An entrepreneur nearly lost her business to fear of failing the Big Festoon, a large arena event. She learned to pause and stay still instead of constantly pushing forward, which let her best work emerge. Now the event has interest from the US, UAE, and Australia, and she's scaling toward a $15 million valuation.
What's your biggest fear in business?
Not pulling an event off. I installed the Big Festoon, which is the event that I run, in an arena. It was the most difficult thing I ever did, but through the other side, it really made me question myself. And my biggest fear was, what if I don't know what I'm doing? And the whole business thing is a trust fall with yourself. And that was the biggest realisation that I'd forgot to trust myself.
So what steps are you taking then to kind of move through that then, to trust yourself?
Biggest thing that I've done was actually be still. And I think that's one of the biggest fears of lots of businesses. If I stop, the wheels are going to fall off. In that pause where your best work will be done. Where is that going to take you?
That allows us now to scale internationally.
We've got the assets from this incredible arena event, and now the US and the UAE and Australia are all knocking on the doors of this incredible thing that we've created.
What comes after that?
So the idea is I scale to sell. For how much? $15 million is the number that I've got in my head. So the event itself is going to become a legacy community as opposed to Dani Wallace being the center of it all.
What are you going to do with the $15 mil?
I've created a CIC called the Flying Away Foundation where we help people who've experienced domestic abuse build businesses. And so what we're going to do is we're going to take that money and do incredible things with it.
