Entrepreneurs: What is the Best Mistake You've Ever Made in Business?

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business. [00:00:03] Speaker B: The time is near. [00:00:05] Speaker A: You've given it hard, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. [00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights. [00:00:20] Speaker C: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups and podcasts. [00:00:26] Speaker B: Welcome to Passage to Profit, the road to entrepreneurship, where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about their businesses and their solutions. It's time for your new business journey. Two in five Americans own their own business or are thinking of starting one. And so we'd like to ask our panel questions that our audience wants the answers to. So this week's question is what is the best mistake you've ever made in business? So I'm gonna go to Brian first. What is the best mistake you've ever made in business? [00:01:00] Speaker A: Being a control freak, not accepting help, feeling that I had to do everything myself. And learning coming out of that into the future was recruiting people and bringing people in that have your back. Understand your vision, your purpose, and understand what their responsibilities are and then being willing to trust them. Actually, I just want to say Ann Sweeney, she was a great mentor of mine. She was president of ABC Disney, and she once told me, put the absolute best people in the position that you want them in and where their expertise is and let them run. She said that. It took me a long time to get that, but now I have and it is absolutely correct. When you can trust someone to do the job, that's on vision and on purpose, it's much better than stressing out and losing sleep. [00:01:48] Speaker B: That's amazing. [00:01:49] Speaker A: My management style is learn how I think. If you can solve the problem yourself, great. If you can't, then come to me. So I think it's a balance and you have to make sure that people are reporting in, obviously. But I wouldn't call it a control freak now. I would call it a superior project manager, perhaps that you're just making sure that everybody's hitting their marks and that they there are performance reviews along the way. But I don't have to control everything. As an entrepreneur, being willing to trust other people I think is really important. And in that case, you have to trust your gut. I've learned a lot of lessons with bad partnerships. [00:02:29] Speaker B: Joshua, what are your thoughts? [00:02:30] Speaker D: I actually very similar to what Brian said, but a little bit different in my mistake I made was that when I first started this business, I tried to do everything by myself. I was a little bit stubborn. I figured that. I read a few books, I took a few lessons here and there, and I thought that maybe that would be enough for me to, you know, get my business started. But as I come to find out, as I really start to build the business, there was a lot of things that I think I wish I had really leaned more towards with other people, for example. [00:02:56] Speaker B: Like what? [00:02:56] Speaker D: Just even as simple as, you know, how to incorporate a business, all the legality that has to go into, all the documentation that needs to go into it. I think that, you know, just a book gave me a very high level of what I had to do. But as I come to realize, it's a lot more complex than something you just read from a book. And there's a lot of unique situations in, you know, how to start a business from, you know, even building a product, identifying what market you want to step into. [00:03:18] Speaker B: As an attorney, I have to jump in and agree with you that getting some good professionals behind you, accountants, attorneys, you don't have to spend a lot at first, but at least get the knowledge and the advice and some things you can do yourself. Sometimes you need the service providers, but I think that that is also really good. [00:03:37] Speaker E: Ryan, I was going to say something else, but now that you're talking, I had a kind of different mistake, which was being so focused on the business and not taking care of your health. During the first year of my startup company, or maybe it was probably second year of this one, I was so laser focused on getting stuff finished. I wasn't paying attention to the quality of food that I was eating. I was getting doordash delivered. I was having noodles all the time. I was having rice. I was barely cooking. Eventually it kind of started to mess up my concentration. I ended up getting some blood sugar issues like hypoglycemia, had some anxiety, and I really had to decide to slow down and like, okay, look, if I keep operating like this, one of the things I learned is that my business is not a sprint. It seems like a sprint every month, but actually this is going to be going on for years. And I can't act like it's a constant sprint every month. And so start cooking a lot more, eating a lot more salads, and really making health more of a focus was one of the best mistakes, because now I'm way more healthy. [00:04:32] Speaker B: That's great. We often hear about entrepreneurs sort of working themselves to death and really negatively impacting their health, but this is one of the first real concrete examples we've had on the show. So thank you for that. And I couldn't agree more. As important, as wonderful as your new business journey is, it's not worth sacrificing your long term health for. And that kind of discussion helps make people aware of how important it is. [00:05:00] Speaker C: Elizabeth well, my best mistake was telling Richard, if you start your own law firm, I'll do whatever you need me to do. [00:05:08] Speaker B: I don't see how that was a mistake. [00:05:10] Speaker C: So now I have a patent agent's license, I can draft patent applications. I know way more than I ever wanted to about trademarks and copyrights. Though I don't practice in there, I went into the marketing. So I became as much a marketing expert as a self taught person can. And then we got this radio show based on the law firm. So it has turned out to be a good mistake. I've learned so much, otherwise I don't know what I would be doing with my time. It's pretty exciting, all the media stuff and I have a podcast studio now and I have, you know, just a lot going on that I really enjoy. [00:05:39] Speaker B: So yeah, I mean, I don't still don't see how that was a mistake. Thank you for all that you do. So my best business mistake, first part, the mistake was not getting along with my boss in corporate. I worked for a big company and as a result of that poor relationship, I ended up leaving the company and of course with Elizabeth's help and encouragement, started our own gig here. And it turned out to be the best decision of my life. One of the nice things about entrepreneurship is that you have the freedom, a lot of freedom that I didn't have before, freedom to work with the people that you like, freedom to manage your time. What little there is just financial freedom to the extent that you earn what you're sort of worth, I think. So it turned out to be a great mistake not getting along with my boss. Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer, Noah Fleishman and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey and our studio assistant, Risa Kat Bussari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct. Never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find [email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.