My Favorite Mistake: Business Lessons from Failures and Success

Overcoming Author and Speaker Mistakes: Insights from Bret Ridgway on Getting Comfortable on Stage

Episode page with links, transcript, and more
My guest for Episode #203 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Bret Ridgway. He is a 25 year veteran of the speaking industry and brings a unique perspective handling the back of the room sales table at 150+ conferences, providing fulfillment services for some of the biggest names in the industry and speaking on many stages himself. He's also the host of the Spotlight on Speaking podcast.
He's the author of eight books focused on speakers, authors, information marketers and event promoters, including:
— 50 Biggest Mistakes I See Information Marketers Make
— Mistakes Authors Make
— 50 Biggest Website Mistakes
His latest book is How to Build a Profitable Speaking Business.
In this episode, Bret shares his favorite mistake story about not having the confidence in himself to get out from behind the scenes — helping authors and speakers — to get up on stage to share what he knows in a way that helps others. How did he discover this pattern? How did he take action and what adjustments did he make? We also discuss some of the biggest mistakes that speakers and authors make. And why write books about mistakes? How does that help others?
Questions and Topics:
Working “the back of the room” to help other speaker / authors
Writing and speaking fear — having the fear of sharing ideas in both ways?
Taking baby steps to get started? Forced into it
Fear – content-related or presence related?
Not beating yourself up? Gotten better about that?
Why write books about mistakes?
Are some of the same mistakes being made now by information marketers?
Doing a book as digital only – mistake?
Mistake to not have an audiobook?
Mistake to not do a paperback / Kindle?
Book as a marketing tool – lead generator
Working with publishers vs. “self publishing”?
Some of the worst speaker mistakes?
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This podcast is part of the Lean Communicators network: http://leancommunicators.com/
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A Former Bank CEO’s Journey from Entrepreneurship to Incarceration and Back: Shaun Hayes

Author of "The Grey Choice" -- Episode page with links, transcript, and more
My guest for Episode #202 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Shaun Hayes. He was the cofounder and former CEO of Allegiant Bancorp, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Shaun started multiple successful businesses, was involved in the casino business, and bought, owned, and sold hundreds of residential and commercial properties. He is an entrepreneur, an author, a speaker… and a felon.
He was a principal at three banks that failed in 2011 and 2012. Five years after selling a company for an enormous profit, Shaun committed a felony. He was incarcerated for his crime eight years later. Now out of prison, he’s the author of The Grey Choice: Lessons on My Journey From Big-Time Banking to the Big House (and Back).
In this episode, Shaun tells two favorite mistake stories. The first was about “going crazy and wanting to fire somebody” when he then realized that the problems were the result of his mistakes as CEO of the bank. The second story is about the mistakes and bad choices that led to his conviction.
Shaun discusses the impact of his experience on his personal and professional life and how he has worked to rebuild his reputation and move forward. The episode offers valuable insights into the challenges of entrepreneurship and the importance of taking responsibility for one's actions.
Shaun provides valuable insights into the challenges of entrepreneurship, discussing how his ambition and drive to succeed led him down a path that ultimately resulted in his downfall. He emphasizes the importance of taking responsibility for one's actions and not making excuses, acknowledging that he made mistakes and accepting the consequences of his actions. Despite the difficulties he faced, Shaun remains optimistic and determined to use his experience to help others learn from his mistakes.
We also discuss the challenges of being a CEO, the importance of transparency and honesty in business, and the need for forgiveness and second chances.
Questions and Topics:
At an early age – making decisions that are not illegal but grey in the “interpretation of the rules”?
How he justified it…
Why go forward with it even knowing it was illegal?
Did this lead to bank failures?
Why did the legal process take 7.5 years to play out before being indicted?
The dynamics / decision around pleading guilty?
Do you remember something early on that got you 1% off course?
The need to specifically define your moral compass?
What’s it like starting a business once out of prison?
Being a speaker today to help others?
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Marché Pleshette on Navigating Change Initiatives and Making Career Choices After College

Co-author of the upcoming book “Change: How to Turn Uncertainty Into Opportunity.” - Available April 18th, 2023.
Show notes with links and more
My guest for Episode #201 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Marché Pleshette. She is a skilled leadership coach who has been a FranklinCovey consultant since 2008. She’s a co-author of the book Change: How to Turn Uncertainty Into Opportunity, available April 18th, 2023.
As a keynote speaker and facilitator, Marché’s work focuses on effective communication, leadership, professional change and transitions, employee engagement and retention, and the organizational value of human capital.
She has been the subject matter expert for The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® and serves on Franklincovey’s coaching team that ensures the quality of their world-class consultants. Before coming to FranklinCovey, Marché worked for a major health system in Atlanta as a manager of employee retention. She holds a B.A. in mass communications with a journalism focus, and is a certified coach.
In this episode, Marché tells her favorite mistake story about what happened on the first day of what was supposed to be her first job out of college. Was she an early example of “ghosting” an employer? Why did she have conflicted loyalties about wanting this job — but feeling pressure not to take it? We talk about her lessons learned and why having a champion inspired her to be a champion for others.
Questions and Topics:
Do most major change initiatives fail? Is some of the data / numbers overblown?
Why/Where most change initiatives fail?
Minimizing the dip… Giving up in the dip?
“Move, minimize, wait, resist, and quit”
The technical part of change and the people part…
Not just logic and reasoning but emotions and feelings…
Why does change trigger our “fight or flight” instincts?
Please follow, rate, and review via Apple Podcasts or Podchaser or your favorite app — that helps others find this content and you'll be sure to get future episodes as they are released weekly. You can also become a financial supporter of the show through Anchor.fm.
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This podcast is part of the Lean Communicators network.
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/favorite-mistake/support

Celebrating 200 Episodes — Mark Graban on Podcasting Mistakes and His Upcoming Book

Episode page with video, transcript, and more
My guest for Episode #200 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is… me, Mark Graban. It's hard to believe that the podcast has reached 200 episodes. If you forgive me for the other episode (#16) where I talked about my own mistakes, that's 198 guests who have shared compelling “favorite mistake” stories with me.
Enter to win a My Favorite Mistake coffee mug!
In this episode, I'm joined by my guest host, Tom Ehrenfeld. He's the editor who is working with me on my upcoming book, The Mistakes That Make Us. He's also the host of the WLEI podcast from the Lean Enterprise Institute. Tom asks me about my reflections and lessons learned from hosting this podcast, including some of the mistakes I've made as a host and producer. We also discuss themes from my upcoming book about creating a culture of learning from mistakes.
Links and Topics:
Healthcare Kaizen book
KaiNexus
Donnis Todd and Dan Garrison episode
David Mayer episode
Mark's podcast mistakes:Didn’t always properly prep guests – especially through a 3rd party PR
An experiment that didn’t pan out — recording via a web-based service
Naming mistake – My Favorite Mistake vs. Our Favorite Mistakes?
Almost lost some recordings (Ep. 16)
Please follow, rate, and review via Apple Podcasts or Podchaser or your favorite app — that helps others find this content and you'll be sure to get future episodes as they are released weekly. You can also become a financial supporter of the show through Anchor.fm.
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.
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/favorite-mistake/support

Finding Your Value & Embracing VIBRANT Leadership with Nicole Greer

CEO at Build a Vibrant Culture™
Episode page with links, transcript, and more
** Mark's Upcoming Book: The Mistakes That Make Us **
My guest for Episode #199 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Nicole Greer. She is a principal coach and CEO of Build a Vibrant Culture™, who specializes in helping individuals, corporations, faith-based organizations, and non-profits fulfill their mission and exemplify VIBRANT Leadership™.
For the last 20+ years Nicole has worked as a coach, marketing director, master of first impressions, and sales trainer in the many facets of business. Her experiences working with all kinds of people led her to found Vibrant Coaching. Nicole is a speaker, trainer, facilitator, life and business coach.
In this episode, Nicole tells her favorite mistake story about giving herself away and not realizing her value when she was in a property management job. Why did she agree to do what seemed like a second full-time job for free? How did Nicole realize this was a mistake? What did she learn and how did she adjust? What was “the big mistake” within the mistake story?
We also talk about change management, showing grace, and keeping employees vibrant through coaching them as leaders (which goes beyond reacting constructively to mistakes).
Questions and Topics:
“Master of first impressions”?
How do you decide the value that you bring? What you’re getting paid?
What does “vibrant” in terms of personality?
How do you define “VIBRANT Leadership”?
“Get LIT” Lead from within, Integrity, Transformation
Nicole's LinkedIn article… “The Love Habit”
What does “showing others grace” mean to you?
C3: Circumstances Conduct and Consequences
How have you coached leaders who struggle with how to react to mistakes?
Book: The One Minute Manager
Book: How Full is Your Bucket?
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CTO Kevin Goldsmith on Leveraging Failure to Drive Success at Spotify and Distrokid

My guest for Episode #198 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Kevin Goldsmith, the chief technology officer at DistroKid, the world’s largest distributor of digital music.
** I WANT TO WRITE MY BOOK (ad) **
Kevin is an experienced leader of high-profile, high-performing product, research, and shared technology engineering organizations. An often-invited speaker on building strong engineering teams at conferences internationally – often talking about learning from failure. Has extensive experience building products using Lean, Kanban, Scrum, and Extreme Programming methodologies.
In this episode, Kevin tells his favorite mistake story about the launch of “Spotify Now” when he was an engineering leader at Spotify. Why was there pressure to launch? What mistake did Kevin and team make regarding data from a small group of initial users? How did Spotify leverage its culture of “handling failure well”? What did Kevin learn?
Questions and Topics:
How do you balance the cost of lost customers vs. the cost of embarrassment?
Being surprised by the results of experiments
Was Spotify Now a problem of a bad concept or bad execution? Or Bad design?
Losing customers as “the cost of learning”
Organizational learning to not get into this situation again?
Doing retrospectives on EVERYTHING to remove the stigma?
The Forbes article that Kevin was quoted in
People who strongly believe in “accountability” — punishing failures — can you change their minds?
Failure vs. mistake? — how would you compare those words?
Tell us a little bit more about DistroKid – strengthening this culture of learning from mistakes?
Video and Blog Post by Kevin:
Fail Fast, Fail Smart… Succeed! by Kevin Goldsmith
Blog post version of the story at Spotify
Please follow, rate, and review via Apple Podcasts or Podchaser or your favorite app — that helps others find this content and you'll be sure to get future episodes as they are released weekly. You can also become a financial supporter of the show through Anchor.fm.
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This podcast is part of the Lean Communicators network.
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/favorite-mistake/support

ADHD Expert & Entrepreneur Kristen Carder Regretted Spending $10k on a Mastermind Program

Host of the "I Have ADHD" podcast
Episode page with video, transcript, links and more
** I WANT TO WRITE MY BOOK (ad) **
My guest for Episode #197 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Kristen Carder. She is a serial entrepreneur and mindset coach for adults with ADHD. She's the host of a podcast: “I Have ADHD.”
In this episode, Kristen tells her favorite mistake story about spending $10,000 on a “mastermind” group that was not at all what she expected. Why was there a gap between her expectations and reality? When did she realize there was a problem? What did she do and how did she learn from this, as a coach-ee and a coach? We also talk about mistakes related to understanding ADHD and living with it — at work and in our personal lives.
As she always says on her podcast, she's “medicated, caffeinated, and ready to roll.”
Questions and Topics:
When did you realize it was a mistake? Did you ask for a refund? 3 reasons why not…
When should somebody join a “mastermind” instead of getting 1×1 coaching?
Lesson learned: explicitly lays out WHAT a mastermind is when she sells one
Red flags that you’re getting bad info about ADHD?
Why ADHD is not simply a “gift” or a “superpower”?
How do you define ADHD?
The inability to direct attention
Trouble regulating impulse – attention and emotion?
You were diagnosed in college… I was diagnosed last year at age 48… what led to you getting diagnosed?
Causes? Differences in the brain?
A mistake to tell people at work that you’re ADHD?
Explanation not an excuse
Her FOCUSED coaching program
Please follow, rate, and review via Apple Podcasts or Podchaser or your favorite app — that helps others find this content and you'll be sure to get future episodes as they are released weekly. You can also become a financial supporter of the show through Anchor.fm.
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.
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/favorite-mistake/support

From Shark Tank and Infomercials: Kevin Harrington’s Cash Flow Crunch - Just the Mistake

Kevin Harrington, from "Shark Tank" and creator of the infomercial.
Welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I’m Mark Graban. This is “just the mistake” — a new experiment.
Today we’ll hear the “favorite mistake” story shared, in episode #1, by Kevin Harrington — one of the “sharks” on season 1 of the show “Shark Tank.” He was the creator of the modern 30-minute infomercial and he shared a powerful story from 30 years ago.
To hear the entire episode with Kevin and his co-author Mark Timm, go to www.MarkGraban.com/mistake1
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Joe Perello, CEO of Props, on Building Strong Work Relationships and a Culture of Learning from Mistakes

CEO of Props -- ⁠Episode page with video, transcript, links and more⁠
My guest for Episode #196 of the ⁠My Favorite Mistake⁠ podcast is Joe Perello, president and CEO of Props, a first-of-its-kind, marketing technology platform enabling DTC brands. Joe is also a member of the board of directors of New York Cruise Lines.
Prior to Props, he co-founded and led an NYC-based digital agency and bootstrapped it into an award-winning shop.
In 2003, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed Joe as the first Chief Marketing Officer of the City of New York. Joe and his team created the first self-funded marketing and promotional engine in the City's history, generating more than $100 million and paving the way for unprecedented results in tourism.
Joe was the Vice President of Business Development for the New York Yankees during some of their most successful seasons, reporting to the late George M. Steinbrenner.
In this episode, Joe tells his favorite mistake story about a “work divorce” that was “really hard” — was it a mistake to separate himself from a company and certain workplace relationships? How did he learn to take responsibility for those relationships? We also discuss how to create a culture of learning from mistakes and creating an environment where you can be wrong.
Questions and Topics:
Work divorces are hard… it WAS the right thing to do
Felt like it WAS a mistake as it happened – turned out to be best…
Fear — no idea what I was going to do next…. — uncertainty or a mistake
It’s always a judgment call – a mistake or not??
The founder dynamic made it more difficult – personal pride
Lessons learned to prevent future work divorces??
Culture of learning from mistakes? “Create an environment where you can be wrong…”
Getting things wrong helps us get it right??
“I don’t want to be right I just want to win”
Direct marketing – test and learn, test and learn
Fail fast, fail often?
Props – how did the company pivot??
Mistakes that marketers make? Being inauthentic or failed attempt at authenticity that didn’t ring true?
Mistaken perceptions of the late George Steinbrenner… public perception vs reality?
Please ⁠follow⁠, rate, and review via ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ or ⁠Podchaser⁠ or your favorite app — that helps others find this content and you'll be sure to get future episodes as they are released weekly. You can also ⁠become a financial supporter of the show through Anchor.fm⁠.
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.
 

Ward Vuillemot on the Power of Celebrating Errors and Understanding Customer Behavior for Business Success

Episode page with transcript, links, and more
I WANT TO WRITE MY BOOK (ad)
My guest for Episode #195 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Ward Vuillemot. Ward is a seasoned C-suite executive with over six years of experience leading fully remote teams while building technology organizations from the ground up for companies with 150 to 650 employees in size and $50M to $125M in revenue across the Americas and Europe.
He is currently Chief Product Officer and CTO at RealSelf. He is a technical advisor with his own company, where he advises startup founders and CEOs on technical roadmap and technology organization along with lean approaches to finding market signals quickly.
I invited Ward because of this Forbes article about celebrating errors.
In this episode, Ward tells his favorite mistake story about launching “Amazon Tote” and why there was “too little friction” in user experience. What did he learn about understanding the customer experience? In a separate story, what was Ward's epiphany about seeing an ant on a bus?
Questions and Topics:
Innovation is doing something others haven’t done before
Tell us about the Celebration of Error (CoE) concept – and practice…
Chicken and egg between psychological safety and CoE?
How much Psychological Safety is necessary and how does CoE build more PS?
From Correction of Error (Amazon) to Celebration of Error?
Are all errors created equally in terms of what to celebrate?
Discovering mistakes that had been there for years
As a person who is “high-functioning autistic” – is it ever a mistake to disclose something that personal?
From mindset to document?
IMPACT of the error on business – send to whole company?… why it matters, not why it happened
RESOLUTIONS — short-term and long-term (countermeasures) – fire out, then prevention
ROOT CAUSE – “show your work”
When to use a CoE?
People “NEED” to make mistakes to hit ever-greater goals?
Taking an impersonal, non-blaming approach — easier said than done? Fighting the instinct to blame?
Please follow, rate, and review via Apple Podcasts or Podchaser or your favorite app — that helps others find this content and you'll be sure to get future episodes as they are released weekly. You can also become a financial supporter of the show through Anchor.fm.
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.
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/favorite-mistake/support