Failure: A Personal Story of Risk and Rebounding

Nobody wants to fail. But every successful leader, entrepreneur, and business owner has a failure story.

In this deeply personal episode of 10 Keys to Thrive in Business and Life, Jim Krigbaum shares the painful lessons behind business setbacks, lawsuits, bankruptcy, market collapses, and unexpected challenges that nearly brought him to his knees. More importantly, he reveals how those experiences became the foundation for future growth, resilience, and success.

Through real-world stories and hard-earned wisdom, Jim explores risk, resilience, leadership, diversification, decision-making, and the mindset required to recover when life doesn't go according to plan.

If you've ever experienced a major setback, questioned your next move, or wondered whether failure defines you, this episode offers a powerful reminder:

Failure is not the end of the story.

It's often the beginning of your greatest lesson.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Let's talk about failure today. Something nobody wants to talk about, but it happens. And we're going to use an example of my failures and how I've used my failures that have made me stronger. They've made me overcome hurdles because of the failures that I've had and how I'm teaching you to avoid the same mistakes I've made. Stay tuned to the end to understand how an entrepreneur's failures can become his tools and his lessons to build on.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

If you're not getting the results you want in your business, your team, or your life, it's rarely a lack of effort. It's a gap in how you think, decide, and lead. So welcome to Ten Keys to Thrive, where practical wisdom meets real-world results. Each episode gives you simple, proven tools to improve your decisions, strengthen relationships, and drive better outcomes right away. Drawing on decades of global leadership experience, Jim brings practical insights shaped by real-world challenges and results. Here's your host, Jim Krigbaum.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Hi, welcome to Ten Keys of Thrive in Business in Life. I'm your mentor and host, Jim Krigbaum. Failure, nobody wants to hear the word, but it happens to all of us. The best businessmen have failed. I failed. There's been times when I've been totally destroyed, crumpled, crumpled, actually, physically crumpled on the floor in my garage, feeling sorry for myself and wondering where I was going to go from there. I had a situation where I had a business and the business had failed because we lost a lawsuit. The market had collapsed around us. Actually, we won the lawsuit. The market had collapsed around us. We won the lawsuit, it was settled, but in reality we lost. The attorneys won. They got paid, but we didn't. The customer that we were suing, who sold one of our trademarks, filed bankruptcy. Their bankruptcy then dumped our brand of product on the Japanese market. So the value of our brand collapsed overnight. Not because of something we did, but because of something that we beat in the lawsuit, beat in court. So I had no way of controlling it, but all of a sudden I was exposed. We talk about risks. As an entrepreneur, we put risk out there. We put it all on the table and we wait for things to happen. In this situation, I had a lot of risk and I analyzed it. And I was told by my attorneys, don't worry, this is a slam dunk, you're going to win. We had a temporary injunction where the judge said, I have too much information to make a decision. My attorney said, That's not a right, good enough excuse. He can't say that. He's supposed to take that information and make a decision. So we appealed it. We took it to the Ninth Circuit for Court and appealed it. And we lost the appeal for the temporary injunction. The next stage would have been to go to trial, which would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The insurance companies then settled. That is, they settled after the Japanese company went bankrupt, after the U.S. company that we were suing went bankrupt, and we were on the verge of bankruptcy because we had too much into that effort and too much into the market at the same time the perfect storm hit. The Japanese economy, which was one of our strongest markets, was aggressively preventing imports. They were utilizing consumer preferences to do that, not trade laws, but they were convincing consumers that if a product wasn't fresh, it wasn't good. We had a situation where we were selling canned corn. Canned corn was packed when it was harvested. So within a few hours of cutting the corn off in the field and getting it off the cob, it was into a can. Once it's in the can, it's stabilized. It's not going anywhere, it's not changing. What was happening is the Japanese consumers were saying our product was old. Corn is harvested once a year. At that point in time, the northern hemisphere was really the major corn producer. So it was harvested once a year and there was no competition. But what was happening is companies were buying frozen corn. They'd buy frozen corn, they'd bring it into Japan, and in January, February, and March, they would package it. So they'd take the frozen corn, which was very similar to our fresh corn or our canned corn, was frozen shortly after it was harvested, but then it sat for a while. And then when the product got to Japan as frozen corn, then they panned it up later on. So the product had a fresh date on it. So a lot of things happened. A lot of things happened that were beyond our control. A lot of things happened that we didn't see coming. So we failed. We had to file bankruptcy. We were forced into bankruptcy, actually. We tried to liquidate and get rid of our assets and pay off the debt that we had. And we couldn't do that. We were forced into bankruptcy. And ultimately the bankruptcy case was dropped. But at that point in time, it was too late. I'd lost everything. Luckily, I was able to keep my personal life and my corporate life separate. I was structured properly so that they couldn't pierce the corporate shield, which meant that they couldn't come after my personal assets. The problem that I had there is that my personal assets weren't significant. They weren't, you know, tens of millions of dollars, but I lived in a nice house, I drove a nice car, and my lifestyle didn't change. I was able to maintain, though for a couple of years I had no income, very little income. And I still had debt. I still had bills to pay. But I was able to, when I went into that situation, I was debt-free. So I was able to gain debt over the two years to three years that I had limited or no income. I wasn't filing bankruptcy personally. I didn't claim personal bankruptcy. My business went out of business. My business went out of business because of several factors, some which were within my control, some of which I should have been able to identify the risk and avoided it. I should have cut the carpet, cut the rug, cut the rope, cut whatever it is earlier as opposed to continuing to fight the lawsuit. Lawsuits are interesting. I ended up settling. Part of the lawsuit is because when my company was getting less and less income and more expenses, I cut my pay. I took less out of the business. By doing that, the amount that I was paid then became a preferential payment, meaning that I was being paid before debtors were paid. If I would have kept my salary the same, it would have been a normal course of business. I wouldn't have had to pay any of it back. But because I cut my salary, the court said that you owe that back because it was a preferential payment. So I settled on that. I paid several tens of thousands of dollars to settle that. And my wife said, Why are you doing that? You didn't do anything wrong. You were trying to save your business. I said, Well, it doesn't matter if I did anything wrong. I could take this to trial and I could try to win. If I win, I get nothing except for the pride that I won. And in the meantime, I've spent $100,000, $200,000 to defend myself. So I settled out of court and I paid basically a fine for reducing my salary when I could have kept it the same and put the money back into the business as a loan. That would have been okay. But by taking a lower salary out of the business, it became a preferential payment. So I learned from that process. And I learned to make sure that the corporate shield wasn't pierceable, which I had set up properly so that I was protected there. So I had failed. I failed in a couple of other areas and market concentration. I talk a lot about making sure you're diversified. When my export business failed, I started two other businesses. I had my consulting business, which worked initially with Ron Sim out of Singapore to develop his U.S. operation for OSIM. And ultimately we ended up working for USAID clients. We didn't work for USAID directly. We had several clients in Washington, D.C. and on the East Coast that had contracts with USAID. So I had six or seven different companies that we're dealing with. I said, hey, we're diverse. We've got if one company doesn't like us, one company goes out of business, it doesn't matter. We're okay because we have six others. The problem is when Doge came in and got rid of USAID, my customer's customer disappeared overnight. Had nothing to do with me, but all of a sudden my market was gone. My market had disappeared. That would have been okay in normal situations because we had another business, as I've talked about many times. I'm an entrepreneur, I have lots of ideas, and I have lots of businesses. We had a second business. Second business is importing stainless steel containers from Austria. These containers are used in the food industry and the beverage industry. Our main customers in the last several years have been brew pubs and small wineries. COVID took a lot of those out. The business changed because small breweries and small brew pubs and small wineries were going out of business. Their assets, which included our tanks, were then sold at liquidation prices and bankruptcy prices on the market. So that hurt our business. We moved through that inventory, and as that inventory moved, we started to see a recovery. And then President Trump put a 50% tariff on all steel imports. The 50% tariff is to protect the U.S. steel industry. I agree. We need a steel industry. We cannot survive as a country without a steel industry. But by giving our producers a 50% cushion means they can be 50% inefficient. They don't have to invest. What happened to me is all of a sudden my containers were 50% more expensive. Luckily, nobody in the US produces the same quality, the same style of containers that we do. The disadvantage and the challenge we have is that there's inventory that's here from the bankruptcies that needs to move out. In the fruit prep industry, which was our largest single customer as far as an industry segment, there were three consolidations and one going out of business. So we lost some of our customers as they consolidated. In some cases, if they consolidated, it would have been good because we would have had a single customer. But these particular customers consolidated with European producers. European producers purchased their containers and their parts directly from our manufacturer in Austria. Nothing we could do about it. So I had diversified my markets. I diversified my business to make sure that I wasn't going to collapse if one industry collapsed. Unfortunately, both industries collapsed at the same time for reasons beyond our control. So I've learned from that. I wish there was a crystal ball that I could say here's where it's going to be in the future. We continue to move our stainless eel containers. We continue to look for consulting opportunities. So that business is really more difficult to jump back into. Any development money that's being spent is not in the sector that we were in, which is really economic development. It's still being done in healthcare, it's still being done in security and food issues, but not so much into the let's build their economies. We're not into building other people's economies because the philosophy now is America first. So why would we want to build our competition? A lot of times we questioned if what we were doing was competing with US companies, did that make sense? We saw that with wood coming out of Paraguay, where we taught them to produce wood molding. In the process, the U.S. wood molding industry got hurt because we were buying cheaper product from overseas. So there is some logic behind some of the things we do, but the business that we did, which was the consulting business to support business and economic development, is gone. I learned from those mistakes. Entrepreneurs fall. And the difference between an entrepreneur and the average person is we fall, we get our knees scuffed, we get back up, we brush off our shoulders, and we move on. We look for another opportunity. We challenge ourselves and learn from that mistake, learn from that experience. And how do we apply that going forward? Now I'm at the stage in my career where I'm not really excited to build a brand new export business or a brand new import business. I don't want to travel as much anymore as I did in the international development. I used to hit 20 countries a year. My situation changed. When I did the assessment of what I want to accomplish, going to 20 countries a year at 65 years old didn't sound like a lot of fun. I've seen the world that I want to see. There's a few places I want to go back to. So my situation changed. And as we talk about, you've got to constantly analyze your situation. Analyze your risk, analyze your objectives, analyze what you want to accomplish. In that process, you will help yourself achieve your greatest success and your greatest potential.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

So that's it for today's episode of Ten Keys to Thrive. Head on over to Apple Podcast or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. Be sure to head on over to tenkeystotrive.com to pick up a free copy of Jim's gift. And join us on the next episode.