I hadn’t seen Jason Henneberry in years. We’d crossed paths camping a while back, but sitting across from him for the podcast was different. Jason is one of those guys: sharp, witty, a total spark plug. On tape, he was exactly that.
But it wasn’t until we went for lunch after the recording that he opened up. We had met up at Strathcona about three years ago, and I didn’t realize it then, but he was going through some serious, life-changing challenges. He was right in it.
Hearing him talk about it now, now that he’s back to killing it, I realized how much we’d been living in parallel.
Jason talked about his “dead stop” in 2008. The business failed, he was broke, and he had a family to feed. He calls his recovery a potion of “panic plus persistence”.
I’ve been in that valley. When my marketing business went belly up, it was a terrifying personal failure. My wife had absolutely perfect credit; she didn’t know how bad things had truly gotten until the day I walked in and told her we had to meet with a bankruptcy trustee (let me tell you, the word trust was a hot topic for the next few years). Understandably I was fearful for my marriage. However, like the leader she is, she didn’t even flinch or look away. Without missing a beat she just looked at me and said, “What do we do next?“
We went through a Consumer Proposal that destroyed her (perfect) credit along with mine. To get by, I took a part-time job at a local retail chain. It kept the lights on, but being there was a daily reminder of my own failures. I remember working this one weekend after delivering a huge marketing push for a sale, only to get an email from management that was so negative and off-base I was livid.
I called Laura and calmly explained what happened. I thought I was mad, but after I read the email to her and explained I’d been put on blast in front of 100 people, she was ready to kill someone. Before I could even suggest quitting, she told me exactly what I needed to hear: “Tell them to fuck off.“
I did, very nicely, and walked away. But walking away meant having no job, and that’s when the lack of purpose and the weight of my failures really set in. I fell into a deep hole. There were days I really struggled to get out of bed. It’s hard to look in the mirror when you feel like you’ve dragged your family down with you.
My way out started with a phone call from my now-partner, Logan.
We met in university. He was the youngest kid there and didn’t naturally fit in. I was one of the oldest, with a huge chip on my shoulder. We were an odd pair, but he became my little brother. I helped him with writing and played the protector; he helped me with math and coding. I could never have imagined a day where my “little brother” would be the one to bail me out.
But bail me out he did. He asked me to help with sales and marketing for an SR&ED company he was building. I said no multiple times. Finally, I said sure, but I told him I needed to own some of it. When he said yes, I was shocked. Honestly, I should have asked for more! LOL.
Once we were in it, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I barely understood what SR&ED even was. I had gone from a confident sales guy to someone who didn’t recognize himself. We were riding 100% off Logan’s confidence. He was unflinchingly, almost over-confidently, sure. I had to borrow that confidence for two years. I persisted because he did. It took two years of him sitting by my side in every meeting before I finally told him he wasn’t allowed to come anymore. I had found my own feet.
During the pod, Jason talked about a radical pricing strategy he launched years ago when he was broke. He decided to stop wasting money on a complex funnel and just give that margin back to the customer.
“I woke up one day and I was like… what would happen if I just gave that to the customer? My life got real easy, real fast.”
We recently made a similar “big swing” in our business strategy. It’s the kind of move that is scary because it has a real, upfront cost, but you do it because strategically you think it will work. Hearing Jason talk about that move, the scrappy innovation born out of necessity, made me feel like if it can work for him, why not us?
Jason and I found different ways out of the same valley. If Jason’s formula was Panic + Persistence, mine was Borrowed Confidence + Persistence. He had to fire up his own engine because he was the pilot. I had to let others fly for a while until I remembered I knew how to handle the controls.
The parallel here isn’t just about the struggle; it’s about the systems we build to ensure we never have to go back to that hole.
For Jason, writing his book in a four-day couch marathon was about documenting “Dependency Design” so other founders don’t get trapped by their own success. For me, chairing the EO Accelerator program for Vancouver Island is about providing that “Confidence Bridge” for founders who are stuck in the trough right now.
You aren’t alone in the valley. We often think innovation has to be a polished, high-tech process, but sometimes it’s just the raw grit required to survive. Jason did it. I’m doing it. You design the ship, you execute, and you keep moving forward, even when you have to borrow someone else’s confidence to do it.
Jude Brown, CEO of SRED.ca
Check out the full conversation between Tom Morin, Jude Brown and Jason Henneberry on Spotify.
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