This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome, thank you for tuning in today. This is our segment known as Failure Friday. Well, first of all, the podcast is called Side Hustle School. And once a week I bring you the segment, which is all about looking at someone's mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure.
I really appreciate the case studies and side hustlers who send us their story for these features because it just requires honesty and transparency and vulnerability, you know, everybody messes up, right? And we can learn from these failures. In fact, we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more. So as I said, I appreciate people sharing their stories. And these stories tend to vary.
They often begin with an assumption or an idea. It's exactly what we have here in today's story. And then, you know, idea meets reality. And sometimes you encounter some obstacles that you did not foresee. So what do you do about that?
You know, how do you navigate that process? How does it give you courage perhaps to regroup and try something different? Today's short story features Cassandra Marsh from Brisbane, Australia. We told the story of her design business on episode 1443. Now that business was rolling along.
It was doing just fine. But when she decided to pursue a new business idea, which was essentially an expansion of sorts and one that made sense, like it made intuitive sense, at least it seemed like a logical natural extension. She felt confident about it. Perhaps she felt too confident about it. I relate to that feeling of perhaps being too confident and going into something and realizing, oh, my assumption did not in fact match up with reality.
So without further ado, Cassandra is gonna tell us the story and I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
Hi, my name is Cassandra Marsh and I do graphic design for workshop materials. Things like workbooks, presentations, brushes. I really wanted to continue to use my skills but in a slightly different market. I decided to start designing not just the documents required for marketing yourself at a convention, but for the booths themselves.
I feel like it would have been an interesting new way for me to make the same kind of documents for a very similar group of people. I don't know if you know this, but there's a whole industry called mice, meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions. Since I was already making materials for workshops, I truly thought that this would be a great fit. To add to this, the idea that I could be designing the booth and the big background banners and all the promo items like the pens and balloons, it was all very exciting. I got excited about the prospect of this business and just jumped right in.
It's not my first business, so I've already learned some of the first steps to make sure your business is both legal and discoverable on the internet. So I registered a fantastic business name, Booth Delivered, and I registered the domain, so far, so good. I decided that I would start pretty small and offer these services to just one convention center. I picked Kuala Lumpur Convention Center because I was in and out of KL while traveling the world as a digital nomad. Part of the plan with the service was simply to help out business people by sorting out all the stuff on the ground so that they could essentially just show up and their booth was ready to go, hence the name.
My plan was to also run this on the side of my usual graphic design services while traveling, so it was put on the back burner for about three months. When I was back in Kuala Lumpur, I started doing my research, and this was my mistake. My key takeaway is do some research into your business viability before you go registering names and buying websites. It turns out that there is a lot of legal meditate when it comes to importing convention materials into Malaysia and then bigger tariffs if these things are getting removed from the country. It's a bit like paying for the stuff twice.
So using local printers was always part of the plan and as was having the company take away the items, but they would have had to have paid to remove them from the country. For that particular convention center, they don't give out passes too easily if you want to work within them. And after doing some investigations, it looks nearly impossible to run a company in Kuala Lumpur as a foreigner hiring locals, especially at my company size. Had I investigated even that much, I would not have bought the name or the website. I would have picked a different country, perhaps starting with my hometown of Brisbane, Australia.
In the end, none of it really mattered. COVID shut down so much of the world and conventions was one of the first things to go. They are likely to come back in the future, but my motivation for the side hustle has already waned. I'll stick to my main business. What I learned from this was to do some business viability research before you start investing money in the business.
A couple of hours is all you need to perhaps save yourself from a business failure. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is the theme of Failure Friday. I really like what Cassandra said about how a couple hours is all you need to save yourself from a business failure. And doing some simple research is not that daunting, especially in a situation like this.
So I'm often encouraging people to start quickly without spending a ton of time doing research. But just to clarify, a couple hours is not a ton of time, especially for something like this that's going to have some hard costs involved. It's gonna take a lot of time to actually pursue this idea. So in this case, a couple hours on the front end, how would she actually do that? How would she gain the information she needed to discover that this might not in fact be the best idea?
Well, it's pretty simple. She would use Google. She would look for competitors. She would look for other people doing this kind of thing in Kuala Lumpur. Maybe she would ask some people she knew in Kuala Lumpur, not necessarily in the exact same industry, but in something that's related.
And that kind of digging might produce some red flags in which she would say, "Oh, maybe this isn't, as I said, the right idea." It's not extensive, but it would have saved her that time. So thankfully, all is well in the end. She just moved on from this business idea. It didn't work out. I really appreciate you, Cassandra.
Thanks for sharing this transparent and truthful story. Listeners, check out her website at lakazdi.com or her Instagram at lakazdi.cassandra. Now I'll include this in the notes, but just so you know the spelling, lakazdi, L-A-K-A-Z-D-I.com, or Z, if you prefer. Instagram, lakazdi.cassandra with a K. K-A-S-S-A-N-D-R-A.
As I said, linked up on the notes page, sidehustleschool.com/1854. You can also send us a question or comment there. I hope you will subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. New episode every day, new failure Friday segment every Friday, and I'll look forward to bringing you all of it. That's it for now.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
