I’m still buzzing with ideas and excitement after attending FounderMade’s Wellness Summit on Friday. Seriously, buzzing. And have 13 pages of notes to prove it.
One of my goals for 2017 was to attend a conference this year relating to blogging and/or business. When I got invited to attend FounderMade, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. A day of business panels focused on wellness? Yes, please!
I spent all of Friday with about 500 other people watching panels chock full of leaders in the wellness industry. It was really an amazing learning experience because it was like getting together for a collective CEO advisor support group. You grow together supporting each other during these events.
Three days later I’m still digesting all the information that was thrown at me, and like I said I took 13 pages of notes (!!) Here are the main takeaways I learned at FounderMade – Wellness.
✨ 1. Own Your Screw Ups.
— Sarah Robb O’Hagan, CEO of Flywheel Sports
Sarah Robb’s keynote speech focused on failure really hit home for me. I’ve hopped from job to job, sometimes by choice, other times not-so-much. Thank to this, I’ve struggled with feeling like a total failure. Getting fired can feel really, really shameful.
Instead of hanging your head in shame when you do fail or get fired, Robb emphasized the importance of owning up to that screw up. She went on to talk about how you should use that failure to help you figure out what’s next.
After she got fired from a job in her late 20’s, she explained that she wishes she would’ve owned up to that failure in her next job interview. She should’ve used it to talk about what she learned from her missteps.
✨ 2. The Beginning Will Suck.
— Sadie Kurzban, Founder + CEO of 305 Fitness
I’ve admired Sadie Kurzban for sometime now and love 305 Fitness. She’s freaking FIERCE, inspiring and runs one incredible business.
Hearing her talk about what it was like to launch 305 Fitness and admitting how much it sucked in the beginning gave me such a great deal of comfort.
✨ 3. Write Down Your Mission.
— Sean Hoess, Co-Founder & CO-CEO, Wanderlust
Use this mission as a compass to evaluate all decisions. Post it on your wall. Write it on your website. If a project or partnership doesn’t fit your mission, it’s not a good fit.
✨ 4. Failure isn’t failure unless you say it is.
— Randy Hetrick, Founder, TRX
Can you tell that failure was a big theme of the day?
Randy Hetrick talked about how the best lessons in business (and life) usually come from your biggest failures. I personally really agree with this, and for that reason I’m grateful for all my failures. Even if they suck in the moment.
✨ 5. Just go and you’ll figure it out
— Kari Saitowitz, Founder, The Fhitting Room.
If we all waited until we had the perfect business model and everything all planned out, we’d be waiting for freaking ever. Right?
Sometimes you just gotta go and know you’ll figure it out.
✨ 6. Passion alone is not enough. You need the idea and the business model
— Jason Wachob, Founder & CEO, Mindbodygreen.
In contrast to the above statement from Kari Saitowitz, you can’t just expect passion to carry you to fame and fortune, as pointed out by Jason Wachob. You do need to back it up with an idea and business model.
✨ 7. Don’t shy away from the chinks in your armor.
— Randy Hetrick, Founder, TRX
We’re not all going to be good at everything. Embrace what you’re not good at (math and social situations in my case!) and work on polishing up that one thing.
After spending all day at Foundermade, I walked home talking a mile a minute with my Holistic Happening business partner Leslie. We were both bursting with ideas and couldn’t get the words out fast enough.
Stayed tuned for some other blog posts coming shortly inspired by discussions at FounderMade.
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