Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like Business Made Simple. Today we'll be breaking down how to choose scary because that's where the magic happens. To drop these value bombs, I had brought Tom Skarta into EO Fire Studios. Tom was able to semi-retire with his first franchise, then failed miserably in his seconds. The lessons learned from

failure is what makes him such an inspiration. In today's Foundation we'll talk about that failure, we'll talk about how to get past fear and who inspires Tom, and we'll talk about losing your life savings and so much more when we get back from thinking our sponsors.

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Tom, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

Hey, hello, everyone out there and I am really excited about embracing fear and failure. People like failure, yes, absolutely embrace it.

Failure is what we need to embrace, especially Fire Nation in this episode. The title choose scary because that's when the magic happens and as I mentioned in the introduction, we are going to be talking about a lot of failure specifically, Tom's.

So let's talk with your backstory, give us all the dirt Tom, but don't get too deep into that failure thing. We'll talk about in a minute.

Yeah, absolutely. So I started as a New York City subway conductor as my first career and I was the guy opening and closing doors if you ever rode the subway in New York, making the announcements that were really inaudible back then.

And one day and old time it said to me, Hey kid, this is a great job. You'll always have a, you know, you always have a shirt on your back.

You'll never have a silk shirt, but you know, at least you'll have a shirt. And I was like, ways that you know, sounds like mediocrity to me.

And I was only 24 at the time and I looked around. My bosses were not wearing the metaphorical silk shirts and I realized business owners were. I knew I needed to be a business owner didn't know how I was a government guy.

And I read a lot of books, went to seminars and realized that a franchise is a business with train wheels. And I decided back in 2000 to buy my first franchise, got into it, built it within five years, sold it and semi-retired at 41 years old. Wow.

It was amazing embracing all the stuff that everybody told me not to do. Just keep the job, keep the pension, the crazy, quit-n-ed government job. And I did it anyway and it was awesome.

We decided to buy a second franchise and it failed miserably. We lost almost our entire life savings. But that's what made me a business expert and a franchise expert was going through that debacle.

And so my mission is to help people not be afraid of it and just embrace it and let the chips forward and make us it's going to be much better than where you are today.

In Fire Nation, I know we're resonating with Tom's story because we all have that first job, that second job of us at 16, 20, 24 years old in Tom's case.

When maybe we looked around and said, you know what? This is a good job and I don't not like it, but I maybe don't want to do this for the rest of my life. What's the next step? And as you have alluded to Tom, you failed big time in business.

So now let's really dive into that. Tell us the backstory behind that second franchise, like kind of build up like, why, how did it come across your plate? Why did you go into it? What excited you about it? And then of course, why did it fail?

So measurably and then of course, the lessons learned for sure. And there's a lot to talk about, but you know, I'll give the bridge version. So we, so I sold that franchise the first one, as I said in 2005.

And in 2006, I was sitting around Smokasagara as my wife is New York City police sergeant at the time. She was getting ready to retire in 2007. And she read in a magazine about this particular franchise called Super Suppers, which was a make and take concept.

Meaning that you come to our location, make meals, follow our recipes, use our ingredients. It was a Tuscan kitchen. It was beautiful. And you make these meals in bulk, take them home and freeze them.

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