Failure is the Breakfast of Champions
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and with the world mired in the Great Depression, 1937 should have been a perfect time to start a company. And so, it was that my maternal grandfather founded Cote & Lambert Tool and Die in a garage in Leominster, Massachusetts. At that time, there were not a lot of jobs of any kind, especially for a twenty-year old trade school kid, so starting a business and hiring yourself wasn’t a bad option. Plastics had just been invented and Leominster was fast becoming the epicenter of a fast-growing new industry. Fashioning the metal molds used to make buttons and combs and other items formerly made of animal horn, Lester and his partner Norman established themselves within the plastics supply chain.
Then came World War II and the world changed again. As engineers, the government reasoned the best place for Cote & Lambert was to join the military industrial complex that proved so instrumental to the allied war effort. Of course, at the end of the war, there wasn’t quite the demand for plastic bomb detonators, so Lester had to re-invent himself yet again, and in 1946, he founded Union Products Inc. There were new competitors forming everyday in the red-hot plastics industry which was something the “Silicon Valley” of its day. My grandad knew the advantage of nimble processes to being able to turn good ideas into product quickly. Their first big hit was producing mass-market low-cost plastic ball point pens. After several years of great success, many ball-point pen competitors had entered the market and it was time to innovate once again. With their efficient manufacturing process powered by an in-house tool and die capability, Union Products began producing consumer goods like plastic flowerpots, Christmas decorations and storage containers.
At each point when competition began eroding margins, Union Products innovated. In fact, the idea for their most famous product came from Lester's nephew Paul Aubuchon who was using the same garage Lester started in to run his first business making wooden lawn ornaments. Lester brought a wooden flamingo lawn ornament to his newly hired designer Donald Featherstone, who quickly saw the potential. Soon, the consummate symbol of 1950's suburban kitsch was born: the famous "Pink Flamingo". Millions of these products graced lawns from Toledo to Tokyo.
Union Products continued its string of successes until the untimely death of my grandfather in 1967. Though it continued on for many years, the company never recovered from the loss of its visionary, selfless founder who empowered others, while taking little credit for himself. As consumer plastics became a commodity, the industry moved offshore and the plastics industry in Leominster became a shadow of its glory years. Still I like to think, if Lester had lived longer, he would have reinvented the company and might have become one of the pioneers of the medical device manufacturing or some similar high technology usage of plastics we see today. Growing up, I worked in the summers as a graveyard shift molding machine operator at Union Products. It was sweaty back breaking work, but I reveled in the stories told by the old-timers about my granddad.
During those summers, Lester’s spirit must have been whispering in my ear because I resolved to finish college and blaze my own entrepreneurial path. During my career, I experienced success and failure in equal measure but always learned the most from the lessons that failure taught. I am reminded of a quote from business author Ken Blanchard: “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Since failure is the ultimate feedback, I would re-phrase Blanchard’s quote as “Failure is the breakfast of Champions.” If I was limited to one piece of advice for an aspiring entrepreneur, it would be that failure is not the end, but the beginning of your next success. Learn from it.