My biggest mistake: Michele Romanow, founder of Clearco

Michele Romanow is a tech entrepreneur, a former dragon on the Canadian Dragon’s Den, and founder of revenue-based funding provider Clearco. But even she makes mistakes.

In her first business, Romanow struggled with execution, and even simply sourcing the knowledge she needed to operate on a day-to-day basis.

But the biggest challenge, it turned out, was launching a luxury product at exactly the wrong time.

“The reality is entrepreneurs fail way more often than they ever succeed,” Romanow tells SmartCompany Plus.

“It just looks like we are successful because some of the wins can be big and we don’t have to document all the failures.”

Romanow confesses that in her career of entrepreneurialism, about 80% of her ideas have not worked.

The key, she says, is to translate failures into lessons that will drive success — eventually.

The mistake

The biggest of those mistakes came down to bad timing, Romanow says. As a 21-year-old student she teamed up with two classmates to launch her first ever business, a caviar fishery.

In the early days, it seemed the youthful team were onto something. They had done their research and discovered that due to overfishing, the global supply of sturgeon caviar was down 95%.

Romanow says she even googled ‘famous chefs’ and cold-called Thomas Keller of three-Michelin star restaurant The French Laundry to see if he had any caviar on his menu.

“He paused and rather urgently asked me if I had any to sell him,” she recalls.

“If he wanted to buy some from this Queen’s University student, then we’d have no problems selling it.”

The trio moved to the Canadian town of Evandale where there were still fish stocks, sourced themselves some sturgeon and briefly saw great success. Demand for Evandale Caviar was skyrocketing.

But this was 2008, and there was one big disruption they hadn’t seen coming: the global financial crisis.

“We’re 21 years old and think we are on the brink of success, and then the bottom falls out of the luxury produce market.”

The context

For this fledgling business, things were actually going rather well. But it hadn’t all been smooth swimming.

Having set up the fishery, Romanow says she had “navigated one of the steepest learning curves I’ve experienced to date”.

While they were confident in their business plan, the founders had not quite factored in the level of effort and determination that would go into running a business like this.

They hadn’t factored in the two-hour drive to source their stock, or the fact that they would “literally be on our hands and knees in the fish”.

They had also failed to realise the only YouTube videos on how to make caviar were in Russian.

The impact

Sometimes, when you’re 21 trying to run a caviar fish farm, there’s simply no quick fix.

Ultimately the impact of this error in timing was “as big as it gets”, Romanow says

“The business failed.”

The lesson

All the challenges the caviar co-founders faced provided valuable lessons, Romanow says; lessons that have stuck with her for the rest of her life.

“We learnt we had to push ourselves to move out of the plan and focus on execution.”

Anyone can have a big idea, Romanow says. The question is whether they can execute.

Now whenever she considers a new investment, one of her first questions is whether the founder has experience in executing their plans.

It also showed her that founders have to be able to get their hands dirty, getting into the weeds of the business — or in her case, into the sea of fish.

“To me CEO stands for chief everything officer; often successful people do what unsuccessful people aren’t willing to do.”

Everyone wants to be successful on their first try, Romanow adds. Any kind of failure comes as a blow to your confidence.

But it’s the grit required to stomach those failures and move on that makes for a successful founder.

“Being a 21-year-old trying to sell the world’s most unnecessary and expensive product in the midst of the worst financial crisis for decades was painful,” she says.

“But it certainly built resilience.”