We were lucky to catch up with Page Mitchum recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Page , thanks for joining us today. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job?

At the last ‘real job’ I had before starting my own business I remember having this lightbulb moment of ‘even they are making it up’ (‘they’ being the leadership of the company I worked at). This was a big moment for me because I was working for a fairly scaled and mature start-up with investment from a large multi-national corporation and at on of our leadership summits it became very clear that even at this level, leadership was making a lot of it up as they went. This isn’t to say they were doing anything wrong, con artists or something like that, just that there is not a moment when you suddenly know how to run a business, you learn by doing. And while you gain experience over time on how to handle certain situations, there will always be things you have not encountered running a business and you have to use creative thinking just as much if not more than critical thinking to navigate business ownership.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My mom was a chef and we lived on a small horse farm. So food and how it got to our plates was always a very intimate process for me. I would get eggs from the chicken coop and feed the chickens scraps and leftovers from our dinner, I understood that the quality of their food impacted the quality of eggs they fed us with. I remember when I went off to live on my own at 18 and I saw the color of the yolks in the eggs from the grocery store (pale and light yellow compared to the bright orange I was used to on the farm) it sort of sent me down this path of understanding where our food comes from and how nutrient density is impacted by how we grow and raise our food. My step-father had been an entrepreneur in the natural and organic products space and encouraged me to explore working in the space. 13 years later and I am lucky to have had experience working in the marketing departments of large and small, public and private natural products companies. About 5 years ago I started to more keenly explore farming and supply chains, dissatisfied with how food companies were relating to the rest of the food ecosystem. This led to the starting of Blue Quest, a solution oriented marketing agency for businesses and brands and RegenCircle, a media collective documenting the emergence of regenerative culture.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

As an entrepreneur I had to unlearn the lesson that rejection means you are not good at what you do. You know putting yourself out there constantly and having this steady belief in what you are doing, it cannot be fueled by the level of success you are receiving externally. If it is that will put you on this big rollercoaster and suck energy from your business. Your will, passion and belief in what you are doing needs to be sourced from a place other than external validation. So many entrepreneurs I have seen were ‘unsuccessful’ and got zero attention or praise for the first 10+ years of doing what they were doing, they were ahead of their time. And all of a sudden ‘bam’ people think they are an instant success. But they don’t see the years of hard work and unwavering belief it took to get them there. I think that is the measure of a founder, someone who believes deeply in what they are doing and are willing to keep workshopping it until they find the right messaging, product offering and really wait until the world is ready for them. So with my businesses when I face rejection I choose to look at it as that it was not in alignment for right now, that it was not an essence to essence match for us to partner together and put my energy towards finding that right fit elsewhere. But I have a personal practice to work through any time I feel rejection impact my confidence and belief in our work.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In 2019 I had left my corporate job as a Marketing Director and was starting this co-working space that was supposed to be focused on wellness and creating a unique work environment for people. Well lets just say a co-working space was not the right business to be starting at the beginning of the Covid-19 breakout. So it forced me to take a step back and I stepped away from my identity of working or having a ‘career’ in a big way for the first time since I was 16. Meaning I was still consulting a bit here or there but I stopped identifying my value with the success I was getting in my career. I focused on what brought me joy and purpose. It led me to this amazing property in Northern California where I lived with a family from Guatemala and they were stewarding land based on indigenous practices. They were focused on restoring water-sheds and cultivating medicinal plants like cedar. It brought me so much healing to be in this place and learning these practices, it showed me that my work in food was not meant to be just selling healthier products in a grocery story but actually helping to restore our relationship to land through food. It was the crumbling of the business I thought I was launching and the chaos of a global pandemic that forced me to slow down and reconnect with my personal purpose and mission. Thats what led to the launch of both of my businesses and the sense of deep passion and alignment I feel with my work today.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.regencircle.com and www.wearebluequest.com
• Instagram: @regencircle @page_faye_ @wearebluequest
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/page-faye/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC5JBCXIA3Q