Rising from the ashes
LEARNING from failure is a key part of the entrepreneurial journey but few have “crash and burn” stories quite like Ash Bent.
Speaking at Entrepreneurs Geelong’s monthly “In Conversation” forum, the cofounder of thriving Grovedale business Sketch and Etch Creative shared some of the learnings from his previous venture, Cinefly, which pioneered filming top quality cinematic vision from drones.
Bent estimates a $70,000 camera was attached to one of his drones, a $70,000 octocopter, on the last day of a 12-day shoot in outback South Australia when the unthinkable happened. It literally crashed and burned.
“The sound that it made will haunt me,” Mr Bent said.
The gear was insured but the young entrepreneur ended up walking away from the venture because it had not defined its focus and the team involved were not all heading in the same direction.
“The big thing I learnt from Cinefly is that you have to be … extremely focused on what we are after and where we are headed, and be able to communicate that with the team and get them on board,” Mr Bent said.
Sketch and Etch has risen spectacularly from the ashes of Cinefly which two and a half years ago was just him and business partner Tash Craven but now employs 15.
Adding value and not competing on price point has been critical for the business, which creates customdesigned business and event signage, particularly for the wedding market, using hi-tech laser cutters.
“We have a client management team and they step the client through the whole journey,” Mr Bent said.
“We do a lot of the same style product but no two products are the same because they have been personalised for everybody. It’s not a click and shift-type product.
“We are not the cheapest, we never will be … we are not playing that game.”
A key piece of advice was to “drop the ego” and embrace failure. “You are going to fail, you are going to succeed at some things, it shouldn’t change how you look upon yourself,”’ Mr Bent said.
He said society was tuned to shunning failure, particularly through an education system in which there was a right way and a wrong way to do things.
“The only way you can really learn and grow as a person is to make mistakes, fail, and just pivot and change the way you are doing things and hopefully do it better next time,” he said.
Failure didn’t matter, it was just part of the process.
“With our team, the No.1 thing is there is a lesson out of everything, let’s just change this process so it doesn’t happen again,” he said.