We all face failure in many different forms in our lives. Sometimes the failure shows up in small doses on a daily basis. Sometimes the failure is bigger and it could even throw our lives into a bit of a tailspin.
I recently chatted with Stephen Somers about this very topic of failure. Stephen is a resident of Miami Beach and the CEO and Co-Founder of Marketplace Superheroes. Stephen spoke with me about failure and shared how we can apply it to our own lives. Here is a summary of our conversation.
What are some of your biggest failures and did you learn from them?
Yeah, it's been interesting. I knew from the beginning that I'm good at certain things, and I'm terrible at other things. So what I've done over the last 10-11 years now is I have surrounded myself with people who are very smart. And I quickly identify what I'm good at and the stuff I'm not good at. I've found people to partner with and work with other people. I've got a few business partners. Now, whenever I started working with Robert, he mentored me into selling on Amazon. At the time, even though he's a really smart guy, he just was kind of doing the wrong thing. And we figured out how to do the right thing together. But even during that time, there were lots of failures. There were products we launched that didn't work out very well, and things like that. But really, what we were always very cautious about doing was making very measured bets. In other words, like we never went all in on something without kind of hedging our bets consistently. And that's been a constant theme of my business. I've sort of been able to always test things at a safe level. So I've never had a monumental failure that kind of wiped me out pretty much in my life. And I've been lucky in that respect. I also think a lot of the failures have had have been more micro-failures. And you know, even now at this point in time, and I suppose I don't think of those things as a failure.
Stephen discusses success through the lens of the coronavirus and encourage listeners that if they are finding themselves without work, this is the perfect time to examine and look at other outlets to sharpen skills and branch outside of your comfort zone. He shares some practical questions to ask yourself and expounds on what the answers mean in today’s economy.
Well, I like that. Can you explain a little bit more about what it is that you do with your business, so we can be able to picture what it is you're talking about a little bit better?
Yeah, sure. I run a number of different businesses. Now, our main company is Marketplace Superheroes. We've run that for a number of years, we teach people all over the world how to sell their own products globally on Amazon. And the HVAC business came about really was, you know, over 10 years ago, and Robert had this business selling on Amazon, they two warehouses, lots of staff and things like that. And I was trying to figure out how to get into business. So, luckily for me, I got introduced to Robert. And so cutting a long story short, we basically figured out a way to run that company, just the two of us. We would get rid of all the warehouses, have Amazon send it or goods every day to everybody across the world. And we created a really successful company doing that. We actually run a freight company as well, where we do all our all we ship all our members goods from China, to we have a warehouse in the US, actually one in the UK, one in Australia. And so that's an herb business. And then we have other things like side hustle heroes. Oh, man, we have so much going on. But it's all really designed to help people leverage the Internet to build a full time income with legitimate businesses.
So one thing that I'm curious about and it relates to the environment that we find ourselves in. With the Coronavirus pandemic going around and things around the world getting shifted around in everyone's lives being turned upside down, how has that impacted your business?
The Coronavirus is changing businesses as we know it forever. And in many ways, it'll have a long-ranging positive impact, but it's gonna take a long time for everybody to feel the positive impact. If you look at the numbers, people are more people are going to be online than ever before now. And also more people are going to be spending time at home. And some people will just have to pivot at what they're doing and do something new.
Special thanks to Stephen for taking the time to chat with me. I really appreciate it. What did you learn from Stephen's story?