Jeremy Harbour started with a market stall, then placed coin-operated video game machines in pubs across his county. When he bought an arcade to house them, the business collapsed. He argues entrepreneurs should seek failure early and learn from it rather than avoid it.
How did you start your business?
I guess like most businesses, you pivot frequently. It started out as me supplying watches and jewelry to market stalls, and then I started and I ran my own market stall as well, selling watches and jewelry. Really, it morphed into selling anything, buying and selling, it was like a trading business. One of the things I started trading was video games, but like the coin-operated ones, the great big machines. And then I realized actually you could put them into pubs and takeaways and bars and things like this. And people go play them, you split the takings with the owner, you kind of leverage other people's heat and light and electricity. And so it's quite a nice business model. Yeah. So I kind of expanded that and I had 28 machines sited all over the county where I'm from in the UK. And then I decided— and by the way, at this point in my kind of career, most things I touched had worked. So I think I was a bit of an arrogant little ass at this point. And I decided to buy an amusement arcade, like a premises where you could put all of these machines. And so I bought this premises and that was the business that went bust. It was that next level of expansion that basically fell over. Suddenly I was using other people, from going from using other people's rent and heat and lights and electricity, I went to my own rent and heat and light and electricity. And also you have to attract the customers to come there. They're a very different kind of customer. They're kind of the people that are really into their gaming and gambling versus the people that might go to a bar and casually play on a thing that's flashing in the corner. So yeah, it was a massive learning curve and I fell flat on my face. And I think that was really useful because it was a good dose of humility at that precise moment in my life. Because like I say, I think before that, most things I tried had kind of worked. And that's, you know, in business, what I found out is most things you try kind of don't work. And that was quite a valuable lesson.
For sure, man. I think that's like, people need to, I think, go towards the failure quicker because like, as you said, it was a big lesson and we prolong it so long and it's like, if you could just get it done now.
Yeah, exactly. You know, and what I was, I was 18 when it happened. And of course, you know, emotionally I was destroyed. You know, I was like, I remember I had, I've moved away from my parents when I was 17. I lived in my own apartment when I was 17 years old. I had to move back with my parents, you know, tail between my legs. They didn't even have a spare room for me anymore because I've had a brother who was born since then. Okay. You know, and yeah, so it was all kind of like a big, yeah, a big kind of deal. But then I realized, you know, literally after 2 to 3 months of wallowing in my own self-pity and kind of licking my wounds at home, you realize, well, hang on a second, like, I've got all my arms and legs. Nothing actually really changed. The days before you go bust are horrible. I remember having anxiety about the phone ringing. The phone would ring, I'd actually sweat, I'd actually come out in a cold sweat, because when I picked it up, there was somebody on the other end of it shouting at me and calling me horrible things. It was not nice. Then after you go bust, it's like all of that goes away and you have the best night's sleep of your life and you're pissed off and miserable because you failed, but actually, nothing really broke. I think the lesson I got from that was that this feels like you're walking a tightrope, but the tightrope is only 6 inches off the ground. You lose sight of the fact that if you fall off, actually, it's not that big a deal, you can get back on again. If you know the tightrope is only 6 inches off the ground, why not instead of tiptoeing across it, why not take a fucking run at it next time? Because what's the worst that can happen?
