My Favourite Failure: Entering a death spiral - Rico Mandel

0:00This might sound like the plot of a spy novel, but UK startups are increasingly at risk of state actors trying to steal their assets. Take one Scottish renewable manufacturer that was harnessing wave power. They were visited by a 60-strong delegation led by a senior Chinese official. A couple of months after that, some of their laptops were stolen. Guess what happened next? Yup, pictures emerge showing a Chinese firm making a product that was virtually identical. This is why we're working with the National Protective Security Authority and the National Cyber Security Centre, the UK's security experts.

0:36They got in touch with us because they see such a growing threat facing UK startups. How are they responding? With the launch of a new campaign, Secure Innovation. It's not just your cybersecurity that matters, but your physical security too. If you want to get a better handle on your security, check out npsa.gov.uk forward slash innovation and download their free quick start guide. There's a link in the show notes. the day i had to let go of my last employee which was my uh art director you know i called him into my office and said you know i gotta let you go i can't and it was almost like tears i mean he you know he was kind of like my right hand guy and he did everything he could to just all right we gotta rally we gotta and at that point i thought all right well there's got to be some way, but I just, there was just no way.

1:30I had to step back. I had to just kind of get out of there. That's Rico Mandel, the founder of Mise en Place, a foodie marketplace where you can buy delicious things and get recipe inspo. But Rico only got into food after his marketing agency business went bust. He was in a very dark place before finding his salvation. This is how Rico failed, what he learned about building businesses, and a simple hack to make you feel better about your life, however bad things seem.

2:10Rico had started a marketing agency, which grew nicely in the 90s. The dot-com era meant lots of companies were awash with cash, but wind forward to the early 2000s and things looked are very different. After I let go of that last employee, I mean, I was devastated. I had all this overhead that I had to pay. I was going into the office. There were days where I would just stare at my screen, had no clue what to do. I ended up getting, you know, going to see a shrink and he prescribed some medication for me. Two medications, one for to be able to actually concentrate and focus. And the other one was for the depression.

2:53I didn't have to take the depression medication for very long. The focus medication I did take for a while because that helped me to actually get something done and to do what I could to kind of start to serve the few last remaining jobs, whatever I had going on. I mean, we were behind on the bills, behind on the rent, behind on everything. And I ended up making a deal with a landlord. He said, look, if you move out by such and such a date, we'll just call it even. You don't owe me a dime. Everything's good. I totally understand. Not a problem. And that was a big relief in that because I was about four or five months behind, I think, on the rent by that point.

3:40And so, So packed everything up, put most of it into storage and moved my office back home, had a little desk and whatnot and did whatever work I could do. But the year after that was just, I mean, I was moping around the house and really it sent me for a tailspin. After the dot-com crash, a lot of companies disappeared overnight. And that had a knock-on effect on Rico's agency, whose clients were mostly in manufacturing. They struggled along and were beginning to pull back when 9-11 happened, and US manufacturing just stopped. They didn't know what was going to happen. It's a cautious industry, and marketing budgets are the first to be slashed.

4:33This is what ultimately led to Rico's company's demise, and him wallowing at home. His whole identity had been wrapped up in the business. But there are lessons in how he got out of his bunk. First of all, he spoke to people. You've got to express yourself. You have to grieve. And then there was something else he did uniquely suited to entrepreneurs. The other thing that really helped me get out of it was to go in a completely different direction. And to do something that really resonated with one of my core passions. In my case, I wasn't even thinking about it. It was my wife who suggested. She says, look, you love to cook.

5:15Go to culinary school. Go become a chef. Do something. And I'm thinking, and she says, and then she looks at me and says, but don't go to a stupid one, like Fred's culinary school. Go to a really good one. I said, okay, fine. So I ended up enrolling in Le Cordon Bleu here in Pasadena. I remember when I was applying, the guy said, so how long have you been thinking about going to culinary school? And I said, oh, about a week. And he just kind of looked at me like, what? You're going to spend how much and you're going to go through this and you've only thought about this for a week? And when I look back on that, that's one of the entrepreneurial things in my, you know, I've always had that entrepreneurial spirit.

6:08It's about being able to make a decision and then just get the decision done. I've never been the type of person that's going to ruminate on something for six months or a year or any of that kind of thing. Once I've decided, okay, yeah, this looks great, then let's just do it. And that going to culinary school for the year changed my life. completely got me out of my depression, got me back into business, set me on a new course, gave me something where I did not, I was no longer where my entire personality and being was just involved with one thing, which was my marketing business. And now I could see there were other things.

6:55There were, it expanded my life in many, many ways and set me on a completely new course at that point. Entrepreneurs are doers. So by all means, grieve for your failure, but then you just need to go again. You can't let the failure define you, but you have to take the learnings with you. One of the lessons I learned from there was watch my overhead very, very carefully. Don't bring on any employees if you don't need to. today in my business, I use people from around the world. They're all freelancers. They work for me. They work for other people. I can work from anywhere. So, I don't have to spend the money on rents and all the overhead.

7:41And the other thing is to take the time for yourself. In business, Business is not just about doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing and continually doing. And then you're working 15, 18, 20 hour days and just you don't get a medal for that. What I've learned is I need to take time for myself. I need to have time to think. I need to have time to get off of the bandwagon, the craziness of business and to be able to come up with ideas and solutions, especially as a founder and a business owner, you have to, as quickly as possible, take yourself out of the day-to-day business. And what I mean by that is work on the things that you're best at and get everybody else to do the other stuff.

8:34Sure, in the beginning, if you're bootstrapping everything, you have to do more on your own. However, the faster you identify what your, as they call it, zone of genius is, where you're just really good at these few things, then it's going to make your business life so much better and so much easier. Because quite frankly, especially today, it's easier than ever to hire people from all around the world at all different price points to get whatever it is that you need to get done. without driving yourself crazy. Something I think people struggle with is finding their zone of genius. People are generally not very self-aware.

9:20It's something I've had to work hard on myself. And I think Rico has a good way of looking at it. One thing I was told years ago by a mentor I had was the thing that comes easiest to you is this thing that you should be charging the most for. I understand that now, but at the time I'm going, okay, so talking to people is easy for me. Gathering a bunch of people together, that's easy. How do I make money doing that? I mean, come on, you know, this is, what's the deal? I read a book by Mark Randolph called That Will Never Work. And that clicked because here he is one of the founders of Netflix. And it's his story about that.

10:04And one of the things he said was that, you know, I'm a big picture guy. I'm not a detail guy. I have detail people that I work with and they, so I can come up with the ideas. I can think about it. And what, and, but I give it to other people to actually implement. And when I thought about that, it's like, yeah, that's how I've always been. I can come up with solutions, ideas, all kinds of things, but don't ask if I get bogged down and the implementation, then literally it's bogging everything down. So Rico learned how to get the best out of himself, but there's another thing Rico does in his personal life every day, which I'm a huge fan of.

10:44It can get some grief, but trust me, if you do this rigorously for 90 days, you will feel better about your life. Well, what I do is I, every night before I go to bed, I write out 10 things that I'm grateful for. Most of the time, it's things that occurred to me that day. My kids do come up quite a bit in my gratitude lists, but I'm grateful for like tonight, I'll say I'm grateful for the podcast because it was an awesome opportunity and we had a great conversation. It was a lot of fun. I'm grateful for technology. I'm grateful for the people, the conversations that I had, et cetera, et cetera.

11:26And the other thing for me personally, I like to bring my gratitude into a little bit more of a spiritual realm. So, at the end of my gratitude, like for instance, I'm grateful for my two kids that I love and adore. And I thank God for that. I'm not a terribly religious person. I use the term God more as a spiritual, universal kind of energy. but that way it takes it away from me and it puts it more into the universal spiritual energy of it's not me doing all these things it's the collective that gets me through and then I compose that in an email and I send it off to three people that I know that are part of my gratitude practice so they get it every night

12:20Rico Mandel, who found his zone of genius after hitting rock bottom. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. If you like this episode, please subscribe or follow us and leave a review. See you next time.