Entrepreneur on fire episode 133 welcome to entrepreneur on fire dot com where remarkable entrepreneurs share their inspiring story let their journey illuminate your path to success, and now, you are host, John, Doomass Fire Nation, what's that next great idea you have?

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Okay, let's get started I am simply electrified to introduce my guest today Eric James Eric are you prepared to ignite.

Absolutely John. I love it. In fact, I've already ignited that's what I love Eric is a business growth consultant innovation engineering black belt co author of four books and professional standup comedian he specializes in helping companies create communicate and commercialize innovations with clients ranging from startups to universities to third generation manufacturers to service based companies and consultancies.

Eric I've given fire nation a little overview but take a minute tell us about you personally we want to get to know you and then take another minute tell us about your business sure.

A little about me grew up in Northern New York we don't get quite as much snow as main but we certainly do get quite a bit of snow up there but.

Yeah, I mean my background is as an engineer I want to run Sir Polytechnic Institute mechanical engineer want to graduate school and Cambridge University in England and studied business and worked for a few years with a small manufacturer making thermo acoustic cryo coolers which I could fill the whole podcast talking about those things but I won't.

And then after a few years there this opportunity came up to and it's as a consulting position and so I took that also around that time I started doing standup comedy which was a dream of mine sort of my if I win the lottery dream.

And and also during that time I co wrote four books with my with my mentor best friend and and co author Judith Barnes so that's kind of what got me here and yeah I still do all those things now I'm still a consultant to business growth consultant working primarily with manufacturers and technology companies.

To help them grow their business through an innovation process and a system called innovation engineering which I help them implement still to stand up on the road on the weekends I travel all over the country I've.

Open for a national acts like Colin Quinn and David tell and John Pennett and yeah some work with Bob Marley couple times out there in Maine as well yeah he's right down the street from.

Yeah Bob Marley and it's not the reggae singers the comedian Bob Marley for yes yes yes and and yeah Judith and I we actually just released our fifth book a few weeks ago called kindness and.

And it's a book on on just that the act of being kind it's an illustrated book and so I'm actually the author of five books now wow well I look forward to delving into that in more Eric later in the interview but before we do we love to start off entrepreneur on fire to get that motivation of ball rolling with a success quote so what do you have for us today I think my favorite success

quote is from Tom Watson former legendary president of IBM who said if you want to be successful double your failure rate I love that quote for so many reasons that applies so well to entrepreneurs but my question to you Eric take it down to the ground level how have you applied that

that mantra to your everyday life in several ways actually certainly with certainly with my clients and with my work and my consultant worked because number one I use that quote with them and it's really my job to help them apply that because the the idea of failing is it's scary to people and they don't understand so I actually teach people how to fail quickly and cheaply so it's probably one of the biggest value at.

I give to my clients and as far as stand up and comedy I mean it is it is nothing but failure the only way to get good as a comedian is to do the hardest thing on the planet which is get up in front of a group of people and try things that you don't know whether they're going to succeed or fail which are jokes and and certainly you know the books the books we've written we self publish those at this at this point of view

because we didn't want to get a bad deal with publishing because you know you know I trouble the publishing industry is in and authors basically make zero money on their books so we said you know what we're going to do this ourselves and so I am really I would say kind of up for anything you know whether it is stand up publishing books

Judith and I are even working on another venture which is a new iPad app so I mean for me I'm up for anything and it's really not about failure it's about what did I learn from from what I've done.

No that's powerful and we've had Tim Ferris on the show and as you may or may not know with his fan for our chef yeah he was great he is just taking on the publishing world because of exactly what you said why do authors make no money with books so he teamed up with Amazon

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