Forged by Fire: building a brand in times of adversity

The story of the Fireside brand and where it all began.

Times of great adversity are often times of great creativity. Entrepreneurship flourishes in recessions. Household name brands like WhatsApp, Uber and Airbnb all started their journey in the last big crash, the ‘credit crunch’ of 2008.

And it’s not just startup businesses that enjoy adversity; character building relies on difficulty too. Climbing a mountain on a balmy summer’s day might be physically testing, but it’s not enough to trigger our latent potential for greatness. Throw in a sudden worsening of weather, threat of hypothermia and getting lost in fog and it becomes a different challenge entirely.

It’s only through adversity that we truly discover ourselves and our true character manifests.

Examples of how adversity shapes us and the brands we create are easy to find, so I won’t go into them here. Rather, I want to explore how we can harness this trend to push ourselves and our creative minds, in what is probably the most testing time in living memory.

One of the oldest and most powerful parts of the human brain is the bit that deals with threat response. Sometimes referred to as the ‘lizard brain’ or limbic system, or to give it its proper moniker the ‘parasympathetic autonomic nervous system’. Most of us simply know it as the flight or fight response.

At times during the last year, faced with a barrage of media messages about threats to our health and economy, we’ve probably all experienced the kick response of flight or fight. We can see this played out across social media too, as people start taking sides to downplay the threat (flight response) or defy the government in various ways (fight response).

The fight or flight response we all feel from time to time can make our minds race. How many of us have felt that compulsion to DO SOMETHING over the last 12 months? It may be a change of career or relationship, take up a new hobby or a sudden irresistible urge to do something adventurous outdoors.

Our fight or flight response was honed over millennia when we humans were one of the weaker species roaming Earth. We had plenty of predators in the past, we weren’t the apex animal we are today. Charged by a Woolly Mammoth, fight or flight would flood our bodies with the stress hormone cortisol which would trigger a surge in adrenaline and make us temporarily capable of doing exceptional things, like running away really, really quickly.

When it comes to starting a business venture though, fight or flight is the enemy of success. Creativity needs a different state of mind to flourish, as does planning and effective implementation of a good idea. Being put in danger, dealing with big problems, staring into the abyss of financial ruin … these immense triggers that kick our fight or flight response into overdrive can create flashes of genius. We see glimpses of a way out of a situation, but at best these are coin-flip odds of being the RIGHT choice. Given that most businesses fail in the first 5 years, we need to stack those odds in our favour as much as possible.

I use the fight or flight response to know WHEN something needs addressing. It’s an incredibly useful tool for an entrepreneur because it’s almost like a sixth sense; it’s the hackles rising at the back of your neck to tell you something is amiss in the world. So my advice is to let it flow. Ride the feeling of wanting to act but stay in control and avoid reacting straight away.

The mechanics of this will vary depending on the situation. It may be stopping yourself immediately replying to an email or social comment that’s got you fired up, or it may be sleeping on that sudden decision to quit your job and start a new business! The important thing is you don’t allow fight or flight to take over your rational decision making.

Knowing what’s going on in our minds and bodies when we’re feeling under threat, is the first step in harnessing our full potential.

Nature is incredibly powerful in helping us find a state of equilibrium that’s conducive to good, creative decision making. Nature is the perfect partner if you’re thinking of starting your own business. Time spent outdoors forces us to change our pace, become aware of our surroundings and ‘get out of our own heads’. It’s also been proven that natural movement like walking and running helps us think creatively – something that renowned pacers like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg fully embrace.

So if you’re feeling stressed, panicked or threatened, and your mind is racing with whacky ideas then going for a walk really is the best thing you can do. What’s actually happening here is your brain is shifting its chemical composition from the fight or flight zone to the rational zone (the ‘sympathetic autonomic nervous system’ to be exact).

Getting wound up is a great trigger for action, but you want to grab hold of those emotions and start to use your incredibly powerful rational mind to work out your way ahead.

If you’ve realised you hate your current career or faced the horror of having your choice rescinded through redundancy, you might feel like you’re in freefall. Take a walk, breath fresh air, spend time with mud beneath your boots, and start to plan.

My own recent experience of this was the formation of our new coffee company, Fireside Brew Co, which I created and launched in the space of a week during Lockdown #1 in March 2020. My incumbent business, which I built from scratch in 2015 and suffered all the pain of a true bootstrapped startup experience ever since, came crashing to a halt with Covid-19.

My business was events.

The first signs of trouble were back in February 2020 when Europe’s largest tech trade show, Mobile World Congress, cancelled just 10 days from launch. In events, this sort of last-minute cancellation of a billion dollar show is unheard of and absolutely catastrophic for the event organisers, exhibitors and region in which it is being held. I remember thinking it should have been headline news on the BBC at the time, but instead the story was buried in obscure trade show media outlets and details were scarce. I delved deeper and uncovered the truth: the trade show sponsors, all of which came from or relied on supply chains from Asia, had pulled out because of the virus. The big businesses simply knew what was coming for Europe and reacted to protect themselves accordingly.

This is an example of fight or flight on a massive scale.

In 2008 when the banks woke up to their self-made exposure to enormous volumes of bad debt and stopped lending to each other, only a few savvy observers realised the implications. Their hackles went up. They knew something big was lurking in the shadows of all the major cities in the world. Their fight or flight response gave way to rational analysis, and suddenly the horror of the fiscal beast was revealed to them and eventually the whole world.

As startup business leaders, present or future, it’s incumbent on all of us to be attuned to economic threats and act with deliberate determination to avoid falling victim.

Your creative mind is your greatest ally in economic survival. Humans have an almost limitless capacity to think their way out of any problem, given enough incentive and with time to compose rational thoughts. That idea that you can almost see in the corner of your eye, that half formed thought that you need to be doing something else with your life, that inexplicable search of social media for inspiration – these deserve your time more than you may realise.

‘Fresh air and fresh ideas’ was the tagline of my last (rather great!) event; Fireside Summit. Since we can’t congregate in person now, that idea had to give way to a new one that would encourage the same ethos of time spent in nature, breathing life into your brand. So, although the formation of Fireside Brew Co may look like a spontaneous act made under pressure, a true fight or flight response, it was actually the result of years of rational thinking, predated by earlier iterations of the same concept and forged by many campfires.

Time spent in nature is never wasted, and it may just help you build something worthwhile.

Starting a business is hard. Quite possibly the hardest thing you can ever do. But like all hard things done well, it’s incredibly rewarding.

As we’ve discussed, our best selves and most creative ideas are often forged in the fires of adversity. Sometimes that adversity is foisted upon us, like when a novel virus tears through society and our way of life is razed to the ground. But for entrepreneurs there’s always another powerful force driving us: passion.

No great brand was ever created without passion.

Being forced into starting a business through a sudden, dramatic change in circumstance like losing your job, might be enough to get started but it won’t sustain you or your brand in the long term.

Equally, a competitive or combative temperament might be enough to keep you motivated at first, but when you realise there’s no finish line and no summit, these emotional states won’t keep you going over the long term.

Passion is the only true fuel for the endless journey of building your brand.

But there are two types of passion: hot and cold.

Hot passion is easy to understand – it’s the fired-up enthusiasm you feel about a new idea (or person!). It’s pure, unfiltered, excitement. It’s heart, not head.

Cold passion is something of an oxymoron, but really it’s like a simmering excitement that makes you want to work on your brand every day (even Mondays). It’s a steady state, with heart and brain working together.

A successful, long-term brand is fuelled by cold passion.

You’ll notice a similarity here between the states of mind mentioned earlier – fight or flight and rational. Hot passion does indeed trigger a similar response to facing a threat; essentially over excitement about a new idea puts you into the same mind frame as being charged by a Woolly Mammoth.

The difference is that passion isn’t just a state of mind, it’s a state of BEING. When you’re truly passionate about something you’ll not only love doing the thing itself, but you’ll enjoy thinking about it too. It’ll set up camp in your soul.

Fireside as a brand came after more than a decade working for other people, building other peoples dreams and convincing myself that it was enough to do a good job well, even if I wasn’t passionate about the industry I was in. It wasn’t enough. It still isn’t.

Passion gives us purpose and meaning. It gives us motivation through the good times and the bad. Understanding what you’re truly passionate about is the first, and most vital, step in building a brand that matters.

I’ve always been passionate about the great outdoors. I’m also genuinely passionate about business. These two things are often seen as contradictory – nature people and business people are very different, aren’t they?

Well entrepreneurs are an odd bunch. We’re often replete with contradictions and strange character traits. So if that’s you, if you feel conflicted in your ambition or career choice, if you find yourself getting fired up about something and thinking about how you could make a living from it (but probably talking yourself out of it too!), then I’d say you’ve got the entrepreneur gene.

My top tip to anyone searching for a way to turn their passion into their purpose and into their career is to think and do. Spend as much time as possible doing the things you love, and even more time thinking about them. Work the idea, immerse yourself in it, but also allow time to let it infuse and take shape. Don’t let it go, but don’t let it take control of you either. To have agency over your brand you must first own your ideas and not let hot passion or fear take over your thinking.

I’ll talk more about the brand journey, especially about building an eco-friendly business, in future issues of FiresideX. In the meantime, stay safe, look out for each other and remember that you can achieve great things through adversity.