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Welcome to the mid-season highlights episode of the Resilient Entrepreneurs Podcast!
In this special edition, weâre spotlighting some of the most inspiring and insightful moments from the first half of Season 4, from Episode 75 to Episode 90.
When something catches your interest, mark that episode as one to listen to in full - every guest this season is phenomenal in the message they share, in their own personal journey or the industry expertise they openly share with you here. Each full episode is on YouTube, Spotify or Apple podcast.
We talk about resilience in all forms - from developing a stunning women's watch company or using martial arts principles to manage conflict in business, or conversations about AI, buying and selling businesses, finding balance as an entrepreneur, marketing, finances, and more. On the more personal side are stories of resilience from being harshly bullied as the fat girl in the schoolyard to escaping being sold off to strangers in child trafficking - these women have created a life and business they love, despite - or because of - their circumstances. Here's your taste of each episode - enjoy!
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Episode 75: Abingdon Watch Co-Founder, Abingdon Mullin: Niche and Grow
Bessie Coleman is, here's an interesting thing about Bessie. She is the first African-American pilot, not African-American female pilot, the first African-American pilot, and how she learned how to fly, this blows my mind, but she was doing hair. She was a hairdresser, and one of her clients talked to her about flying and she got really interested in it and wanted to pursue that. But of course, learning how to fly as an African-American in the early 1900s was pretty much a no go. Being a black woman and learning how to fly was definitely a no go. So what she did is, she bought a ticket on a ship and shipped herself to France, learned French so that she could take lessons because they taught black people how to fly in France, and then after she learned French, got her pilot's licence, she came back and started doing exhibition air shows, loops and barrel rolls and things like that and displayed all of her skills showing off what she could do in an aeroplane. She ran mail for the post as a job, and the craziest way, they didn't have seat belts in aeroplanes at the time. So during one of her airshow performances in a loop, she fell out.
Carol Hopson, she's a pilot for an airline, she wrote a book a couple of years ago about Bessie and her life called, A Pair of Wings and it's a beautiful book. It's an absolutely wonderful book. I highly recommend it.
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I think I'm making a difference. I would rather make an impact with my crew members, my customers, the scholarship winners and the people that wear the watches. Because I do think that with this brand, it's taken on its own life in a way that I've had customers say they wore their watch going through a bad breakup and it reminded them that they were part of a tribe of really strong women, and it helped them get through that. I've had women who've gotten into helicopter crashes, car crashes survived, and the watch was on their wrist at the time, and it also survived. There's been some really, really strong stories about women who wear this product. And because I think having the woman's name on each of the watches, it's like having a friend. So when somebody sends in their watch for a battery change, or just a repair, they'll say âHow is she doing?â â When do you think you'll be able to ship her backâ, and it's like, you've kind of separated from your friend. And if that continues to happen, and my customer service stays on point, and I'm still making a high quality product that holds up with the customers that wear them, then maybe we can start defining success.
Episode 76: AI Strategist, Mikal Minors: AI Vs Human Development
So Mikal, if a company is AI curious, where should they start?
I say they should start by playing. They should look for something like ChatGPT, Claude or Anthropic or Bard. These are all large language models which just means a robot that understands a lot of language based on being fed a bunch of information. The goal of playing with these things should be understanding how to ask questions to get the results you're looking for, understanding where its limitations are, like you probably shouldn't use it to do research for legal studies but you can use it for research on a great recipe. You can use it for certain business use cases, but other use cases you really should avoid it. And it's starting to understand the logic behind it, and you can achieve that by playing without spending any money. That's the best place to start. Now, I will say, if you're looking to invest in something like this, it's gonna be having a conversation with somebody like me, bloop bloop, and it starts with a request for information. Essentially, we would need all the information you want the bot to be proficient in so that we can train that bot. And you can normally expect to have customer support on your website within a week to four weeks. And it's pretty pain free. Or we like to say it is at least.
Episode 77: CEO Coach Patrick Thean & Author Colin C. Campbell: Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.
That project of the book started 10 years ago, and then only two years ago we got really serious, I got a writing coach and we interviewed over 200 people in this book, and only about 50 interviews actually made the book. And today, the work we put into it, a lot of work, weâve had six full time staff members on it in the last two years and the results are in. Today, right now, we are the number one bestseller on Amazon for starting a business in the United States, and the book has also been written for the ADHD entrepreneur, it really is simplified, we have over 58 chapters, 30 Illustrations and 200 call outs. So there's a lot in this book about starting, scaling, exiting and repeating. And at each stage, it's very, very different. So three little tips. And I don't have them in my head right now, but they'll pop in.
First of all, when starting a business, I know a lot of your entrepreneurs or they might be thinking about starting a business, we have a chapter called Ideas to Action. And really, you can have a great idea and a lot of people do, but they never take action, they never do it, they never take the action. We were sitting in Odisha in 2005 talking about our frustrations as we travelled around the world, how we could never get a taxi. And we came up with an idea called My Yellow Button. So you just press this yellow button and a taxi would come to you on a GPS device. Well, we took that back to the team on Monday, we never really followed up, and we had a development company in the mobile space - then Uber and Lyft came in. So don't be the one to look back and say, Hey, that was my idea.
In scale, I think the most important thing you can understand is that the entrepreneur is in the way. I say that's the number one reason why companies fail to scale, the entrepreneur is in the way - they need to step back. They need to figure out who they are, their personality profile, hire around them and implement systems, like we've talked about today.
And then in exits, I think the message there for me is start, scale, exit, take some money off the table, repeat, because bad things do happen. In 2022, we saw the tech wreck, the crypto crash, we saw the war start in Ukraine, we saw a hurricane in the United States, it was a hard, hard year, we saw the pandemic only a year or two before that. Look, the reality is bad things do happen and that's why it's important to start, scale, exit, take some money off the table, and then repeat.
Episode 78: Private Market Labs Co-Founder Josh Levine: Buy into Entrepreneurship
The decision to buy a business is not necessarily only a financial decision. It is a decision about your personal future, your independence, your freedom, your ability to operate and grow something of significance and embed yourself within a community. And I think that most people who are looking to buy a business, particularly as individuals, are looking to solve some less tangible thing. They're searching for a sense of purpose. They're searching for a sense of independence. I mean, it's one of the things that got me into entrepreneurship as well. I was working in corporate and I wanted to do something else. I wanted to find something that put more pressure on me, that made me feel more engaged with my day-to-day work. So I think that there's a lot of people trying to solve this with entrepreneurship through acquisition.
Episode 79: Founder & Creative Director, Stephan Johnstone: Zero to Hero Building a Creative Business
Balance is super important. I feel like everyone that's on the team is opposite of me in some way. So they bring something to the table because I know my strengths and my weaknesses. So I think that's super important to understand where you are weak and recognise that and then bring on people that complement your weaknesses. Because if everyone on the team thinks the same, has the same experiences, has the same strengths, then there's going to be areas where there's going to be blind spots. So everyone on the team has different perspectives. And I like the fact that when we leave the office or we put down SJD World for the day, everyone goes off, has different experiences, live different lives and then we come back to the table and we all see things differently and can bring different perspectives. So, that's super important to me. And also that everyone's job is flexible. I'm not super strict. Like even the designers that are on the team, I encourage them to do freelance, as long as it's not too much in the office or on my system. But I feel like that's important that as designers, we go out there and make mistakes and then you learn from your personal clients and then you bring it back to the company because thatâs how I built myself. I designed a lot as an intern, I interned for a lot of agencies as well. And while I was interning, I was doing freelance work as well. So I think that was super important, because I made a lot of mistakes along the way in my freelance work. So when I came back to the agency, it was, oh, I went through this before. I think that is super important and it's weird because I know working with a lot of agencies theyâre non-compete, but backsell your time. Go ahead and make all the mistakes you can and then come back here and you don't have to make those mistakes with me.
Episode 80: Advocate, Lawyer, Mom- Amanda Baron: The Bullied Kid, Turned State Prosecutor
And it was a cafeteria filled with thousands of kids, and this one particular kid would start with little cracker bits and then it ended as full apples he would throttle at me in the middle of the lunchroom, to the point where I was eating my lunch in the bathroom stall like you see in the movies. So all of these things obviously shaped who I was and now as a mom and a woman, I didn't really understand the magnitude of why I wanted to be a prosecutor, to be the voice for those who perhaps weren't confident enough to give that voice to themselves. But now obviously it's very clear, because even as a mother, I want to be able to give my kids that voice, but also be the voice for others that they see wrongdoings being done.
So I had weight loss surgery at 17, I was the 24th adolescent in the country to have the gastric lap band. I lost a lot of weight and had a very big following and at that time there was a lot of talk about bullying. If you recall, there was one high school or college student in the US who unfortunately took his own life off of a bridge. There was begging from the media for people to talk. But at that time, social media was not prevalent. Maybe MySpace was around during that time, I don't remember but it certainly was not and so I had my surgery and People Magazine followed my story. They did a very large spread on my story and then it got picked up from a few other television shows, Good morning America, Today Show, The Neil Cavuto Show.
Episode 81: Leadership/Lifestyle Coach & Corporate Trainer, Jessica Lightbourne: Thrive, Survive or Die
It's so interesting because I'm mixed race and one of the beautiful things about growing up in Bermuda was I related to myself as mixed race. My mother used to tell me, you get the best of both worlds and so I truly believed that. It wasn't until later on in life, that story became a little bit more nuanced. I'm saying all that to say that for a long time, it made me very sensitive to exclusion and sensitive to people not having community. And so for me it meant that I wanted everybody to come along and not everybody can come along.
It's really important to create communities where you have the right people in the room for whatever the purpose of the work or the play that you're doing is for. It's important to be intentional about who gets to come. It's important because you want to create an experience that is fruitful, an experience that is constructive and for me, an experience that is safe. There are so many people, so many women, so many women of colour, but just people in general who don't necessarily have that safe space. And so it really is important to figure out who gets to come and who can find another space that is helpful for them.
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As a newish entrepreneur, Iâve only been full-time entrepreneur for eight months, the idea that some days I'm anxious and I'm thinking, âOh my gosh, what have I done?â I get to now really understand that it is not gonna serve me to stay in that place. I get to be aware of the thoughts that I have, and then I get to choose a new thought that will be much more supportive of what I am creating.
I don't think it's something that we necessarily are aware of until we are. And then once you see it, you can't unsee it. Once you understand that your thoughts create, they influence your actions, but I say they co-create our reality, right? They actually impact the way that we show up and the way that we show up impacts everything.
Episode 82: Psychologist & Author Dr. Marie-HĂ©lĂšne (MH) Pelletier: Plan for Resilience
First I would say, the best way to message anything here to yourself and others is modelling. So whatever you're hoping to convey to your team over here, we'll start with, are you doing it yourself and be seen as doing it? So for example, I would say ideally before even, you are in this phase as you're building it, or if you're in it, better now than later, so I would do it now, I would say build your resilience plan for now in this context. We're not saying given that it's so demanding, so busy, I'm gonna work on my resilience later. No, no, no, because you're gonna be pulling from that well through this entire phase and you will be at risk if you wait until it's finished. It's not just a nice to have that you can just put aside and say, I'll deal with it when I get there. Sometimes people think, oh, but I am resilient. Look at all the resilient things I've gone through in my life so far. Clearly, I don't need to do anything about it. Not true. It's not a personality trait.
Episode 83: Executive Coach & Author, Fabrice Desmarescaux: It's urgent to slow down
We always talk about hyper growth and scaling, etcetera. But these are important metrics for sure. But when you think about your employees, particularly as a company starts to scale and there's hundreds, maybe thousands of employees, your employees don't get out of bed because of your market capitalisation or your profits. You say, youâre going to go from $100 million of profit to $200 million. Okay, that doesn't speak to me. If I explain what I do to my kids and I tell them, my purpose in life is to grow profits from $100 million to $200 million, they're going to look at me with round eyes and say, âDaddy, what is it that you're really doing? And why should I be proud of you?â And so there needs to be something else. There needs to be a purpose that could be really anything. It could be serving communities, it could be delivering something to our customers that no one delivers because we understand them better. And I think we can all relate to companies that we love because we love their products, whether it's technology products, a search engine, a favourite airline. In Singapore, we're blessed with one of the best airlines in the world and really, if they didn't exist, I would miss them. So, that is a purpose, right? And you ask yourself, âIf my company didn't exist, who would miss me?â And if you're just in the business of making money, you're just in the business of scaling, you're just in the business of increasing your market share, that is not sufficient to say, yes, absolutely, there will be people who miss you if you don't exist.
Episode 84: Fractional CFO Ben Risser on Vision, Faith & Financials
We work our way down from sales all the way down to what's the balance in your bank account and is that balance heading in the direction it needs to be heading or are you heading towards zero and how long do you have? And so where fractional CFOs can really add value to entrepreneurs is, when you're pre-revenue you're always heading towards zero until you start bending that curve up and realising the revenue to start making deposits in your checking account. So it can give them an idea of how much runway they have as far as cash goes. And that's something that a lot of entrepreneurs, unless they have an accounting or finance background, they would struggle to tell anybody, how many days of cash on hand do I have? And when do I have to be going back to investors to raise more equity?
Big questions. How does your personal journey of overcoming sight limitations play into who you are today?
So going blind, it sweeps so many distractions off the table. I grew up loving aviation, cars, boats, and all these things that require eyesight and as you get older, I think we hopefully all get wiser, and your priorities change, and you really start thinking about âWhat do I want my legacy to be? What's all of this for?â And so blindness has accelerated that growth for me. Maybe I wouldnât have been thinking about those things for another 10 or 20 years, but because of this blindness, it started for me in my 20s, now I'm in my 40s and I'm very focused like a laser on my purpose.
Episode 85: Author Sussi Mattsson: Extraordinarily Resilient from 8 years-old
When I was eight years old, my mom passed away from cancer. And then I had to live with my super abusive father, which I found out six months later after living with him that he was about to sell me to strangers in a foreign country down to Southern Europe, and I was only eight years old. My stepmother found this false passport and also a one way ticket, airline ticket for the following day, which put me in a situation that I needed to make a decision really quickly to save my life and to save myself from boarding that plane straight to hell.
So the following day, I actually ran away from home. I was eight years old, and I had equal to $1 in my pocket.
So that's the childhood story, and moving fast forward, in 2012 I had a really successful coaching business around the world and still I found myself not living with purpose. I had success but not fulfilment. So that was the starting point of going back and trying to connect the dots of understanding myself better and diving deep into the discovery of my childhood trauma.
That's the story behind all this. And I came to a point where I couldn't identify myself with that little courageous brave girl who ran away from home, but also follow through with action. So I decided to at least write her a letter to say thank you. Thank you for saving my life, thank you for being brave, and thank you for taking action. And in that process of writing that letter to my younger self, something really shifted in my body and the pain and the burden that I had been carrying around for over 34 years, it felt like it belonged to the letter. It didn't belong to me anymore.
Episode 86: Author Nick Jonsson: Solving Executive Loneliness
The reason for coming up with these five pathways is actually because I was, can say fortunate enough to have a drinking problem when I hit my rock bottom in 2018 and with that, I started to seek help, and I went into one of the wonderful 12 step programs who helped me through there. And as I came out of that, I became a new person basically and people around me asked Nick, what happened to you? What's going on? I was just shining of life and I haven't had a drink since I walked into that room and it's nearly six years now so people wanted what I had and I didn't know what to answer because I said, well, if you don't have a drinking problem, maybe it's not for you. So that's why I then developed these five steps. So it's for anyone. And it's basically tackling the same thing because as we say in these kinds of rooms, you come in there for the drinking, but you stay for the thinking. So it can actually help anybody. It doesn't matter if you have any drinking problem, but if you are feeling isolated from time to time, if you're suffering from that or any other addiction, even if it's shopping, gambling, or any other form of addictions or bad habits out there, then these five steps can help you.
Episode 87: Martial Artist, Consultant & Author, Karen Valencic: Conflict? Roll with it
To master conflict you got to really, and actually to do Aikido, you have to understand the difference between force and power. And force is straight line, and that's what this is, and power is always rotational. And that's what I teach people, and that's where that model of spiral comes from. So there's lots of layers of spiral. There's actually four quadrants in that spiral in the model, but there's also the whole physical movement. So when somebody attacks you, say somebody punches me, I could stand there and take that punch. But in Aikido what we learn is we learn to move in and with it. So we don't leave it, we stay with it. And what we do is we shift positions so that rather than being face to face, as I shift, then I'm looking in the same direction as my partner. And what happens in the martial art is when you shift, because actually, if you resist their punch, you get hurt. But if you move in and with, you catch their balance because their momentum is going toward you. So you actually step in and just not grab them, but connect with them lightly in the martial art. And then you can really catch their balance and move them in a way that diffuses the attack and also doesn't hurt them.
Episode 88: Serial Entrepreneur Reid Tileston: All In or Youâre in the way.
I think the best way to minimise risk in a business is to go all into the business. And I think that skipping the assessment part of it and answering that key question of âwhyâ, is what the biggest cause of failure is. If one is halfway in, by definition, they are halfway out. If one is not all in, they are in the way. So I think that when it comes to what you're talking about there, I think that the best way to mitigate that is just get intrinsically aligned to go out there, have a grit it done mindset and delve deep into it. And know that if you don't go one route or another, that's fantastic. That just means that you're still searching for that right one. Now, can you search forever? No, you got to choose something eventually.
Episode 89: Innovator & Strategist Leigh Burgess: Does it pay to be BOLD in business?
I always felt like I had to do it by myself. Like it was a solo act and B.O.L.D is not a solo act. I think having whether it's a friend or a family member or a coach or a mentor or someone, a therapist, knowing that you don't have to go it alone would be my best advice because I think for a very, very long time I had this mindset of if I ask for help, it means Iâve failed, if I don't just get it done and get it done fast I've failed. So I had this loop going on that was âI needed to do it by myself, I needed to be strong and not show a lot of weaknessâ. That's just not anything that is Okay. It's okay to be vulnerable. It's okay to not succeed at everything. It's okay to ask for help. And so for me, that would be my advice is don't go it alone, being bold doesn't mean you have to do it solo.
That's such a great point. And I think we can even take it the next step and embrace it and look for opportunities to ask for help and look for opportunities to stumble and the more we lean into that, I think this is part of your Own and Learn, that combination of let's lean into this, the messy stuff and see what comes out of it.
Yeah, cause life is messy. Sometimes I really just get frustrated with what we see on social media for ourselves, for our children, for the younger generation. It just comes across like everything can happen overnight. Success has a hack, if there's a shortcut to this and a shortcut to that and I'm all for efficiency and agility trust me, but there's not enough authenticity when it comes to some of the things that we see. Because it isn't great every day as an entrepreneur. It's hard on certain days. I've shed a tear here and there of frustration. It doesn't mean that everything's butterflies and rainbows, but for me, what it means is, I have the highest level of freedom to succeed and fail - that's at my fingertips. And to me, that's a responsibility but it also is very freeing for me in the sense of what it means I can do, what I can accomplish.
Episode 90: In-house Marketing Specialist, Kasper Sierslev: 100 Bad Ideas Makes a Winner
I have this story, it's in the book also because it's old, three or four years old, where I was Head of Creative at Georg Jensen, which is a jewellery company. Head of E-Com came down and said âWe need to change the colours on the website because it's boring and it's too Scandinavian, it's too dullâ. He was from the UK, so he needed more colours. He said âIt's bluish and oh yeah, people are not buying enough. They can't find the buy button because it's too boringâ. And then we talked to each other and said it can't be true. And we went in and we looked at the website and we could see that a lot of men came in, they went to the shop, they found the ring, clicked on it, they went to the product page and they clicked on the buy button. So the colour wasn't a problem. The problem was they clicked again and then they clicked again, and then they realised this small drop down on top of it where they had to pick the ring size, then they chose that one and they had 14 different sizes and then they left because nobody knows even their own ring size, I guess.
So true.
So what we did was actually build a small app on a phone where you could steal a ring from your loved one or take your own ring off and put it on the screen. And you could see what size it was. Really, really simple. It didn't cost a lot to do, and that was also advertising. Even though it was kind of a product, it was also advertising. And people started sharing this on social media saying, âLook, Thomas, I think this one's for you.â Her girlfriend posted her, or tagged her husband or something like that and âNow there's no excuse anymoreâ and so on. So I think, trying to tell that story of being helpful or being out there as well is also marketing. It's about telling the same story of being available in all kinds of situations.
