By Emily McLaughlin
The Embracing Failure Lunch event is held weekly, with several guest speakers discussing their failures. Learning from setbacks and cultivating entrepreneurial skills is what the lunch event is all about.
“We decided to spice things up and give our fellow students and budding entrepreneurs a front-row seat to the raw and real tales of seasoned and veteran entrepreneurs,” the Spartan Collective said back in December.
The Embracing Failure Lunch event is every Tuesday from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. and is set at the Lowth Center Collaboration Kitchen on the eighth floor of ICB. Guest speaker Travis Miller came to talk about his story of failed and successful entrepreneurship experiences.
Born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas, Miller came to The University of Tampa for his degree in Management Information Systems. After graduating in 2011, Miller had a few bumps in the road that led him to become the successful businessman he is. Over the years, Being co-founder of Arrowlynk Ventures and developer of Travis Miller Web, Miller has had numerous stories to tell.
“Failure is a part of the equation,” said Miller.
After graduating, Miller was on the road to building companies and starting to make new relationships. During his first job, Miller felt like he could do more at the company. However, he did not have the experience to continue in that job, so he was fired.
Miller explained, “I felt like it was a failure because I couldn’t make the mark even though I tried as best as I could.”
After losing his job, Miller was ready and learned what he needed to strengthen for the next opportunity. Miller was offered to work with SPARK, a local advertising agency in Tampa. After a few years at SPARK, an opportunity arose to run a coworking space.
“It felt like there were micro errors and failures daily,” Miller said. “Eventually, the COVID pandemic happened, and we couldn’t maintain operations, so we decided to close up shop.”
Failing that allowed Miller to learn how to run operations, which allowed him to understand business fundamentals. Growing from these failures led him to share that understanding of business with others and their consultancy, Arrlowlynk Ventures.
The event, “Starter Island,” was a five-day entrepreneurship event from Nassau to Exuma Miller was a part of. Miller’s experience from this event came with many failures he took learning curves from. Starting raising funds for sponsorships was a big priority for the event; however, they received a lot of no’s from them.
“At points, it got discouraging, but the frustrations allowed us to refine our pitch and understand better what we were trying to achieve,” Miller said.
As Miller and his team got better familiar with communicating to the audience what their angle was and how it aligned with their vision, it got them the funds they needed successfully. The failures Miller has gone through have allowed him to build a better local ecosystem for himself and his team.
“I feel there’s so much value in finding opportunities for events like this,” said Junior Madison Sjostrom after the event. “Everybody talks about what’s so great? What did they accomplish? But nobody talks about all the struggles that they’ve been through.”
Sjostrom has even learned from this event that she might change her major to the business realm instead of her current major, economics. After coming to these events several times before, Sjostrom wants to continue learning entrepreneurship and what she could do with that in her life.
“Always be hungry to learn new things,” said Miller.