Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / From Painful Mistakes to Profitable Pivots: William Holsten’s Story of Reinvention

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From Painful Mistakes to Profitable Pivots: William Holsten’s Story of Reinvention · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:04
  So my wife and I sat down, kitchen table, and on the back of a napkin, we said, how do, how might we get that dunking experience without requiring all that water?
• 0:14
  Imagine spending 30 years in the corporate halls of bare consumer health only to trade that security for a water balloon game.
• 0:23
  That's exactly what William Holston did.
• 0:26
  But what started as a brilliant invention, the pitch burst, nearly became a total disaster.
• 0:31
  Just as the business was taking off.
• 0:33
  A single critical error in material selection led to widespread product failures, crushing financial stress, and the kind of what have I done?
• 0:42
  Moment that keeps founders awake at 3am But William didn't just survive the mistake.
• 0:48
  He decoded it.
• 0:49
  Today, he's known as the business mistake prevention Specialist.
• 0:53
  He's joining us to break down his SAFER framework, a toolkit designed to help you spot the blind spots caused by stress, fatigue and faulty assumptions before they cost you everything.
• 1:06
  If you want to move fast without breaking the things that matter most, you can't afford to miss this episode.
• 1:12
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:17
  All right, William Holston, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:20
  Thank you, Dave.
• 1:21
  Glad to be here.
• 1:22
  Yes, we are glad to have you.
• 1:25
  So, William, you are known as the business mistake prevention specialist.
• 1:32
  And you know that area very well because you've made a lot of mistakes as an entrepreneur.
• 1:38
  And you, you had a very long corporate career for a large company, Aber Consumer Health, before you launched your entrepreneurial journey.
• 1:46
  And you're very vocal about what you went through, the mistakes you made, how much it costs, and then how that has led you to your new business where you're helping other entrepreneurs prevent their own mistakes.
• 1:58
  So if you could, for our audience, can you just kind of recap your journey and tell us how you became an entrepreneur?
• 2:05
  Yeah, happy to.
• 2:06
  I'll go back.
• 2:09
  My day job for more than 30 years was at Bayer Consumer Health, where I was a brand manager.
• 2:15
  And then I evolved into the R and D side where I was in innovation.
• 2:19
  And in the innovation space, I led workshops for the global teams to come up with new product ideas and solve problems.
• 2:27
  I was trained in design thinking.
• 2:31
  I was trained at the Creative Problem Solving Institute.
• 2:35
  So I had skill sets that I used for the day job that comes in later when I wrote a book, how it applies for entrepreneurs.
• 2:42
  In my last 10 years or more at Bayer, my wife and I, my family and I set up a side gig where we invented and marketed carnival games, you know, like dunk tanks.
• 2:55
  But this was an alternative.
• 2:57
  We got that way because my niece was holding a Make a Wish backyard carnival a while ago and asked all of her aunts and uncles to help raise money by bringing something to play and raise money.
• 3:10
  So we rented a dunk tank for that day a month or so in advance, two weeks before.
• 3:16
  The rental company said, sorry the drought restrictions.
• 3:20
  It was Pennsylvania and it was hot in August.
• 3:23
  Drought restrictions won't let us rent you that 500 gallon requiring dunk tank.
• 3:29
  Do you want something else?
• 3:30
  I said, no, I got it.
• 3:32
  Let me tell you what actually happens with the knowledge that runs your business.
• 3:37
  Someone spends a week writing an sop.
• 3:40
  It goes in a binder.
• 3:41
  The binder goes on a shelf.
• 3:43
  And when a new hire has a question, they find the person who knows and they ask them, that's tribal knowledge.
• 3:50
  It's valuable, and it walks out the door every time someone leaves.
• 3:55
  With QuicklyDoc, you just film your experts doing the job.
• 3:59
  It takes five minutes.
• 4:01
  QuicklyDoc turns that into a professional searchable documentation that, that your team can pull up right from their phone.
• 4:09
  So when someone searches, how do I reset the controller?
• 4:12
  There's the answer straight from the person who actually knows.
• 4:17
  Film it once, reference it forever, go to QuicklyDoc.com beyond for your free pilot, and stop losing what your best people know.
• 4:27
  So my wife and I sat down, kitchen table, and on the back of a napkin, we said, how do.
• 4:32
  How might we get that dunking experience without requiring all that water?
• 4:36
  What we came up with ultimately was a game called Pitch Burst is where you're throwing a ball.
• 4:42
  We made it out of materials from Home Depot and a sporting goods store.
• 4:47
  There's a vertical plywood board, and on that we hang a basketball rim.
• 4:54
  And in the basketball rim, we put a water balloon.
• 4:57
  The action was, you throw the ball, hit the target, and then the water balloon pops over someone's head using much less water each time.
• 5:06
  We had a wonderful day at that carnival.
• 5:08
  Made hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the charity and thought it was wonderful.
• 5:13
  The next day, the phone began to ring and people said, where can I get that game?
• 5:17
  I'd love to use it.
• 5:18
  My party, I want to own one.
• 5:19
  And the wheels began turning.
• 5:21
  I said, there's got to be something here.
• 5:23
  We did the research.
• 5:24
  We found out it's never been done before.
• 5:26
  We filed for provisional patent, and we thought we'd be going into that business.
• 5:32
  When the provisional patent was issued, we got an SBA.
• 5:36
  We did a business plan, got an SBA, SBA loan for almost $100,000, which helped us build the first hundred units and advertise in rental Industry publications.
• 5:46
  This is before a lot of social media made that simpler.
• 5:50
  So we made the hundred units out of the same wood products that we had used when we made it in our garage.
• 5:59
  There was the mistake because we sold 60 units in the first three or four months over the winter when they shipped and they went into use in the early warm weather spring, they broke, the parts fell apart, the
• 6:13
  wood did not hold up.
• 6:14
  The, the, the logo panels peeled off and there were lots and lots of complaints.
• 6:19
  Move the two years later we had recovered, we borrowed more money, got somebody to redesign it out of steel and.
• 6:25
  And it's a resilient game that's still available now, although we have sold the patents and trademarks to another company.
• 6:31
  That's my background.
• 6:32
  That was my first.
• 6:33
  I call it an oh moment when we realized we were in deep trouble because of mistakes we've made.
• 6:38
  The type of my mistake was faulty assumptions and I didn't do the testing that I needed to do to prove that this was a resilient thing for that marketplace.
• 6:50
  Later on we invented more games and had some more hiccups and learning curves.
• 6:57
  So when I retired from bear in 2022, I wanted to write this experience down in a book that put together my dumb mistakes, why I made them.
• 7:08
  I also collected a few dozen other famous dumb mistakes that people had made.
• 7:14
  And then I put together 10 tools from my workshopping experience that people can use to avoid them.
• 7:20
  Like doing a pre mortem, like being sure you use the right checklists, like being more aware of your own tendencies for mistake making.
• 7:29
  There's 10 of them at all.
• 7:31
  The journey continued.
• 7:32
  I launched that book last February in 2025.
• 7:36
  And I thought this is going to be great.
• 7:38
  I'm going to become a speaker, I will do workshops and I'll be able to later on make online courses all about these things.
• 7:46
  And I learned after the first few months, entrepreneurs are mostly your audience is caring about my sales, my customers, my competitors, my profit, my bottom line.
• 7:57
  Nobody's thinking about how do I prevent mistakes.
• 8:00
  But I realize it's a real factor for everybody because I also learned that 9 out of 10 people do admit to making a business mistake each year.
• 8:10
  So that learning I began calling myself after the book launched the business mistake prevention Specialist.
• 8:17
  But it felt hollow to me because I didn't really have data beyond my own to be.
• 8:23
  To be a specialist.
• 8:25
  So what I did in middle of 2025 is I commissioned a study of 300 entrepreneurs across the US to really dive into the behaviors that lead to making mistakes.
• 8:40
  And those the big ones.
• 8:42
  We looked at stress, fatigue, distraction, faulty assumptions, missing customer signals and even knowledge gaps.
• 8:50
  The questions we asked were the ones you can answer, I never do that or I always do that.
• 8:55
  Like on a one to five scale questions like when I'm under stress, I rush decisions without fully checking the details.
• 9:03
  When I add together all 12 of those questions, they go on each of those topics, we learned a few things.
• 9:09
  Nine out of 10 people did make one mistake at least in the past year, and almost 20% said they made five or more.
• 9:17
  When we add together and scored people into risk bands, low, medium and high, nearly 60%, some of whom didn't realize it, fall into the medium risk band, which says once in a while they're going to make a mistake
• 9:30
  and they can avoid it with some behaviors.
• 9:33
  The big four factors are fatigue and distraction and stress and faulty assumptions.
• 9:39
  When one is present, sometimes the other ones are present.
• 9:43
  Then we turned it around and said, what are some five common operating styles?
• 9:49
  We made segments of the entire population so readers of my study or people can recognize from the online quiz I'll tell you about in a little while whether they fall into the category of being a steady operator, people
• 10:05
  making very few mistakes, very smooth operations, people who are hidden risk entrepreneurs, people who think they are low risk, but in fact they're not.
• 10:15
  Then there's the overloaded drivers, people just overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do every day and taking on too much.
• 10:22
  There's intuitive improvisers.
• 10:25
  These are people who work with their gut rather than confirm things as they go.
• 10:31
  They make decisions on the fly and that puts them sometimes at high risk.
• 10:36
  Then there's the juggling builders whose workload changes from week to week.
• 10:40
  Sometimes it's really busy, sometimes it's not.
• 10:43
  And there's danger at those really busy points of making mistakes.
• 10:49
  One big learning was that most mistakes happen before decisions feel risky.
• 10:54
  You can make a choice and you won't know is a blunder until a few days later when it hits whatever thing hits the fan.
• 11:03
  How are we doing?
• 11:04
  Any questions?
• 11:06
  Yeah, a whole bunch.
• 11:07
  So yeah, quite, quite a intro there and appreciate all of that, all of that detail.
• 11:13
  And yeah, there's a lot unpacked there.
• 11:15
  So let's just go back to the like the beginning of your story here.
• 11:19
  So you're at bear, right?
• 11:21
  You're doing this for your niece, you're doing this party, you're helping out with the dunk tank that the water restriction hits.
• 11:28
  So you have to really improvise.
• 11:30
  You came up with a brilliant idea to use so much less water with a water balloon.
• 11:34
  You build that yourself.
• 11:36
  People love it.
• 11:38
  You don't think nothing of it that day.
• 11:40
  The next day, the phone starts ringing and you realize there's some real demand for this idea, right?
• 11:45
  And we hear so many stories from these successful entrepreneurs where they didn't intend to set out and start a business with this idea, but once they had.
• 11:54
  It, it caught on and then they.
• 11:56
  They, you know, took action and made it happen.
• 11:59
  That's what you did.
• 12:01
  So I mean, when that's going on, right, because you had like, did.
• 12:06
  What was your first thought?
• 12:07
  Were you.
• 12:07
  Because you clearly weren't intending to be an entrepreneur.
• 12:10
  Like how, like how quick did you really put that into gear?
• 12:13
  Like, right away?
• 12:14
  We, we.
• 12:16
  I was.
• 12:16
  I was intrigued by it.
• 12:17
  We had tons of fun doing it.
• 12:19
  So it's something I had some passion for and enjoyed the fun side of it.
• 12:23
  But before spending real money or borrowing money, we looked into the marketing side of it.
• 12:30
  What is the demand?
• 12:31
  How?
• 12:31
  We even did a short survey of dunk tank renting companies in the northeast to understand how many stores actually had them.
• 12:40
  What is the pricing like when they rent them out?
• 12:42
  What are their loves and hates about owning dunk tanks to rent out to their customers?
• 12:46
  So we learn the marketplace before really getting real busy.
• 12:51
  Then we went and saw a few dunk tank owning rental stores and showed them on paper our idea.
• 12:59
  And they loved the idea.
• 13:00
  So we got that.
• 13:01
  What that helped us get excited about it.
• 13:04
  There was a pivot point that I missed actually looking back on it when I become studying mistakes more.
• 13:10
  We receive the utility patent for this invention, and that was the time I was facing a left fork or a right fork and I took one fork.
• 13:21
  That changed my life.
• 13:22
  I could have taken the other.
• 13:24
  What we did was we decided we should go into this business ourselves.
• 13:28
  In an industry we didn't know very well, the rules, the operating things, how durable games need to be.
• 13:34
  We didn't know any of that.
• 13:36
  The alternative.
• 13:37
  That did not occur to me until recently when I was writing my book with a patent in hand, I might have had a different business model.
• 13:45
  I could have, with some effort, introduced myself to people already in the business and license it to them or sell them the patent and take royalties or sale without ever having to worry about how do I make this
• 13:58
  game and not get in trouble because of stupid mistakes.
• 14:03
  Okay, all right.
• 14:04
  Well, so, yeah, like they say, Hindsight is always 2020.
• 14:09
  So clearly it could have been different experience.
• 14:11
  But you went through and you did research, you found out there was demand, people liked it.
• 14:16
  But really the fatal flaw with that project is you ruin or you use the wrong type of wood.
• 14:21
  Right.
• 14:22
  So it was a materials choice.
• 14:23
  Yes.
• 14:24
  So when that's happening, right, because you're excited, you got some sales, you know, you get the loan, you build the first 100 units, you sell 60 of them pretty quick, it looks like everything is going well.
• 14:35
  And then everything starts to unravel when you know, there's complaints, Spring hits the, the game's falling ap, everyone's upset.
• 14:43
  So when that's happening right after everything appears to be on track and you realize you're in deep trouble.
• 14:50
  Like what's the mental conversation like at that point?
• 14:55
  First, if I sold you something and it goes bad, I'm good for it.
• 14:59
  So out of my own pocket, we were doing make goods, extra parts, repairs.
• 15:05
  We tried over and over again to make it still work.
• 15:08
  And when all comes, when, when push comes to shove and a refund is requested, I'll give it to them.
• 15:15
  I'm good for what I sold you.
• 15:16
  So there was my credibility and reputation I was very concerned with.
• 15:23
  But when the fan is hit with all of that stuff and things are going bad and the phone won't stop ringing with these complaints, there was very, very high stress levels.
• 15:33
  We didn't know what we would do.
• 15:35
  Since all of the money and the hundred grand we borrowed were in inventory, which I couldn't sell, and ads for a product which is no longer available, I had to take it off the market.
• 15:46
  So we, we had a lot of soul searching and stress to go through while working a full time job for both of us, my wife and I, by the way, we, we got, okay, we got through it by,
• 15:57
  by leaning on one another and looking for alternatives.
• 16:02
  It ultimately led to, we were convinced and our customers told us it's a great idea, it just sucks the way you made it.
• 16:11
  So we found a way to make it out of steel.
• 16:14
  So it wasn't the bad way, by the way, that the steel version is still being sold today.
• 16:21
  Okay, all right.
• 16:22
  So like you said, high stress, you borrowed a bunch of money.
• 16:25
  Now it's all tied up in inventory you can't sell and in ads for a product that's no good and you're having to work full time.
• 16:32
  Right.
• 16:33
  So like how did you say.
• 16:34
  And you know, you ultimately got it made out of steel and you got some reassurance from customers that it is a good idea.
• 16:41
  You just made the product wrong.
• 16:43
  So how did you ultimately get out of that situation.
• 16:45
  You went and borrowed more money.
• 16:47
  We.
• 16:47
  We extended our loan so that we could afford an engineer who, first, in a computer aided design cad, showed us what it would look like if it was made out of steel.
• 16:59
  We then had a prototype made and tested ourselves, trying to break it with baseball bats and everything else.
• 17:05
  It would not break.
• 17:06
  Then we committed to making.
• 17:07
  Then we researched.
• 17:09
  We surveyed our customers again, would you buy it at a higher cost?
• 17:13
  Because it would cost more than wood if it were available as soon as we can make it.
• 17:17
  And to a person, they said yes.
• 17:19
  With that confidence, we went forward, borrowed more money to then go into production with another manufacturer.
• 17:26
  We didn't make anything ourselves.
• 17:27
  Who would construct this based on the CAD designs out of steel.
• 17:33
  Okay.
• 17:33
  And it relaunched formally to the rental market, where the first one was 2001.
• 17:38
  In 2003, the new good one was on the market.
• 17:42
  Okay.
• 17:43
  So two years later, the good one is an on the market.
• 17:45
  How long did it take you to really recoup those losses with a new product?
• 17:52
  On that game alone, it was five or six years before we were back in the black on that game.
• 17:58
  Our challenge was we invented four more games, and every couple of years, we launched a new one.
• 18:05
  And we were in debt with that most of the time until we sold off the IP.
• 18:12
  Okay, and when did you sell the IP?
• 18:15
  2013.
• 18:15
  12 years into the business.
• 18:18
  Okay.
• 18:19
  All right.
• 18:20
  So you kind of accidentally become an entrepreneur through this experience building a game.
• 18:25
  You make these mistakes that really put you in a bad way.
• 18:31
  You had to borrow your way out and really claw your way back and ultimately.
• 18:35
  And then invent more along the way.
• 18:37
  But like you said, you're in debt most of the time, trying to recover, trying to move along.
• 18:43
  And about 12 years in, you sell the IP.
• 18:46
  But I mean, looking back, looking back at that whole experience.
• 18:50
  Right.
• 18:51
  Of entrepreneurship, especially after working corporate for most of your life and then going through all that, how would you sum up the experience in a couple sentences?
• 19:02
  It was, on the positive side, thrilling and very enriching to enjoy watching customers love what you created is very fulfilling.
• 19:13
  It's like an actor getting applause on stage.
• 19:17
  So for me, that was great.
• 19:18
  One of our biggest customers, I can't name them, but they operate a whole bunch of theme parks in Florida and in Orlando and California, they put our pitchforce game in their poolside daytime recreation for the kids.
• 19:33
  And I got to go there and observe them using this.
• 19:37
  And the smiles on the faces and the way the parents just loved it.
• 19:40
  It was very fulfilling.
• 19:41
  So the plus side, we got through from the feedback we got, the downside, it's a good thing I had a corporate job and there was money in the bank where I needed to fill in the holes that the
• 19:55
  business, business cash flow didn't provide.
• 19:59
  And it was my wife and I and my family and I being together, agreeing to work through this and the support, the mutual support.
• 20:09
  Did I answer your question?
• 20:10
  Okay.
• 20:11
  Yeah.
• 20:12
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:12
  Okay.
• 20:13
  All right.
• 20:13
  And then that led you into the next chapter of your entrepreneurial career, which is basically this, this business mistake prevention career where you wrote a book.
• 20:24
  When.
• 20:25
  What year did the book come out?
• 20:26
  The book came out just last year.
• 20:28
  It's oh, how to Avoid Unintentional Blunders that Derail Entrepreneurial Success came out last year.
• 20:37
  And my belief was that there is high demand for business books to help people succeed.
• 20:46
  And that's true.
• 20:47
  But when it's titled Avoid Mistakes, it doesn't pop up on high in the list on Amazon and nobody's really looking for that is what I learned after I sold my first batch.
• 21:00
  Okay, and so let's talk about that too, because one of the things too, right, like, particularly in, in like entrepreneurship and what so much of the, the, the conventional advice out there too, is you're gonna make mistakes.
• 21:14
  Don't be afraid of mistakes.
• 21:16
  You have to take action, you have to move forward.
• 21:18
  You can fix it, but, you know, just, just start, right?
• 21:22
  And so many of successful people have stuck with an idea that no one else really believed in, but they made it work, right?
• 21:31
  And like that whole side of the thought process.
• 21:36
  So how do you balance that versus the practical wisdom of you want to do your research and you want to ensure that you don't make a mistake.
• 21:47
  How do you balance those two schools of thought?
• 21:49
  The one distinction I need to make is that we're talking about preventable mistakes.
• 21:53
  I absolutely agree that mistakes are part of learning.
• 21:57
  When you're learning to ride a bike and you fall down, you skin your knee, you get back up, and it's only because you've done that a number of times that you get the proficiency to do that.
• 22:05
  Well, that's true of every entrepreneur entering a new business, a new industry or not.
• 22:12
  And you'll make strategic mistakes and you'll learn from them.
• 22:15
  What I'm talking about, what I'm focusing on is not that it is those which you commit that you regret later because you could have prevented them.
• 22:25
  Those are the ones where you were too tired, where you were too stressed, where you rushed your decisions.
• 22:31
  There are two tools you can use to help you avoid those types of mistakes.
• 22:38
  Nobody's going to get rid of all mistakes because some of them are needed and good.
• 22:43
  Okay, appreciate that distinction.
• 22:45
  So I mean let's dig into to kind of what's in this quiz too.
• 22:49
  And if you want to break that down because like you said, I guess one of the themes there too is I guess people are more prone to mistake if they're, if they're tired, if they're under stress, that sort
• 23:01
  of thing.
• 23:01
  And again, when we're talking about entrepreneurship, so much of so many people that have been successful entrepreneurs, you're talking long hours talking really having to push yourself to make things happen.
• 23:18
  So can you talk more about like your, your study and how that, I guess how that people can apply that to their own entrepreneurial journey?
• 23:27
  Yeah.
• 23:28
  Once you're able to, whether you deduce it yourself or you take my quiz and you learn it from that or both and you realize my last couple big mistakes that I made that I regret and could have prevented
• 23:40
  were because of the fatigue or because I made some faulty assumptions or any combination of those things.
• 23:48
  You can then put into place a few self tools of how you just manage your day to day that are easy to do.
• 23:55
  And I made an acronym for it.
• 23:57
  It's S A F E R or safer.
• 24:00
  And that is the universal advice when these things are happening are slow down at moments that matter.
• 24:09
  Don't rush in or even take a pause or a breath and walk around the block.
• 24:12
  Before you make a choice assumption check before you decide, check into and ask yourself what am I assuming here and am I sure it's correct Focus during high risk work.
• 24:25
  If you have a million things going on, triage and work on the one or two that matter most first.
• 24:33
  So it's about focusing energy.
• 24:36
  Guardrails are needed for fatigue.
• 24:38
  If it's you're right as an entrepreneur, I was up 20 hours a day and I'm making lots of choices at 2am if you know that's where you make mistakes that you regret, don't do that or build in guardrails.
• 24:52
  So only make important choices or do important actions or approvals when you are well rested or at least better rested.
• 25:00
  And the last one is to raise small issues early.
• 25:03
  One of the learnings was that when people are under stress, they defer making important choices or or having important conversations with their partners, with their vendors or with their customers.
• 25:15
  Those get.
• 25:15
  Those get deferred.
• 25:17
  So the R in this safer is to raise small issues early.
• 25:22
  There are three sub tools that help you be safer using that language.
• 25:27
  One is a self assessment so you become aware of your own tendencies for preventable mistakes.
• 25:34
  Two is using structured routines and tools that help you do that.
• 25:38
  Those are in my book and many other books about checklists, pre mortems prompts, understanding the customer experience better so that you can see where problems might arise.
• 25:53
  And then the third very important is using trusted outside perspective.
• 25:57
  I myself am a SCORE mentor.
• 25:59
  SCORE is an organization of mentors that are free that you can you can sign up with and they'll help you with your business plan.
• 26:07
  They can also bounce ideas off of but we're not the only ones in score.
• 26:11
  There's the Small Business Development Centers, there are local chambers of commerce, many places that when you are feeling very alone as a solopreneur or a couple of entrepreneurs, get some outside counsel if you can.
• 26:29
  Many times it's free.
• 26:30
  You can pay for an expert as well.
• 26:34
  That is an important thing to help you realize because I remember being an entrepreneur how lonely it was when things are going bad, you should know you're not alone.
• 26:44
  Many people have been down the same road before.
• 26:46
  It's why I wrote my book, to share that.
• 26:49
  Because you can get through this.
• 26:52
  So the quiz puts together the same 12 questions that lead to these conclusions that you just respond on a never a one to five scale, never or always.
• 27:06
  And it adds up all of those individual answers and gives a rating of you are low risk for a near term business mistake that you could prevent at medium risk or at high risk.
• 27:19
  And then when you go online, take this quiz, your screen immediately says what your rating is and you'll immediately get an email direct to you with the individual scores in the categories of stress and fatigue and distraction, faulty
• 27:36
  assumptions, missed customer signals, and any knowledge gaps.
• 27:39
  You'll get a rating for each.
• 27:41
  To see within your overall rating what is driving while you're high or while you're low.
• 27:47
  And the email also has URL links to click Practical tips How to avoid mistakes if fatigue is your big problem, it's tailored for that, so it's free.
• 28:01
  You go to mistake risk quiz.com and you'll be able to see go through it.
• 28:08
  It takes you five, six minutes and you'll have your answers within five minutes and it's up to you to make the difference after that.
• 28:16
  Okay, so clearly you've put a lot into this too in terms of the study and helping people find out where their blind spots are, so to speak, or whether they're more prone to make mistakes and then providing follow
• 28:29
  up resources once they get their assessment.
• 28:32
  I mean, what's been the feedback on not only the book but now this quiz that you've come out with as well from other entrepreneurs?
• 28:40
  Quite honestly, the book very positive from entrepreneurs I work with, certainly friends and family and a few people have bought the book and said it helped them because they learned a tool skill that they didn't know before.
• 28:52
  The quiz is rather new.
• 28:54
  It just went up on my website and I'm just finishing the the page that describes the study within a few weeks.
• 29:01
  By the time this airs, I hope we'll have a downloadable PDF of a summary of the study and the quiz is already up.
• 29:10
  But I'll normalize the results and recommendations based on the final numbers from the study because we had earlier done one with with interim numbers.
• 29:22
  Okay.
• 29:23
  And so if you could sum up everything too right in terms of advice because a lot of entrepreneurs watch this channel.
• 29:29
  So if you're talking about advice to not lose that edge of taking action and really going forward and really believing in yourself and making your dreams a reality, but yet being practical and avoiding these, quote, dumb, preventable mistakes,
• 29:48
  I mean, what would your advice to other entrepreneurs be?
• 29:52
  I, I sum it up to a few words that say think smartly and be more aware.
• 29:59
  But that's easier said than done.
• 30:02
  Use tools, use trusted outside people to keep you honest.
• 30:08
  It's free to even ask.
• 30:11
  Your spouse will be too friendly, but another adult and say, hey, I'm thinking of doing this and I wanted to do that.
• 30:17
  How is that?
• 30:18
  I will also agree.
• 30:19
  Dave, you need to work if you're going to dedicate as much time as entrepreneurs do on building their businesses.
• 30:25
  Whether it's an invention or it's reselling things online or in brick and mortar.
• 30:31
  Do something you have passion about and do it so that you can apply.
• 30:35
  You apply good people skills not only as a seller, but a listener.
• 30:39
  Be attentive to what you're hearing people tell you Honestly in the beginning when I had one of my four or five games, I saw feedback that it was going to break and I did not listen to it.
• 30:53
  I wrote it off as an anomaly.
• 30:55
  So I learned from that.
• 30:57
  It's really important to listen and pay attention.
• 31:01
  Okay, love that.
• 31:03
  All right.
• 31:03
  And William, looking back on the entire journey, right, because clearly in this chapter of your career, you're very passionate about helping others learn from their mistakes.
• 31:11
  Given what you went through, when you look at this whole experience experience of yours as an entrepreneur, what would you say has been the Best.
• 31:22
  The best part is the first day you got the first sale when we launched even the wooden pitch burst.
• 31:28
  We had marketed it in magazines.
• 31:31
  And the phone rang one day and my wife Janet answered the phone and somebody in Albany, New York, ordered two of them out of the blue.
• 31:38
  And we were so excited that all of the work getting up to that point seemed to be ready to pay off.
• 31:45
  That I already mentioned being at this theme park place where they're playing my games, the.
• 31:51
  The steel game, by the way, and the delight on people's faces.
• 31:55
  That feedback was there.
• 31:57
  Now when I'm mentoring people in the SCORE organization, all that's behind me and I can see their passion and I can guide people to.
• 32:07
  To follow your passions.
• 32:09
  But be very, very careful.
• 32:10
  Ask yourself the right questions, listen carefully, and be open to the other right answer because sometimes what you jump to conclusion is a good one, but there are better ones to consider first.
• 32:23
  Okay, Love that.
• 32:24
  And yes, I'm sure so many people can relate to the.
• 32:27
  The thrill of that first sale as you detailed there.
• 32:30
  Okay, so, William, if people are hearing this or watching this and they want to find more about what you do or they want to connect with you to speak further, what's the best way people can reach out to
• 32:42
  you online?
• 32:43
  Online is the I'm on LinkedIn, but the best place is to go to that website I mentioned, which is mistakeriskquiz.com that is a page on my website.
• 32:55
  And from there you can not only take the quiz and get your own profile, but you can go to other pages and learn more about me, the book, and connect with me directly.
• 33:04
  Okay.
• 33:05
  And we'll link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 33:07
  All right, we'll.
• 33:08
  William, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this valuable wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 33:14
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 33:16
  Thank you, Dave.
• 33:16
  Glad to be here.
• 33:18
  Have a good day.