Take the Plunge: 10 Lessons for Starting Your Own Business

May 17

What does it take to start a small business and then grow and adapt it to an everchanging landscape?

This year, Fruitful is celebrating 10 years of creating and launching dreams, ideas, and brands.

From Ben’s basement to the hallowed halls of the former headquarters of Omaha’s Flywheel…
In this week’s episode of GaFB, Ben Lueders is unpacking some of the lessons he learned during his journey growing Fruitful Design & Strategy:

Find what you do best and then find a way to make it profitable.

You may really enjoy making espresso art but there are three Starbucks around you.

What sets you apart from similar businesses or what can you do better in the industry you already serve?

What do you like to do? What do you hate to do?

These are just a few questions to consider when trying to find what kind of business to start.

Make mistakes but learn from them.

I know, you’ve heard it before: don’t make the same mistake twice. The more important lesson here is to learn and grow from your mistakes.

This lesson is so foundational to starting and growing a business, we coined it as one of our values: Always Learning. Every experience gives us an opportunity to learn something new.

Take a chance and bet on yourself.

Check out the episode for more on Ben’s surprising personal journey growing Fruitful from the ground up and advice he has for anyone trying to start a new business.

Ep. 31:

Take the Plunge: 10 Lessons for Starting Your Own Business

Automated Transcript

Ben Lueders:

What does it take to start a small business and stay in the game for over a decade? This year, Fruitful celebrates 10 years of business, and today I'm going to take you through 10 pivotal moments in our company's story, and the things that we learned along the way.

Welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand, where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Ben Lueders, founder and art director of Fruitful Design & Strategy.

Now, you might be thinking, "Didn't Raj just do this episode?" And yeah, my business partner did just record a similar episode from his perspective a few episodes ago while I was out on paternity leave. The episode was called Hope As A Strategy, and it was a really beautiful tribute to our partnership and the business that he and I have created together over the years.

Yesterday, he challenged me to do my own version, a solo episode recounting 10 pivotal moments from my perspective as a founder. As you may remember, I founded this company by myself over 10 years ago, and Raj didn't come on as my partner until about halfway through that story.

So I want to go way back and show you the conditions, experiences, and people that helped guide me to starting my own business, and the lessons that I learned along the way. And I hope this could be helpful to you in your own journey. For those of you who have already taken the plunge like me and started your own business, I hope you could identify with aspects of my story, and I hope it'll cause you to reflect on your own journey.

For others who maybe haven't taken that plunge quite yet and started their own business, I hope that this episode can give you the courage and hope that you need to maybe become your own boss and start to make a difference in the world.

All right, let's dive right into these pivotal moments. And like I said, I want to go way back. And just like everybody's story, it doesn't just start the day that you open up the business storefront. The foundations for how you operate as an entrepreneur and as a business owner are really laid as a child in your upbringing. And so I look back on my own childhood, and I find that I was empowered and encouraged to learn and explore things that I was naturally good at.

I happened to be homeschooled, which I don't think you have to be necessarily homeschooled in order to be a successful entrepreneur. But from my own perspective, which is really the only one I've ever lived through, my parents, my mom and my dad, Mike and Robyn... Little shout out to you guys. They really encouraged me in the things that I was already good at.

So for example, they knew from a very young age, was not the greatest at science and math. But I showed a huge love, talent for art, for music. And so they still made me do my math to some degree, but they made a lot of opportunities for me to explore those things that I was just naturally drawn to.

And so of course, I started doing a lot of music lessons, started taking art lessons. The only time I ever stepped foot in a public school was actually to take some after school art lessons as a homeschooled kid. So things like at that time, painting, there was some pottery and ceramics and stuff. But really, my parents were so open to letting us explore things that we were good at.

And looking back, this matters so much now that I have my own kids, because one of the things I love about my parents is they had no idea this world of graphic design and branding. Websites weren't even really a thing at that time. So they had no idea what I could maybe do with some of these skills.

My dad is a military man. He was a Vietnamese linguist in the Air Force. And I think in the back of their heads, it was like starving artists. And maybe a children's book illustrator is something that... There wasn't a whole lot of applied art in their minds. But they just kind of leaned into the hope that maybe if Ben continues to learn, and develop, and grow the things that he's naturally good at and enjoys doing, then it's going to lead somewhere.

And at the time, I'm sure that was really blindly to them, that had to have a lot of faith that would turn into something good. But they were totally right. Their instincts were totally right. And I've even been surprised at the level of success and enjoyment that I've had doing a lot of the same things that I was learning as a very young child.

And so from my childhood, we go to the second pivotal moment, which has to do with my first jobs. My first ways of getting paid for services. And some of you may be surprised to hear that I've never really had a traditional job. For example, I've never worked in food service, I've never been a waiter, never worked at McDonald's flipping burgers or whatever. And sometimes I look back and wonder, "Man, maybe I'm missing out on a lot of life experience by having never had one of those regular jobs." And maybe that's true.

But from a young age, I was shown this other way of making money, this more entrepreneurial way of making money. And so, my first jobs were babysitting and piano teaching. And you might be kind of rolling your eyes, those aren't real jobs. Guys, I made a killing. I branded myself as a responsible but fun male babysitter, which is kind of a rare thing. A lot of people who have rowdy boys, they wanted a boy babysitter. It was kind of a weird thing.

But I made it work, and I found that the kids would go to bed at a certain time, and I'd be able to stay up eating some of their snacks, and the parents' snacks, and working on my own art projects and school, and stuff like that. And got paid pretty well, especially by some military officers families. I also just love kids and I come from a big family, so it was kind of a no-brainer.

But it kind of got me thinking down this path of and just getting used to the fact I don't necessarily have to have a nine-to-five job, and a traditional boss, and a traditional hourly salary, and all this stuff to pay my bills. And I was able to save a lot of money just doing babysitting. And the other thing I said was piano teaching.

So as I started getting more and more advanced in my own piano lessons, they started to become more and more expensive. And one of the first things that an advanced piano teacher of mine told me was, "Hey, you need to start teaching people who you're ahead of. And you don't have to be an expert to teach."

And so that instilled a couple things in me. This entrepreneurial spirit, but also this love for teaching, which I like to think I'm still kind of applying now in different ways with the designers in our company, and even on this medium of a podcast where I'm hopefully teaching something that makes sense and is helpful to someone else. So that was really, really cool.

Kind of tied in there, my first real job as they would say, was actually as a graphic designer. But I didn't know what graphic design was. I kind of fell into this student help job through the University of Hawaii system. I'm from Hawaii. I heard they needed someone with an artistic eye, which I think I thought I had.

But because of my upbringing, I was not aware of graphic design, Photoshop, illustrator, logos, packaging, definitely not websites publishing. This was not a world I lived in. I was definitely still going down more the illustrator, or actually illustration route. Doing a lot of caricature art and things like that, that I loved to do, as well as exploring music as a career. And so I fell into this internship.

So I also at that time really developed a love and a respect for internships, and student help, and just trying things. At my first job, which was as this student help graphic design intern position at the Hawaii Coral Reef Initiative, which is a division of the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii, I was able to just try so many things, and learn so many life lessons in a low stress environment.

And it actually turned into a mini career. I ended up working there for over seven years. And after I graduated, it turned into a full-time job with benefits, and was able to get married, buy a house, a couple cars on that job. So even from a young age, I was learning to just be open to learning new things, trying new things, and thinking more entrepreneurially as well.

All right, moving right along to number three. I moved from Hawaii to Nebraska to finish up a degree in graphic design at Metropolitan Community College. And so when I started going to community college in Hawaii, I was just taking lots of crazy stuff. Lots of music, classical guitar, 3D modeling and animation. I was trying a lot of stuff. I did some oil painting, just learning a lot and figuring out what I liked. And through that, I got this student help job as a graphic designer, and it just changed my world. It was like, "Okay, this is a way I can make money. This is a career path."

So when I moved to Nebraska, started to community college at Metro, I just focused on, "Okay, I'm going to get this two year degree, an associate's degree." And many of you may be thinking, "Wait a second, Ben, all you have is an associate's degree." And obviously for some careers, that probably wouldn't be enough. You'd hope a doctor doesn't just have an associate's degree. I mean, I don't think they can. They're a doctor. That kind of implies that they have a higher level of degree.

But that being said, I was already working in the field. I didn't even really care so much about the piece of paper. In fact, there was a chance I almost wasn't going to get that piece of paper. My parents I think, really appreciate that I finally did.

But really in the graphic design world, it's about your portfolio. It's about if you can do the work. So I was already working for the Hawaii Coral Reef Initiative. I was already starting to do a lot of little side projects for friends, and family, and stuff like that. And I was finishing up this degree. So my portfolio was growing and I kind of realized, "Hey, I don't really want to go get further in debt," for example. The world of graphic design is not necessarily the most traditionally lucrative career. So at a very young age, didn't really want to get in a lot of debt, but I did want to learn.

And so going to a community college, I just want to encourage those of you out there that... Don't believe every lie. Not everyone needs to go to college. Not everyone needs to have the same level of college as well. Don't just do these things because your parents or other societal pressures are weighing down on you thinking that you need to have some certain piece of paper to show your worth. It may not be the case. It really just depends, case by case, person by person, industry by industry. And for me, that was enough. And it's funny, so many of the people that have worked for me, I've worked with also just have two-year degrees from community colleges.

I'm a huge fan of the community college system. I love how a lot of the teachers are actually in the field active and doing it part-time. So you get a lot of real world experience. And that was totally the case for me, and really inspired me actually in starting my own business later on, which I'll get to.

So a couple really exciting things happened while I was at Metro. One is, one of my teachers was a guy named Donovan Beery who we're going to get to in a couple more points, but just keep that name in mind. Very crucial figure in my story, who is also a teacher of mine.

And the other thing is I actually named Fruitful while I was in college. I was probably 20 years old, and in a class where the job was to brand ourselves for our big end of year portfolio review. And I explored all these different things of branding myself as Ben Lueders Illustrator, etc.

But in the process, I kind of had this thing in back of my head where it's like, "What if I had a firm? What if I had my own firm?" And I played around with all these different names. Some of them were terrible. I think there was one called Multiplied or Multiply, one called Justified, with justified text as the logo. I think there was a tadpole in there. It looked really terrible. So a lot of horrible ideas.

But this name Fruitful, which kind of came from that biblical command in the beginning of the Book of Genesis of, "Be fruitful and multiply." I really loved that, the vision of growth and that vision of flourishing that comes from those words.

And it was kind of a joke at first a little bit, but I showed a logo concept, which was very simple. It was just a font where the I in the middle of Fruitful was dotted with a little fruit, a little orange. And the teachers really liked it. He said compared to all the other ones, he just liked it a lot. And I thought it was the best. I ended up not branding myself that way for the portfolio, but I kept in the back of my pocket, and I ended up dusting it off years later when it was time for me to open up my firm. And it definitely still resonated with me.

So the next pivotal moment is Big Omaha. So number four, Big Omaha. And we've talked about Big Omaha on this podcast. If you go back to my interview with Jeff Slobotski, who's one of the founders of the Big Omaha conference for entrepreneurship, you'll get a good picture of what exactly Big Omaha was. But basically, Big Omaha was this big get together here in Omaha with lots of startups, tech people, creatives, entrepreneurs. And I'd heard about it. It just sounded so cool. It sounded like a crowd I want to be a part of. A lot of designers would attend it, and some really great designers designed the branding for it every year.

And so I really wanted to go, but I was super poor. And another firm in town called What Cheer, they put out this coloring contest, and whoever wins the silly coloring contest would win free tickets. And I was like, "Hey, I'm pretty good at coloring." Got out some colored pencils, and I entered. But I almost didn't because actually, halfway through my coloring, I accidentally spilled spaghetti on what I was doing, and I was like, "I'm giving up." And it was the night before the deadline that had to be post stamped by or something, and my wife encouraged me to persevere. And I stayed up all night and colored this silly thing.

And I won. And it was super fun. I got some press attention on Silicon Prairie News and elsewhere. And through it, I kind of came back on the radar of an old teacher of mine, Donovan Beery, who I mentioned a minute ago, who also in his day job runs a small firm called Eleven19, or he did at the time. And he runs a very small firm. He ran a very small firm. It was basically him, a silent business partner, and usually a part-time designer. Usually a student or someone fresh out of school.

And so after seeing this kind of splash that I made in social media at the time here in Omaha, he offered me a part-time job. And I figured it out. I worked part-time with the Hawaii Coral Reef Initiative long distance. I worked part-time for Donovan. And I started up doing some more Fruitful stuff on the side. That's when I started looking into actually doing things as Fruitful Design.

Because even between those couple part-time jobs, it wasn't a lot of money. And I knew my family was growing really fast, and Donovan was super gracious to let me explore things on the side. Some people make you sign some exclusive thing saying, "You're not going to be pursuing other client work," and whatever. And he was not that way at all. He was very, very open, very, very encouraging. And even the couple years that I worked at Eleven19, he encouraged me and even gave me feedback on stuff that I was working on for my own clients.

And so I learned a lot of lessons from Donovan. Donovan is a cool guy. He actually is doing teaching full-time Metro now as of very recently. That was just in the last year. So first of all, he was just a wonderful teacher. So already, I'd had some experience teaching piano lessons, etc., and even some drawing lessons. And I loved working with him, mainly because he was such a good teacher.

The other thing he was really good at that still stuck with me, or I'm trying to be better at it every day, is networking. And not in a kind of gross handing out business cards and just trying to sell people things or whatever. He just had this really natural way of going out to lunches with other creatives and other people in town.

He started up a podcast himself. He already had been doing it for a few years, and he had me co-host this podcast with him, which really is what gave me a lot of the idea to do this podcast today. It was such a natural way to meet people, hear from people, and to connect with people all over. So I learned so much of that from Donovan and from my time Eleven19.

The other thing, maybe not the sexiest thing, but I learned a lot about file organization from him. He was a highly organized person. He had systems for everything that he did. And I was not. I still am not. But I try my darnedest to follow a lot of those best practices that Donovan showed me. I still name my files the same way that Donovan did. And I owe a lot to him.

So Donovan and seeing what he did, how he ran this really fun, quirky design firm, branding firm that was full of colors, and Legos, and action figures, it really inspired me to want to do that myself.

And so after working with him a couple years and as my side business began to grow, I started seeing the inevitable, that I was going to hit this point where I had to either take the plunge or go all in at Eleven19. And it became really clear pretty quick that I needed to take that risk. I needed to jump and officially start Fruitful full time.

And so that was 10 years ago in 2013. Towards the beginning of the year, I took Donovan aside and told him my wishes. He supported me wholeheartedly. Even helped him in finding a replacement for me. Was a lot of fun. Still friends with Donovan to this day, and I'm just so thankful for him and the way in which he has inspired me over the years.

But basically to take the plunge, I needed an office space. I'd been operating out of my basement. And I got connected with this really cool arts startup called the 402 Arts Collective. They had kind of a crappy logo, kind of a crappy site, no offense. I think they would agree. They did agree actually, because one of the first times I met with Ben Shafer who was running the program over there, he mentioned, "Dude, I hate our logo, I hate our website, I hate everything."

And we worked out this deal that I, as Fruitful would start doing some design for them. And the more we talked, we started realizing they were in the process of renovating this building in the heart of Old Benson here in Omaha, and a really cool part of town that had kind of fallen under repair, but what looked like it was about to experience a revitalization, kind of a renaissance, and they wanted to be a part of that.

And so the building that they were considering moving into, were in the process of moving into was actually very special to me. Because it used to be a coffee shop and music venue called The Foundry, which turns out later, my now business partner Raj actually helped start that coffee shop and music venue.

But anyway, that was the first place I ever played any of my own music. So I used to do a lot of singer-songwriter stuff, but that all started when I moved here at age 19. And I did a little show at The Foundry for a non-profit fundraiser, and there's still a recording out there somewhere of that performance. So it had a special place in my heart.

I was married at this point, had been married for a little while. My wife, Meg is amazing. I love her so much. But she does not like to take willy-nilly, fly by the seat of your pants kind of risks. She's not afraid to take a chance as long as it is a calculated risk, and as long as we can do the math and it all adds up.

So one of the ways that I did that, the way I convinced her that, "Hey, we could take this plunge," is I showed her, "Hey, here's what here's been making at Fruitful. Here's what I think is realistic to make going forward, especially if I'm able to work on this full-time," or semi full-time. And then I showed her, "Hey, I could always beef up my piano lessons."

So I was still teaching some piano lessons on this side. And the 402 Arts Collective, they actually did music lessons and art lessons. And so it was perfect. I got a upright piano, we moved it into the 402 Arts Collective space, and I started teaching piano lessons to mitigate the difference. And I showed her, "Hey, if I just took on this many piano lessons, we could pay all of our bills."

And it was very generous. The 402, they loved me a lot. In addition to paying me for doing their design work and their ongoing communication design, they also gave me a little office in their building for free for the first year. And that was so amazing. I didn't expect it. And it was really awesome.

So very generous, especially Jim Shaffer, who was our landlord there for a number of years, was so thankful to have that free space for a while as I got settled in and kind of got on my feet. And both he and Ben Shafer were really instrumental in moving me along in my journey. But to take that plunge, it takes a lot of courage. But it's not this blind courage. I think that calculated kind of risk is what you want.

And also, we think to do this, it's got to be all there nothing. And I don't think that's true. I think it's smart and wise to keep your part-time job over here while you scale this up. Try to do some things, have some side hustles going. Maybe Uber, or do GrubHub, or whatever, Amazon delivery, I don't know what it is. You see this all the time, people trying to make it big or whatever in Nashville or Hollywood where they have to also wait tables on the side.

This is super smart stuff. Make sure you can pay your bills. Make sure that you can survive while you try to do some of these risks. Don't just throw all your eggs in this one basket right away. And I'm really thankful I did it that way. We had some scary times, but we were always able to pay our bills, and sometimes very miraculously. So I'm very thankful to God for seeing us through some of those crazy, lean years.

The seventh pivotal thing, I guess, in the history of Fruitful was this concept of Fruitful friends. That's what I called them. But right away, my website, the fruitful-design.com website, it wasn't just my face. I immediately started putting other people's faces on there, because I immediately wanted to collaborate with others. I had this idea of I couldn't afford to hire these people. I didn't even really know how to hire people and pay for their benefits, and all that kind of crazy stuff.

And so I was like, "Hey, who do I know? What other creatives do I know?" Videographers, photographers, animators, web developers that I could bring in on projects. And I just started putting their faces on my website, even though they weren't my team. I made it clear. I said they're Fruitful friends and that they collaborate on stuff. And a lot of people got it, but a lot of people thought it was really cool too.

At first, I was afraid that it would look like I was trying to show I was bigger than I was. But in a way, I was. I was kind of like, "Hey, Fruitful is just me. But I do have this wealth of friends that I can pull in on projects in a really lean, fast way." And that really appealed to a lot of my core clients that I was building. A lot of churches, nonprofits, people that didn't have huge budgets, but they did need a lot of capabilities.

And so I learned how to work with a lot of different people. I started bringing in a lot of friends to work on projects. And these include some of my favorite design friends now. Guys like Nicolas Fredrickson, who is worked for me for a while and is now renting office space from me working for someone else.

Erin Pille, who worked with Fruitful up until last year, but is still a dear design friend of mine, and has created so many of the most beautiful things that Fruitful has ever made.

And even my now business partner, Raj Lulla, he was a Fruitful friend. He was doing photography and copywriting for Fruitful before he became my business partner. And then also Jacob Willis, who we branded his videography firm Rend Motion, and does a lot of video work for us. And also guys like Bryan Findell who does all the animation stuff for Growing a Fruitful Brand and a lot of other things that we've done.

Anyway, a lot of these are folks whose faces were on my site in the first two years of me doing Fruitful, and they were just my Fruitful friends. And it was fun how later on, a lot of them have become employees, and some stayed as contractors. But that was a really fun, collaborative way to do business. And I was in that first room and the 402 Arts Collective. It was super crowded, but people loved to come there, had this little square table. And we'd all kind of pile around and we'd work on projects. Sometimes people would work on other projects. It didn't really matter. We were just friends. And there was something really special to that time. And there's a lot of pictures you could see of even Raj hanging out, or Erin, or Nic. And very special time.

And I would just encourage those of you who are contemplating starting your own thing, think about, "Who can I collaborate with?" Not just who my clients should be. You should be thinking about that. I probably should have thought about that more. But who do I want to do work with? And don't just think, "Hey, I've got to hire these people. I've got to pay their salary. I've got to give them benefits." No, maybe it's something you can throw them 300 bucks and they can turn something around in a day or two. Just something that they can do better than you can do and would add a value to your client. And so I really, really heartily recommend this idea of Fruitful friends.

So this concept of Fruitful friends leads us right into Raj. I've already said his name a million times. But of course this kind of generous, hopeful, collaborative mindset got me open to the idea of just working with lots of different people.

So Raj was running his own business consultancy where he was giving strategy, and photography, and content to people, adding a ton of value to different clients and organizations across the city. And I was over here doing all this graphic design, and it was kind of this perfect marriage. He started bringing me a lot of my big clients and retainer clients, and then he would manage them.

So he actually became the face of Fruitful to so many of our clients, over half right away. And that was super cool. And I really started discovering even before we formerly made that partnership, it was just really fun to not have to be everything to all those people. Because when you start as a solo entrepreneur, you can kind of feel like you have to be in every single meeting. You have to know every single person and project. And Raj started showing me that, "Hey, if we join up forces," we could kind of complete each other and I could be designing things while he's talking to the client. And I really started getting this idea of what partnership could look like before we even got close to considering that.

But when the time came, we had a lot to consider. We consulted a lawyer. We had a lot of hard conversations about how it should look. And again, listen back to Raj's Hope as a Strategy episode for more details on exactly how we ended up working that out. But all in all, it's been really great.

Not without its challenges of course, but I definitely don't regret it. It's so great to have someone like Raj in my court and helping really complete me as a business owner. Because just like I know, we use the marriage analogy too much, probably. My wife says it makes her sick when she hears me say that about Raj, because she's my wife. Raj is not my wife. But anyways, it is kind of true though. There's a lot of ways that we compliment each other and we're able to do so much more by working together.

All right, we're getting towards the end of this list. The ninth thing is, of course, StoryBrand. You hear us talk about it all the time, but Raj and I both really started flirting with this concept of using the StoryBrand framework, making the customer the hero, and becoming their guide. And we were already using a lot of those practices.

But it wasn't until in 2019 that we went to Nashville, and we were trained in the framework that we really started realizing, "Oh man, this is the formula that we need to be using for all of our clients, for all of their messaging, all their marketing, all their homepages."

And really, I think overnight, it gave us some authority to really streamline our processes. I think that there was a lot of guessing that was going on beforehand. And sometimes a client would have an idea of what they wanted their websites to say. And it'd be so much easier to be like, "Well, I guess we could try that," instead of being like, "No, we're going to stick with this way and here's why." And StoryBrand has such great results from their method. So it's really fun to partner with a really powerful method that's kind of rooted in history, and science even, and psychology.

So that was a huge game changer for us. And we became StoryBrand certified as we go into 2020 in the pandemic. What a crazy year that was. But our business actually grew during that time, and a lot of it was because of StoryBrand and us working our butts off.

So that leads us to the final pivotal moment. And it's not really a moment, it's kind of a catchall because there's so many more things to say. But really, that 10th thing is this new season that we're in of just trying new things. Since StoryBrand, since COVID, we've been in this season of trying lots of new things, iterating. And then just learning from our mistakes and moving on. And so some of those things have been hiring a friend to be our CEO because we're so burned out coming out of 2020. And it ended up not working out long term. It lasted a year, but we don't regret making that decision. We tried it. Some aspects of it were awesome, some aspects weren't the best. Ultimately, we agreed to move on from that and learn from any mistakes that might have been made.

And the same goes with trying a little bit of our own marketing, starting things like this podcast and YouTube channel, and blog, and weekly emails. We're trying a lot of things right now, and we're measuring, and we're testing, and we're tweaking, and we're changing. This spirit of trying new things, always learning has always been a part of our DNA here at Fruitful. But I say that we're in a special season of that right now.

It's also personified at us moving offices from our space in Downtown Benson into a much bigger space with a lot more room for growth. Things like hiring an executive assistant for Raj, something that we always thought we should do, but never felt like we could. And even the recent change of Raj becoming managing partner here at Fruitful and kind of freeing me up to do more business development and more art direction with the team.

The thing I want to end on is encouraging each one of you listening to really embody the spirit of trying new things, not being afraid, taking calculated risks. And then instead of beating yourself up for when things fail and saying, "I should have done this, I should have done that." As Raj says, stop shooting yourself and start learning from your mistakes. And don't get down on yourself. Really try to learn and try to move on. What would you do differently the next time?

I think we can get to a really dark place, and we can start to wonder whether we should be doing this at all. The imposter syndrome, that's just terrible with creatives and entrepreneurs. Who am I to be running this thing? Who am I to be talking to any of you, that any of you should even be listening? And maybe you're not. And maybe that's what I deserve.

But that imposter syndrome, it's just the worst. And the guilt and the shame that can come from mistakes... Instead of just learning, admitting that we're human, admitting that we're going to mess things up at times, and then learning from them and moving on. Not making those same mistakes twice. How can we actually change? How can we grow together?

So we always end this podcast with grow something good, and I think that's how you grow something good. It's not always right the first time. It's not always good the first time. It may take a little bit of replanting, and trying different soil, and trying different techniques. We've got some plants here in the office that aren't doing so well. We got to adjust what we're doing, how we're caring for them. But I think in doing that, in trying new things, learning from our mistakes, we truly can grow something good in this world.

Thanks for joining us today on Growing a Fruitful Brand. If you found today's show helpful, don't forget to subscribe and consider sharing it with someone who might also enjoy it. If you'd like to work with Fruitful on a branding website or messaging project of your own, you can always reach out on our website fruitful.design. So until next time, don't forget to grow something good.