Taking Your Business from “Uh Oh” to “Ah Ha” (with William Holsten)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John, and my guest today is an inventor, entrepreneur, corporate innovation catalyst, and small business mentor.He's the author of the new book avoid unintentional blunders that derail entrepreneurial success and goof proof your business. Welcome to the show. William Holsten.

Hi, Sarah. It's wonderful to meet you. Thank you for having me on.

It's good to have you. First, I'll say I love the title of your book. That caught my attention.

Uh, oh.

Can you give us a little bit of your backstory and how you got the idea to write this book?

Sure, sure. My backstory in a short moment is I've got a marketing degree.I worked for 20 years in a company as a marketing manager, and during the last 10 years of that, I had a side gig where my wife and I invented carnival games. I'll get into it in a little while. We would do them on the side while working full time, both of us.And we went to trade shows on weekends and did our side gig work at night. And to kick it off, our first invention was alternative to a traditional dunk tank.You know those party games where somebody sitting on a ledge, somebody throws a ball and it hits the target and they fall into the big bucket and get soaked in. Everybody laughs. It's a lot of fun. We had rented one of those for a make a wish carnival for my sister's daughter's backyard carnival in 1999.It's a long time ago and two weeks before the carnival in the Northeast, it was a drought. The laws called me and they said, you cannot rent that because you need 500 gallons to fill it.And we're on austerity now with water, so you can rent anything else. I said, give me a minute, I'll think about this. So on our kitchen table with napkins and scribbles, we came up with, what if we had a way to make it?So you sat down on a chair, threw a ball, and it was a water balloon over your head, and somehow the thing pivoted and put a pin through the balloon and the water fell on you. We called that originally a different name, but it became a game called Pitch Burst. And that carnival made. They made hundreds of dollars on it.The kids and parents were lined up around the block to play our game, which we made in our garage with wood from Home Depot. We went to a sporting goods store and got a basketball hoop. So it really was just a pivot thing. When they hit the ball.It moved the thing forward to pop the balloon. A lot of fun. So we thought, this is wonderful.I worked in marketing, I worked in innovation in the company and I said, I bet we could make some money on this. So we went first to research it in the library and all around and we found it had never been patented before, that exact configuration.So we filed for a patent.Once the patent was pending, we then applied for a small business SBA loan to help fund getting us started, which we invested in finding a company because I suck as a manufacturer. So we hired a company who could make it the same way we made it a hundred times. So we made it out of wood. So they made it out of wood.This is all wonderful.Then we began buying ads in trade journals in the rental industry, in the party industry, managed to create some demand so that in our first six months we sold about 60 of these things and we shifted them out. They were big contraptions, big heavy things we had to use a warehouse for.And it was all wonderful till the following spring when those first 60 games we sold were sent out for their fifth, sixth and seventh time for rentals. And they began to break and wear out. The screws came out, the labels came off and we got daily calls. And that was, I called it our oh moment.Because if I sold you something, and to all of those people, we made good. We sent extra parts, we gave refunds where necessary at our own expense. So that was our oh moment.When we realized the first two, we said, oh, that's just anomaly. It's not a big thing. But when they continued to come, we realized that wooden game was doomed.So that's all in retrospect, we were going to go out of business and just somehow pay the loan off some other way. Because we borrowed a lot, did not.Because we talked to our customers, they were convinced they loved the game idea, but just the wooden version of it was not durable for purpose. With some come to Jesus moments, we said, well, we could borrow some more money and hire a engineer. And we did.And we got, we reintroduced it made out of steel, steel and some plastic panels. And that did the trick. It was about 24 months between the first ones and the reintroduced ones. But that version is still on the market now.We sold it off a while ago, but you could still buy pitch bursts. So that was the beginning of my uhoh experiences in the side gig. I never did leave my day job until I retired.The side gig continued where I learned customers who buy these games at rental shows and partying Event and amusement industry events. They look for something new every year. And I began to get a reputation for innovative cool things.And I was pressuring myself to put up more and more each year. So a few years later, we came up with an air balloon pumping game. So it was like a dynamite detonator called Boom Blaster.And you would pump and pump and pump until the balloon on a stand would pop. And you have two or three or five of these next to each other and they're racing to be the first to pop. Very visual, very loud, lots of fun.We designed that. It was out of steel so we didn't have any durability problems until we had a second oh moment when we learned the pumps were bicycle pumps.And they're designed to be used for a minute or two to fill your tire.When we put them into competitive games side by side that were rented out and played for hours by aggressive young children, teenagers and adults, the inner parts of that would heat up. It was an O ring that would flake and it would clog the pumps.So while it was a big popular success and we sold hundreds of them, we had a big problem when they began to clog again. We'd been through make goods before. We did that again. We found a better pump and long term we solved it.But it was a very painful and expensive oh experience. I won't go into detail, but we did that a third and then a fourth time. A lot of cool games. Three of them are still in the market today.But there was a difficult learning curve in retrospect, looking back at this, that I wanted to define oh as the moment you realize you're in trouble. And a lot of times it's avoidable because you forgot something, you didn't know something, you built something on faulty assumptions.And I said, there's got to be some lessons there that can apply that others could learn from. Skip ahead 10 years. In my day job, I was a marketing guy, a brand manager for a multinational drug company.Consumer medicines like aspirins and things. And then I switched over to the R and D side where I began being trained and leading workshops and coming up with creative ideas for new products.So in my workshopping, I was always being instructed for to design thinking tools and other ways of understanding the consumer experience than designing things that delighted people. Didn't just satisfy the E but made it really, really good. When I sat down with my laptop, I was going to say with my pen and paper to write the book.I gave meaning to ohs as they're unanticipated. It's four things. It's unintentional and unexpected. It's humbling. It's observable. Other people can see it and it's a hardship.It really becomes expensive. And those types of events can become embarrassing, expensive or tragic. My own were just kind of expensive and somewhat embarrassing.But as I researched the type of event this is, I found lots of real world examples in the media. An embarrassing One was in 2017 at the Oscars. They announced the best picture, but they got the wrong envelope from the people running the thing.They announced La La Land one. And it. What, in fact, was Moonlight. That was the embarrassing one, an expensive one.Steve Wynn, the billionaire in Las Vegas, was selling one of his Picassos for $139 million.And the day before it was going on sale, he was showing it off to some people in his office, and he put his elbow through it and he ripped it and it lost $50 million in value. That was expensive. And the tragic. There are many tragic examples. The most dramatic one is a skydiver named Ivan McGuire who in 1988 was.He'd been an instructor. He'd been a frequent skydiver, and he was asked to use a film camera to shoot people coming out of the plane after him.There was an instructor and a new student who wanted to come out and be on film doing their dive when they pulled their parachutes. So they're up 10,000ft, and he jumps out of the plane, gives them a thumbs up, turns on the camera, and he's ready to go. And he's filming.They come out, they reach, pull their parachutes, and they're. It's a beautiful shot. Then Ivan reached for his ripcord, which should have been here. That's when he realized he forgot his parachute.He had fussed so much on this new camera, which apparently was strapped to him, he forgot that he didn't have a parachute.

He.

He died. And the camera stayed alive so people could listen to his voice saying, oh, my God, no.So these are little slips and lapses that are embarrassing in front of millions of people or tragic end of life. I am looking at ways and the book gives 10 tools for people to avoid those types of things and to learn from others.In the case of the parachuter, I try to translate into observe and learn and then think and apply. If it's an entrepreneur with their small business, they're a bakery, they're a gas station, they're.Whatever they're doing, you can think, oh, that was Terrible, but never happened to me. But what one key step of your process, if you ever forgot it or got it tragically wrong, could be disaster for you.And there you can say, oh, well, yeah, in my bakery. Boy, if I ever left the pilot light on when I was doing something, we could have a fire or each person can think of their situation.That's one of the 10 tools in my book. I call it, uh, oology. It's learning from others mistakes.And Warren Buffett said it's good to learn from mistakes, your own mistakes, but it's much better to learn from others mistakes. So I give method to how to do that.

Wow, those are really interesting stories. I hadn't heard of those. That's tragic about the skydiver. So you had mentioned one of the tools.Can you tell us a little bit about some of the other tools?

There are 10 tools. There are four groups of tools. You read the book or I can give a talk or I can come work with a company. They're based on four things.Learning about yourself, your own tendencies, learning about your business, what's your business plan, where are the risks There you must learn about your customers. And I talk about walking in their shoes to understand the process so you really know them.And of course there's the external word that includes the oology. Thinking of yourself, I do provide. And your viewers, listeners can have it free. I'll tell you at the end where to go.There is a self diagnosis tool that in 10 minutes it helps you think through mistakes you've made personally in the last 12 months and then kind of look at the patterns of causes that led to them on your end.So by circling things on a little page, you can realize, oh, I'm prone to being overtired or getting distracted, or there's about 10 reasons you could do the.You learn about yourself so that you can say, I need to be more aware, I need to be alert when I'm doing something really critical, that I don't put myself in the situation to make a stupid mistake. By the way, I do differentiate these. They could be minor, they can be major. As you heard, slip ups from big, strategic or tactical mistakes.A company can put out new Coke or crystal Pepsi or the Edsel, or there's a whole bunch of examples where the company purposely did what they came out with, but it was wrong because there wasn't enough demand. But it's not, somebody slipped.I'm talking about if you're an entrepreneur and you're responsible for getting the bank deposit into the bank with this week's receipts and somehow you lose that cash. That's a big, gigantic damaging. Oh, it's embarrassing. And all those things that it takes time to recover from.So learning about yourself is one of those things, learning about your business.I'm a mentor with a SCORE organization and I'm constantly talking with small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs about having a business plan because many businesses just start. Bootstrapping is a good word because it's. You're on your own. But if you don't think it through and think, who is my customer?What is the product and service I sell and why is it differentiated? How do I make money? If you don't think through at least those three things and there's more, you could be in trouble unless you're very lucky.So I encourage one of the tools is to look at your business plan and find the soft spots that you yourself are nervous about. Another one is to do a pre mortem. This is like a post mortem after somebody's died. A pre mortem is a creative imagination exercise.Nobody dies but you. Imagine it's two years or five years from now and your company's gone belly up fantastically, and you lost all your money.Then you and your partner, you and your team, depends how big your company is. You imagine what are the things that went wrong. So you can say, well, could have been we ran out of cash.It could have been we underappreciated the customer demand. It could be we just got the demand wrong.And by knowing them now, as you're getting ready to either launch your company or a new product in your company or a new initiative, you can imagine the damage of bad stuff happening and make plans to avoid it. We talked about yourself, you talked about your business. An important one, thinking about your customers, is to map your customer's own experience.Lots of people, including entrepreneurs, think, I know this category well, I know what they need and they put something out. But if they'd only taken the time to do mapping or spend time with real buyers, real customers, in the places where they use your product or service.An example in my book is a company who made relishes.And the example I give of using this tool is they go into the kitchens of a dozen customers one at a time and ask them, show me where you keep your relishes. Show me how you use them. Show me you put them on.And by observing, making a map of those customer experiences and then looking at opportunities, they can find gaps they could fill or they can find problems with what competing products and services do because they're not filling those so the tools in the book go through the steps to use to do mapping your customers experience and and also doing a test and learn. If you're thinking of a big thing, cut off a small piece try it out with a few customers before you make a whole pitch burst out of wood.In my case, I wish we had these tools when I was starting out but I made the book so others can go where I didn't. And then as far as the external world I've already talked about oh ology.Another important one is rely on other people I mention in the book mentors, experts and naive observers. Mentors are folks like me who from score can mentor for free.Or it could be an uncle who's been in business put his arm around you say here's how you do that. Or just somebody to bounce ideas off to be sure their business solid sound. You may need experts.In my case with my pump game I needed an air pressure and experts in fluid dynamics and I didn't have them so I had to find them. I wish I went to them earlier could have avoided a problem. And the naive observers.Nobody's smarter than little kids or people who can come and they're not experts in something so you can need to explain to them in three minutes. Here's what I'm trying to do. What do you think? And they will come at you with questions you could not have anticipated.Smart questions a lot of the time, sometimes not so smart sometimes, but at least they make you think. It helps people realize they're not alone because many entrepreneurs are solopreneurs.And boy, when things are going bad or might go bad, you do feel very lonely. I know I did. So those are. There's a few tools in each of those. The yourself, your business, your customers and the external world.What's in there is why these tools are there, how to use it, and there's even a written example of how to use it. And the free giveaway is one of those tools. The tool in the book is called look in the Mirror. It's introspective, but for a giveaway.You'll see the title when you download it. It's why the f did I do that? Because you made this realization that you've done something you wish you didn't a moment after you did it.

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Yes. No matter how many times you read the book or how careful you are, things will still happen, hopefully less frequently and with less impact.But when things go wrong, you're really facing five. And there's a couple pages on each. One of them is to accept, learn and move on. Okay, shouldn't have done that. Nobody died. Hopefully. And many times.One realization I've had from talking to people about this is if I personally made a mistake, I may not talk about it with anybody else and I'll hope I get away with it. Or I can correct it before it's a problem. And in that case it's a silent except learn and move on.There could be public ones too if it's very obvious. So that's one option. The second option of course, is to fix it. To find out what went wrong and diagnosis.You could do six sigma on a massive scale or just find out where the screw fell down and didn't work that time. So fixing it is one, pivoting is the third.That's when you you realize this is not going to work and I've got to find something else in my pitch Burst game would clearly would not work. After our hard learnings, we pivoted over to make it out of steel. We might have pivoted, oh forget that game.But we learned something about the marketplace and another mean we can apply our assets to something else. The fourth one is to quit. Nobody likes a quitter, it's been said, but sometimes quitting is the smart thing.There's a book I read called Quit that advises you take a look at you don't look backwards. You look to the future and you look at the future value of all the efforts you'd have to do to fix or do something with something.Compared it to applying the same efforts, resources, money, towards a new thing you have higher confidence in. In that case, it does make sense to just move on to the next thing and minimize the damage from the first and not look back.The fifth choice is to ignore. I write one sentence in the book about that that's always the wrong thing because ignoring it doesn't solve it.It doesn't get you in a better position. It doesn't make you think. It's like being the ostrich to just hide from it. Usually most of the time, 99% of the time, not a good choice.

And what underlying factors would you say cause most of these mistakes?

These mistakes are, again, they're not the big strategic new Coke, new Pepsi things. These are, I forgot to put the pilot light on. I made a choice to make something out of wood when that won't work. I lost the keys.I couldn't find the deposit when I got to the bank. These are, you might say, stupid mistakes. I call them ohs and I have an acronym for them. These are caused by inattention, distraction.These are caused by not thinking things through all the way. In the book, before I get into the tools, I say there is a simple solution to not do these. And it is.And I can show you my cup, which I have a coffee cup with it on. It's maybe you can see, think smartly and be more aware, just pay more attention.But it's not that easy unless you understand yourself, your business, your customers and things like that.

What prompted you to write this book is your own experiences that you had talked about earlier. Are there any other kind of experiences you've had either with those businesses or others that were like.It's almost like the oh moment is almost like an aha moment in a way.

Yeah, it's a negative aha. A negative aha that you can learn from. You can, you can make it turn into a positive if you didn't jump out of a plane without a parachute.But it's very painful while you're going through it. Other experiences, Yes, I can talk back to my game business. Our third game was A water bucket spilling game where two people play.It's behind me on my wall. Two people play against each other with a water pump to pump the water from one side to a bucket over the other guy's head.And the fastest one makes the other guy get the bucket spill on them. So we designed this. We had another moment because the first version was not durable enough, the second one was. But I had a realization myself.I had heart surgery in 2009. At this time we were in debt from the side gig and I was working my full time job and my knees hurt and I was going in for surgery.The pre surgery test found that I had blockage in my heart and they wound up doing quadruple bypass surgery. So while I'm recovering from that surgery, my wife and I are just realizing this can't continue working 22 hours a day all the time.I've got to let something go. And we had expected we could quit the day jobs and do this game thing, but we just had too much debt. It wasn't going to work.We came to the realization we had to sell. So it took us a few years to find the right buyer. I love them. They're a company called Water wars in Minnesota. They sell my games now.And Tom Woog was a mentor to me.He saw us with our original pitch burst game at a trade show and we were running back and forth to the bathrooms at a trade show to fill our bottles, to fill the balloons, to demonstrate. And he says, you can use my hose. He saved us 20 minutes each step.When they bought these games from us, they changed this Downpour derby was the third game we made. They change it from a two person portable game into one which can be used at water parks because their games are used at water parks.And I was up in their Minnesota shop and I saw that he had redesigned it out of wood as a prototype to see how it would work. And I said, tom, you're going to be selling those to customers soon.And he said, nope, we're going to give it to our best customers for a year for free. And then we'll come back after the season, we'll ask them to kick the snot out of it was their term.And then we'll assess at the end of the season how did that go? And then they can do their re engineering to fix those problems before they ever sold the first one. Man, I wish I talked to the guy a long time ago.He mentored me by listening and observing my problems and gave me a solution.

So that business you've sold so you no longer have. Are you doing anything with like creating games, water games, outdoor games?

That's behind me now.I'm glad the games we began inventing 25 years ago are still in the market and helping because my favorite thing from my game business days wasn't the nights worrying about money or the problems when the customers call with complaints which was bound to happen because we were lousy engineers at first. My joy was when we got to see kids playing these games. The side by side air balloon pump thing, the boom blaster.I just love seeing kids with their tongues out be as as much as they can.Or our biggest customer when we had the company running was a certain theme park or the builder theme park operator in Florida near Orlando and they had our pitch purse game at every one of their poolside recreation programs. So I would go down, visit them and just sit back and watch the delight on kids and parents faces playing with our creations. So there was a.Oh there was an extremely good side to the things we did in those years in the game business. But to answer your question, no.My role now as a mentor to small businesses and somebody who's been through this experience is to tell this story, hoping it will help others.

So what I guess piece of advice would you have for an entrepreneur who does have an oh moment or two or five, however many, what would be your best piece of advice for them to keep going? Encouragement.

I guess it's about encouragement. Take a deep breath, look honestly at yourself about your own strengths and your own weaknesses and address them.I was going to say carefully, methodically. Don't panic. You don't have to. Nobody has to do anything all the time, immediately.You can take your time to get it right and make sure that what if you choose to fix that your fix is expected to succeed where the first try didn't.But I would encourage before you get into that position, if you're at the beginning of your entrepreneur journey, do the thinking on paper, do the thinking with potential customers asking their experience so that you can anticipate things which could go wrong before they do.

Yeah, that's great advice. And so you had mentioned earlier in the interview about a link that people can go to take a quiz.

It's a PDF you can download and do this self assessment on your own. And it's the same place you'll find my book and it's my author website. My name is William Holston.H O L S T E N so it's williamholston.com and on the landing page when you get there, you'll see on the left a picture of my book at a place you can click to go buy it or if you're not ready to pay any money. On the right is this. It's called why the F Did I Do that? It's a 10 page PDF which is really tool number one from the book and it's free.You'll be asked to sign up for my newsletter in exchange for getting it free.But each month I do put out a Ology newsletter with events and developments that have happened since the book got published and some of my additional advice that's free to people who sign up for this download.

I love that. Oh, Ology. Well. Awesome.Well, I really appreciate your time today and sharing some of those experiences, things you've learned, how to approach those things. So if anyone wants to check that out. WilliamHolston. Com do you have any last words or thoughts?

Yeah, I know that frugalpreneur is all about helping people on a tight budget or on shoestring.Really succeed, typically with digital programs, but with any startup kind of thing and you might have just listened to me for the last 20 minutes and you say, oh, that's not me. My advice is think about it could be you in your situation.Be aware, maybe even keep track of silly mistakes you make and find the pattern so that when you are spending precious money, you're not going to mess it up by forgetting something important. Other tools include checklists and things. Just keep you honest with yourself. There's lots of ways of doing it. I encourage you to do the thinking.This mug, I think I held it up before. No? Oh. Think smartly and be more aware. Applies every day.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time.I really appreciate it and I think the listeners definitely learned a lot from this and hopefully they'll be purchasing your book like I will.

Very good. Thank you Sarah. I appreciate being on the show.