Lessons Learned From 3 Moncton Entrepreneurs Who Really Messed Up
MONCTON – Heather McDonald of HALA Connected, Sylvie Roy of Eclair Lips, and Marcel Petitpas of Parakeeto shared their experiences with failure and lessons learned at La Station last week. It was the first Fuck Up Night in Moncton.
The event is brought to Moncton by Rivers Corbett based on an international movement started in Mexico City that aims to provide a space for entrepreneurs to share stories about their errors. It’s now in 318 cities around the world.
“Fuck Up is meant to say, you know what, we go through a journey as entrepreneurs and there are lots of times that we fuck up but we don’t talk about that. We don’t celebrate them. We don’t learn about them,” Corbett said. “This movement is all about celebrating and learning, but also connecting with the emotion of the fuck-up.”
Here are the things we learned from the entrepreneurs who shared their experience at the event:
1) Self-doubt Is The Monster That Leads To Bad Decisions
McDonald says self-doubt and a lack of confidence were at the bottom of her mistakes in life – personal and professional.
“I doubted my intelligence. I doubted my ability to learn. I doubted my ability to do anything that somebody said was complicated,” she said.
In her business, self-doubt crept in as she was building her company and as it grew. One of her biggest mistakes was being completely reliant on others who told her they were experts to do her accounting.
“I would trust other people to handle more and more of my stuff and I called it delegation when it was actually abdication. I don’t trust myself. I trust you. So, I’m going to let you do everything,” she said.
That led to a situation in which she owed the Canada Revenue Agency over $70,000 dollars in unpaid HST and payroll taxes. She took out a loan to get her business out of trouble, but she had to also get her mental health back together after the stress of it all.
She said her fiancee encouraged her to face the problem head-on and work on her self-doubt. Now, McDonald is in much better financial and mental health, and she focuses daily to overcome self-doubt.
Self-doubt also affected Marcel Petitpas, who became CEO of a startup at the age of 24. He said even when experienced investors and tech industry veterans believed in his abilities, he struggled to see that himself.
When a product launch was delayed, Petitpas became frustrated and doubted his abilities to lead the company. But he later hunkered down and took ownership of his role by presenting his vision to his more experienced co-founders, allowing the company to move forward with more clarity and at a faster pace. It’s now on-boarding clients to the product.
“I think some of the most important things I’ve learned were first and foremost, the impostor syndrome. That made me make a lot of decisions that made me question myself when I should have been strong,” he said. “And the biggest one was just being really clear about expectations. That was just something that I never really did until later, and we had some really tough conversations.”
“When we have this self-doubt, we make poor decisions. We don’t believe in ourselves, so we don’t take ownership,” he said. “I was thinking I’m just lucky to be here, I don’t know what these guys see in me and I’ll take whatever I can get. And I didn’t have the confidence to have logical and difficult conversations with these people that were in the business to organize a [capitalization] table. That came back to bite us.”
2) Get Your Capitalization Table Right
Petitpas learned about the importance of a well-balanced capitalization table when he was seeking to raise funds for his company.
His co-founders had significant stakes because one of them provided seed investment, and the other one came up with the idea for the company’s product. But because they weren’t actively working in the business, investors weren’t keen on putting their money into the venture. Petitpas had to add a co-founder that would actively work in the business and negotiate a rearrangement that works for the other founders too.
“When you’re early in a company and you plan on raising [funds] you’ve gotta get that right,” he said. “And everybody should always be on a vesting schedule.”
The process of it all became something Petitpas is grateful for now.
“Looking back, I’m glad that we didn’t move faster in the beginning because we probably would have moved faster in the wrong direction anyway,” he said. “We spent so much time as entrepreneurs really feeling that we’re just grinding it out and we forget there’s light at the end of the tunnel. At the end of the day, the process is what’s really important about this.”
3) Charge What Your Product Is Worth
Eclair Lips has been growing rapidly since its re-branding in 2018 when the company’s products were in about 60 stores. Now the handmade lip balms are sold in over 250 stores across Canada and the U.S.
What has helped it grow was owner Sylvie Roy’s initiative to offer custom displays and testers for free with her branding, so shop owners can easily display the products. But the quick growth meant Roy and her husband, who helps with her business, had to make a lot more displays and testers.
“I was like the Oprah of lip balms,” she said.
Lip balms are also considered a filler item in a store. So, stores may want Eclair Lips’ products for one month to add variety or a “pop of colour” but may drop them the next month. This means free displays and testers were given to one-off clients.
When Roy realized she was losing around $12,000 in revenues giving away free testers and displays, she changed the terms of purchase.
“The joy that I had over the booming business and the re-brand started turning into resentment because of all the stuff that we gave for free. But it’s all my fault, as well. I was telling people they can have them for free,” she said.
“Charge what they’re worth,” she said. “Because that’s how we make our income. It’s our lifeline … And I think people appreciate it more if you charge what [your product’s] worth than giving it for free all the time.”
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