I’ve often heard the life of an entrepreneur described as endless stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. In my experience, that’s spot on.
Take this week, for example.
A couple of years ago, we became a full‑stack electrical contractor and launched a separate division inside Livewire called Lightsource. To kick it off, we hosted an event for our customers with all our lighting vendors called Lightsource Live. Attendance was solid. Energy was high. It felt like the start of something big, so we scheduled a follow‑up and began talking about making it an annual event.
Fast forward to this past Fall. We planned to host it again in October, but RSVPs were underwhelming. Maybe we didn’t call enough. Maybe we didn’t market enough. Maybe the timing was wrong. Whatever the reason, we made the difficult decision to cancel rather than host a mediocre event and waste everyone’s time.
We rescheduled for February, convinced we would rally the troops and fill the room. We told ourselves we just needed more runway.
What we never really stopped to ask was this: Why are we doing this event in the first place?
In many ways, Lightsource Live was a local Lightapalooza. And at the end of the day, maybe people simply didn’t want to attend an event full of wall‑to‑wall lighting vendors and that’s okay. What’s not okay is plugging our ears, sticking our heads in the sand, and pretending everything’s fine.
This week, we made the call to cancel it again and instead double down on our May block party and more intimate one-on-one visits to our Ketra design center. That event, typically around Cinco de Mayo, has organically grown into something that draws hundreds of people every year. It continues to expand because the market actually wants it.
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I have been told before that I shouldn’t write openly about failures because competitors or customers might read it and find out we’re just human beings like everybody else. I recently watched a Gordon Ramsay documentary where he opens up about losing Michelin stars and having to shutter some of his restaurants. His vulnerability drew me closer. I’m trying to operate the same way.
Lightsource Live was a great launch event. It simply did not deserve to be an annual one. No one was clamoring for it. If anything, the market has been nudging us toward something different: small-format dinners or Genius Bar style Q&A sessions with conversations instead of presentations.
Score one for eventually listening. Score one against getting the message through our thick skulls a little too late.
Now for the epic win.
This week, I hosted a small‑format dinner for the design‑build community here in Richmond: 12 hand‑picked architects, designers, builders, and industry professionals gathered around one table.
I first heard the idea a couple of years ago from my friend Rob Sutherland, former CEDIA Board chair and CEO of Inspired Dwellings in the U.K. It took me another couple of years to work up the courage and finally put a date on the calendar.
I originally tried to host the first Livewire Connections dinner last Fall and couldn’t get enough traction, so I moved it to February. Even then, filling the list was a grind. About 30 days ago, several of the people I most wanted to attend said they’d come. They didn’t ask many questions, which meant they trusted me to put on a good event. The pressure went up immediately.
Finally, the big day arrived. We started with cocktails. As we sat down to dinner, I invited each person to interview their neighbor for five minutes. Then we switched. Afterward, they each introduced their neighbor until we’d made our way around the table.
You can’t fake listening when you have to stand up and represent someone else.
I asked everyone to bring either a raving‑fan success story or a burning issue from their business. We call these “roses & thorns” around the Clifford family dinner table.
As we went around, I captured them all on a paper parking lot list.
By the end, we had surfaced common themes: finding and retaining great employees, accounting headaches, and intergenerational workforce challenges. Despite different specialties and roles around the table, the pain points were universal.
As the evening progressed, the conversation loosened. People opened up. Connections formed naturally. Just before 9:00 PM, I ended on a high note. Everyone went home with a bit of Livewire literature and some chocolate truffles. I couldn’t resist a little Ketra lighting demo where we lit up a painting on the wall and changed the color settings to transform the single piece into two or three completely different colorways.
Did we close a major project that night? No.
Did I intentionally avoid selling anything? Yes.
The win wasn’t transactional. It was relational.
My hope is that these dinners become quarterly. We rotate the cast. We build community. Over time, I hope the room begins lifting itself.
I have long wrestled with where I fit in the universe of networking. I enjoy golf, but not enough to justify a club membership. I love aviation, but flying is often solitary and, when pilots gather, we tend to talk only about airplanes. My addiction to endurance racing is similarly introvert-friendly.
By intentionally creating a series like Livewire Connections, I’m tapping into something that feels more authentic to me: a curated room, honest conversations, and no pitch deck.
Will it work long term? I have no idea.
Was this week’s dinner an unequivocal success? Absolutely.
Also by Henry Clifford: Here’s Why Your Employees Quit
Entrepreneurship is not a straight line. It is a series of experiments. Some deserve to scale and some deserve to die. The key is listening carefully enough to know which is which.
What are you doing in your business to build community with your prospects and customers?
Stay frosty, and see you in the field.
