Grace Ueng: Failure is a good thing and speaking the future, now

Editor’s Note: Grace Ueng is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Her great passion to help leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential combined with her empathy and ability to help leaders figure out their “why” is what clients value most. Grace writes a regular column for WRAL TechWire. She’s traveling this week. This column is a reprint.

+++

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Last week, this column told the story of how I came to meet Eric Chang, arguably the most important furniture designer in the country. This work led to the synthesis of seven themes which appear in my work, Project Peak: Climbing the Mountains of Life – Business and Beyond. In last week’s column, we discussed the importance of becoming someone who asks questions. This week, I delve into two additional themes.

Project Peak: Climbing the Mountains of Life, Business and Beyond

Failure: A good thing

Whether it be cash flow or hiring and managing employees, their growth strategy has been informed when they have fallen down. Coming from the tech world, the furniture world could seem so slow as the time to build is so long. Banks placed them into the “cabinet maker” category, which puts them in the highest risk level, so they could not receive a bank loan or even a line of credit. Their growth has been self capitalized which is very difficult in an extremely capital intensive industry.

There has been no shortage of problems. Eric categorizes them as “mini-failures.” Don’t fear them, learn from them. Eric recounted how his most important lessons were learned from mini-failures and those learnings have made him and Hellman-Chang a lot stronger.

Grace Ueng: Asking life’s important questions

Speak the future now

Hellman-Chang’s elegant Z Pedestal table won Interior Design magazine’s Best of Year award. Dan and his co-founder Eric Hellman thought that accolade might produce a few orders over time. Just a week later, the Four Seasons called and wanted 15 pieces of the table they saw in Interior Design for their Seattle location’s bar. And they saw a coffee table on Hellman-Chang’s website and wanted to also order that for their presidential suite.

What the Four Seasons did not know is that Hellman-Chang was just two 24-year old guys working out of a meager 5-by-10 foot rented space in a Brooklyn woodshop. And it took them a month to turn out a single table. Eric and Dan immediately said yes and made it happen. They quickly hired 2 interns and their first full time employee. And then put in a lot of very long days.

While Brooklyn is hip now, when they started there, people were scared when they heard “Brooklyn.” Quickly, “made in Brooklyn” became cool – with young, creative, upstarts. Furniture had not been the sexiest thing in American pop culture, but Eric and Dan wanted to change that and bring the furniture industry to the forefront. They want to lead the design industry on a global level for America, not Italy or Paris.