Flops 004: The Case of the Missing Contract

Flops 004: The Case of the Missing Contract

Ray Sylvester:
So, you've heard of Steve Jobs and probably Steve Wozniak. They're two co-founders of Apple Computer. But have you ever heard of Ronald Wayne? You may have noticed, I didn't say Jobs and Wozniak were the two co-founders of Apple. That's because Ronald Wayne was the third co-founder of Apple. Did you know Apple had a third co-founder? Not too many people do. Anyway, the year was 1976. Wayne was an engineer in his 40s working at the video game company, Atari, when two of his coworkers, a couple of whippersnappers named Steve, asked him to help them start the company that would eventually become Apple. Wayne agreed to come on board, with the deal that he would own 10% of the company while the other two would own 45% each. Wayne's role would be to provide administrative oversight and documentation for the new venture. He was the grownup in the room, so to speak. He also designed the first Apple logo and wrote the user manual for the Apple I.

But unlike the two Steves, who were raring to go and start this new company, Ronald Wayne was a bit more skeptical. You see, he'd already tried to start a company that made slot machines, and things had not gone well. He ended up with a lot of debt, which took him a year to pay off. Wayne knew that if things didn't go well with Apple, he and the other owners would be on the hook for that debt as well, putting him right back in the same spot. Plus, being in his 40s, Wayne also had a lot more assets than the 20 something Steves did, assets that could be seized if the bottom dropped out at Apple. Ronald Wayne had a lot more to lose.

So, just a few weeks after Wayne and the Steves signed the contract to start the company, Wayne's risk aversion got the best of him, and he renounced his role. In exchange for his equity in Apple, Ronald Wayne was paid $800. A year later, he got another $1,500 for agreeing to forfeit the right to any future claims against Apple, which had been restructured as a corporation. Signing these two documents, one to renounce his ownership in the company, and the other design away any future claims against it, cost Wayne dearly. If he hadn't put his John Hancock on those two pieces of paper, he'd be worth over $80 billion today.

To make matters worse years, later in the 1990s, Wayne sold the original contract that he signed with Apple for $500. A decade later, that document was sold for $1.5 million. A piece of paper, a contract, can hold a lot of power. What you do with that contract, whether you sign it or don't sign it, or maybe you misread it, can mean the difference between $500 and, well, billions of dollars.

In today's episode of Flops, we'll hear from someone who made the mistake of not signing a contract. While her loss wasn't as big as Ronald Wayne's, she still lost a lot of money and endured a year of stress, but also learned some valuable lessons. We'll hear her story today on Flops.

Karen Beattie::
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. I'm Karen.

Ray:
And I'm Ray. And we together are the content team at SPI Media, a company that helps entrepreneurs build the skills and community they need to succeed. Now, Karen, I am looking forward to hearing your interview today with Trudy Rankin.

Karen::
Yes. I really enjoyed my conversation with Trudy. She has a really interesting story. She started out as an IT professional working for large companies and governmental agencies, but then she founded her own company called Online Business Liftoff. And it's a program in Australia that helps people who, for whatever reason, have a hard time getting 9:00 to 5:00 jobs, like those with disabilities or maybe a caregiver or people who are over 50, and she helps them launch their own business

Ray:
Right on. That sounds like a really awesome business model. I'm especially curious to hear how Trudy went from being an IT pro to founding this really cool sounding company.

Karen::
Yeah. I love her story because it shows her tenacity in following her passion, and it all started when she helped a man who was blind start his own business. And so, she launched her business to help others do the same thing. But things started going south when a large client, who she was depending on for a year's worth of work, backed out, leaving her without income for an entire year.

Ray:
Well, this is Flops, so you knew there was going to be a big challenge somewhere along the way for Trudy. Well, I'm super intrigued to hear her story now, so can we get to it?

Karen::
Yeah, let's get right to the interview. Here it is.

Trudy, welcome to the show.

Trudy Rankin:
Thank you very much for having me.

Karen:
Yeah. We're so glad to have you today. So as you know, this podcast is all about failure and we're going to get to your story in just a minute, but first I want to just hear about your background. Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

Trudy:
It's a bit bit complicated. I was born and bred in the US but I ended up marrying a New Zealander, a Kiwi, and I moved to New Zealand in my early twenties. And since then, we've sort of bounced back and forth between New Zealand and Australia. And at the moment we're living in Australia, in Melbourne. And I love, you know, I love both places. They're both beautiful. They have their own beauty about them. So it's always a wrench to leave on and go to the other. And then, but there's good things about both.

Karen:
Yeah. Yeah. And you have acquired the accent, I hear.

Trudy:
It's a bit of a myth. It's a bit of a complicit. I always say that it's a corrupted accent because it's been mish-mashed with so many other things.

Karen:
Yeah. Yeah. So tell me, like, what, so did you so obviously you moved to Australia and New Zealand like when you were an adult. So did you go to college in America or what is your background?

Trudy:
Yeah, sorry, we moved a lot when I was a child. My father was a GP, a small town GP, and he had itchy feet, always have, has, had, always did have. And so we moved quite apart when I was a child, grew up in little country town, little farming towns. Until basically, even when I went to university, I went to a university just in a place called Walla Walla, Washington. And basically just did I did it. It was so going to be a doctor. I was determined to be a doctor, you know, just to follow in my father's footsteps and completely ignored the fact that when I, I worked in summers, in his practice as a, like a nurses aid, I actually didn't like it at all, but I was still gonna be a doctor. So I ended up doing pre-med.

I did, I did a mix of history and chemistry at university, finished and then went overseas for a break here just to do some volunteer work. I went to Hong Kong for nearly a year and helped out in a school there and also taught English and PE to some, some Chinese nursing students. And that was where I met my future husband. He was there as part of his medical degree studies that he was studying medicine. And basically he had to go back to New Zealand. I had to go back to the U S to finish my degree. We wrote to each other for 18 months, and then he came over for a visit and, you know, it sort of goes from there. He proposed, and then I had to make a decision. He had to go back to New Zealand to finish his medical degree and I had to decide whether I was going to stay in the States for six years and do medicine. You know, do all the bits that you have to do this study, plus the internships. And I decided that was an easy decision. It's like, forget that I'm going to marry my husband and I'm going to go and have an adventure and live in New Zealand. And I did that and I have never, ever regretted it.

Karen:
Wow. Wow. So did you, I know you're an entrepreneur now, did you have any thoughts back then that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Trudy:
I was, I think I was one of those closet entrepreneurs. When, when I was a kid, we used to, like I said, we lived in a small town and we lived at the top of a hill and at the bottom of the hill was a big public swimming pool and used to get pretty hot in the summers. And we would, as a family, we would go swimming. We had to go together. My parents made sure we went together. If we didn't go together, we didn't get to go at all. And we had to do chores in the morning before we could go, but we'd go down, we'd swim and swim and we'd come home. We'd be really hungry. And on the way home, there was this little corner shop that sold sweets, you know, candy and things like that. And we would stop and we would spend our tiny, tiny amount of money that we had back then and buy sweets and eat them on the way up the Hill.

And I would always eat half of mine and save the rest so that when we got home, they were still hungry and they'd go, “Oh, you've got some left.” And I would sell them to them, to my brothers and sisters. And they told me years later that I used to double the price. I don't remember doing that, but I always enjoyed just that whole, what can you do to make money thinking? But I didn't, I didn't go down that route. We chose to have children early on in our marriage and by the time they were in school and ready to either, you know, okay. To be, for me to take on work again, I ended up going the corporate route and fell into project management by accident, as you usually do with project management. And then I moved into more senior roles, management roles and became a chief information officer and just basically a manager who ended up looking after the IT for big organizations, like mostly government.

And just basically it wasn't until, you know, but always had that nagging feeling in the back of my head that I wanted to do something because when the children were small, I always used to do things to try and earn a bit of pocket money. And finally got to the place where I actually had an incredibly ideal opportunity to be able to make the choice. I could make a choice, I could actually keep doing what I was doing. You know, keep working in the same area that I was working in, or I could take the opportunity to start my own business. And I thought, well, if I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it. So I might as well take the leap and start my own business. And I did, and it's been up and down, but it's been a lovely journey and I'm not sorry I did that either.

Karen:
Sure. So how long were you in the corporate world?

Trudy:
Oh, wow. 15 years or so, a bit more than that, possibly.

Karen:
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I was in the corporate world for awhile too. So I know that, I know that world very well, the beige cubicles and all of that. So.

Trudy:
Yes, it's a different, it's a, it's like being on a different planet, you know, when you work for yourself and when you work in corporate, there's just chalk and cheese and there's a lot of adjusting that you have to do when you make the leap from one to the other. And I think a lot of people don't realize that.

Karen:
Yeah. Yeah. So what did you do then when you went off on your own and started your own business?

Trudy:
Well, I probably did it the backwards, you know, because I went, I want to start a business and then I decided what I was going to be about rather than the other way around. I thought I had a bit of an idea, but like I said, there's a big mind-shift between corporate and people to support you and having a PA and people to, you know, help with all of the tasks and then jumping into your own business. And you're doing everything yourself. You're having to learn, like drinking from a fire hose, all the learning you have to do. And then part of that learning was,, well, who do I want to serve? And my problem was that I do have a lot of skills. I have a lot of experience and I could help a lot of different people.

And so that's a worse problem than almost in not having an idea because it took me a long time to actually filter out and decide who I really wanted to serve. And it's been a bit of a journey to get to that place. And when you don't have clarity about who you want to serve, you're confused, your marketing messages are confused. You confuse your customers and it just, it makes it a lot harder. It does. It's not impossible because you serve people along the way, but it does make it a lot harder to actually really, really take off.

Karen:
Sure, sure. So, who did you decide that you wanted to serve then?

Trudy:
Well, basically it was a bit of a long story. I'll try and keep it a little bit short. When I was in management as a chief information officer and because of my experiences of moving countries, I know how hard it is for, for some people to actually get jobs, especially if you move to a new country or for there's something in your background that makes it really, really difficult to just fit into that mold of the traditional nine to five mold.

And basically I'd always run internship programs or I had partnered with universities to bring in interns. So I ended up working at one stage when I was in New Zealand, I was the chief information officer for the department of conservation, loved that there was a beautiful job to have, but we partnered with the local university to help migrants, who they had a lot of skills, but they just needed experience in the New Zealand workforce to understand the culture, you just pick up the work culture. And so we did that. We ran programs like that. And I saw the benefit. I saw the value both for us and for the people who were coming through. So when I started my own business, I, you know, I thought, Hmm, you know, I'd really like to be able to still do that, like to be able to, you know, have an intern or set up an internship program.

And this is me dreaming big when it's just me, by myself. So I had, I'd been doing some work for Vision Australia. This is as a consultant. And I noticed that they had a, a service that helps people who are blind and partially sighted find employment because it's very, very difficult for people who are blind or partially sighted to get jobs. Just, it's just really difficult. And I ended up bringing on a young man as an intern, just for three months. And as I was working with him, he was someone who, he desperately wanted a job. He really, really, really wanted a job and he just couldn't get one.

So he had finished high school, no job. Finished university, no job. And he'd ended up, you know, doing a lot of study and doing writing, you know, he'd done courses in writing and everything is finally out of sheer desperation and boredom, he started writing a blog, just for something to do because he was bored spitless. And as he wrote his blog, he started to refine what it was all about. And when he got to me, it had sort of solidified a little bit and I was just talking to him about it. And I said, his name is Shahan. And I said, Hey, you know, Shahan, how many people come to your website every month to read your blog? And he told me, and I said, that's a pretty big number. How are you making money from it? How are you monetizing it? And he just looked at me. He says, what do you mean? I said, you know, that you can earn money from websites. And so I helped him figure out how to monetize what he was doing. And obviously it was small to start with.

They were little experiments, but it was just beautiful. The first time that he said, Hey, Trudy, I just got paid $10 from the monetization opportunities that were set up in my website. And I won't go on about that. But he's gone on to actually very successfully earned money both from his blog and from a business that he's built up where he buys and sells antiques. He buys them in the flea markets, restores them, makes videos of his restorations, posts those on YouTube, and then he sells them on eBay. So he's got a very successful business. Anyway, the next step was, is that I said, well, that worked really well for Shahan. Could we do it for more people?
You know, people who are blind or partially sighted. So I put together a really quick sort of brief telling the story of Shahana and I took it to the CEO of Vision Australia, and I said, Hey, this worked for him. Could, could it work for more people? Would you like to try an experimental project? I didn't have to sell them. He just said, let's do it. And so we actually set up myself and one other person, we set up a six month program and we worked with a small handful of people, some of whom were completely blind and some of whom were partially sighted and we helped them understand how to use the internet to build their online business. It was very successful. And after that, that was a very exciting thing. And I wanted to know if I could take it further, and this is where sort of, I dunno if you want to get into the failure part, but that's where the failure part starts.

Karen:
Okay. So, we've kind of have the story leading up to it. So, go ahead and, and tell us about your failure.

Trudy:
Well, this is one of the big juncture points or pivoting moments in my business is, is that as part of that while, that program worked, who else would be interested in it? I was able to make connections with a really big organization in another country, and I'm not going to say who they are. And, and they were just keen as mustard to run this same program, because it'd been so successful. And so I was really confident that we were going to be working together to the point where I, cause it's a big program, you know, it's, it goes over quite a lengthy period of time because it's very intensive and hands on.

And I planned out my full year, 2018 was completely planned out around this program. And as a consequence, I did not do any business development with anyone else. So I had one basically, you know, customer. We had everything planned, everything ready to go, everything was done. And I had actually spent money on starting to develop some of the supporting material to go with the program. And, and then all of a sudden I started getting crickets. You know, I started getting silence from the other side and I'm going what's going on? And, and just the long story short, what happened was, is that they had gone. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But they'd never signed the contract and I had done the work without that signed contract on the strength of their handshake. Started to do the work. But what had happened with them is that they had, the CEO has said, yes, the manager down had said, yes, the person below her had said yes. And then they brought in somebody else from the outside who hadn't had all of that discussion and dialogue, and that person managed to convince them that they wanted to do it themselves. And I had shared a lot of my IP. I had shared a truckload of my IP and basically it went crickets and I'm going, what's going on? Silence, silence, silence. And it just built to the point where I finally had to send an email, you know what ‘s happening here, please? Because I need to know, cause I need to be booking tickets. I need to be doing all sorts of things. And, and I got this really, really short brisk email back saying, “Oh, sorry, we're going to do it ourselves. Thanks very much for all your assistance.”

Karen:
Wow.

Trudy:
And it was just before Christmas, just before Christmas. And it's just like, now, what do I do? What do I do? Because I had no other work lined up. I had no other income that was going to be coming in because of that. I had spent my own money and I had lined up a team member to help. They were counting on that as well. And now there was nothing, you know, it was absolutely nothing, a blank slate. And so I just went, wow, that was, that was pretty intense.

Karen:
So, how did you respond to this email?

Trudy:
You know, I, I have, I'm a strong believer in a couple of things. One: never burn your bridges. And two: I am responsible for what happens and sometimes you can't control what happens, but you can control how you respond to it. So I sent them back an email saying that was unexpected and I'm a little surprised, but I'm glad you're still doing the , any way, your way. Cause it's going to help people and stay in touch. And basically, you know, as I thought about it, as I reflected on it, I realized that I didn't like their decision and I didn't like the way they had arrived at their decision or communicated their decision, but their decision was completely within their rights as an organization to do it that way, because if that's what they believed was going to help their customers the best that's what they should be doing. And that's, that's what they should be deciding. So I had to decide not to get all bitter and twisted about it and just go, Oh, my I've just learned a whole lot of lessons out of that, set that aside. And let's just see what we can do to retrieve some of the situation. So we took the work that we had done on, on the, on the course on the program side of it, turned it into a, a bit of an online course that we could just pop up onto the Internet and then basically started, I started hunting for work, you know, like customers. Because my alternative was to get a job and I, I just didn't want to do that. I loved being my own boss.

Karen:
Yeah. So, well, I was just wanting to take a few steps back to ask a few questions. So this was like a year's worth of work, so I assume it was several thousands of dollars that you were out.

Trudy:
We're talking six figures.

Karen:
Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a lot. And how long had you worked on the project before it was canceled on your end?

Trudy:
Several months. So, you know, I was out of pocket some money, which at my stage of my business was I'm still new growing, young. There wasn't lots of cash flow there. In terms of available cashflow to use there's cashflow, but to, to be able to just throw it out the window. No.

Karen:
Yeah, yeah. So, you said you didn't have a signed contract. Was that just because you had trusted the people you were working with or, like, explain, explain that a little bit, like, you know, how that came to be?

Trudy:
Yeah. So I had sent them through a proposal, you know, a professional proposal with clarity around price, what was going to happen, who was responsible for what. And I had verbal confirmation that they were going to do it. I had an email, had emails that said, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, theoretically, you know, it could, it could maybe have challenged it in courts, but life is too short. So, you know, I had every reason to believe that they were going to sign it as a proposal. All I need. Because until they signed the proposal, I couldn't send them the first invoice, you know, so that we could get started with the work to complete the work on building the program. And so that was my first mistake was to actually do work before they'd signed the actual proposal, the contract to say, yeah. And then I could have invoiced them, et cetera. So that was, that was my first mistake. So that was that was that was something that I'll, I won't do it again, but I'm sure. My mistake was in doing the work before they signed.

Karen:
Sure, sure. Okay. The project ended, you decided not to be bitter about it. So then what happened next? Like tell me, tell me kind of how, like how long it took you to kind of get back on your feet and, and figure out what to do next.

Trudy:
Yeah. Well, the figuring out what to do next was the tricky bit, because I wanted to salvage what we didn't want to lose the work we'd put into it. So that's why we turned it into an online course, a part of an online course that we could just pop up onto the Internet. And I went looking for things I could do to bring some money in so that we could survive while we were going through this process and some of that was customer based and then there's a few opportunities to apply for grants. And the Australian government—we were in Australia, obviously at that stage— the Australian government a few years ago, did something really innovative that governments don't usually do innovation, but they did something innovative. And they actually said, we want to try new ways of helping people avoid being reliant on government support for, to survive.

So basically on the benefit. And so they created the opportunity for people to propose pilot projects that would experiment with this ability to do that, to help people avoid or either get off or, or avoid having to be reliant on the benefit. And we applied. We realized that this opportunity was coming up. We went to their meetings to hear what it was all about, decided we were going to apply. It was a diabolical process. It was very work intensive. It was our first grant that we'd ever applied for, nearly gave up, finally finished the application and we were told or think I was in February. So this is a couple months after I got this note, we were told that we would hear by May, whether we were successful or not.

We did not hear until just before Christmas. So a whole year, a whole year, it took for us to go, okay, now, now we've got something that we can really get our teeth into. We can reuse all of the work that we did on the program and we can actually enhance it, expanded and make it really, really useful. And so in 2019, early in 2019 we, we kicked off that piece of work with the Australian government and, and it's been really fantastic ever since then. And it's all about helping people start their own online business and making sure they have the solid foundations to make it a success.

The, we can see the difference for people, the difference that it makes in their lives. And it's not always financial. A lot of times it's confidence. It takes them from a place of absolutely no confidence at very low self-esteem to a level of high confidence in their ability to learn their way through situations. So we've given them the tools to be able to learn. Just to explain a little bit, we work with people who are carers aged 26 and above who are carers. So they have somebody in their family that they are their primary care for, who has a disability or a severe illness or an injury, or they're elderly. And, and this person can't get a job because they have to look out for this other person. And oftentimes they have health issues themselves.

And we also look, and also a group of people who are aged 50 and above, who are unemployed, or they're at risk of long-term unemployment because either they are casual laborers or something's happened and they have to change. And, and just working with those groups of people, you know, made us realize that there's an extraordinary number of people out there who are willing to do the work, they are willing to do the work. They just need an opportunity to, to try something that's going to help them build their confidence and their belief in themselves.

Karen:
Yeah. So is this program then you're funded through a grant, so is this going to be going on for awhile then? Or like, what is the next step in your business?

Trudy:
The grant funding comes to an end on the 31st of March. And we're in the process of working with a government agency that we're working with, just to see what is the next step we're working towards what's known as an outcomes-based contract. So we brought in a mentor to help us with that. And in the meantime, we're looking at collaboration opportunities with other, with other people who are in kind of the same space as us. And we've just started a new thing that we developed it specifically for our OBL people—Online Business Liftoff. We call it OBL people. And basically we work with experts, consultants, and people who have got lots of knowledge in their heads who want to actually start a course or a workshop. They want to create a workshop or a masterclass. I'm not talking a full blown course. We've done it with a few people.

Now, the ability to work with somebody to do that and add in what we call a diagnostic tool or a calculator to help with that aha moment building, and then turn that into an evergreen type offering that they can put onto their website as a lead magnet or, or a course that people can pay for. So, basically sort of taking people who have finished our program, they’re ready for that next step, or people outside our program, who will want to just use the knowledge that they have to, to help people. And they're ready, they're ready to start taking that next step in building their business.

Karen:
Yeah. So, the course that you have that you offer in your business, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like what, what that course is like?.

Trudy:
Sure, yeah. Basically, basically over a period of 12 weeks, we've kind of divided up into four chunks. We spend a bit of time, quite intensively helping people mine their past experience, their life experience, their work experience, their personality, the things they care about. We mine all that information and we teach them about the different kinds of business models that are available, online business models. And we look at, and we help them come up with a problem that they would like to help solve. So then they use that problem as a basis for their idea for their business. Then we match that with their personality to decide what their business model is going to like. Then they decide that then we work with them. Once they've decided that we help them get their URL, their web address, then we work with them to help them build their website and their really simple, basic funnel is where you basically just get people to sign up to your email list and you send them an email nurture sequence, just very simple funnel, but it works.

We spend the rest of the time helping them understand the basics of, and the fundamentals of content marketing. So what it is, how to reach out on social media, what's SEO—search engine optimization. We teach them how to do keyword researches way back as part of their figuring out what the problem is. But we focus very much on helping them understand their customer better. So we using, we teach them the techniques that they can use to get out there and talk to the customers, ask them the right questions and make sure they're using the language their customers are using to describe the problems that they're experiencing.

Once people have done all that work their way through the program, at the end of it, as a reward for those people who have finished building their website and their funnel, as simple as it is, and we then help them set up their, their metrics, their, their Google analytics.

Karen:
Sure. So, so who is this course open to, and I don't think you've said the name of it yet. So can you just mention the name?

Trudy:
So the way people can get to our course, it's the Online Business Liftoff program. And the way people can get access to it is to come and join our community. And basically they can then go through the program self-paced. They can just take it at their own speed, go through all of the training modules. And we also, I, at least it's been my experience that people getting started off. I get stuck on two things. Now they get stuck on the tick. They find it hard to develop their website, or they get stuck on the marketing. And so we make sure we have somebody who's there available for tech support, and they can sign up for tech support sessions. And we also have a lot of training around the marketing side of things, so people can get help, they can post on our community forum basically asking for feedback on the things that are done. Yeah.

Karen:
Yeah. That's great. I want to ask you a few more questions, just going back to kind of the, the failure part of the story. It, so it took you about a year from the time you got that email from the client saying that the project was not moving forward until, you know, the next Christmas, when you got word that you got this grant. So what was happening during that year? Like where you just, you know, kind of sitting on pins and needles, where you're looking for other work, where you just, you know, having a lot of self doubt, like what was going on during that time?

Trudy:
It was a really turbulent year. It was a quite a difficult year. And basically I spent a lot of time going out there and doing, you know, business development, trying to replace or build a pipeline back up again. So I spent a lot of time doing that, and I just have to say the best advice I ever got from anybody during that period of time was, was basically from somebody who's a very successful coach consultant person, he said, just go out and have lots of coffees, just have coffee meetings.

Karen:
You can't go, you can't go wrong with coffee.

Trudy:
And he was right. You know, that was, that was the best thing. So I did that. It was, it was very up and down.I did doubt, you know, whether or not I was going to be able to turn things around. Financially, I nearly went broke. I was within less than a hundred dollars of not having any money in the bank at all, which was quite, that was really hard. Because my husband had been, you know, very supportive of my desire to, to become an entrepreneur and that support's there, but it only goes so far when it starts impacting on my ability to help contribute to my share of the family budget, the family costs and things like that. And it got to the point where he basically says, look, you're going to have to go get a job.

And I did, I had to go start looking for a job. And it's just like, I just felt so frustrated about that because all of that time that I spent looking for a job job, I could have spent working on my business. And so, you know, basically that was just, that was frustrating. It was a lot of, a lot of, and down a lot of self doubt, a lot of hard, hard, hard work. But at the end of the day, in terms of helping to bring clarity about what I really wanted to do, that was gold. I look back on it now and like I said, I wish I wish they hadn't communicated their decision the way they did. I would not trade that experience for anything.

Karen:
Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about that. Like, so it just did it just clarify that you wanted to be an entrepreneur and didn't want to go back into like a regular nine to five job and like, what other lessons did you learn from it?

Trudy:
Yeah, no, it absolutely clarified that. I just, deep in my gut, I knew I just didn't want to go back, did not want to go back. And it also helped me clarify who I really wanted to serve, which that's the that's part of the gold. I just so enjoyed working with people who don't fit the traditional nine to five job mold. You know, they just, for, for whatever reason in their life, the circumstances in their life traditional nine to five job just doesn't fit. And that has really big implications for, for those people. In that situation, it impacts their, their feelings of confidence, their feelings of self esteem, their standing in society and, and the way society views them, the way they view themselves. And so being able to have an alternative and provide people with a really well thought out and effective program that helps people go from here to here means that it actually changes that whole fit in society. I don't even quite know how to describe it.

Karen:
Sure. So, really the failure really helped clarify that for you and just your audience and who you want to serve. Was there anything else that you learned from that whole experience? Besides getting a contract signed?

Trudy:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. My husband will tell you I'm a very stubborn person and I I've actually taken that. And I say that being stubborn is a virtue because it means you don't give up no matter what happens. And it solidified for me that if you, you say you, you basically saw I'm not going to give up. I don't care what happens. I have a saying, you know, we use in our program, it says you can fall down seven times and get up eight and that's success. If you fall down seven times and stay down, that is failure. And for me, failure, isn't about having something, not turn out the way that I thought it was gonna turn out or the way I wanted it to turn out. Success for me is getting up and keeping on trying. And that just solidified that for me, it's the people who give up that, that are never going to end up doing anything.

Karen:
Sure, sure. Yeah. Well, I just love that story. I love your story. I just love seeing people who find their passion and who find fulfillment in the work they do. And this really is truly a story of someone falling down and getting back up. And I, I just really appreciate your story. Is there anything else that you want to share about the experience?

Trudy:
I'm just going to mention, you know, because you can either have somebody who's a friend or you might meet somebody in a mastermind, or you might meet somebody in a community that you're part of who can help with that. And that's one of the reasons why I'm in SPI Pro. I don't know you talk about SPI Pro on this podcast, but I need people around me who understand what I'm going through in my, what the journey is because they're trying to do something similar, different industry, different service, different product, but they still understand that entrepreneurial journey and having something like that is probably going to make the biggest difference in your business journey than anything else will. So I highly recommend that you go find a mastermind, go find a community, you know, be, be with like-minded people who were trying to do what you're doing to do.

Karen:
Yeah. I love that. Well, Trudy, thank you so much for sharing your story today. I have just found it so inspirational and I think our listeners will find it inspirational as well. So thank you so much.

Trudy:
Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Ray:
So, Karen, in the very first episode of Flops, the one with John Vuong, who, as you may remember, got caught up in a pyramid scheme, I talked a little bit about arbitrage, where you buy something cheaply and you resell it elsewhere for more money. And Trudy's story got me thinking, maybe she could have avoided all that pain and failure if she just stuck to selling candy for a profit like she did to her siblings.

Karen:
True, true.

Ray:
I'm kidding, of course. But that part of the story, on a serious note, showed just what an enterprising mind Trudy had from such a young age. It was really pretty impressive.

Karen::
Yeah, you're right. And I'm sure her candy business could have been very lucrative if she had stuck with it.

Ray:
Yep, potentially.

Karen::
But her story resonated with me because I've been in the position where having a client back out has caused serious pain. I worked for two different creative agencies in my career that were too dependent on one major client, and when those clients decided to end the relationship, tons of people were laid off, including me. So, I know the dangers of relying too much on one client.

Ray:
Yeah. Yeah. I haven't been exactly in that boat, but I have freelanced a lot in my career as well, and was recently working, actually, with a client that decided to go a different direction, and they were the majority of my income at the time. So, yeah, they gave me a month's notice, they didn't need my service. Yeah. They didn't need my services anymore.

Karen:
That's painful.

Ray:
Yeah. Yeah. So, I definitely suffered through a few sleepless nights and a couple of weeks of figuring out my next plan, but definitely nothing like what Trudy went through. And speaking of Trudy, she obviously clawed her way back from a pretty serious setback, and I'm curious to hear from you, what impressed you the most about how she managed her way out of this massive failure that nearly wiped out like a whole year's worth of business for her?

Karen::
Yeah. Well, she definitely learned from her mistakes. She realized that it was a huge mistake to rely just on one client for a whole year's worth of income, and she also realized the importance of a contract and having that signed. But I was also inspired that she really stuck to her guns, even when she felt pressure from outside forces, like family members or just society in general, to do something different, to get like a regular 9:00 to 5:00 job. But she hung on for an entire year waiting for that grant to come through, and her patience finally paid off. And I also love how she found clarity about her passion and her audience when she helped one person and realized, "This is it, this is my passion."

Ray:
Yeah. Yeah. And I really admire her patience and her tenacity, as well, as you said. And I'm also really glad you mentioned the passion thing. A lot of people talk about the importance of following your passion and finding a career, but I think that's not always the best advice. A lot of people, they may not know-

Karen:
Yeah, that's true.

Ray:
... you may not know what your passion is, or the things that you're passionate about just may not make for a good business or career. And for Trudy, it seemed like it was this balance of, she had an idea of what her passion was, but she also had to go out and find it, in a way. She had a sense of how she could make it work, but she needed to get that clarity, as you said, through practice and experience, the clarity of what was going to work and really click for her.

Karen:
Sure. Yeah. And I love Trudy's quote from the interview, which actually could be a motto for this whole podcast.

Karen:
She said, "Failure isn't about having something, not turn out the way I thought it was going to turn out, or the way I wanted it to turn out. Success, for me, is getting up and keeping on trying. It's the people who give up that are never going to end up doing anything."

Ray:
Yeah. Well, what's the quote? It's fall down seven times, get up eight.

Karen:
Yeah.

Ray:
Although I don't know about the math on that one. It seems like you'll be fine if you get up just after the seventh time, but anyway.

Karen:
Sure. True. Well, anyway, Trudy also mentioned that she's a member of the SPI Pro community, so this seems like a good time to talk about SPI Pro. In fact, all of our guests so far on this inaugural season of Flops are also SPI Pro community members. And SPI Pro is a private online community for growth-minded entrepreneurs.

Ray:
That's right. The community is currently more than 500 members strong, and it's a place where entrepreneurs at various stages can come together to meet and support one another, get answers to burning questions, learn from experts, participate in growth challenges, and a lot more.

Karen:
Yeah. So, if this sounds intriguing and you want to learn more and apply to be a part of the community, check out the link in the show notes.

Ray:
So, Karen, we have a special guest joining us today at the end of the show here. David Grabowski is actually one of our producers here, and he does most of the music and sound design for the show. Hey, David, how is it going?

David Grabowski:
It is going, Ray. Karen, Ray, Karen. Nice to be here.

Karen:
Hey, David.

Ray:
It's good to have you, man. So, we brought you on because you're a great guy, but also because you have a mini failure story of your own to share with us from.

David:
I do.

Ray:
Yeah. From back in your time in the hustle and bustle and bright lights of New York City.

David:
I do, I do. To clarify though, I have many failure stories. This is just one that I'm willing to share on air.

Karen:
Well, we have plenty of episodes that we can fill, David.

David:
Oh, excellent.

Karen:
If you want to share all of those stories.

David:
Many seasons.

Ray:
Well, give us what you got today and-

David:
All right.

Ray:
... see how it stacks up.

David:
The failure story in question today is the failure of David's attempt to join the New York City restaurant scene. This was back in 2011, I want to say. So, this is my first job when I moved to New York City. I was fresh out of college, and I'm like, "I'm going to go to the big city and become a superstar." So, I moved to New York City, I got a shitty apartment in Brooklyn, actually in Harlem, but I was crashing on couches for a little bit, actually, while I had this job. So, not only was I working 10 plus hour days to afford to live in New York City and work my way up to getting an apartment, I was also crashing on couches, and so not sleeping well. It was just not great.

David:
The place I ended up working at, I won't name, but let's just say it was a very cozy place in the West Village. You can take cozy to mean very, very small. It was teeny, tiny. Everything about it was cute. There was cute decor everywhere, the servings were cute, even though they still charged you New York City prices, the tables were cute. Everything was very small. And I, as you both know, extremely tall. I'm 6'2" and sort of gangly. And so, me trying to rush around inside this tiny, little closet of a restaurant with 30 tables in it was just not ever destined for success.

Karen:
But you're cute, David, so-

David:
Thank you.

Karen:
... I'm sure you just fit in with the restaurant.

David:
You know what? The big takeaway from this restaurant situation was that I did learn how to tie a bow tie, because we all were bow ties. Like I said, very cute.

Ray:
What's the trick? Because I've never seen it.

David:
It's all about the rabbit hole, man. Once you create the rabbit hole and you thread the other side through the rabbit hole, you just put that bunny in his hole, man. You're good to go.

Ray:
I have no idea what all that meant, but I'll trust you on that.

David:
You'll know. Next time you're doing it you'll be like, "Wait, there's a little... It's the rabbit hole," and you'll know.

Ray:
I'll take your word for it.

David:
So, anyway, I'm working at this place, and I had a couple of mishaps, a broken dish here. Like I said, the place would be packed. And we had celebrity clientele, too, like Jake Gyllenhaal used to eat lunch there every day. And it was an up and coming place, so the pressure was on. The woman who was the manager/owner of the place wasn't like the gentlest of people. If you've ever seen, what's his name, Gordon Ramsey, she was pretty much the female version of that. She once fired a guy for mispronouncing cumin. I was there. He was like, "Can you pass the cumin?" She goes, "Excuse me? Get the hell out of my kitchen."

Ray:
I was going to say, there's the British and then there's the American, but it sounds like this person found a third pronunciation. It could be cumin or cumin.

David:
Exactly. Yeah. It's not cumin. Don't say that if you work in a kitchen. So, the one incident, though, the tipping point, let's say, of my career as a bus boy in a tiny, cute restaurant in the West Village of New York City in 2011, was that one day for lunch, there were several well-dressed ladies on the other side of the bar, and there was a stack of silver serving trays at the end of the bar. Next to the stack of silver serving trays were several bottles of very expensive wine, which were all open. I mean, things were moving around so quickly that to this day, I'm not quite sure what happened. But all I know is I put a tray down at some point, and then at some other point, these bottles were all knocked onto the other side of the bar, excuse me, where they exploded at the feet of these women. It was like a bomb going off. And one of them was wearing this fine fur. I think it was probably a mink coat. And they were just drenched in fine wine. And I was looking into their eyes just horrified.

David:
To their credit, as people of this world, they were not mean or rude, even having just had wine exploded on them. We ended up paying their laundering bill. But the chef, she was pissed, and I was fired not too long after. She fired me in that roundabout way, though, where she was like, "We actually just don't need any more busboys right now, so I'm sorry. We just have too many busboys."

Karen:
Oh, poor David.

David:
That was the end of my restaurant career in New York.

Ray:
So, David, I think my biggest question for you is, who would play you in the movie version of this story? I'm picturing Andre the Giant, but he's sadly, of course, passed away. So, if not Andre, who would it be?

David:
Just top of my head, I think it's Adrian Brody, because-

Karen:
Oh, yeah, that would be a good one.

David:
... in order for the audience to really feel this story, you need his sad, sad eyes looking into the camera. Can you imagine Adrian Brody looking across the counter at these two gorgeous women just with the saddest eyes, like, "I'm so sorry about the explosion of wine"?

Ray:
Yeah. I feel like he... It's sort of the slapstick silent movie kind of thing, he could pull that off. I could see it working. Definitely.

David:
Yeah.

Karen:
And were the wine bottles, were they like a set of dominoes? Did they just fall one after another? I'm trying to picture it here.

David:
I think there were two and they both fell at once, and it was just like... And it was just like, "Oh, holy shit."

Ray:
And did you see it all happen in slow motion, or was it just like a blur?

David:
No, it was like the noise happened, I turned around, looked into the eyes of these women, looked at the wine everywhere, and was just horrified. It was horrifying. I don't think I've ever been quite that embarrassed in my life.

Ray:
I bet. Well, David, you've clearly gone on to bigger and better things, and we're, I guess, thankful for your failure because it brought you here with us today.

David:
Every failure is a fork in the road. I'll say that after... I remember, just to add on a little bit to this story, that the moment after this all happened, I remember I stepped out of the restaurant and I just started walking west. And I walked and walked and walked until I got to the edge of the water, the Hudson, and I cried a little bit. And then I was like, I was angry, because I was like, "This place is not well-designed," and blah, blah, blah. I was having trouble accepting that I was just not a good fit for the restaurant scene. But I pulled myself together, went back, and had a new job within another week. I worked at the Apple Store, I think, after that in New York. Yeah, it was good. In the end, I was like, "Oh wow, I was super unhappy there." Sometimes of failure is like a, "Duh, dude." This is just the icing on the cake.

Ray:
Yeah. Sometimes you need an outside force to make that clear for you.

David:
Or a couple of exploded bottles of wine.

Ray:
Or that. Well, David, thanks for hopping on the show with us.

David:
Yeah. Thank you, Ray.

Ray:
We appreciate you.

David:
Appreciate it. Appreciate you.

Ray:
... bearing your soul.

David:
Yeah. Appreciate you listening to my tale of woe. Adrian Brody's eyes.

Ray:
There you go.

David:
That's all I have to say.

Ray:
Well, that'll do it for this episode of Flops. We hope you had fun, were inspired, and learned some stuff.

David:
And learned some stuff.

Ray
Groovy.

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 Trudy Rankin for joining us on today's episode. Learn more about her businesses at westislanddigital.com and onlinebusinessliftoff.com. Join us next week to hear from an entrepreneur and musician, whose big break nearly broke him.
Your hosts are me, Karen Beattie, and my colleague, Ray Sylvester.

Flops is a production of SPI Media.

Our executive producer's Matt Gartland, and our series producers are David Grabowski and senior producer Sara Jane Hess.

Writing is by Karen Beattie and Ray Sylvester.

Editing and sound designed by Paul Grigoras.

Music by David Grabowski.

See you next time.