Rivers Corbett Wants Entrepreneurs To Learn From Failure, But He Uses Harsher Terms Than That
MONCTON – Years ago, Rivers Corbett made a major mistake as the owner of popular restaurant chain Relish Gourmet Burger that led to the demise of the company. In an effort to grow it, he jumped into a partnership with an investor that wasn’t a good fit.
“We should have done more due diligence instead of just getting excited about the money,” he reminisced. “A lot of emotions went with that as we tried to battle our way out of it, but ultimately we lost the battle.”
He’s learned from the mistake and moved on to bigger, and better things, now helping entrepreneurs to succeed, he said. But the former Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the province of New Brunswick wants more business people to share their experience with failures and mistakes, as well as the lessons and emotions that come with them.
Corbett is starting the Moncton chapter of Fuck Up Nights, a global 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, including eight in Canada.
The first Fuck Up Night in Moncton will be on Dec. 11 at co-working space La Station on Botsford St. It will include a 30-minute panel of three entrepreneurs, including Heather McDonald of HALA Connected and Sylvie Roy of Eclair Lips.
The panel will be followed by networking with drinks and refreshments. Tickets are $10 each, including one drink. Attendees can connect after the event via a Facebook group.
“The key to the panel is the stories are about deep fuck-ups that took a while to paddle through…It gives a sense of the journey of dealing with the fuck-up, but also how they dealt with the emotions that came with that, and how they came out the other end…There’s a sense of hope and entrepreneurs can celebrate that.”
Corbett says talking about failures is important so entrepreneurs can not only grow professionally, but also feel less alone.
“We don’t talk about failures enough as a part of the [business] journey. We tend to glorify entrepreneurship but we need to understand it’s still a battle, there are scars associated with it. And I think society, particularly Canadian society, really shuns failure in business,” he said. “We want [entrepreneurs] to know it’s okay because everybody’s going through it.”
Because the aim is to have a social event where entrepreneurs can let their guard down, Corbett said La Station’s ambiance and sense of community makes it the right place.
“It’s not a board room, it’s not a classroom. It’s a social setting which really connects with entrepreneurs.”
La Station founder Mylène Després says Fuck Up Night is the kind of event she wants the space to be used for.
“I think it’s great to have other ways to network and to be real with each other and have real conversations,” she said. “It’s great to pat each other on the shoulder, but it’s also really great to listen and be aware of what it takes to get where we are and what we can learn from those things.”