Flops 002: The Rock-Bottom Beach

Flops 002: The Rock-Bottom Beach

Colin Clapp
So I didn't want to go home until everyone had gone to bed and darkness and couldn't be disturbed by anyone. I just wanted it to be in this black hole.

So it got later and later and later, eventually I stood up and I walked home in the darkness through the forest and crawled into bed alongside Elly and fell asleep. And then I woke up in the morning and I said, yeah. Okay. I get it. That's it. Enough.

Ray Sylvester:
A quick Google search turns up easy examples of corporate collaborative failure. Take Target and Neiman Marcus, getting together for a new clothing line that would try and fail to bridge the gap between Target's mainstream consumer tastes and Neiman Marcus' high-end offerings. Or Lego partnering with Shell Oil to brand its toy race cars and gas station sets. Then getting tripped up by consumer distaste for Shell's lousy environmental track record. Or take Kendall Jenner's 2017 ad campaign for Pepsi.

Okay. It's not really fair to call it a campaign. It was an ad ... where Jenner uses the power of Pepsi to bridge the divide between the police and the participants in a surprisingly well-lit civil rights protest. She literally hands a cop a Pepsi can and joy and relief fills the air. The commercial is so tone deaf, it almost feels like a troll job.

ET Canada Clip:
“There’s no real correlation between Pepsi and politics. And that’s where they’re sort of getting this wrong. And what it leads to is a really sanitized, inauthentic version of what a protest can look like. So the ad feels especially fake from the moment the first frame starts.”

Ray:
It's a baffling piece of work. No surprise, the ad pissed a lot of people off for making light of serious social and civil rights issues. And we haven't seen any Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad since then. But there's another layer to all this. Examples of high profile brand partnerships like these are easy to find. And like the Pepsi Flop, sometimes they even let us poke fun at them and feel a little better about ourselves at the same time. I mean, can you believe Pepsi thought it would be a good idea to do that?

The Kendall crash is the failed partnership we don't have to work hard to see and laugh at because it doesn't have any real consequences for any Jenner's or any of PepsiCo's top shareholders, or for us. Target, Lego, they're all going to be fine, but way under the radar, every day, entrepreneurs you've never heard of with way more skin in the game are failing.

Some research suggests that 65 percent of startups fail because their co-founders can't keep it together. That's higher than the divorce rate in the United States. So what happens when you go into business with a partner and your spouse? On one hand, that's just three people and the fewer people in your business, the less that can go wrong, right? Or it could just mean fewer points of failure that could bring it all crashing down.

Today, the story of an entrepreneur who did both of those things, went into business with his wife and partnered with a literal stranger at his doorstep. We'd like to say it all went amazingly well, but, well, this is Flops.

Welcome to Flops, where we uncover what happens when business plans go up in smoke and what we can learn from sifting through the ashes.

Karen Beattie:
Today, we're going to hear the story of Colin Clapp. A guy from New Zealand who went into business along with his wife, Elly, to deliver organic produce to people's homes.

Ray:
So Karen, you interviewed Colin for this episode, and this organic fruit and vegetable delivery business was actually someone else's business originally. And Colin and Elly came along and saw an opportunity to improve the way the founder was running it. Correct?

Karen:
Yeah, that's right, Ray. So Colin met this guy who owned the business and this guy was a single dad, and he and Colin hit it off and Colin wanted to help him out. So Colin and Elly had been ordering this produce for a while, so it seemed like a good fit to join forces with him and ramp up the business. So after doing some due diligence with their accountants, they went for it. But unfortunately, it didn't turn out the way they had imagined. So let's listen to his story.

Colin, welcome to the show.

Colin Clapp:
Yeah, glad to be here.

Karen:
Yeah. We're so glad to have you on the show today. Talking about failure and I know that you have a story about failure, so we're going to jump right in.

So I want to start by just getting a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up? What part of the world?

Colin:
I was born in the UK. But right now I consider myself a Kiwi, a New Zealander. I'm a proud New Zealand citizen and my family's New Zealand now. But I was brought up in London in what I describe as a very ordinary upbringing.

But it wasn't until I was 21, I went to America on a one way ticket. You could do that back then, by the way, I don’t think you could do it anymore. And it changed my life forever. So the experience of being in America as a 21, 22 year old... I overstayed my visa. I was there for about 16 months. I lived in Colorado as a ski bum for a while. When I went back to England, my life had changed forever.

Karen:
Uh-huh. So I know that you're an entrepreneur now. So what did you do during that time to pay the bills?

Colin:
Well, I wouldn't say I was an entrepreneur back then. My dad pushed me out, pushed me out there, pushed me out of the house when I was 16 and said, go get a job. And he pretty much found a white collar job for me. And in those early years I worked for a corporate in administrative positions and then sales positions.

I don't know if you can remember Karen, you know, you go to school, you're surrounded by people your own age.Then you go into the workplace and now suddenly you're mixing with people for the first time who are different ages. So I can still remember that environment very clearly, but it was very was an old school admin set up, can you imagine typewriters, computers in one part of the building, but not the other, and lots of old gray suits and people who had been there 40 years in one company. But it all seemed very ordinary at the time. Anyway, I got myself out of there, got a sales position, was quite exciting,

Karen:
So why don't you tell me about just your story of your business and your organic fruit and vegetable business, I understand. So can you tell me a little bit about your business and just how that started and, and what happened?

Colin:
Absolutely. So that was the organic fruit and veg business that you were referring to. So this is winding the clock forward to 2016 living in Christchurch, New Zealand. And by now I am in a long-term relationship with my partner, Elly, and we have one small child about two, we now have two. This was quite a serendipitous event that went horribly wrong that has led to today.

So I was at the time a business coach / consultant, and I was doing okay. But I've always been wired to try and leverage things and systemize things, and I'd never made a breakthrough with regard to that. I'd created sort of frameworks that I thought would be scalable and dreams of bringing on other coaches and that's — it just never happened. I've just, so I was working one-to-one, I’d landed some good clients, won some awards and with them, and yeah, we were making a good living, but nothing, nothing fantastic. And Elly is very much a health-orientated person and very into natural, natural products, and services. And she's like our doctor, our family doctor, and trying to, you know — sustainable health and all those sorts of things. And she found a organic fruit and veg service that she wanted to try out.

And she got in touch with the owner. And without me knowing too much about it, she ended up getting the fruit and veg delivered to us complimentary in return for her doing social media postings for the owner, because she found out he was a single dad. And he seemed like he was doing it all, but we'd never met him, never spoke to him. This was all sort of over the phone. And so that's what happened. She's a server, she wanted to help. And this kind of seemed like a win-win. This went on for many months with our fruit and veg being delivered to our door and Elly just having these periodic conversations, trying to help him with his social media posts.

And then one random Thursday, I was in the house and he delivered. And I opened the door and I saw this bedraggled, frazzled man on the doorstep, who I knew was a father of two kids. And I was a father myself. And I just looked at this man, and I just wanted to help him. And we ended up having a long conversation on the doorstep. And I could see that he had this business with potential, but I could see he had no resources, no business brain. And he had no idea about systems or anything like that.

He looked like he had a problem, I looked like I had a solution, and somehow this could all work. And so Elly and I ended up going through a bit of a to and from. We, it's kind of a long story short. We went through some due diligence with the guy, or, you know, we got our professionals involved. And when I say our professionals, I'm talking about my accountant and advisor. We're a husband and wife partner team. There's no big — we're very much lifestylers as we're not corporates. And we did what we could in the way of due diligence. I'm not an unintelligent guy, but I'm not saying I've now had everything done. I've got all these successes. That's not it. You know, I'm a trier, I'm one of life's triers. So we ended up proceeding, but the deal was that we would fund him in the early months while to give him a wage while I systemized the business so it could scale, that played to my strengths, and that Elly would act as customer service liaison. Like she would just be talking to the customers and this in theory should free him up to sell.

He had the passion, he had the passion and the knowledge for the product, you know, organic. I didn't have that. Elly had it, but I had systems. I loved systems and I knew what I could do. And within three months I had outsourced and built systems that meant we didn't have to touch the fruit and veg. We could take orders, receive payment, outsource it to a logistics team and do it all. And I was so excited, but what was happening in parallel was the sales were coming in; this three-way this three-way partnership wasn't working. And it wasn't that the sales weren’t coming in. It just looked like nothing was changing except excuses.

And we were funding this and we’re not rich people. We didn't have bottomless pockets or, you know, angel investors behind us or anything like that. New Zealand is a small country. It's a very much a DIY mentality. The big companies in New Zealand are few and far between. It's a very small business orientated thing. And we, we, we had to work and, and so what I meant by that, it's not a big marketplace either. You need sales. And if you're not getting sales ... so I'm gonna admit to my learnings about all of this, because I was just doing what I believe was my role, but it turned ugly very quickly when the sales weren't coming in and we couldn't see anything but excuses coming our way.

Karen:
Right. So how, how, how long into the endeavor was this?

Colin:
This is about three months. And we said, look, we're seeing nothing coming back from you, yet we’re delivering on what, you know, here's our shareholder agreement. Here's our partner arrangement. Here's our expectations. And we feel like we're delivering and you're not. And we can't keep paying you. And so my dream of supporting this dad suddenly turned very toxic and very unpleasant.

Karen:
So can you talk a little bit about how, like, what you felt like when you realized that things were not working with this man?

Colin:
Well, we could see money just disappearing and we're not rich people. We were backing on instinct and due diligence, but it was slowly, it was slowly materializing in front of us that our competition wasn’t other fruit and veggie people, it was the big supermarkets. And we had missed that. We had really missed that and underestimated that. And what I'm talking about there is people's apathy to making change. I don't know what it's like in America, but a lot of people would aspire to having an organic fruit and veg box delivered to their door, but they kind of go, “Well, you can't sell me anything else?” And even though we had the ambitions to provide more and more groceries, we didn't have the capital to go into that. You know?

Karen:
So they would basically just end up going to the store to buy the organic fruits and vegetables instead of getting the box delivered?

Colin:
Yeah, or they would just, they would forego organic because, “Look, we're going to the supermarket anyway, we're just going to get our fruit and vegetables.” You know, they didn't really understand the benefits or they weren't committed to the organic thing. So we underestimated demand, underestimated competition of who we were really in competition with. So supermarkets and apathy of people making change, and without volume and all the scale that I'd built in and all the costs associated with that. And I'm not I'm not I don't throw money at things on a, I'm quite a lean person I know out to be efficient and effective. But I incurred a cost base. And that was the idea, to make it a freedom business, you know? And so this, yeah, so this turned ugly, but we got, we managed to part ways with the guy. And —

Karen:
So how did, how did that happen? Like, did you just have a confrontation with him or a discussion?

Colin:
We got our accountant to facilitate a conversation. It was, you know, it was unpleasant. We all sat in a room and I pretty much, I was silent because if I spoke it wouldn't have been good. But we all sat in a room. My accountant did most of the talking and he facilitated an exit plan and we just executed that. And meanwhile, Elly and I just carried on, so a little bit, a little bit of what I've already shared was maybe getting slightly ahead — Elly and I were still determined to go on. We thought we could make it work and we would just try more. And so we did, and we were willing to bet more money. So we mortgaged the house, put more money into it and just carried it on. And it was over the coming months. So now he's out of the way, we're doing this on our own, but this is where as the more we went into it believing we were doing something good, worthwhile for ourselves, our family, the economy, for the higher purpose and all those things, we were digging a hole. But when you're in a hole with enthusiasm, you don't know, you're the last person to see it. We carried on for I want to say 12 months maybe, but we were burning cash. We were just burning cash. We were paying our customers, and I'm trying to keep my other business going. And we were both burning out and we've got, and we've got like a one-year-old and getting to grips with parenthood.

Karen:
Yeah, that sounds really stressful, especially with the young child and trying to run two businesses. And yeah, that sounds, that sounds really stressful. So, so what happened next? Like when did you decide to actually get out of the business?

Colin:
So it was a dark day, Karen. It was a dark day. And I can remember it quite vividly because I was using a VA to help me like, build some spreadsheet that was going to help me with stock inventory or something like that. And I was going back and forth. The VA wasn't quite getting it and going on and on. And one day she sent something back and I just felt like, this is, I can't even get my VA to see what I'm trying to do here. And this is taking way too long. And then it kind of just dawned on me: this isn't going to work. And I think it was a Friday or a Saturday maybe, and we closed orders on the Sunday. And then we delivered on the Wednesday. So we collect — the nature of the business was closed orders, got all the information together, sent out what needed to happen. And then we would deliver on Wednesday or Thursday, something like that.

I must've made this decision on a Friday or a Saturday that I'm done. I'm done. And I can't quite remember the order of the events, but what happened on this particular day is when the seriousness of it really dawned on me that I could not, I could not do another thing and I could not go on, I remember walking out the house mid-afternoon, I think I had my phone on me, but that's all I had. I had no money. Dunno if I was dressed appropriately, Walked to the end of the road and walked into some woods that are at the end of the road. I knew these roads lit this wood.

It's kind of nice area in Christchurch, and this forest was at the end of our row. But the other end of the forest was the ocean. And I knew if I kept walking through the forest, I'd come to the ocean. And I did. I just kept walking until I come to the ocean. And while I was walking through the forest, I dunno why, but I did call a trusted friend. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but whatever he said gave me enough to sort of admit defeat. There was no way back and it's time to walk away or whatever, you know? There's no — I'm not attached to failure or anything like that. There wasn't any ego saying, what are people going to think? It was more how I was supporting my family and the money and the stresses around that. But he convinced me, he was the one who told me the story, you know, more than one occasion. You know, when you find yourself in a hole, the best thing you can do is stop digging. And I'd ignored that for a long while. That's when that story sort of is right, where it's time to stop digging.

Karen:
Right. That sounds like a rock bottom moment.

Colin:
Yeah, it was, it was the darkest day. And when I've told this story before I do, you know, it was the darkest day of my life. When I got to the beach, I sat on the beach for hours, just staring out. And it was daylight when I got to the beach and the sun went down behind me and I stared out at the ocean getting colder and colder, watched the moon come up over the ocean, and I could see the reflection on the ocean. And my brain was just going round and round and round probably landing on no thoughts whatsoever. And eventually, I knew I didn't want to go home and speak to the girls — nothing to do with them. They hadn't done anything wrong. I just knew I didn't want to speak to anyone. So I didn't want to go home until everyone had gone to bed and darkness and couldn't be disturbed by anyone. I just wanted to be in this black hole. And so it got later and later and later, eventually I stood up and I walked home in the darkness through the forest and crawled into bed alongside Elly and fell asleep. And then I woke up in the morning and I said, “Yeah. Okay. I get it. That's it. That’s enough.”

Karen:
Sure, sure. So was Elly feeling the same way about the business?

Colin:
Yeah, she was, she was more burned out than — I mean, she's, she was, she was that at that point, she was more full-time mum, you know, we were, we had already, we'd already decided to homeschool. Even though like, the baby was non-schooling age, we saw ourselves as full-time carers and educators. So we were taking it seriously. And I said, well, we'll close orders and we'll close orders till the end of the month. So we'll do orders to the end of the month and then we'll pack up and she turned around and said, “Why are we going to wait to the end of the month? Why don't we just stop today?” And I went, “Yeah, you're right.” And so we did, we let the orders come in for the day. And then we'd started having all those awkward conversations, but already the sense of relief was starting to kick in. Obviously I was not in a good space and it wasn't in a good space for several years afterwards. But the relief of the moment, you know, like you said, that rock bottom moment of sitting on that beach, staring out into the darkness, feeling like it was my darkest day, that was the turning point. That was when it was at its worst and everything else since then was just a slow, gradual ...

Karen:
Sure, sure. So what was the state of your affairs after you made this decision? You said that it took you several years to recover. So kind of give me that picture of, you know, where you were like financially and just emotionally and in your relationships. Kind of paint that picture for me.

Colin:
So at the time I had — we had our own house on a rental property and you know, we weren't rich people, we were doing okay. And you know, we've got honesty and integrity and we were determined to walk away and make sure everyone was paid. All our suppliers were paid. We wasn't just going to run down the road and not be heard of. So we were determined to do that. So we did what we did. We sold everything we could, we rented out our house, and we sold off all our possessions because we decided at that point we just needed to get away. We didn't know what we needed to do, we just needed to get away. And my coaching and consulting business had fallen away because of everything I'd put in. And so now I had nothing.

And obviously I want to be, I want to be the best dad I can be. I want to be the best partner I can be. And that none of that was happening. And so we made the decision, we just need to leave. And so we, we ended up putting out possessions that we still had left into a trailer, and we went and moved from the South Island to the North Island just to be with Elly's family.

And I'm going to share something now, which I think is really, really important: When we left, all we agreed to do was we said the only decision we must make now is the decision not to make any decisions. We need to remember what it's like to be happy again, to be with each other, to have some fun again, to just relax again. And that’s all we must do.

So we went and stayed with Elly's mom for three months. And all we did for three months is be. We just woke up and and we ... “be’d.”

Just look, you know, we just, we just went for walks and went to the beach and it was summer in New Zealand back then, it was my daughter's birthday. It was Christmas. This period was the first stage of our rejuvenation. And during this period, we, you know, we started the process of tying up all the loose ends, which went on for a long, long while. But we read a book called The Suitcase Entrepreneur. And this is when I got my first discovery of digital nomads or location independents. And inside this book, there was an example of a family who traveled and lived location independent, and they had five, six, seven kids.

We had one. And Elly and I are travelers from our young days, but we'd never traveled together. And so we, as we read more about this and sort of saw this life where we could go traveling and somehow make a new life, this became more appealing.

Karen:
So, so during this time, when you're when you're just being, what did you learn during that time?

Colin:
That's a really great question. And I've often used this phrase, like, as we sifted through the wreckage — it was that sort of, you know, sifted through the wreckage of our past ilfe — the bit that got us excited was that we had systemized, something can made it leverageable because up until then with Elly's she'd been a health and fitness personal trainer coach. So, you know, you'll understand, your listeners will understand, you know, that's trading time for money and I was doing the same. And so I've already, I've already alluded to always being wired to what can I do? I, you know, I, I do have the benefit of a business background. And so my, and my entrepreneurial instincts were always trying to leverage and scale and system. So whilst this business had not worked out as expected, I had scaled, I had made it scalable for the first time in my life, and I'd done it inside three months and I was like, wow, I can do that. I can do this. And we had our first experience of people taking out a credit card, paying over the internet while we were asleep.

Karen:
Right. Smart, passive income.

Colin:
As we all know, it's anything but passive. But and, and I should also point out, I don't know whether this is linked to SPI, but I've never even heard of Pat Flynn at this point. And I did not know anything about smart passive income, but I had been on personal development and I knew, you know, I knew what I was trying to do. So as we sifted through the wreckage, the thought that someone could get their credit card out while we slept and place an order and money ends up in our bank account, it wasn't just theory anymore. It was real. And we could systemize. It was like, right. We can do it. We just need a different business model. One that doesn't have all the logistics and the waste of delivering fruit and veg.

And then we, then we read the book, you know, where the digital nomad thing is. And it's then that I started to dive into online marketing and come across the likes of Pat and SPI Media and, you know, a lot of Pat’s associates and mentors. And I won't go into the hundreds I've listened to since, but you, I'm hoping you will, your listeners will sort of fill in some contexts there. There started to be a route forward. And, and so we knew if we went and moved to somewhere like Southeast Asia, we could pretty much, you know, live off of a very low cost way of life and recover, you know, warm weather, time with our daughter, less expenses, and less chores and maintenance and all those things, you know, got rid of all of that, minimize things, minimalism, you know, just kind of took all that on, living out of a suitcase and just being, and here we are four years later, we're still doing it.

Karen:
So when you look back, do you feel like there were some red flags that you missed along the way?

Colin:
Really, really, really good question. They certainly weren't red flags at the time and, but I'm going to be open enough to realize that they might've been, and I pushed them. I'm a systems-orientated person and I've always been willing to sacrifice short-term gain for long-term gain. And I still do it today, in fact probably to my detriment, I'm like the worst, you know. So it wasn't a hurried decision to go into business with this guy. I wasn't rushing full steam ahead. We was the one backing up the trap trying to. This guy came around for dinner and we got to know him as a person and met his kids and dived into as much as we could on a personal level.

But we believed, you know, we're, you know, it's the entrepreneurial trait is that you, you believe, you're optimistic. You believe you can do it. So, yeah, there would've been some red flags where he maybe couldn't come up with some of the stats he was alluding to. And in hindsight, maybe they were lies. I believe that he ... I always believe people are telling me the truth. I go and do my due diligence to prove it, but I'm not trying to prove people wrong. And so we, you know, we got as much data data as we could from his records, but his records weren't great. He was useless at systems, you know, he had very little to go on and I was just pulling it together and making sense of it and then running it through my accountant, who was very well-trained in this space and making sure that we saw enough, and even my accountant, he, you know, he said, this isn't a guaranteed win, but I can see why you're doing this, and it's not the accountant's job to say you shouldn't do it.

So he never said don't do it. He just said, look, you got to, this is what you're going to need to do to fulfill on your aspirations and your forecast and stuff like that.

Karen:
Yeah. I'm sure that's hard to see in a moment because like you said, you were just being optimistic and you know, I think it's a lot easier to see things in hindsight.

Colin:
Oh yeah. Yeah. And like I say, when he walked onto the doorstep, that was just a man to man moment where I, as a new father, looked at another father and had total total empathy for a man frazzled. And I knew I could help him with all the right intentions. I could help him and help me, Elllie, in the process. Right. I don't regret it because not once was I trying to cut corners or I was not trying to look at any process or cheat anyone or do anything. It just didn't work out.

Karen:
So when you moved in with your mother-in-law, how long were you there?

Colin:
Three months.

Karen:
And so that's when you moved to South Asia, then?

Colin:
That's when we, we saw what our options were, stay in New Zealand and start all over again. And, you know, literally start a new life in New Zealand, but we had, no, we were still burned out. You don't recover from burnout in three months and you're still dealing with a lot of negativity and all the loose ends.

Karen:
Wow. Can you just explain to me how long ago this was like, when was, I don't think we talked about when you started the business.

Colin:
The guy probably turned up on my doorstep around 2014. The business panned out over 2015 and 16. It lasted about 18 months: three months with him in it, 12 months, me and Elly just giving everything we possibly could to make it work. And, and eventually bowing out around October, 2016. And that's when the darkest day was in October, 2016. A month later we had left Christchurch and have never been back since. And we have a baby who is going to turn two in a couple of days.

Karen:
Wow, congratulations. Yeah. Well, it sounds like, it sounds like a wonderful lifestyle. So what is the business you have now and how did you end up starting that?

Colin:
Elly writes, she does freelance writing and works on our own blog where we're focused on affiliate marketing. So we're still trying to work out how we can scale her writing.

And I have had my, you know, I look to ads some pay-per-click and chat bots and things like that, and built relationships where I could partner up, but where I've had my most success and I probably enjoy and it plays to my strength is search engine optimization. So I've slowly sort of narrowed my online marketing offering down to specializing in search engine optimization and content, particularly on page, you know, optimizing existing content, content that has got stale over time, bringing that back to life. So now I'm, you know, following the advice: niche down, niche down, you know, narrow down, narrow down. And so, so now Elly's skills and my skills, like they dovetail a lot more. She can cross-sell me and I can cross-sell her. We're not trying to do too many things. We still feel like we still could do less, but this is where we find ourselves up and it's location independent. We can serve clients anywhere in the world. We received currencies in — we’re self-employed rather than building a business. We employ VAs, but we don't have employees so to speak. There's something nice about receiving income in different currencies and finding ways.

And we wake up in a different country every few months. We don't travel fast. We refuse to travel fast. And obviously COVID has changed things, but it hasn't stopped us. It’s stopped a lot of people, but it hasn't stopped us. So yeah, I guess we're, self-employed online entrepreneurs, freelancing, doing whatever it takes to be with our daughters, world-schooling them. And we're still going.

Karen:
Wow. Well, it's an incredible story so I appreciate you telling me the story and everything you've learned from it. Is there anything else you want to want to bring up or mention?

Colin:
I guess, for anyone listening, I'm in my fifties and I have less time to recover from this, but that doesn't define you. Failing in business doesn't mark you as a failure. It's just an experience. And I now have a much wider appreciation of ... the universe is just playing with all of us. I have now just become happy in the game, in the ebbs and flows of life. And because the most important thing is to be the best partner I can, the best dad I can, the best person I can with myself.

I don't care what anyone else thinks, if they want to call me a failure, because this hasn't worked or that hasn't worked, that's entirely their prerogative, and I’m not uncomfortable with that at all. I just need to look at my partner and my children and know that we are smiling as much as we can, being as happy as we can, and passing on our happiness to the next person we meet. And if we do that, the world will be a better place.

Karen:
Wow. That's, that's a great message to end on. And I think your story is going to be inspiring for many of our listeners. So thank you, Colin.

Colin:
You're welcome, Karen.

Ray:
Wow. What a journey. It seems like part of the problem for Colin and Elly is that they … they went into business with this guy because they felt sorry for him, or at least Colin did.

Karen:
There was definitely compassion involved, but Colin did work really hard with his accountant to see if the business model could work and his accountant gave him the go ahead. So I think sometimes there are just things that you can't know until you're in the situation.

Ray:
Definitely. There was another thing related to that, that really stuck with me, that Colin said, and I wrote it down, which is, he said, "The entrepreneurial trait is that you believe you're optimistic. You believe you can do it." And it just feels like balancing that entrepreneurial optimism with a sense of, what's real, what's possible ... it just feels like a central friction or challenge of the entrepreneur's journey, if not the central challenge of that journey.

Karen:
Yeah. I definitely think that's true. Colin kept believing that it could work and he just kept working harder and harder until he hit that rock bottom moment at the beach when reality kind of slapped him in the face. But I love how he and Elly were able to recover. And now they have this nomadic lifestyle that they really love. And it's the true story of success, his own version of success.

Ray:
Yeah. They found it; it was a winding path, but they got there eventually.

Karen:
Yeah. So Ray, last time, in the last episode, I shared one of my own failure stories and you promised to share one of your own, so I'm ready to hear it.

Ray:
All right. I don't know if it's going to be as good as your pinata story, but here it goes.

All right. So when I was in like sixth and seventh grades, I was a swimmer. I swam a lot. I was on the swim team at school. And we'd have these swim meets. We actually called them swim galas. I grew up on the other side of the world in Botswana, and I spent time in Zambia. That's a story ...

Karen:
I want to hear that story.

Ray:
Totally. That's a story for another day. But anyway, so gala's, we're at this gala ... And for the swimmers out there, I would usually swim two strokes: the front crawl and breaststroke. So those were the main ones that I swam, that I raced. But at this one gala, I was in a butterfly race for some reason I don't remember.

Karen:
That's a really hard stroke.

Ray:
It is. It's a tough stroke. It takes a lot of energy. It's a stroke I could swim, but it wasn't my specialty and I wasn't used to racing it. Anyway, so we line up, the gun goes off, we're in the water and I'm butterflying away. I'm just swimming as hard as I can. I mentioned that butterfly wasn't my specialty. With the strokes I was used to swimming, I had a slightly easier time seeing what was going on around me. And that was just because of the way that you swim those strokes. So in front crawl, you turn your head to breathe so you can look up and see what's happening on either side of you. In breaststroke, your arms are underwater and your whole head comes up to breathe so you can also see in your peripheral vision what's going on.

In butterfly, your head comes up but your arms come up too at the same time on either side, blocking your view a little bit. Also, like I said, it wasn't a stroke I swam very often. I didn't race it. So you can maybe see where this is going. So I get a little past the halfway point in the pool and had the sense that something was off. And this was a long time ago. I don't remember exactly like, what that sense was. This was more than 25 years ago. But there's a little sense. It started as a little sense, and then this sudden realization that you're the only one still swimming dude.

Karen:
Oh no.

Ray:
Yeah. So I stopped swimming and I'm just hanging out in the middle of the pool all by myself. And there are people packing the stands on three sides of me just laughing their heads off.

Karen:
Poor little Ray in the middle of a pool.

Ray:
Yeah. So somebody had false-started, obviously. It wasn't me, thankfully. But when there's a false start, the gun goes off twice. And I just missed that second shot, I just didn't hear it. So there you go. At least I wasn't the one who false-started.

Karen:
So you're just there in the middle of the pool, treading water when everyone's laughing.

Ray:
Yep, just rub it in, go for it.

Karen:
That's a very tragic failure story, Ray. And I hope you've talked to your therapist about it and have recovered.

Ray:
Yeah, at least once a month. It comes up.

Karen:
Okay. Well, thank you for making me feel not so alone in my failures. I appreciate it.

Ray:
My pleasure.

Karen:
Yeah. Well, that's it for this episode of Flops. Thanks for joining us. And we'll see you next time.

Ray:
See you later.

Karen:
Thanks for listening to Flops. For more information on today’s episode, including links and show notes, please visit SmartPassiveIncome.com/flops.

Special thanks to Colin Clapp for joining us on today’s episode. Learn more about him and his business, Parenting, Passports and Profits, by visiting ParentingPassportsandProfits.com.

Join us next week to hear a story about an ambitious hotel renovation that turned into a scramble to scrape by.

Your hosts are me, Karen Beattie, and my colleague, Ray Sylvester.

Flops is a production of SPI Media.

Our executive producer is Matt Gartland and our series producers are David Grabowski and Senior Producer Sara Jane Hess.

Writing is by Ray Sylvester and Karen Beattie.

Editing and sound design by Paul Grigoras.

Music by David Grabowski.

See you next time!