the show notes, you know, and. And I would just say don't. Don't ignore the setbacks.

It.

You know, because it just. It leads to this false perception. And when. Then when you do get a setback, you kind of, you know, tear into yourself, which is not helpful either.

Right, right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

That's interesting. Yeah, it's good stuff. Do you have another one you want to share?

Sure. And it's one that I had forgotten about until, like, I. I built a list. I. There's. There were four things on my list. Many of them have to do with not choosing my business partners correctly.

I don't mean to laugh, but that's never happened. Sorry.

That's okay. But, yeah, and I mean, thankfully, you know, the present company excluded, which is great, but I had this one, and I had completely forgotten about it, but I remembered the success that came after it. And as we were doing the episode, I'm like, wait a minute. There was, you know, I was trying to think of, like, well, we've, you know, you have kind of bursts of success here and there. It's sort of how things at least Go for me. And then, you know, you sort of get an autopilot, then maybe you get on, you know, dangerous autopilot, then you fix it and things get better. And I was trying to remember what predicated this and I was like, oh, right, Black chop. So I got people know me like, Shannon, you came to me because you knew me from other business and publishing Mac observer means that there's people that know me that I'm not actually doing business with. Right. You know that. And so I've had several partnerships that started or almost started because of, you know, somebody saying, oh, you would be a good person.

Of course.

Yeah, great. So these guys came to me and they're like, hey, look, you know, they were Apple fans and they were stock traders. And they said, we've been working on an automated trading algorithm that would, that essentially traded Apple options. And you know, they're like, we've back tested it. It's pretty amazing. We just, we need a tech partner to pull all this together. And then we're going to essentially form a very small boutique fund that is just for this one thing, which is like, okay, fine.

Interesting.

Yeah, it's like, okay, I put some time into this. We had to set up servers that would run this trading algorithm on a platform that, you know, that's built to do this, this automated trading. And it has the software and we, you know, we tweak that or they tweak this algorithm. But I didn't know these guys. You know, it was just, it sounded good. And there's a sounded too good to be true lesson here. I don't think they had any bad intent. I really don't. But I also don't think they knew what they were doing. And I, I, they, they knew less about what they were doing than I thought they did. But I don't think they misrepresented themselves. I think it was me misinterpreting things and just seeing past any flaws because it was like, oh, this actually sounds like a pretty easy thing. If I get involved, I do these things, there could be some money on the table with the profits from this automated trading thing. Well, and then I chose to put some money into it and be not only a partner in the business, in the management of the business, but also a partner in this fund. We got, I don't know, I think we got 20 people to each put in 10 or 15 grand or something. And then it was like, okay, we'll let the engine run with whatever it is, you know, 250 grand or whatever. We had. And, you know, okay, let's see what we can. Let's see what we can make it do, you know, and it crashed and burned. I mean, it. We basically lost everybody's money, you know, except. Except for like a pittance here and there. And. And that sucked, you know, to lose whatever, like you said, you know, 10 or 15 grand. And it was at a time when the kids were younger, and I was like, wow, that was actually a lot of money to watch lose, you know, it really hurt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was. It was not it. Yes, I chose the wrong business to get involved in, but it was. I didn't vet my partners enough and to, like, what else have you done? What. What is. I know you came to me because you see at least a face of success from me with. With, you know, Mac observer and that sort of thing, but they didn't ask, like, what I actually. Like, I might just be able to put on a good face, you know, like, yeah, they should have dug in a little deeper, you know, but they didn't, and nor did I. And that was really the lesson. It was like, okay, who are these guys? Have they had a track record with this sort of thing before? Why am I getting into business with these people? Is their idea really that good? And if so, how come nobody else has done it? You know, that kind of thing was the lesson there. And it was, you know, it was fine. It was, you know, lost some money and that's that. There you go. So I lost some time, and time.

Is the biggest thing.

I think that's the killer. Yeah. But again, pissed me off right? At the time, it was like, crap. Oh, and I got my father in law to invest, too, so he had, like, 10 grand in it.

Yeah.

So much stuff he knew going in. That's good. That he could lose it all.

And.

And. And he was fine, actually. He got more out than anybody else because he. He pressured those guys to get some. To get the cash out of him and succeeded. You know, just. I mean, not. Not. Not like. Like, you know, with. With like the. You know, it was all legal pressure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't anything like, shady or anything like that.

Break your legs.

No, there was none of that. No, no, no, no. He just. Yeah, he just has friends in all the right places. And he was like, you don't. Like, you want to. You want to honor my request to get my money out right now? And they were like, yeah, actually, you're totally right. Yeah, we don't. We don't need any Legal troubles. Yeah. And so he, but he lost some. But I don't think he lost all of it. Yeah, but, but still, like, that's egg on my face. Right. You know, with my, like with my father in law, I don't, I don't know if that's better or worse than my parents. Probably worse. I don't know. It might be.

Yes. Yeah, I would be. I mean, that, that scares the heck out of me to take other people's money. And I have had it offered to me time and time again. And I was like, you know, I really just, you know, I value your friendship or whatever, you know, too much. I just can't do it because things go south all the time. I mean that more often than not.

Most businesses go south. That's right.

And, and so if it's just my money and my time, I can then, you know, chalk it up to tuition. Right. And yeah. You know, and I just had a big failure. I had a company that I started, you know, and worked for a year with the guy. Talk about, you know, we were talking about partners and how to pick good partners. I wrote that down to do an episode on that coming up and. But the only person that I, I, it really hurt was me. Right? Yeah. Financially and time, Time is. And probably because I'm getting a little older now that I don't think, you know, I've got all the time in the world. So time for me is, is, is always more challenging. And it's like, wow, it burned almost a year on this project. I got some other stuff out of it, some ancillary things that I can use to regenerate that revenue that I invested.

The last failure that I had, which we haven't talked about. Well, we've talked about it on the show, but not in this show. But the time that I lost on that one was the thing that really, really upset me the most. But it fueled me. I mean, I came out of it with a vengeance. It was like, all right, cool. All the mental energy and time that I lost and spent on that thing, I've still got that every day. So I can apply that in the smartest way possible. And I did. And it, you know, and it was like, okay, cool.

Got out of that hole.

Yep, good. That's good.

You know, the last thing for me on as I was writing this stuff is I noticed on a couple of failures there was some commonality. And one of those or two businesses that failed, I believe now I can trace back to poor timing that I almost like a Retail stock buyer, right? Like me, who buys stock, just, oh, that looks like a good stock. Netflix is going up. I got information about it. I learned about a market, but I entered it too late.

Right.

And it's because I didn't have the insight to know what was going on or what was going to happen, you know, a year earlier. Right. I wasn't in the industry. I was, you know, shiny object. We should get involved in this type of thing.

That's like my black chop thing. Exactly.

Yeah, same kind of thing.

Yeah.

And so two of, you know, significant failures that cost me, you know, good chunk of money, six figures each are based on that bad timing. And so I haven't done it again, but I've learned that or just, just by writing it down like that. And I never really thought about it because I didn't see those things next to each other. So, you know, so go write a failure resume and then share the results with us here. You know, send it to, you know, give us some feedback at businessshow.co. we want to hear from you. We want to celebrate your success and your ability to recover from failure.

Right.

Because that's what that failure resume is going to do for you. And I think it helps connect you with people, even maybe a little closer because they realize you're fallible and, you know, you're not always a rock star.

No, no, no, not like that. You know, pre show. In a very different context, we were talking about how people, none of us knows what it takes for any of the rest, the of of us to get through our day, right. You see our highlight reel. We talk about it here, like, you know, yeah, we talk about our failures. But I mean, to be fair, we've turned every one of these stories into a success just by nature of talking about it. So. But, you know, you don't know what it takes to get somebody through their day. And it, it's like, yeah, everybody is failing all the time is the reality. And, and then you just have to, you just have to. To have good successes. That's all. You know, it's. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. And. But then it means experimenting. It means trying.

It is an experiment. It's trying. It's. And I would say that that's where the majority of people get stuck is they don't want to talk about the failure. They don't want to take that risk. And so I, you know, cheers to you if you have a failure resume to create, because that's part of your success.

Yeah, cheers indeed. Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Because you tried.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it.

That's it. You're not gonna. You're not gonna change anything if you don't try.

Yeah, absolutely. Just like we're changing the format of the show here a little bit. You know, we love to hear what you think. We'd have also love to get a review. If you go to businessshow.com review, you can. And click right through and leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. We definitely want your input. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

All right, Well, I think that wraps us up for the day. Thanks for listening, folks. You know where to find us. Thanks to Linode.com SBS, our sponsor, keep living that charmed life, which includes failing sometimes.