The HCC Dale Mabry campus introduced the Startup Toolbox Series for the business and entrepreneurial students. This series included different people that own their own businesses and these people come to HCC and talk with the students about different aspects of business. The event that I attended chose to focus on “my biggest business failures” in which the speakers came and talked about their biggest business failures and how those failures led them to bigger and better things. The speakers all went down a line and openly talked about different times that they failed in the business world and how those failures affect them in both positive and negative ways.

  For this event there were four speakers and one moderator that talked about experiences in the business world. The speakers were Thierry Duthil, Neil J. Guilarte, Dave “Doc” Dockery, Robert Ong and the moderator Chris Krimitsos.

  Duthil, owner of Nite Life T-shirts, creates t-shirts that light up. He creates t-shirts for different businesses. He talked about his biggest business failure being a time when a woman walked into his place of business wanting a shirt that lit up for her fitness program. He talked about how each time he would create a shirt she would want him to change something on the shirt. Eventually, he became angry and decided to give up on this client; a few months later he saw on TV the same woman that walked into the store and she talked about how popular her fitness program had become.

  It was then that he realized that she owned Zumba, a popular fitness program, and he felt terrible because he gave up on a big opportunity; he did end up learning that in order to grow your business you must “know how to handle contacts, know that you don’t have all the answers, and know that opportunity knocks.”

  Guilarte owns All Things Post, a podcast that covers many different topics. His biggest failure in business did not come from the company he owns now, instead, his biggest failure came from when he worked at Inside Outside in Orlando, Florida. There was a small concert happening in Wal-Mart and he didn’t have someone to cover the event so he decided to do it himself. He arrived and tried to get through the crowd of people, when someone pushed him and broke his camera. He was angry and decided he would leave when the group’s manager came up to him and asked if he would like to go on tour with the group so the group could get some photos and publicity. Guilarte declined, and told the manager that the group wasn’t even that talented to begin with; years later he discovered that he had rejected the offer from N Sync.

  Ong, owner of Local Mobile Advertising, a search engine optimization business, used to work for Wall Street when he experienced his first failure. His boss at the time went through some legal problems and clients did not want to be associated with someone with legal issues, so they began pulling their money out. It took a man like Ong, who was just a banker for Wall Street, to do some research and let the public know that his boss was exonerated and that there were no problems.

  After hearing these men speak, I got to sit down with Krimitsos and speak to him. Krimitsos was interested in business at the age of 13 because, in his words, he had “a poor dad and rich uncles” and he didn’t want to end up being poor. Krimitsos works for Tampa Bay Business Owners, a business that brings business owners together to speak with future business owners and educate them. Tampa Bay Business Owners has worked with HCC since the spring of 2012 with two business professors, Mary Beth Kerly and Andrew Gold.

  Krimitsos had a big business failure as well. He was in charge of putting together an event and at the end of the event he had no money left over and realized that he forgot to pay himself before he spent all of the allotted money. His advice for future business owners would be to “pay attention and test different concepts; if one thing doesn’t work than try it a different way until it does work.”