My Favorite Mistake: Business Lessons from Failures and Success

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My guest for Episode #169 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Erin Joy.

As the founder and executive consultant behind Erin Joy Business Coaching & Consulting, Erin uses over 25 years of experience in entrepreneurship, roundtable facilitation, business strategy, and executive coaching to help fellow female business owners launch, propel, and grow their companies.

Erin has hosted over 300 roundtables, 200 group coaching calls, 70 live events, and 1000 online events, and the company continues to serve over 60 clients.

Erin is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Business Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology to enhance her ability to connect with and support women in business on both a professional and emotional level.

She is also the host of a new radio show and PODCAST: “Erin Joy Talks Business.” She has released an anthology of advice from women business owners titled The Anatomy of Accomplishment: Your Guide to Bigger, Better, Bolder Business Results.

In this episode, Erin shares her “favorite mistake” story about a “huge mistake” that she avoided by making a pivot before it was too late. She was looking to franchise the roundtable side of her business — how did she discover this would have been a “heavy lift” (and an expensive one at that)? How did she pivot and what happened?

We also talk about questions and topics including:

• What does it mean to be a “business psychologist?”
• Business is about making predictions... and testing... you have 25-year plan? How specific are the details of that plan? Is there wiggle room?
• What can we do to be more resilient and better adjust to what life and business throws at us?
• “Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs”
• Video you posted in 2021 — “A time to give up control” — when is that necessary for a business leader and how can they do that?
• You work mainly with women leaders and entrepreneurs — are there mistakes you help them avoid in career transitions? Or setting them up to learn from them?
• What do we need to be doing to build the next generation of women as leaders?
• Tell us about the podcast — what topics do you cover? What sort of guests do you have?

Find Erin on social media:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

Episode page: https://markgraban.com/mistake166

My guest for Episode #166 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Alisha Wielfaert, a leadership, creativity, transitions and resiliency coach for women.

She started her career at an over one-hundred-year-old insurance company. She moved on from that. Along the way, she started studying yoga at the Asheville Yoga Center not just as a physical practice but as a spiritual path. She opened a yoga studio... and then sold it...

Alisha is also the author of a book that’s just been released, titled Little Failures: Learning to Build Resilience Through Everyday Setbacks, Challenges, and Obstacles.

Enter to win a signed copy!!

She is the host of a podcast, The Yoke and Abundance: Wise Women Podcast and her company is called Yoke and Abundance.

In this episode, Alisha shares her “favorite mistake” story about opening a yoga studio that “did nothing but lose money” as it went into bankruptcy. Why was this her “greatest learning experience” but also the “most shameful” that has happened to her? Why did the business fail and what lessons did Alisha learn that she has (and will) apply to other businesses?

We also talk about questions and topics including:

• Passion plus seeking for purpose in life
• Bootstrapping was a problem – couldn’t fully commit
• Lessons for when you became a coach?
• Do the failures help you be a better coach?
• The Dropout? Elizabeth Holmes
• Other thoughts or tips on how to analyze or process our failures?
• People who are successful after failures do what things?
• How to not get stuck in the grieving and processing time?
• Fear of mistakes — Atelophobia is an obsessive fear of imperfection
• Do you see a difference between “mistakes” and “failures”? Let’s explore that...
• “Planning for failures” in the writing and release of the book?
• You write about the idea of “Failing out loud” — the implications for women and minorities?
• TEDx talk – founder of Girls Who Code (Reshma Saujani)
• Tell us the story behind the name of your company, Yoke and Abundance?

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My guest for Episode #236 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Sofie Roux, the visionary Gen Z Founder & CEO of BloomBox Design Labs, which is transforming education through innovation.

Sofie's journey began long before her studies at Stanford University, where she studies civil engineering and architecture. It all started with "Sparkly and Smart," an art enterprise that remarkably raised $300,000 to support girls' education. Today, through her revolutionary BloomBoxes ingeniously crafted from repurposed shipping containers, she's reshaping education in Malawi by crafting vibrant STEAM learning environments.

Unravel the revolution of the BloomBox, an educational space breaking barriers by merging innovative technology with architecture, designed to host an array of teaching resources for optimum learning. From its humble beginnings, built and shipped from North America, to transitioning operations to South Africa for economic and environmental sustainability, Bloombox has become a beacon of hope. This initiative has not only curtailed costs but has boosted local economies, creating new job opportunities, and reinforced its mission to bring quality education worldwide.

What's Sofie's favorite mistake related to this project? How did she react? And what did she learn in the process?

• Tell us about the functionality of the BloomBox?
• Starting with the why
• What was your spark for this passion for helping girls in Africa?
• Tell us more about the tech of the BloomBox and how it’s used?
• Was the retractable solar panels part of v 1.0? Design spec or lesson learned?
• With the Bloombox – there are apparent iterations and learning — is that continuous improvement or learning from mistakes, or both?
• Tell us how you raised the money? “Sparkly and Smart” — website and Etsy
• The website shows the overall design and installation process. Talk to me about how the end-to-end process design matters, not just the hardware design...
• Tell us about Design Thinking and how that influences your work and the BloomBox?
• At Stanford what are the opportunities to learn about Design Thinking and entrepreneurship, formal or informal?
• Social benefit corporation vs. not-for-profit?

Sofie Roux, a Gen Z visionary and CEO of BloomBox Design Labs, seeks to transform the educational landscape with innovation at the helm. Her journey, which commenced even before her tenure at Stanford University studying civil engineering and architecture, is evidently embellished with radical innovations and projects.

One such project entails the creation of Bloomboxes from repurposed shipping containers. These blocks have become instrumental in reshaping education in Malawi. Positioned within the learning environment, Bloomboxes are transforming the way students learn and interact with educational materials.

After months of sweat, effort, collaboration, $80,000 on technology and meticulous planning, Sofie and her team encountered a debilitating setback when shipping their first BloomBox. But every dark cloud has a silver lining. This setback unlocked a pivotal lesson for Sofie – accounting for important aspects that one might overlook during the planning process, and rallying the community for support during the implementation phase.

At its core, the BloomBox strives to provide access to quality education for every child, especially girls, worldwide. Crafted from upcycled shipping containers and fitted with a retractable solar roof system, the Bloombox is more than just a classroom – it represents a merging of innovation and education.

Designed to host about twenty laptop computers connected to an off-grid server, the BloomBox is equipped with premier technology, lights, fans, projectors, mobile furniture, and a teacher's desk. It also boasts an extensive library of educational resources, transforming it into a full-fledged maker space.

Since its inception, the BloomBox project has seen considerable growth and progression. Initially, the boxes were built and shipped from North America. However, the need to cut costs shifted this operation to the South African development community, including Malawi. This strategic move not only curt...

Episode page and links: https://markgraban.com/mistake163

My guest for Episode #163 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Jeff Zigman, known as “The Business Engineer,” and the founder and CEO of SkillBuilder.

He’s been a tech entrepreneur 10 years, having led and built 25+ software projects from idea to Live, including multimillion-dollar enterprise software, with an engineering background, ten years as a Business Analyst, and eight years as a Chief Technology Officer.

He’s married with two little kids and, during COVID, he created a software platform that incorporates the learning principles that he’s gained from 20 years of martial arts into a remote learning system that he’s been able to prove to be more effective for virtual training than most in-person training, with higher absorption and better retention.

In this episode, Jeff shares his “favorite mistake” story about trusting somebody he was working to build a software company with — working for 1.5 years on a trust basis, how did Jeff end up saddled with a “lopsided contract”? What problems did that cause and why was it “a real nightmare”? We talk about that and the lessons that Jeff learned through this experience.

We also talk about questions and topics including:

• Were there red flags?
• Should he have gotten a lawyer to review it?
• How has he focused on not preventing this mistake?
• Why is training thousands of employees so difficult?
• Lessons from martial arts?
• 4 things that are required?
• What is Process-Oriented Learning?
• Knowledge (information or theory) vs. Skills (ability)?
• How do we confirm that the learning has sunk in... that the skills can be applied effectively? Closing the loop?
• How can training be gamified?

CEO of Hughes Advocacy, Birmingham, Alabama

Show notes: https://www.markgraban.com/mistake40

My guest for Episode #40 is Krista Hughes, the CEO of her company Hughes Advocacy, a private patient advocacy firm that helps patients and their families navigate the health care system and get the best medical care possible.

She has over 25 years of experience working in the medical industry for Fortune 500 Companies like Cardinal Health. She has also worked for CareFusion, C.R. Bard, and Karl Storz. Prior to founding Hughes Advocacy, Krista worked as a medical device representative in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Florida Panhandle.

She has worked for the last five years as a “patient advocate” and we have a chance to talk about that today. Krista's “favorite mistake” is related to a time when she was advocating for a patient. We'll hear what she did (or didn't do) and how she's adjusted her approach as a result — to be a more effective advocate.

We also talk about our shared passion around what's often called “medical mistakes” — many of these mistakes are very preventable. We'll talk about systemic causes of these mistakes and how the system often falls back on a strategy of “delay, deny, and defend” which we all known gets in the way of learning and progress. We'll also explore this in a future episode with Dr. David Mayer, the CEO of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation, so please stay tuned for that.

You can listen to or watch the episode below. A transcript also follows lower on this page. Please subscribe, rate, and review via Apple Podcasts or Podchaser! You can now sign up to get new episodes via email, to make sure you don't miss an episode. This podcast is part of the Lean Communicators network.