Editor’s note: This story contains profanity.
Local entrepreneurs celebrated and shared their failures at Fuckup Nights Phoenix’s inaugural Fuckup Night on Thursday at The Grand Central Coffee Company. The event kicked off on the International Day of Failure.
Fuckup, an international movement for entrepreneurs to tell their stories of failure, added Phoenix to its list of over 150 cities celebrating failure over music and beer.
“I didn’t see anything that existed like this here, and especially with the great entrepreneurship community and startup community we have here, I wanted to be able to tell those stories in a different way than we normally hear,” Leah Marche, organizer for the Phoenix Fuckup branch, said. “You’re telling a story, not just about business or the product you’re selling, but you’re bringing yourself in there too.”
James Moore, Brayand Ponciano and Jamie Pettis shared their business mistakes with frank and playfully self-deprecating humor.
Moore shared the trouble that comes with attempting to run a business with friends. Over the course of running his consulting company, Moore lost both money and a friendship. He made a pattern of lending money, which created an unsustainable product he referred to as “The First Bank of James.”
Moore said that his spirit of entrepreneurship came mostly from his mother. He said that when he was 14, his mother dropped him off in front of a foster home and told him he would never amount to anything and would most likely end up on a corner selling drugs.
“For me it was like, ‘How dare you say that to me? Now what can I do to make sure she was wrong?’” Moore said.
He went on to earn a doctorate in business administration, an associate’s degree in culinary arts and sciences, a master’s degree in management, and two non-commissioned officer awards from the U.S. Marine Corps. He is a professor of business at Ashford University, is a single father, hosts three radio shows on Radio Phoenix (We’re on Point, Soul Star Live, and Food Corner), owns a small tea company, and still works as a consultant. “I just have fun in life,” Moore said.
“I’m not saying I’m accomplished in everything, but everything she said I’d be, I never was,” he said.
Moore’s business mistakes taught him to be careful about “how you operate and who you operate with.”
Ponciano shared his struggle with trying to earn an investor their money back in a complicated real estate debacle.
“No matter how big the problem is, I can figure it out,” he said. “If I was able to figure out this problem that seemed very, very impossible, there’s no other problem that I can’t overcome.”
Ponciano also pulls his confidence from a stuffed monkey named Bobby Jack. Bobby Jack goes everywhere with Ponciano. He has a backpack, a passport, a full suit and sometimes his own seat on a plane. The monkey has his own tailor.
“I don’t even got a fuckin’ tailor and the monkey has a tailor,” said Porciano.
Bobby Jack plays an important role in Ponciano’s business life. He said the monkey makes him more approachable, helps him remember not to care about others’ opinions and helps his creative imagination. Ponciano added, “that creativity helps me create good business ideas that help me make money. And that comes from letting my imagination run free with this little fuckin’ monkey.”
Jamie Pettis, owner of 32Fitness and Brazen Wolf Art & Apparel, explained her mistake of jumping the gun when it comes to asking for money in her personal training. “I would just go ‘My name is Jamie, I’m a personal trainer. What are your goals? Would you like to purchase 12 sessions for $625?’ I don’t want to know what people were saying about me then.”
According to Marche, the event will continue in Phoenix the second Thursday of every month moving forward. The events will continue to be held at Grand Central, but Marche hopes to expand to a larger venue in the future.
Contact the reporter at Nicole.Neri@asu.edu.
